Thursday, December 07, 2006

We Wish You a Merry Christmas, We Wish You a Merry Christmas, We Wish You a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Butt

The fall finale (damn do I love that concept) of One Tree Hill is on at the moment, so I do not have to pay too much attention to the show to follow what’s going on. As a result I’ve been sucked down a fairly intense wiki-hole that lead me from the Invisible Pink Unicorn, through sex toys, Douglas Adams’ characters and ultimately to what my question concerns. Specifically, these two descriptions of religious experiences in relation to psychedelic mushrooms. The first of those links includes this sentence: “Almost all of the members of the experimental group reported experiencing profound religious experiences, providing empirical support for the notion that psychedelic drugs can facilitate religious experiences.”

Since I was reading this while basking in the glow of ANTM’s second ever successful finale and “watching” One Tree Hill, I didn’t read it carefully enough first time through and thought that it said something more along the lines of “this provides empirical support for the notion of religious experience.” My thoughts in response to that were a) “dude, are you really lacking support for the existence of religious experience, just head over to, you know, a church” and b) if I was giving them a little more credit “I think people getting lit up for God doesn’t have quite the demonstrative force Wikipedia is suggesting.”

My further reading clarified this fact, but actually led me to a somewhat prior question. That is, does the fact that hallucinogenic drugs seem to be causally related to religious experience act as proof for or contradiction of the religious thesis itself? I’ve only been thinking this through for the past hour or so, but my dueling thoughts so far.

First, this could suggest that all religious experience is analogous or identical to hallucinatory experience. I suppose this somewhat depends on making the assumption that the religious experience on psychedelics is analogous to the experience of watching an interview with Mark McGuire in the filter of your cigarette on psychedelics. Since religious experience is often considered to be defined by faith and faith is often defined by the exclusion or even direct contradiction of logic—the fact that you know that its not real doesn’t influence your experience.

At the same time, of course, hallucinations aren’t random incarnations with no connection to anything. One could make a pretty good argument that they have some connection to either mystical or natural experience, or at least to some level of consciousness which is not limited by logical experience. It seems a bit like that may be short circuiting the argument, but I’m not sure.

In psychosis as per the Freudian/Lacanian tradition, one of the aspects of hallucinations concerns address. That is, the subject may not be able to say what the hallucination means or why it appears that way, but they can say for certain that it is a SIGN and that it is ADDRESSED to them. When the hallucination is the result of foreclosure or a mental structure, this is not surprising, but what about when it occurs via an external substance? It seems that the best argument (which I have no intention of addressing or exploring at this point) would be that the fact of address guarantees an external subject and since in the drug is only interacting with one person’s consciousness, that address must be metaphysical.

Hippo thinks that my idea in writing this must have been inspired by stealing a pinch of her catnip, but I assure her I was sober. Some chow should convince her.

Peace,

MB-K

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