DMT and the Soul of Prophecy p.57

Both of these non-Western systems have built into them characteristics chat indicate their being less than optimal religious models for the spiritual properties of the Western psychedelic drug experience. One is theological. Neither Buddhism nor indigenous shamanism are theocentric, positing God as the creator and sustainer of the natural and spiritual worlds. Buddhism, at least ostensibly, teaches that belief in an external God is not conducive to the inner work that one must engage in to attain the enlightened state. And shamanism emphasizes a multitude of invisible spiritual forces instead of God. I believe that in order for the psychedelic drug experience to exert the greatest possible influence on Western religious sensibilities, it is advantageous to present and interpret that experience in a manner consistent with religious notions already existing within those religions. The bedrock of all three major Western religions is the belief in God. Therefore, maintaining and building upon that belief seems more likely to be accepted than what might result from discarding it and substituting non-monotheistic beliefs.

The situation is more complex in Buddhism, at least for the school in which I trained. Both during ritual and everyday activities, we routinely prayed to the Buddha, bodhisattvas,* and deceased teachers within our lineage. We bowed to their photographs and statues. And our teacher taught that Buddhism is not atheistic after all, but that one must search for references to God in textual allusions. After some years the notion began pressing on me that if I were to bow and pray to something or someone, I preferred that it be the highest and most sublime “thing,” rather than a dead human or one of many spiritual beings. And if Buddhism needed to cloak its belief in God, there seemed to be an intellectual dishonesty underlying that decision.

In a similar nontheist manner, shamanism emphasizes evoking and controlling invisible spiritual forces of nature for healing, revenge, attracting a spouse, warfare, seeking lost items, and so forth. I again found myself chafing under a model that prayed to spirits instead of their creator and sustainer: God. While Christian elements such as belief in God and Jesus are making increasing headway into Latin American shamanism, this is a relatively new phenomenon and is not intrinsic to it.

Neither Latin American shamanism nor Buddhism will be able to claim much theological allegiance from Westerners who either believe in, or refuse to disbelieve in, God. Western atheistic students of Buddhism or shamanism may prefer interacting with the illusory nature of reality or a panoply of nature spirits than with their conflict-laden notion of God. However, the seeming lack of a recognizable God in both models is an obstacle to either of them providing a large-scale religious model for the contemporary Western psychedelic drug experience.

*Spiritual beings with particular characteristics such as love, compassion, courage, chergy, and so on. One may invoke their aid by prayer and other rituals.

Rick Strassman, MD – DMT and the Soul of Prophecy: A New Science of Spiritual Revelation in the Hebrew Bible p.57

Nahmanides p.256

Nahmanides believes that idolatry has substance—the angels do exercise some degree of dominion over the nations, the zodiacal signs to determine the fate of individuals and peoples. The worship of these powers, and even the near deification of great emperors, is not superstitious rubbish or madness: “they were wicked, not downright foolish”; in fact, quite the contrary, their devotion can impact reality. To worship beings other than God is not a preposterous act based on miscomprehension of the world, but an act of evil based on an accurate understanding of it. Likewise, pagan prophets can prophesy accurately about the future, and demon worshippers can induce a malefic effect upon the fate of their enemies. From Nahmanides’ point of view, their effectiveness is a scientific fact: “as is well known about them from the science of necromancy.” By isolating one power from the rest of the chain of being, the idolater can alter the divinely willed order and the course of Nature. Idolatry attempts to impose human will upon the natural order by singling out one actor within the chain of being for manipulation, and, as such, its faithful are not guilty of a blunder but of rebellion.

Moshe Halbertal – Nahmanides: Law and Mysticism p.256

Ritual p.158

Death, mourning by the mother and other women, and resurrection of the killed god have been taken over into the ritual of the world religion of Christianity. Freud has shown us that the self-sacrifice of Christ was the expiation for an attempted murder – a parricide, since original sin was a sin against God the Father.

The sacrificial death of the Son of God is an attempt at expiation; it has the character of a compromise, for it ensures the attainment of the son’s most urgent wish, namely, his own enthronement at the side of his father.

Theodor Reik – Ritual: Psychoanalytic Studies, p.158