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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.
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