The Psychedelic Handbook p.75

I wish to introduce a model dating back to the Greek philosopher-scientist Aristotle that I believe is useful in understanding both the psychological and spiritual effects of psychedelic drugs. In this, I use the version that the medieval Jewish philosophers developed, especially that of Maimonides—a rabbi, philosopher, and physician who lived in Egypt in the 1200s. I am the first to admit the idiosyncratic nature of this model, but please bear with me, and I think you will see why I find it attractive.

Aristotle divided the mind into two “faculties,” or functions. One is the rational faculty, or intellect. The other is the imaginative faculty, or imagination.  

The rational faculty is the location in the mind for abstractions, thoughts, beliefs, and concepts. Things that have no discernable form. That is, we do not see an idea, we think it. The rational faculty is where we experience concepts, remember them, and combine them in new ways. Mathematics is a good example of the contents and operations of the rational faculty. For the medievalists, nonphysical thoughts provided a link between our minds and a nonphysical God. The rational faculty is what distinguishes humans from “beasts.” It is the manifestation of our spiritual nature.

The imaginative faculty is the location of everything else. It contains “physical” information, such as sensations, body awareness, and emotions. As such, the philosophers believed that the imaginative faculty was physical, biological, something that we share with lower animals. The “imagination” in this system differs from the common definition of “imaginary,” “unreal,” “make-believe,” and the like. Instead, it is simply the location of everything nonabstract that exists in our minds. It is where we experience nonabstract contents, remember them, and create novel combinations such as works of art.

The medievalists proposed that the imaginative faculty, being biological in nature, was not especially amenable to change. They knew of no way to increase the function of the imagination. As they located it in the brain, this meant that the brain constrained the function of the imagination. The best one could do was to not degrade its function through an unhealthy lifestyle. The rational faculty, on the other hand, was amenable to growth and development through study and living a virtuous life. That virtuous life would also help maintain the health of the brain.

For Maimonides, the attainment of prophecy—the highest possible spiritual experience in the Hebrew biblical tradition—occurred with the “perfection” of the imagination and intellect working in concert. This was quite rare because of how infrequently one encountered a “perfected” brain, as well as the rigors of study and morality necessary to perfect the intellect.

In the case of the prophet, the perfection of the intellect and the imagination resulted in heightened receptivity to externally existent divine information. It was not a case of “influencing God” to communicate with the prophet. Rather, the state of the prophet made him/her more capable of receiving divine influence that was constantly everywhere.

Maimonides’s model proposes that divine influence stimulated the imagination from outside the person. The imagination then converted this influence into things one could perceive: visions, voices, feelings, and other “bodily” contents. Because of the divine source of the imagination’s contents, those contents contained divine information. A perfected imagination would allow for more clear and discernible contents than those one perceived via a weak, corrupted imagination.

Then, a perfected intellect would extract information from the perfectly perceived, divinely generated contents of the imagination. This information is now verbal, conceptual, abstract. A perfected intellect is also able to effectively communicate that information verbally to others. There are hundreds of examples of this process in the Hebrew Bible’s account of prophetic experience.

Here is how I see psychedelics fitting into this model. Up until now, we have been unable to significantly modify the biological imagination. We are born with a more or less well-developed brain. Our senses are only so sharp, our emotions only so refined. Psychedelics, however, may be a route to stimulating the imagination.

During my DMT work, I was impressed by how the psychedelic experience was much more “imaginative” than “intellectual.” Volunteers could describe in extraordinary detail the feelings, visions, emotions, and bodily properties of the experience. However, the quantity and novelty of the cognitive contents were relatively meager. The experiences simply confirmed or extended volunteers preexisting beliefs, or helped clarify personal problems, enhancing their meaning, imbuing them with a greater sense of truth and reality. I believe this is the result of a stimulated imagination. How one determines what is real ultimately relates to “how it feels.” It is a feeling, not a rational deduction. And feeling is in the domain of the imagination.

Thus, it seems as if DMT and other psychedelics stimulate the imagination more than the intellect. In this, they provide a tool to strengthen the imagination in a way that was not available to the medievalists.

There are two ways in which a “stimulated imagination” may impart new information to someone in the psychedelic state. One is the aforementioned heightened receptivity or sensitivity to spiritual information that surrounds us at all times. This is the basis of my “theoneurological” model of spiritual experience, an alternative to the top-down model of “neurotheology.” Neurotheology, the reigning model for the biology of spiritual experience, treats such experiences from a bottom-up perspective. The brain generates the impression of communicating with the divine, perhaps through the release of endogenous DMT through the activation of a brain reflex brought about by prayer. The top-down model, theoneurology, proposes that the world of spirit communicates with us through the brain. Endogenous DMT, from this perspective, allows formless divine information to become perceptible.

The better developed one’s intellect, the more capable one is in deciphering the contents of the stimulated imagination. This is where I see the role of the intellect—which our “set” contains—in determining what we learn from any psychedelic experience. On one hand, a trip may be primarily “imaginative”—an aesthetic experience—fun, exciting, interesting, and novel. Or it may be the source of more practical and enduring information if one possesses the intention, vocabulary, and similar tools to mine the newly rich imaginative contents.

Rick Strassman – The Psychedelic Handbook: A Practical Guide to Psilocybin, LSD, Ketamine, MDMA, And DMT/Ayahuasca p.75

The Doors of Perception p.77

Systematic reasoning is something we could not, as a species or as individuals, possibly do without. But neither, if we are to remain sane, can we possibly do without direct perception, the more unsystematic the better, of the inner and outer worlds into which we have been born. This given reality is an infinite which passes all understanding and yet admits of being directly and in some sort totally apprehended. It is a transcendence belonging to another order than the human, and yet it may be present to us as a felt immanence, an experienced participation. To be enlightened is to be aware, always, of total reality in its immanent otherness—to be aware of it and yet to remain in a condition to survive as an animal, to think and feel as a human being, to resort whenever expedient to systematic reasoning. Our goal is to discover that we have always been where we ought to be. Unhappily we make the task exceedingly difficult for ourselves. Meanwhile, however, there are gratuitous graces in the form of partial and fleeting realizations. Under a more realistic, a less exclusively verbal system of education than ours, every Angel (in Blake’s sense of that word) would be permitted as a sabbatical treat, would be urged and even, if necessary, compelled to take an occasional trip through some chemical Door in the Wall into the world of transcendental experience. If it terrified him, it would be unfortunate but probably salutary. If it brought him a brief but timeless illumination, so much the better. In either case the Angel might lose a little of the confident insolence sprouting from systematic reasoning and the consciousness of having read all the books.

Aldous Huxley – The Doors of Perception p.77

The Doors of Perception p.55

Confronted by a chair which looked like the Last Judgment—or, to be more accurate, by a Last Judgment which, after a long time and with considerable difficulty, I recognized as a chair—I found myself all at once on the brink of panic. This, I suddenly felt, was going too far. Too far, even though the going was into intenser beauty, deeper significance. The fear, as I analyze it in retrospect, was of being overwhelmed, of disintegrating under a pressure of reality greater than a mind, accustomed to living most of the time in a cosy world of symbols, could possibly bear. The literature of religious experience abounds in references to the pains and terrors overwhelming those who have come, too suddenly, face to face with some manifestation of the Mysterium tremendum. In theological language, this fear is due to the incompatibility between man’s egotism and the divine purity, between man’s self-aggravated separateness and the infinity of God. Following Boehme and William Law, we may say that, by unregenerate souls, the divine Light at its full blaze can be apprehended only as a burning, purgatorial fire. An almost identical doctrine is to be found in The Tibetan Book of the Dead, where the departed soul is described as shrinking in agony from the Pure Light of the Void, and even from the lesser, tempered Lights, in order to rush headlong into the comforting darkness of selfhood as a reborn human being, or even as a beast, an unhappy ghost, a denizen of hell. Anything rather than the burning brightness of unmitigated Reality—anything!

Aldous Huxley – The Doors of Perception p.55

The Doors of Perception p.23

According to such a theory, each one of us is potentially Mind at Large. But in so far as we are animals, our business is at all costs to survive. To make biological survival possible, Mind at Large has to be funneled through the reducing valve of the brain and nervous system. What comes out at the other end is a measly trickle of the kind of consciousness which will help us to stay alive on the surface of this particular planet. To formulate and express the contents of this reduced awareness, man has invented and endlessly elaborated those symbol-systems and implicit philosophies which we call languages. Every individual is at once the beneficiary and the victim of the linguistic tradition into which he has been born—the beneficiary inasmuch as language gives access to the accumulated records of other people’s experience, the victim in so far as it confirms him in the belief that reduced awareness is the only awareness and as it bedevils his sense of reality, so that he is all too apt to take his concepts for data, his words for actual things. That which, in the language of religion, is called “this world” is the universe of reduced awareness, expressed, and, as it were, petrified by language. The various “other worlds,” with which human beings erratically make contact are so many elements in the totality of the awareness belonging to Mind at Large. Most people, most of the time, know only what comes through the reducing valve and is consecrated as genuinely real by the local language. Certain persons, however, seem to be born with a kind of by-pass that circumvents the reducing valve. In others temporary by-passes may be acquired either spontaneously, or as the result of deliberate “spiritual exercises,” or through hypnosis, or by means of drugs. Through these permanent or temporary by-passes there flows, not indeed the perception “of everything that is happening everywhere in the universe” (for the by-pass does not abolish the reducing valve, which still excludes the total content of Mind at Large), but something more than, and above all something different from, the carefully selected utilitarian material which our narrowed, individual minds regard as a complete, or at least sufficient, picture of reality.

Aldous Huxley – The Doors of Perception Includes Heaven and Hell p.23

You are the Medicine

by Maria Sabina

“Cure yourself, with the light of the sun and the rays of the moon.
With the sound of the river and the waterfall.
With the swaying of the sea and the fluttering of birds.
Heal yourself, with the mint and mint leaves,
with neem and eucalyptus.
Sweeten yourself with lavender,
rosemary, and chamomile.
Hug yourself with the cocoa bean and a touch of cinnamon.
Put love in tea instead of sugar and take it looking at the stars.
Heal yourself, with the kisses that the wind gives you
and the hugs of the rain.
Get strong with bare feet on the ground and
with everything that is born from it.
Get smarter every day by listening to your intuition,
looking at the world with the eye of your forehead.
Jump, dance, sing, so that you live happier.
Heal yourself, with beautiful love,
and always remember… you are the medicine.”

The Secret Chief Revealed p.89

Leo would say, “You don’t want to make any life-changing decisions until at least three weeks after the trip. You don’t want to move. You don’t want to quit a job and take another one. You don’t want to leave a relationship and start a new one. Just be with it a while. See what pertains to the trip itself and what is meant to be actualized in your life.” That always seemed like good advice.

Myron J. Stolaroff – The Secret Chief Revealed p.89

The Secret Chief Revealed p.86

Leo would review the instructions and the agreements. You were not to repeat to anybody where, when, or with whom you had this experience. You were not to leave the room without explicit permission from the facilitators. You would not do anything harmful to yourself or anyone else. There was to be no sex with anybody else.

The final agreement was Leo saying, “If I should at any time during the trip tell you to do something that you are not doing, or to stop something stat you are doing, you will.” He would look the person in the eye, and each participant would have to say “yes”. Then Leo used to say “That means that if I told you to jump out a window, you would.” He did not want it to seem like it would have to be something that would be clearly in our best interests, because in our tripping state it might seem like something that was against our best interests. So if he said, “Go fly now,” we would say “Yes” without question.

Many people reported afterwards that it occurred to them during their trip to do inappropriate things. Then they remembered that they agreed not to do harm, and that they had agreed to do whatever they were told by the leader. Therefore, they would remember this and censor themselves. That turned out to be part of the freedom, not a restriction.

Not every group leader warrants being given that degree of trust. This sort of agreement was very delicate and strong. Then Leo would say to the group “I want you to know that I have never had to call on that, I have never invoked it, but you still need to agree to it because it is one of the agreements.” Participants knew beforehand that every time they came they had to reaffirm the same commitment to the agreements. So the beginners in the group and the repeaters all came on a common playing field.

Myron J. Stolaroff – The Secret Chief Revealed p.86

The Secret Chief Revealed p.25

Whenever they’d get really frightened—I’d ask them to, “Look at what you’re afraid of, just look at what you’re afraid of. All you have to do is just look at it; don’t do anything about it, just look at it. Just keep on looking at it and just tell me what you experience when you’re looking at it.” Most of the times they’ll go off into some kind of a visual trip. Experience something. But they were not experiencing a specific block that you do experience consciously. It wasn’t that. It was a painful fear. That’s what I had them live with and stay with until it became transformed. As it did, the block was gone. I don’t think we even knew what the block was. It was not a specific fear. It seemed to me at the time that it was an accumulation of all the unfaced fears that was being expressed at that time. By facing them they dissolved them—to some degree at least . . .

I use an analogy with them when we’re going through preparation. You know, if you’re walking along and there’s someone behind you and you’re worried or scared about it and you start to run, the more you run in fear from it the greater the monster becomes. Once you stop and turn around it turns out to be some little silly funny thing, and their fear disappears. There’re many little anecdotes like that that I would give in preparation for trips.

Myron J. Stolaroff – The Secret Chief Revealed p.25

The Secret Chief Revealed p.23

I’ll bring my analogies in here at this point. When I’m talking about a trip to a person who hasn’t tripped and they want to know, “What’s it like?” It’s hard to describe what it’s like but I have a couple of analogies that I use.

One is, imagine that you’re on a stage, a very large stage, a round stage, circular. You’re standing in the center of the stage. Around this stage is a huge curtain, very, very high and it’s closed and where the curtain comes together there’s about say three feet of space, of an opening. You’re standing in the middle of that stage and you’re looking out through that opening. Everything you see is the totality of your experience of yourself. What happens on a trip is by some mysterious means the curtain very gradually is pulled back. Very gradually. It’s pulled back until it’s pulled all the way around the back and you’re given the opportunity to see everything that’s been there all the time but you couldn’t see it before because there was a curtain. All the different levels of experience that it’s possible to have, you have. All the different truths, all the different things, you have. You experience it. Then, as you start to come down, very gradually the curtain sets pulled back around until you’re all the way down.

When you’re all the way down, the difference is that before, you had about three feet of space that was open to look through. You now have about fifteen feet of space. You have really expanded your awareness, which is what they call these materials, awareness-expanders . . .

There’s another analogy that I use, too. It’s similar to that. That is, imagine a castle, a huge castle, very large. Many rooms, many turrets, many levels ofit There’s only one way to get into this castle, and that’s the front door. The front door is solid steel. Impregnable. You can knock on that door all you want. You can do everything you can to tear it down. You can’t get it down. Every nowand then you might somehow or other move it a little bit to get a glimpse of what’s behind it, but that’s all. There’s no way, and you’ve tried every way possible to get into that castle—which is yourself.

What happens on a trip is by some mysterious magic means this door is dissolved, and you have the opportunity to go in and explore that castle. Any place you want. You go in and you look around, and you find many wonderful places, strange places maybe, scary places and all that. You can go to the top and you can go to the bottom and you get a sense of what the totality of yourself really is like. As you come down, what happens is that the door somehow or other gets back up there. But that’s all right, because you have a memory of what possibilities are there and what you’ve experienced. The biggest experience that it brings to you is that it connects you with feelings that you’ve never been connected with before. They are now open to you. Not on the level or the intensity that you had in the experience but certainly much more than they ever were before. That gives them an idea.

Myron J. Stolaroff – The Secret Chief Revealed p.23