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Love of All Wisdom

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Love of All Wisdom

Tag Archives: William James

On chemically induced mystical experience

25 Sunday Sep 2022

Posted by Amod Lele in Biology, Certainty and Doubt, Emotion, Epistemology, Philosophy of Language, Psychology, Roman Catholicism

≈ 7 Comments

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drugs, Michael Pollan, mystical experience, Richard Boothby, Roland Griffiths, Thomas Aquinas, William James

One of the more exciting scholarly developments of the century to date has been the growth of studies – previously hindered for too long by legal barriers – into mystical experiences induced by psychedelic drugs. In a landmark 2006 experiment, rigorously controlled and double-blind, Roland Griffiths’s research team at Johns Hopkins University found that people given high doses of psilocybin – the active ingredient in magic mushrooms – typically had experiences they described as “having substantial personal meaning and spiritual significance”, and bore several other characteristics in common with a certain kind of non-drug-induced mystical experience: a sense of merging with ultimate reality, a nondual sense of the unity of reality, a sense of awe or sacredness. This sort of mystical experience, it seems, can be chemically induced.

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