“Democratizing Primary Spiritual Experience-Around the Year 2000”\u00a0by Thomas B. Roberts, Ph.D. asked why entheogen’s, a psychoactive substance that is primarily used in a religious or spiritual context, offer religions? The article states that the application is not simply ‘dropping acid’ rather they are developed in a manner that paralleled medical research practices. The research required demographic data to obtain a firmer understanding of\u00a0psychoactive drugs and the cultures surrounding their religious use. In order to achieve his goal the author performed experiments using experience’s as they present themselves\u00a0to consciousness.\u00a0\u00a0The author analyzed this data using quantitative analysis. \u00a0I believe that the research provided a unique insight into our religion and its subjectivity in part due to varying mental\u00a0faculties. These experiments\u00a0despite subjectivity\u00a0yielded\u00a0incredible results including that 1\/3 of all participants in the experiments\u00a0experienced\u00a0on of the five most meaningful experiences of their life. In addition, psilocybin mushrooms increased participant\u2019s altruism and senses of well-being.\u00a0The issue that I found with the research methodology is that it failed to examine the cultural aspect of regions that use psychoactive drugs to experience spirituality. For instance, drugs like Ayahuasca are conducted in large spiritual ceremonies which last several hours, with little frequency and are often heavily emotionally taxing. The areas of the research that I found myself most interested in are the fields like drug induced contemplation, and his deep analysis of religious texts that observe various levels of religious understanding the deepest being one\u2019s primary religious experience. This claim argues that even though primary experience provides a deeper understanding they also do not dilute the importance of habitual religious activity.<\/p>\n
Roberts, Thomas. Democratizing Primary Spiritual Experience-Around the Year 2000\u201d Association for Transpersonal Psychology 48. 1 (2016): 28-32.<\/p>\n
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“Democratizing Primary Spiritual Experience-Around the Year 2000”\u00a0by Thomas B. Roberts, Ph.D. asked why entheogen’s, a psychoactive substance that is primarily used in a religious or spiritual context, offer religions? The article states that the application is not simply ‘dropping acid’ rather they are developed in a manner that paralleled medical research practices. The research required […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":30,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/evst399.mcguire-spickard.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1149"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/evst399.mcguire-spickard.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/evst399.mcguire-spickard.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/evst399.mcguire-spickard.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/30"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/evst399.mcguire-spickard.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1149"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/evst399.mcguire-spickard.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1149\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1170,"href":"https:\/\/evst399.mcguire-spickard.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1149\/revisions\/1170"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/evst399.mcguire-spickard.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1149"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/evst399.mcguire-spickard.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1149"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/evst399.mcguire-spickard.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1149"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}