HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_013619.jpg

taint the personal use of plants and practices that facilitate access to the mystic way. Rational, socially responsible and otherwise kind and tolerant Presbyterians, Unitarians and Reformed Jews can be suspicious and rejecting of what appears to them as the politically tinged mass hysteria of praying in tongues and other rituals of Charismatic Christian rebirth and renewal or the ecstatic states of Orthodox Jewish chant-dancing.

Modern brain and behavioral scientists, remaining under the philosophical spell of logical positivism and its requirement for operational definitions and (external) experimental disconfirmability, operate from the position of strong doubt when mystical experience is addressed. What is striking and strange about how science plays the game of mysticism research is exemplified by the publishable increment in credibility concerning a meditation-induced change in state of consciousness when Boston University’s William Benson reported the accompanying relaxation response, a sudden decrease in heart rate---much like the dive reflex of a seal or what the heart rate does when you duck your head suddenly forward into a sink full of water. Decades are spent getting professorial tenure for research yielding things we have already experienced and know directly and for ourselves. Recall that the existence of visual imagery in the human, doubted by an experimental psychology of the time in which William James self-exploratory observations were viewed as revolutionary, was made more credible by evidence for the existence of a subjective spatial metric: verbally reporting subjects, when timed, took longer in their minds to go from one room to another one that was down the hall then going to the room that was immediately next door.

We use brain chemical, pharmacological, neurophysiological and neuroanatomical localization and computation of characteristic statistical patterns in time dependent brain and behavioral observations to the same end.

Further Readings for SOME ENTHEOGENIC ENTROPIES

119

HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_013619