Wolfe on “The Unspoken Thing” in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test:
There was something so… religious in the air, in the very atmosphere of the Prankster life, and yet one couldn’t put one’s finger on it. On the face of it there was just a group of people who had shared an unusual psychological state, the LSD experience–
But exactly! The experience–that was the word! and it began to fall into place. In fact, none of the great founded religions, Christianity, Buddhism, Islam, Jainism, Judaism, Zoroastrianism, Hinduism, none of them began with a philosophical framework or even a main idea. They all began with an overwhelming new experience.
…”there is no language which will express the things which I see and hear in the spiritual world…” Sounds like an acid head, of course. What they all saw in…a flash was the solution to the basic predicament of being human, the personal I, Me, trapped, mortal and helpless, in a vast impersonal It, the world around me. Suddenly!–All-in-one!–flowing together, I into It, and It into Me, and in that flow I perceive a power, so near, and so clear, that the whole world is blind to.
For all the disillusioned, disgruntled atheists, non believers, and for the dazed and confused–religion is not as bad as you all make it out to be. The quote above proves the plausibility of greatness being associated with the religious/spiritual–a notion very foreign and difficult to step outside the bubble.
Tags: Atheism, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, LSD, Religion, Spiritual, Wolfe
February 6, 2008 at 5:11 pm
What you see as religion and what I reject are very different concepts. The experience that the Pranksters went through is no different than the investigative understanding I advocate. Submission to an amorphous, oftentimes violent and mysterious being is quite different than a reasoned skepticism and hunger for knowledge.
February 6, 2008 at 8:07 pm
“If development continues beyond the mind via meditative disciplines or, in some instances, psychedelically induced mystical experience- then the eye of contemplation opens and discloses the world of soul and spirit, of subtle energies and insights, of radical intuition and transcendental illumination”
-Ken Wilber, from Sacred Mirrors by Alex Grey
the psychedlic experience opens up the mind spiritually to an entire new way of thinking… about everything and anything imagined. whether it be art or friendship, or even religion. this fufilling perception opens up the mind like a filter to a whole world of ideas and concepts, that usually only the person can truly grasp and understand. “the experience” is an insightful, and true journey into the spiritual world.
many people can also find the same spiritual world without “the experience” as well. that’s what makes us all unique.