The Entheogen Theory of Religion and Ego Death

Home (theory of the ego death and rebirth experience)

by Michael Hoffman

December 25, 2005

Published in Salvia Divinorum, Issue 4.

Contents

Introduction. 1

The Entheogen Theory of Religion. 2

The Dissociative Mental-Construct State. 3

The Experience of Helpless Embeddedness in Frozen Spacetime. 7

Self-Control Cancellation and Dependence on Pre-Given Thoughts. 10

Mythic Descriptions of Dissociative-State Experiencing. 13

The Drug-Based Past and Future of Religious Initiation. 15

Introduction

The entheogen theory of religion and ego death explains religious experiencing, bringing together cognitive dissociation, the experience of timeless determinism, self-control cybernetics, and mystic-state metaphor. This new theory integrates these four domains to form a model of transcendent experiential insight, including a simple explanatory model of the ego-death and rebirth experience.

This model of intense religious experiencing is a simple, readily summarizable, and easily intelligible combination of views regarding history and the nature of religion, myth, psychoactives, philosophy, mysticism, and enlightenment. The entheogen theory of religion and ego death explains these related areas by applying the combination of the four key areas of concern, matching up with what the ecstatic-state tradition holds as important, clearly explaining myth and religious experiencing.

Four domains need to be integrated to construct an adequate and relevant model of transcendent experiential insight:

The dissociative cognitive state, including the history of entheogens in religion, and dissociative cognition as a readily accessible, pre-configured mode of mental processing

Block-universe determinism, including determinism-transcendence in religious history, and the experience of frozen-time Necessity and pre-set thoughts throughout all subjective experiencing

Self-control cybernetics, including personal agency, the separate-self construct, personal government-power, and breakdown and transformation of personal control

Metaphor and myth as descriptions of experiential insights in the dissociative cognitive state, including recognizing the purpose of the figures of Jesus and the Apostles as exclusively mystic-state allegorical figures and the New Testament as a sociopolitical rebuttal to Roman imperial Ruler Cult and Pax Romana.

This combination of these four main concerns manifests in every form of Western Esotericism, including alchemy, witchcraft, shamanism, Hermeticism, magic, astrology, mysticism, the Grail legend, Rosicrucians, Templars, Sufism, and Kabbalah. In these, and in all robust religious experiencing, the mental model of self and world undergoes a standard, pre-configured expansion and transformation to take into account the representational nature of experience, the experience of embeddedness in timeless unity, the limited nature of self-control, and the workings of metaphor of the experiential insights.

The Entheogen Theory of Religion

Entheogens are the basis and wellspring of religion. The origin and essence of religion is the use of visionary plants to routinely trigger the intense mystic altered state, producing loose cognitive association binding, which then produces an experience of frozen block-universe determinism with a single, pre-existing, ever-existing future. The effective restoration of self-control stability and the return of the ordinary state of consciousness are metaphorically described and allegorized as a transcendent journey past the boundary of cosmic determinism or Necessity.

Salvia Divinorum is an effective vehicle of religious revelation and transformative, initiatory mental-model regeneration. Salvia has a different religious tenor than LSD or mushrooms, so at first the result might not be recognized as “religious experience”. The feeling of Salvia is strange yet familiar, returning the mind to home-base, the block-universe Origin.

The essence of religion is initiation, which is a transformative development of the mind’s mental world-model. Actual religion and spirituality entails deep cognitive dissociation directed toward the transformative restructuring of one’s mental model of self, time, control, will, and agency. Other goals for which religion is harnessed can only be peripheral.

Myth describes this development process of mystic-state experience. Initiation classically combines a series of visionary-plant sessions with learning perennial philosophy, followed by ongoing periodic dissociation such as symposium “drinking-party” associations, festival feasts, or Agape meals, all of which used visionary-plant beverages rather than alcohol-oriented beer and wine.

The culturally predominant type of religion in the modern era neutralized and reduced the traditional initiation system by a combination of non-transformative surface ritual and intellectual speculation based only in the ordinary cognitive state, lacking the intense mystic altered-state experiencing that was the origin and ongoing wellspring of religious experience and religious transformation of the psyche.

The modern scholarly system of assumptions obscures the mystic experiencing in Roman religion, in the early Mass, and in Jewish religion in late antiquity. Every aspect of the culture and religious practice was so firmly rooted in the plant-induced dissociative state that no isolated mysticism can be visibly singled out. Traditional culture prior to 1700 AD is altered-state based culture, instead of being informed only by the ordinary state.

The aspect of secrecy has been exaggerated; visionary plants were not a secret controlled only by a single group to empower them over others, who were in the dark. Use and knowledge of the visionary plants was common, not rare, in European religious history until the Enlightenment, and was understood by all social classes.

Visionary plants have always been widely used and understood throughout the Catholic Church and Western Esotericism systems, until the battle between politicized religion and politicized science gained cultural dominance, snubbing the mystic altered state as too ambiguous an ally. They were only “suppressed” in a weak sense of mere veiling; the main Church strategy was to co-opt and profitably direct the use of visionary plants, not to eliminate the source of religious experiencing.

Visionary-plant inebriation was thoroughly integrated into ancient cultures. ‘Mixed wine’ was central to every aspect of Hellenistic-Roman religion and culture, and it was a dissociative-state inducing infusion of visionary plants, not merely grape wine. A common standard “banqueting tradition” practice (often with “reclining at table”) using ‘mixed wine’ ran across many seemingly disparate cultural practices throughout antiquity (Smith 2003).

Greco-Roman ‘mixed wine’ is best thought of as mushroom wine, in terms of its resulting effects, with variable plants being utilized to bring about the desired psilocybin-type effect. If Electric Kool-Aid in an Acid Test type of gathering were switched with ‘mixed wine’ in a Hellenistic symposium, neither party would notice the difference, except possibly the duration.

Visionary plants have been the basis of Western culture from pre-history through antiquity (Russell 1998). Psychoactive plant usage has a long and influential history (Escohotado 1999). Visionary plants have been commonly used around the world throughout the history of religion and culture (Hofmann, Schultes, & Ratsch 1992) and have been used at the origin of religions around the world, including the variants of Western Esotericism (Heinrich 2002).

References to visionary plants are now routinely recognized in Greek and Christian mythic-religious systems (Ruck, Staples, & Heinrich 2001). The entheogen theory of religion explains ancient Dionysian religion as founded on visionary plants (Taylor-Perry 2003). Dionysus’ animals (psychoactive plants) are torn apart and ingested raw. By eating the entheogenic flesh of the divine visionary plants, the Bacchants receive the god into themselves and are likewise pulled apart in disintegration. This ecstatic state experience is fundamental to the Dionysian religion. The Bacchants eat the god by eating the divine plant. Mithraism was a series of initiation experiences based on ingesting visionary plants (Hoffman, Ruck, & Staples 2002). Buddhism is based in visionary plants as well (Crowley 2004).

Early Christianity is portrayed in the New Testament as being based in ecstatic, dissociative-state religious experiencing. The Jesus figure is portrayed in the New Testament as a spirit-possessed altered-state shamanistic healer (Davies 1995). The figure of Paul the Apostle is portrayed as a shamanistic mystic (Ashton 2000), and the apostles are portrayed as adepts in shamanic altered-state mystic experiencing (Pilch 2004). Early Christian writings contain polemical indications of familiarity with ecstatic mania, inspiration, elevated sobriety, and “drunkenness” (Nasrallah 2003).

Coming to grips with the historical and cognitive centrality of visionary plants in religion is an all-or-nothing proposition. Scholars have increasingly recognized that the Western and Eastern religions, including Western Esotericism, Platonism, and religio-philosophical variants, were shamanic; that is, based on visionary plants.

The Dissociative Mental-Construct State

Cognitive phenomenology is an effective and well-suited approach to studying and theorizing about the entheogen-induced experiential state (Shanon 2002). Mental constructs are the basic units of cognitive phenomenology. Mental constructs are dynamic association matrixes, held together by some degree of binding intensity. Mental constructs are initially arranged into a standard egoic configuration, then upon loosening of association structures and perceptual layers, mental constructs are rearranged into a standard transcendent configuration, in a revolutionary system-wide transformation including a systemic shift of meaning and mental world-model.

Revolutionary conversion to a new theory or world-model involves structural transformation of concept networks and hierarchies, increased explanatory coherence, concept recombination, and rational mechanisms of paradigm conversion (Thagard 1992). Like egoic structures, the transcendent mode of thinking is an innate, pre-configured structure that is discovered and revealed, like the adolescent discovers the innate ability to climax, then developed and refined, rather than being invented and constructed as though an arbitrary invention.

The ability to mystically climax is inbuilt, as is the mental model that is revealed, although the useful metaphors and systematized explanation required to retain the revealed mental structure must be a product of human effort, such as the present systematized theory. Having this theory in hand speeds up the conceptual retaining of the glimpsed, innate altered-state structure, and increases comprehension for subsequent individuals.

In the ordinary cognitive state, the mind uses linguistic and conceptual associations in a particular predefined, rutted, and repetitive way. Ordinary-state cognition is settled and immersed in the standard egoic ruts of patterns and mental associations, such as trying to improvise on a musical instrument but ending up playing repetitive patterns. Having a recognizable personality relies on such habitual patterns of dynamic mental construct associations, which are dynamic within a particular range or mode.

Representation and referent are fused, identified, and bound together such that they can only be slightly differentiated, using abstract theoretical speculation. Ordinary-state patterns of thinking and perceiving are supported by tightly bound association of mental construct patterns.

Entheogens cause their effects by loosening cognitive associations, resulting in mental construct processing appearing as artificial representationalism and projection. Loose cognition is easily and tangibly recognized through visual-pattern construction and through improvising on a musical instrument. Loose cognition facilitates and teaches rich improvisation in all aspects of playing and mental activity.

The dissociative cognitive state enables deep revision of the interconnections between mental constructs. Loose cognitive binding enables and causes the mind to readily and easily switch from the accustomed world-model to another particular, essentially predefined world-model: an egoless, timeless, uncontrolled, frozen-future world-model.

In the experiencing and perception in the ordinary cognitive state, mental representation is identified with the referents, in naïve representationalism, producing the referent projection illusion or effect. In the dissociative cognitive state, not only do the usual associated mental constructs become separate from each other, the mental representation of each item perceptibly splits and separates from the represented referent, splitting into two perceptibly distinct layers: the representation layer present like a tangible painting, and a remote, speculative realm that is pointed to but perceptually clearly absent, like a foreign country one has never directly seen.

Mental constructs quit naïvely referring to, or representing, their referents, and instead, are explicitly perceived as merely being mental constructs, such as the now-unconvincing and questionable representation of personal movement through time and personal movement through one’s spatial environment. This is mental construct/referent dissociation or representation/referent dissociation. Not only tables and chairs tangibly split into representation and referent layers, so does personal control-power and personal movement through space and time become perceptible only as unconvincing, fake and synthetic-looking mental constructs.

In the dissociative cognitive state, pattern-perception becomes highly flexible, receptive, and perceptive. Blatant perceptual distortion together with representation/referent splitting vividly poses questions of epistemology and the philosophy of perception, including the existence of one’s past. All that is presented to awareness is present mental constructs, which point to alleged referent objects which might or might not exist, or might exist in a way other than the usual tangible mental constructs representing them.

Meta-perception is the tangible perception of the layer of mental constructs that is the only thing directly presented to awareness. In the dissociative state, the world blatantly and explicitly appears as merely mental representations which are themselves frozen into the block universe. Extension of objects and the controlling ego-entity across time appears to be distributed along a fixed and pre-set stream of time-slices frozen into position, a living statue consisting of a series and set of statues in incrementally different poses. The vantage-point of awareness can be raised, or stepped back a level, to observe mental construct processing and perception itself. Time is no longer perceived as a flow, but as a frozen expanse and positional relationship of stationary slices.

There are multiple triggers for the dissociative cognitive state, including psychedelics, meditation, schizophrenia, sensory deprivation, and temporal-lobe epilepsy. Entheogens are by far the most powerful and historically common trigger for cognitive dissociation sessions. Meditation and shamanic drumming were developed as activities to do in the plant-induced dissociative state, not as methods of inducing the dissociative state in the first place. Visionary plants have been used throughout history to activate the mystic cognitive state in many variants of mysticism (Freke & Gandy 1997). Leading mystics throughout the history of various religions have used on-demand, visionary-plant sessions with rationality-oriented mystic-state experiencing (Merkur 2001).

There are practical and phenomenological differences between using LSD (acid) or mushrooms versus Salvia Divinorum, with respect to dissociation, determinism, cybernetics, and metaphor. Compared to LSD and mushrooms, Salvia has a distinctively narrower, signature range of effects and religious tenor, without color smearing and audio warbling.

Salvia makes mental constructs visible and perceived as such, rather than as their referents. The visual warping from Salvia moves differently than the familiar “water waves” produced by LSD. The acid-lyric metaphors of looking through water or crystal don’t apply as well to Salvia, which has less visual watering and blurring, though there can be general turbulent undulation of vision and of body-image sensation. Salvia emphasizes spacetime merging, due to all types of mental constructs ceasing to naïvely refer and project.

The shorter duration of smoked Salvia means the dynamics such as “voyage”, “long trip that plays out”, and “epic journey” vanish compared to peyote or LSD. This shorter duration reduces the situation of “the long trip is starting and there is no turning back from any control-crash that might be sitting up ahead on the worldline”, thus wrestling with self-control power has less time to build up.

Myths and metaphors for dissociation phenomena, the sensation of determinism, and self-control grappling, recognized as experiential descriptions, can be mapped to visionary plant chemical effects such as Salvinorin-A, Scopalamine, and Psilocybin based on the cognitive phenomenological signatures of the chemicals – one way to attempt to determine what was in ‘mixed wine’, for example.

The Time-Voyaging, Control-Wielding Self Seen as a Mental Construct

Enlightenment is about seeing and understanding the aspects in which personal separateness and autonomous personal control-power are illusory. Any other expected goals of enlightenment are mundane self-help, not deep transformation, just coping better in a mostly unchanged, status-quo framework, to be well-adjusted within that sensation of personal existence and power. Enlightenment isn’t mundane self-improvement; enlightenment transcends details of personality style. Ego structures are refined, revised, and upgraded after enlightenment; only some structural aspects are eliminated.

Mental processing is structured with the ego-representation as the center of control and experiencing. The ego-entity exists as a real set of patterns and dynamics spread across time, but the ego is not as solid, continuous, or autonomously powerful in the manner or sense as usually conceived. This representation of the ego is a particular dynamic set of mental constructs. The mind usually projects and constructs a fairly solid and simple image of oneself. The mind is designed to accept the mentally projected self-representation as literally identical to oneself. The naïve concept of ego is distorted, accepting the projected ego image as being as real as the egoic cognitive structures.

In the ordinary cognitive state, the basic facts of mental construct processing we’d expect to be obvious and visible are hidden from awareness. The mind’s mental representation of the self or ego is only one portion of the ego. The mind’s internal representation of oneself is deceivingly tangible and apparently simple and direct, but aspects of this familiar perspective are unreal. The ego really exists, as a set of thinking-patterns that are usually experienced as directly present and solid. The ego agency and its movement through time while wielding control-power normally seem simply real, directly and straightforwardly perceived, and solidly present, but are actually known indirectly, through the intermediary medium of synthetic, artificial, representational mental constructs.

A person lives their entire subjectively experienced life inside a brain-computer simulation that their own mind produces by presenting mental constructs to awareness. The mind’s simulation or representation of self, personal movement, and the world is so realistic, perception of the elements of practical daily life consistently seems simply and transparently direct, including perception of things, people, the personal boundary and self-image, wielding power, and moving through time. Mental representation and projection form an internal simulacrum of how things are.

In the loosened, altered state, this set of normally hidden relationships and this state of affairs becomes obvious, like philosophers would expect it to always be. The highly realistic-seeming quality of experiencing in the normal state (the illusion of direct perception of referents) is almost more mysterious than the state of things that’s revealed in the dissociative cognitive state (that all we ever perceive is the mind’s own present, internal, representational mental constructs). The loosened, altered state permits and causes the mind to see what we’d expect to be always obvious; this state gets rid of the usual masking-illusion of simple reference, such as time’s passage. The egoic agent wielding power and passing through time is a projected, constructed, synthetic image and perspective. The ego exists virtually; it exists in a sense that is quickly corrected and revised upon encountering the un-masked observations provided by the altered-state perspective.

Jewish mysticism has often involved a perilous mystic-state transient, transcendent death experience (Fishbane 1994). Seeing the illusory aspects of mental representation of oneself and feeling static spacetime unity in the absence of the accustomed sense of personal solidity can be experienced as death, as the ending of personal existence, because the egoic-mode mind strongly identifies with the projected image and sensation of the moving continuant agent and its control-power. In the dissociative state, the usual cognitive structures constituting the ego suspend and reduce, and the projection of the ego image also is reduced. Oneself still exists in many ways, such as a body in time, a brain, a mind, possessions, and a personal past. One genuine aspect of oneself has temporarily ceased to firmly exist: the egoic cognitive processing, which is largely suspended.

The projection of the self-image is also partly suspended. Insofar as the mind confuses the projected self-image with that part of the self which is genuine, that projected self never existed, other than a perceptual illusion, and so could not cease to exist. If the ego is defined strictly as the natural assumption that the mentally projected self-representation is literally oneself, then it can be said that “the ego is only an illusion”.

Salvation and regeneration are about experiencing and understanding the way in which the power of personal control-agency is an illusion. There is a shocking feeling of helplessness upon realizing the insubstantial aspects of the cross-time ego when the usual curtains are drawn aside and the cognitive mechanisms backstage are plainly perceived. The will exerts control-power, but this power is virtual or secondary-level rather than literal or primary-level control-power. There is some control-power, but the normal perception of this power is distorted.

The mind in the ordinary cognitive state is designed to generate this sensation of being a power-wielding agent moving through time and space. The sense of having control-power is generally valid and reasonably represents reality, but it is an incomplete perception, with some aspects taken too literally and too simply; it’s an incomplete, half-developed world-model.

The Experience of Helpless Embeddedness in Frozen Spacetime

All eras are concerned, in their own fashion, that determinism (Heimarmene or Fatum) reduces personal power and freedom. The Enlightenment and subsequent modern era lacked much contact with the dissociative state, and therefore in practice conceived of the ego as an autonomous self-steering entity, despite the fact that determinism (in its modern scientific and philosophical version) theoretically suggested that people are slaves or puppets of determinism playing out over time in a clockwork, empty, machine-like universe.

The complaint that modern science introduces determinism and thereby reduces the person to an automaton reflects the lack of historical awareness that traditional mystic-state-based determinism comparably reduced personal power. The principle of determinism or fatedness is not actually unique to modernity, as the common complaint assumes; the only thing that’s new about the modern idea of determinism is the ordinary-state-based manner of picturing determinism.

Time can be envisioned as a space-like dimension, forming a block universe that includes snake-shaped personal worldline threads; this perspective is characteristic of altered-state perception (Rucker 1984). Analytic philosophy and space-time physics have been brought together to construct a tenseless, static model of time (Oaklander & Smith 1994). Philosophical Metaphysics investigates tenseless time, fatedness, agent movement through space and time, and controller agents (Oaklander & Smith 1995).

The mind is designed to experience the world from a mental world-model premised on freewill, while in the default cognitive state. During the series of visionary-plant initiations, this model is increasingly suspended and replaced by the sensation and perception of no-free-will – frozen-time block-universe determinism – while the mind systematically reinterprets key aspects of its mental world-model to fit the transcendent perspective.

In the experience of helpless embeddedness in frozen spacetime, everything and everyone is physically attached together back to back, affixed to the spacetime cross, looking out; all nailed to the same structure, looking out from the same throne in the land of Hades. Prometheus is chained looking out from the rock; the disc of Ixion in the sky pivots around the pole star of the fixed Heimarmene-sphere looking out and down. That is the same physical block Pirithous and Theseus are snake-fastened to down in Persephone’s kingdom, and the same tree king Pentheus is caught up in, looking out from. The gods do with the block-universe tree, throne, star-sphere, or block what they will; they strike down the king’s notion of autonomy and then put a triple crown on him, letting him know he’s a spacetime puppet in a chain of control-origination (transcendent God, then determinism, then finally egoic control).

Snakes represent Heimarmene and the pre-set worldline of one’s life, a thread frozen into spacetime, including one’s future train of thoughts. Ingesting the entheogen is the predetermined destiny of initiates. Thus, pictured metaphorically, these “snakes” are inevitably drawn to the entheogenic libation of ‘mixed wine’ or ‘sacrificial cake’ placed or poured onto altars of sacrifice, like that to which Isaac is attached and bound, the frozen-into-spacetime altar, comparable to the labyrinth path inevitably leading the sacrificial children to the Minotaur in the central lair every year.

From the transcendent perspective, the hand of god does everything, which puts the problem of evil in not just some abstract light. In the dissociative state, all actions anyone has done in the world, good and evil, are experienced as physically attached to one’s own arms, body, and frozen-into-spacetime train of thoughts. Mysticism is hyper-physical at the same time as becoming a mass of mental constructs pointing to nothing in view.

Contemplating timeless determinism and utter dependence on permanent, unchangeable, pre-set thoughts inevitably coming your way presents a vulnerability that threatens to lead into inescapable seizure, panic, and chaotic control-instability breakdown. The prospect of a hidden, separate, uncontrollable force or agent designing one’s entire life, near-future thoughts, and direction of will, is disturbing and may lead to a call for truce – the hidden controller or Author forming a pact with the authored character.

Salvia Divinorum enables experiencing frozen timeless block-universe determinism, with time as a space-like dimension. Salvia presents a strong, clear sensation of spatial merging and unity, and of the static frozen nature of time is perceived as a collection of present moments, with time as a space-like dimension, but with space itself seen to be not simply present, but rather, mediated through present mental representations. In contrast, the colors and lights and explicit audio distortion in LSD can distract from spatial merging and the simulated, indirect nature of perceiving personal movement through time and space.

Religious philosophy often equates transcendence and enlightenment with awareness of cosmic determinism (Balsekar 1999). Greco-Roman culture was premised on no-free-will. Greek culture including myth and tragedy was concerned with Necessity and the nullification of the sense of autonomous control-agency (Vernant & Vidal-Naquet 1972). The story of Socrates’ trial, punishment, and death is not historical reportage, but rather a commentary on the laws against “corrupting the youth”, or “revealing the secrets” – that is, publicly and explicitly admitting that there’s no free will and no moral culpability, as the mysteries teach, and as the Mystery Religions mean by “moral purification”. Mystic-state purificatory ego death is inherently tantamount to a divinizing rebirth; to sacrifice the old self-conception and yet to live is to become athanatos, “non-dying”, or “immortal”.

Mystery-cult society veiled the fact of no-free-will from youths. The hierophantic priests abducted and “killed” them through the revelation of no-free-will in a communal religio-political authorized sacred environment and context. This revelation “killed”, rebirthed, purified, and rendered deathless (athanatos) the mature or “perfected” initiate, who has already died as an autonomous moral agent.

The problem of Heimarmene (Fatedness, timeless cosmic determinism) was the central thematic concern of religions in the Hellenistic era (Martin 1987). Heimarmene was centrally important in ancient astrological cosmology (Barton 1994); these were major themes and concerns in Hellenistic-Roman astral ascent mysticism and religion (Cumont 1960). Hermeticism was Greco-Egyptian esotericism integrating philosophy and religion, particularly the crucial doctrine of Heimarmene which played a large part in the late antique consciousness; transcending astral fatedness involved ingesting holy food, ambrosial water, and astrological medicine (Fowden 1986).

Transcending Cosmic Determinism

Through the mystic dissociative state, religion reveals determinism and a way to transcend it. The revelation of determinism transcends animalistic or demonic thinking to some extent, and then discloses a possible transcendent escape from the rational and experiential problem of prison-like determinism (star-prison), to complete the transcending of animalistic or demonic thinking.

3-stage initiation paths centered around determinism are simple yet confusing because they are often posed as a 2-stage system: they both endorse and disparage the realization of determinism, because determinism is the intermediate destination on the path to salvific regeneration – like loving and hating adolescence. Such is the feared and venerated level of “the 8th”, the sphere of the fixed stars, or Saturn, eating his children.

In gnosis, the mind turns one way to discover Fatedness (the Law, the Demiurge, or spacetime imprisonment), then turns an opposite way to discover the potential to transcend Fatedness. Valentinian Gnosticism affirmed cosmic determinism but also transcended it, and formulated two contrasting schemes of thinking about moral culpability (Pagels 1992). There’s a sequence of two basic devils or evil demons: the demon of beginning-level ignorance (naïve freewill and personal autonomy delusion); and then there is the demon of determinism, Fatedness, Heimarmene, or material Nature (the urgent problem of awareness of being in the overpowering grip of cosmic determinism).

Transcendent, dissociative-state religion provides a justified alternative to determinism. Similarly, Copenhagenist quantum mechanics aims to provide an alternative to hidden-variables determinism, but through intellectual activity and a conception of time that are based in the ordinary cognitive state.

The Christian religion uses game-like metaphors centered around the theme of no-free-will, including playing with the idea of moral guilt and release, mentally reconciling one’s autonomous power with no-free-will, and transcending no-free-will. This metaphor game involves visionary plants and mastery of the various metaphors centered around no-free-will theme, applying these to the mundane realm and drawing themes from the mundane realm.

Christianity incorporated the mystic-metaphor theme of ‘transcending cosmic determinism’ and the mystic-metaphor theme of ‘moral guilt and purifying atonement for sin through willing sacrifice’. Protestant Reformed theology emphasizes the ‘atonement’ theme, affirming determinism, particularly the predestination of who God gives salvific grace to, while inconsistently holding to the moral culpability of created persons.

Protestant Reformed theology asserts a form of determinism: the predestination of who is rescued from post-mortem punishment for rebelling against God’s all-powerful rulership. But mystically attuned Christianity often continues past the affirmation of determinism to affirm transcendent freedom from determinism, sometimes demonizing or disparaging determinism.

Gnosticism, Western Esotericism, and Neoplatonism are ways of penetrating past determinism into a trans-rational, hyper-cosmic, ultra-transcendent sphere. In this 3-level, determinism-centered system, there are two pivots or jumps: the jump from naïve freewill autonomy to rational mystic awareness of timeless block-universe determinism, and then the jump to a mental model that is trans-rational or super-rational. Thoughts or mental constructs exist, and possibly also the various kinds of referents that are pointed to by mental constructs. Both cognitive states or perspectives combine to form a comprehensive world-model.

Astral ascent cosmology is key for understanding much of Gnostic mythic metaphor, Platonism, Western Esotericism, and Christian mythic metaphor. Astral ascent mysticism uses the Earth-centered Ptolemaic cosmology, emphasizing the star-sphere boundary to the transcendent heavens. Astral ascent cosmology is a tangible framework or model for crossing the boundary from the material cosmos into the transcendent heavens during a series of initiations (Ulansey, forthcoming). Astral ascent mysticism pictures the series of entheogenic initiations as ascending through the planetary spheres (1st-7th) to the determinism-aware sphere (8th) of the fixed stars, and then beyond to reach the mysterious hidden, spiritual realm (the 9th) that transcends determinism.

Through entheogenic anointing, the initiate ascends to the pleroma. In the hour of mystic-state death, the anointing assures the “dying” person of victory in the perilous ascent of the soul. The gnostic can leave his body, relinquishing the particles of the soul in the individual stages through which he will pass, and thus can enter into the pleroma as a spiritual being. This Platonist ascent of the soul past the boundary of the material cosmos is a process of redemption. Ancient Jewish writings metaphorically describe mystic-state experiences, including the problem of how to get past various threatening gatekeepers that are encountered during ascent (Arbel 2003). The pivot point of this system is the most dangerous gateway or “fatal” boundary crossing, the sphere of the fixed stars, representing consciousness of Heimarmene and its power over one’s own thoughts.

Self-Control Cancellation and Dependence on Pre-Given Thoughts

The mystic-state perception that near-future thoughts are permanently pre-set occurs together with the sensation of not wielding control over one’s train of thoughts, accompanied by a strong feeling of helplessness and vulnerability. Religious conversion is a trembling, desperate, turning and change of dependence on the source of your own given and substrate-embedded thoughts.

Dissociative-state initiates feel the source of their thoughts isn’t themselves, but some hidden, external force or forces, as if emanating from some mysterious underground spring in a cave. Esotericism is transcendence from determinism in the entheogen-induced dissociative state, with rulers (archons) or prison gatekeepers representing self-control instability; and sacred marriage representing the mind acknowledging that its practical controller-actions work in conjunction with a separate hidden part of oneself that’s the mysterious ultimate origin and source of thoughts, upon which the controller part of oneself is profoundly dependent upon and subject to.

The whole thousand-armed world of all actions at all times is governed by that same ultimate source of all our movements of will, which ultimately undercuts all power that individual minds, or personal control agents, wield. The entire world, across time, is filled with puppets, all driven by the same puppetmaster, all frozen into place, including the abstract, transcendent thought of transcending cosmic determinism, sprinkled like light-sparks throughout the spacetime block.

Mystic-state experiential insight involves not only the self as a being-entity, but the self as a controller-entity; mystic enlightenment is about self-control cybernetics (Watts 1973). The heart of the spiritual divine encounter is trembling dread and fear of God, which is a result of realizing one’s vulnerability to thought-coercion and control-instability, and the illusory aspect of personal autonomous power. Practitioners fearfully cross themselves and pray for mercy before taking the Eucharistic potion.

Controlling one’s thoughts is a difficult or intractable problem (Wegner 1989). Early Christianity involved personal mystical, religious, visionary experiencing, including the experience of the transformative, transcendent power of the Holy Spirit at Agape meals (Johnson 1998). A crisis of personal existence is a central event in transformative altered-state experiencing (Grof & Grof 1989). Cognitive dissociation brings thought-control crisis in which reliance on one’s own powers and resources is of no avail; to combat fear and re-stabilize mental control, trust is needed in the hidden, uncontrollable source of one’s thoughts and actions.

Salvia Divinorum emphasizes the fascinating, strangely attracting, fearful thought of vulnerability to thought-coercion. Mushrooms or Ayahuasca direct mental energy into a great variety of visual and audio special effects. With Salvia, that energy is directed instead into experiencing timeless frozenness, spatial merging, and explicit representationalism – conditions which produce a sensation of inability to control and steer away from one’s near-future thoughts, which are pre-set, unmoving, and inevitable.

Autonomous or sovereign personal control agency becomes problematic in light of the principle of Fatedness (White 1997). Self-control seizes and becomes unstable in the light of comprehending timeless determinism. The mind then has to acknowledge its profound vulnerability and come to grips with it, having no viable choice but to trust in the source of all thoughts on which moral life has always secretly depended. The resulting sudden restabilization is experienced as being divinely rescued, reset and restored to stability from outside one’s own local locus of power, as if a god were artificially, mechanically lowered onto the stage to resolve a humanly unsolvable problem in the plot of a tragedy. Similarly, Mithraism tells of a pact between the sun inside the material cosmos and the hypercosmic sun outside the material cosmos – the reconciling of the local control agency with the meta-controller.

Gnostics used the theme of the Immovable Race (the deterministically pre-chosen set of initiates), highlighting the theme of stability, of being able to stand stably in the face of God’s overwhelming, autonomy-undermining controllership. Durable mental stability is a challenge and a desired goal to be achieved by transcending cosmic fatedness and metaphysically transcending change altogether (Williams 1997).

Equivalent themes drive Eastern religions as well. Buddha was aided by spirits who reminded him of the countless compassionate efforts he had made on behalf of sentient beings throughout his incarnations. Buddha recognized that it was his destiny to touch the ground in an act of resolve, causing Mara and his army of demons to instantly disperse – then he experienced enlightenment. The goal of ceasing to be reborn into a material body is equivalent to Western figurations for transcending the egoic illusion of autonomy, such as purification and casting out seven demons.

Determinists equate the ego or devil with naive freewill thinking, while determinism transcenders equate the ego or devil with determinism. This disparity is due to determinism-awareness being the intermediate but not final goal of religious mental transformation. There are effectively two devils or two stages that can be disparagingly called “egoic delusion”: the first devil to break away from is the naïve assumption of simple self-control and freewill, which gives way to retaining the comprehension that the world is ruled by determinism rather than autonomous egoic freewill-possessing agents.

But then the second devil to break away from is that model – cosmic determinism – in its practical problem-raising aspect. Sensing and believing in timeless determinism in the dissociative state brings control-chaos and self-control cybernetic instability. This urgent control-crisis problem is solved by transcendently leaping outside that rational but impractical model of time, self, and control.

Political ideas were deliberately related to dissociative-state mystic experiencing, connected by the idea of governing or controlling power, the power of governing-control agency. The good news of Caesar or Jesus was not finally a way to avoid post-mortem punishment, but rather, the arrival of divine rescue from chaos of governing: rescue from civil war, and rescue from internal battle between aspects of controllership in the psyche.

The gospel is the rescuing thought of the psychic availability of restabilizing trans-rational belief in the harmless beneficence of the mysterious hidden source of your control-thoughts. The rescuing message is the idea of the compassionate, caring, and responsive nature of the controller of the universe including your near-future thoughts, as figured in Isis or Virgin Mary as loving, nurturing mother and Queen of Heaven.

Dissociative-state thematic concerns include overcoming anxiety and panic, ecstatic death, and prayer to restore personal stability by trusting in transcendent power over oneself (Merkur 1993). Rescue from self-control chaos in the light of frozen-time determinism arrives the moment one believes in a non-rational supposition: a reason for stability, a ballast to regain stable self-control, a practical, sovereign self-control power, despite reason’s utter inability to provide control re-stabilization. This is the divine transcending of reason which is the mind’s power to save its control system from certain destructive, harmful potentials – a divine, rationality-transcending thought that rescues it from the jaws of destructive, chaotic control-loss.

The Christian canonical gospel combined the mystic-metaphorical scheme of ‘moral guilt, then atonement to become right with God through the punitive payment of sacrifice’ with the theme of ‘Heimarmene, then ultra-transcendent rescue from it’. This gospel emphasizes a mystic-metaphor system with a riddle, puzzle, or double meaning of religious transformation as ‘moral guilt, then purifying atonement for sin through the willing sacrifice of the child’.

There is a riddling switching between two networks of word-meanings: between the initiate’s initial conception of ‘sin’ in terms of moral guiltiness, and the transformed mental-model conception of ‘sin’ as logical error about the nature of control-agency. To ironically lay-on and assert the noninitiates’ moral guilt is to encourage their autonomy-illusion, entrenching that “moral rebellion against the almighty Creator”. Enlightenment is the regenerative transformation from the mental model premised on ‘sin’ in the sense of ‘freewill moral guilt’ to a mental model in which the concept of ‘sin’ is reinterpreted and revised to indicate a logical error regarding the nature of agent-culpability.

The Authorial Avatar Crossing Control-Levels

Mysterious Evangelical sayings such as “Jesus died for your sins” or “Jesus is Lord” are easy to understand in terms of levels of control using a puppet model. The puzzling moral logic of vicarious atonement is straightforwardly solved by applying the logic of crossing control-levels, rather than imagining atoning guilt being transferred horizontally onto Jesus as a regular man situated on the same control-level.

To believe God is all-powerful, to believe that Jesus is Lord and is identical with the Creator, is to believe that only Jesus is justly held morally responsible, from the ultimate point of view. The Jesus figure is the puppetmaster’s own representation in the puppet world. The Jesus figure was portrayed in the New Testament as the earthly avatar and manifestation of the all-powerful and all-controlling Jewish creator god (Thompson 2001). All culpability, all claims of autonomy the puppets make, all rebellion against the puppetmaster, and all punishment for all moral or spiritual transgressions properly reverts to the fault or credit of the puppetmaster. Therefore, if the puppetmaster is truly just, all moral punishment (and reward) is rightly directed onto and assigned to the puppetmaster’s own avataristic puppet representing the puppetmaster.

Reformed theology nevertheless holds created agents to be morally guilty as though they were autonomous agents, finally arguing that this contradiction is a mystery incomprehensible to the fallen mind, citing the ironic verse about the potter which amounts to “You puppets are in no position to question the blatantly self-contradictory logic of your puppetmaster.”

“Jesus died for your sins” is ambiguously an assertion that the puppets are guilty of moral rebellion, or that the puppets are rightly exempted from culpability. The former reading serves to sustain and protect the egoic, falsely pseudo-autonomous mode of personal existence, a delicate illusion which readily collapses in the light of the dissociative cognitive state.

Vicarious atonement is vertical, not horizontal, as when a master commands a slave to break the law – the master is rightly punished, not the slave. This legal and moral relationship similarly applies to all controller/agent scenarios: master/slave, commander/soldier, child/doll, programmer/robot, author/character, puppetmaster/puppet, and virtual-world creator/virtual agent.

To declare that Jesus is God and truly all-controller, is to necessarily assert that Jesus is all-responsible and all-culpable, that therefore the only righteous judgment for rebellion against God’s rulership falls onto the one who authored that rebellion, God himself, punishable through his authorial avatar inside the world he created and controls – Jesus. The Jesus figure is positioned as the avataric lower-level representation of the higher-level Creator and controller of all that happens down at that level, not as a regular citizen in an egalitarian society. The shifting of responsibility-attribution and guilt-attribution is vertical, not horizontal.

The author and creator of a virtual world places an avatar of themselves within the virtual world, claims to commit moral righteous judgment upon all agents within that virtual world, and to rightly do so, punishes their own avatar for all the crimes committed within the virtual world, reveals the logic of this, and thereupon declares the puppet-like agents as justified, cleansed, and purified of guilt and error regarding guilt.

If a created, mundanely guilty man is in God’s transcendent court along with God’s avatar Jesus, the man should rightly be released, becoming a released prisoner, and his crime attributed to God’s avatar. This dynamic is found in the Roman Saturnalia and in Jesus’ trial by Pontius Pilate. In the latter, the mundanely guilty Bar-Abbas (son of father) is released and the mundanely innocent Jesus is found and declared transcendently guilty instead – which is sensibly just, if Jesus is considered to be the avatar of the all-responsible all-creator and all-controller, God. The puppetmaster’s own puppet representing himself must be found exclusively culpable in any court of puppets that is set up by the puppetmaster.

Mythic Descriptions of Dissociative-State Experiencing

The original purpose of myth for the ancients was to poetically express the various phenomena of the intense mystic altered state, including stumbling across the world-model and experience of no-free-will, and the desperate scramble for some way to recover a practical sense of stable egoic control.

Myth describes the experiential insight provided by visionary plants. Visionary-plant states and otherworldly themes form the tradition of altered-state journeying (Culiano 1991). Visionary journeying has a long and rich history (Collins & Fishbane 1995). Myth is first and foremost the expression of the intense mystic altered state; the ultimate motivating concern of myth is not the surface figurations about agricultural fertility, birth and death, celestial observations and cycles, ordinary mental tranquility, ethical conduct of life, or avoiding postmortem punishment.

Myth primarily reflects dissociative-state experiencing from visionary plants, rather than ordinary-state or dream-state experiencing. Myth is the metaphoric description of dissociation, determinism, and self-control cybernetics. Searching for these patterns reveals widespread evidence for this Theory.

Visionary plants have a long history throughout world religions, indicated by many metaphors for visionary plants (Hoffman 2001-2002). Myth is metaphorical description of the intense mystic experiencing that results from visionary plants, more than description of the plants themselves. Religious myth is primarily entheogen allegory, not intended literally. This is the entheogen-metaphor theory of religious myth. Religious myth can only be understood as altered-state-based metaphor; that is, description of altered-state experiences, particularly visionary insights into the nature of perception, time, will, and control.

Hellenistic esotericists wrote in a puzzle or riddle mode to ambiguously convey two contradictory networks of meaning. This misled the noninitiates, while confirming initiates’ understanding. Deliberate hiding through double-meaning, followed by revealing in religious initiation, initially protects the sense of straightforward and simple personal autonomy during youth and emulates the mind’s natural developmental sequence.

Myth metaphorically describes the dissociative state experiential phenomena induced by visionary plants, notably ego death and metaphysical crisis (Grof & Grof 1980). Many thematic categories of metaphorical descriptions have been created throughout history to describe dissociative-state sensations and experiences (Metzner 1997). Different visionary plants lead to different metaphors. Salvia Divinorum provokes metaphors of spacetime embeddedness and thought-coercion more than of visual and auditory distortion.

Metaphors describing plants and the dissociative experiencing they produce are found abundantly in acid-oriented Rock lyrics, including madness, overpowering natural forces, fear, blurred and wavy vision, fragmentation, bending, moving images, and confusion or delirium. Entheogens reveal the experiential content of the philosophy of mystic religion and vividly reveal how themes of water and light are metaphorical descriptions of altered-state experiencing (Thorne 1998). Metaphors for mystic-state experience and insight into self, time, and control include birth, death, climax, rape of the mortal soul by the deity, rebirth, conception, copulation, marriage, family, twins, parent/child, lovers, and reincarnation.

The most profound aspect of myth reflects the dynamics of the entheogenic state, in which cognitive associations loosen, and the egoic model gives way to the transcendent model of time, space, self, control, and world. This is accompanied by extreme phenomena such as ego death, the apocalyptic revelation at the end of time, the end of the former world, and the descent of divine concord after a great struggle.

The perilous collapse and transformed restoration of apparent personal power in light of one’s snake-shaped, determinism-ruled train of thoughts is also metaphorically described as a battle with demons, rescue from Leviathan’s jaws of hell, an unavoidable encounter with the angel of death on a winding path with no place to turn aside, or escaping across the guarded boundary of the serpent-encircled fate-ruled material cosmos into the higher heavens.

The mystery religions used entheogens that produce the phenomena allegorized in mythic form as miracles, child sacrifice, and shape-shifting. An ancient mystery-religion initiate looking at a myth would search for metaphors describing dissociation, determinism and divinely transcending it, and self-control breakdown and transformation. For example: the hunter Actaeon saw the goddess Artemis bathing naked, so she turned him into an animal, and his own hunting dogs tore him to pieces. That myth comprises the dissociative-state themes of seeing God, transgression of limits, transformation of oneself, mental searching, and fragmentation of the mental body-image.

Metaphors for being embedded in the frozen, timeless block-universe include the end of time, imprisonment, and fastening the body to physical objects. The mythic image of being fastened to a bench in Hades describes the dissociative-state sensation of physical embeddedness in the timeless block-universe. Hades imprisoned Persephone’s would-be suitors by binding them to a magical bench. Heracles freed Theseus, but had to leave Pirithous behind. The figure of Pirithous describes aspects of dissociative experience, when the self-image and mental world-model are revised during the dissociative state, abandoning the former world-model.

Metaphors describing self-control cybernetics include restoring to power the disempowered king; political turmoil and resistance followed by harmony; the Golem growing tall, going berserk (out of control), and then returning to bits of clay; Helios’ proud son Phaethon losing control of the horses, getting tangled in the chariot-reins, and falling to his death; drunken, out-of-control centaurs at the wedding banquet; and Dionysus rescuing the pilot Acoetes from Dionysus’ destruction of the slave-taking crew.

Writing prior to the modern era is primarily initiation allegory. The mystic-state realm accessed through ‘mixed wine’ was the primary point of reference across the entire culture. Entheogen-induced mystic-state experiencing was the common conceptual language and the single master domain throughout Hellenistic culture, serving to interrelate all known domains. This made it easy to map any domain to any other, including politics, philosophy, mysticism, myth, religion, literature, poetry, drama, contracts, and contests.

The adept use and comprehension of metaphor faded after the battle between politicized Christianity and Scientism around 1700, leaving a permanent standoff between mystically neutered religious literalism versus exclusively ordinary-state-based Science. Metaphor and culturally integrated entheogen use lost cultural dominance together, and knowledge domains drifted apart, no longer reflecting mystical experiencing and insight.

Jesus and all the apostles were entirely and strictly mythic. Only the lack of entheogen experience makes people claim historicity for such figures. The figure of Jesus as crucified and ascended king was a rebuttal to the Caesar cult figure, drawing from themes of Heimarmene (no-free-will) and its transcendence.

The gospel was an allegory of the mystic experience of determinism and its transcendence. Trustingly acknowledging one’s total dependence on the hidden level of control, and calling for help from the savior sent from that transcendent level, calms the life-threatening mental storm and prevents shipwreck and death of the helmsman. This prayer is directed to a compassionate, transcendent rescuer who is positioned to pull one’s strings – a god or a divinely directed and appointed savior from destruction.

Mythic religion employs the dissociative experiential theme of ‘destruction resulting from resisting divinely authorized rulership’. Self-control instability and recovery through dependence on the transcendent hidden controller has been allegorized in terms of political conflict, rebellion, and rulership, including the initiate-king, rulers, and nations resisting Caesar’s rulership, and then attaining harmony upon accepting Caesar’s divinely mandated rule. The figure of Caesar was plugged into the routinized mystery-cult format utilizing ‘mixed wine’; these imperial mystery cults had initiation rites for mystai using ‘mixed wine’ heavily, along with symposium drinking parties (Pleket 1965). King Pentheus resisted Dionysus’ power, was lifted and caught up helplessly in a tree, then was torn apart in an ecstatic-state outing with raving initiates (Esposito 1998).

A key metaphor is the disempowering crucifixion (fastening-to-spacetime) of the false king, then the resurrection and ascension to co-rule with the true governor of all thoughts and things throughout the spacetime block. This metaphor of ‘the affixed-then-ascended king’ represents the intense mystic-state experience of determinism, followed by the experience of transcending determinism.

Rock lyrics express the full range of entheogen insights, a continuous tradition running from early Psychedelic Rock (John Lennon’s song “Help!”) through Acid, Progressive, and Heavy Rock, New Wave, and Electronica. Rock is a modern-era authentic mystery religion, though it has been disowned and alienated, dominant culture not recognizing that Rock is authentic religion. Drug taboos caused allusions to drugs in Rock lyrics to become more cryptic; to the uninitiated these appear unrelated to the entheogenic state, but many Rock lyrics in various genres contain clear allusions for the initiated.

The Drug-Based Past and Future of Religious Initiation

Recent, Illegitimate, Unnatural Laws Contradict the Human Religious Drive

The proper role for representative democracy is working out how visionary plants and psychoactive substances are to be healthily integrated into United States culture, making dissociation and initiation as ergonomic and as safe as possible. Dissociative substances require serious and respectful use, with religious and scientific considerations (Forte 1997).

Laws against psychoactives are laws against true religion. Dissociative drugs are doorways into religion; a religious system without integrated use of visionary substances is a simulacrum, spiritually dead. Prohibition opposes not just religion, but ultimately the controller of the cosmos.

Drugs, like democracy, have dangers. Actual religious experiencing is inherently dangerous, but that doesn’t justify making entheogen use a crime. Instead of thought-stopping prohibitionist propaganda motivated by insidious self-serving opportunism, the future populace will learn the rich history and practical usage of psychoactives.

Government will abandon the delusion of “saving us” from drugs, which are not a “problem” calling for a “solution.” The phony “war on drugs” was a ploy to expand prisons while feigning benevolent concern. Laws against psychoactives will have been repealed, ending the delaying tactic of claiming further studies are needed. Real studies will be clearing the way for the cognitive science of altered states.

Religious freedom and civil liberties are what the United States offers. Instead of legislating against the ecstatic heart of religion, there must be an informed respect for the drug-induced breakdown of the illusion of simple personal autonomy and subsequent reconciling with God’s higher rulership. If the religious discovery of our cybernetic control-seizure potential is rejected, then the American experiment will have failed.

If America forbids its citizens the true, ergonomic Eucharist, then religious freedom is dead for all relevant purposes. America needs real religious freedom, which enables recognizing the Christ figure as acknowledgement of our merely secondary-level control-agency, with Christ, as God’s lower-level avataristic representation, being the rightful ultimate bearer of universal moral culpability, and acknowledging that personal control is trumped by and subject to the mysterious prior power that secretly controls and governs all things.

Decriminalizing entheogens is essential to religious freedom, and any reform movement must know and spread the truth about psychoactive plants throughout history. The only viable reform strategy is to expose the insincerity of the prohibitionists and to develop a robust, constitutionally based position, against the self-defeating, grossly understated view regarding the role of psychoactive plants in religious history.

Repealing drug laws is not only sensible and moral, but constitutionally required (Kubby 1995). The legislative construct of “scheduled substances” is unconstitutional and illegal. The very idea is a recent notion that contradicts the innate human drive for religious experience, like declaring puberty illegal. Making entheogens a crime is an abomination against normal human development, like foot-binding. The system of schedules is not from God, but is a recent, baseless, illegitimate invention snuck into law through a mixture of profit-motive, bureaucratic self-promotion, ignorance about the central role of plants in religion, and ignorance about cognitive psychology and the human drive to self-transcendence. As the truth unfolds, the notion of “scheduled substances” will inevitably be recognized as a crime against religion, human developmental nature, and the Creator.

The government will no longer distort use into “abuse,” curable by a profit-motivated “drug rehabilitation” industry in league with the incarceration system. Government will abandon the historically baseless paradigm of “all use is an unfortunate mistake”. Enlightenment is not a mistake; it is our innate destiny as mature adults, and has always been effectively accessed through combining visionary substances with the study of determinism and self-control agency.

The Future of Religion

Plant use and its suppression are pre-set and frozen into the timeless spacetime block. The predominance of the ordinary cognitive state and egoic mental world-model and lack of altered-state initiation in the modern era resulted in our modern cultural experience. The late-modern full rediscovery of the plant-chemical basis of initiation will result in a modern-type systematization of dissociative-state experiential insight.

Only in the simultaneously drug-obsessed and drug-alienated modern era have enlightenment and salvific regeneration seemed rare, difficult, and unobtainable by ordinary people. The future of religion will be a modern-type systematization of perennial mystic experiential knowledge, starting with recognition of the central use of ‘mixed wine’ in antiquity. Psychoactive plant products will once again be culturally central. Authentically modernizing the ancient practice includes courses and textbooks covering the dissociative state and resulting insights. Such tools will make the mystic state common knowledge again, but more explicitly and systematically than in antiquity.

Religious scholars will shift to giving these plants the central role – along with self-control cybernetics, transcending determinism, and recognizing the use of metaphor throughout pre-modern culture in general.

Salvia Divinorum makes the dissociative-state experience accessible and practical. Salvia produces few bodily effects, while LSD produces trembling, pupil dilation, temperature swing, and heart palpitation. This reduction of bodily effects, controllable dosage and short duration makes Salvia ideal for studying cognitive dynamics; when combined with understanding the present Theory, one can readily be initiated into transcendent self-knowledge.

Extreme dissociation prevents constructing new mental structures, producing merely primordial chaos. With the present Theory in hand, there is no need for heroic doses of psychoactives; moderate dosage is most effective. Full basic ego death requires comprehension and moderation, with mental stability restored by a prayerful attitude of trusting dependence in the hidden source and controller of all thoughts.

Actual religion is drug-accessed, leading through self-control seizure to regeneration of the mind’s self-system, producing a mental model that recognizes our “autonomous” self-control through time as merely a secondary level of control-power, with the Creator (or Tao or other Eastern concepts) as the primary level of controllership.

Christianity can only be revived through the original, true, active and efficaciously transformative Eucharist, which is psychoactive plants. Christianity is essentially experiencing, through the God-given entheogenic body of Christ, the testing and culmination of autonomous personal control-agency. Christianity has always been about ingesting visionary plants to test egoic control-power in the court of the mind, and recognizing the Lord’s hidden role as the all-powerful puppetmaster, to whom all praise and blame must ultimately be attributed.

Drugs are the only authentic vehicle for the Holy Spirit in communal religion, because they are the only method that is immediately available to all people and fully ergonomic. The same plant-induced dissociative-state reformation applies to the other religions, uniting the authentic core of religions under the true “monotheism” (the preeminence of the higher control-level over lower control-level agents) whether the higher control-level is labeled as Isis, Zeus, Jupiter, JHVH, God, Mithras, Mary, Allah, or the Tao.

Regarding the Constitution of the United States, the essence of religious freedom is specifically the freedom to reliably access mystic-state consciousness, as in early Christianity, the banqueting tradition, and the mystery religions of antiquity, all of which utilized psychoactive plants as their central sacrament. ‘Mixed wine’ was the central, reliable means of accessing the intense mystic altered state throughout antiquity, and has been the missing key to religious experience and scholarly comprehension in modern culture.

The defining feature of the modern era is its cultural alienation from and lack of integration of visionary plants. The culture of the post-modern era will have post-modern forms of religious initiation. Society will understand the destabilization and restabilization of personal control through trust in the hidden controller of our thoughts and destiny. Cognitive Psychology will routinely acknowledge how the mystic altered state experientially reveals that all experience is mediated by mental constructs.

Delusion or enlightenment are collective. First there was shamanistic European religion, culminating in figurations such as the visionary-plant Eucharist. Then in the modern, Enlightenment era, only the ordinary cognitive state was officially influential; there was a shared inter-egoic control field, uniformly deluded about moral-control agency. In the post-modern era, the rational and systematic, multi-state-informed, cybernetics explanation of enlightenment is discovered and readily communicated, collapsing the egoic field throughout the society. The post-modern era integrates the ordinary-state-based modern heritage with the traditional altered-state-based heritage.

About the Author

Michael Hoffman has been developing the Cybernetic Theory of Ego Transcendence since 1985, including the maximal entheogen theory of religion. For detailed findings from this Theory, see Egodeath.com.