Ethnobotany Vault : Spiritual Use - Journal Article #4. The experiences resulting from the use of psychedelic drugs are often described in religious terms.
They are therefore of interest to those like myself who, in the tradition of William James, (1) are concerned with the psychology of religion. For more than thirty years I have been studying the causes, the consequences, and the conditions of those peculiar states of consciousness in which the individual discovers himself to be one continuous process with God, with the Universe, with the Ground of Being, or whatever name he may use by cultural conditioning or personal preference for the ultimate and eternal reality.
The New Alchemy. Alan Watts. Taoism, Terebess Asia Online (TAO) The Mystic Rider - The Alan Watts Story. And if you feel a stranger you feel hostile , and therefore you start to bulldoze things about, to beat it up and to try to make the world submit to your will, and you become a real troublemaker . This whole sensation that we're brought up to have, of being an island of consciousness locked up in a bag of skin, facing outside us a world that is profoundly alien to us in the sense that what is outside me is not me , this sets up a fundamental sensation of hostility and estrangement between ourselves and the so-called "external world" The universe is fundamentally a system which creeps up on itself and then says BOO!