Muraresku, Brian.
The Immortality Key
Supernatural- an earlier book
“Primitive” Christianity, as Brian convincingly argues here, started out
around two thousand years ago as merely the latest form or incarnation of
this archaic religion, and—at least in some cases—seems to have made use
of bread and wine infused with psychedelic plants and fungi as its
sacrament. At that time, because Christianity was persecuted under the
Roman Empire until the reign of Constantine (AD 306–337) it was normal
practice for its adherents to meet secretly in small groups to eat the bread and drink the wine of Holy Communion, and afterward experience powerful
and deeply meaningful beatific visions. And more often than not, these
secret ceremonies of direct experiential communion with the divine were
led by women with men playing a secondary role.
PRIMITIVE Christianity.
Then, from the second half of the fourth century AD onward, came the
rise of Roman Catholicism, dominated by men who took decisive steps to
marginalize the role of women in the Church and to remove the psychedelic
elements from the sacrament, reducing Holy Communion to the empty
symbolic act, devoid of powerful experiential content, that hundreds of
millions of Christians continue to perform.
JW’s celebrate the DEATH of Jesus... by doing “this in memory of me”
My friend, the visionary artist Alex Grey, whose work has been much
influenced by Ayahuasca, describes the Old Testament story of the serpent,
the forbidden fruit, and God’s expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden
of Eden as “the first psychedelic slapdown.”
FORBIDDEN FRUIT was a psychadellic.
Pursuing that thought, Roman Catholicism’s persecution of “primitive”
Christians and the extirpation of their visionary Communion wine might be
described as the second psychedelic slapdown.
And then, in the twentieth century, just as we seemed to be freeing
ourselves from the loveless iron grip of the Church and opening up to new
spiritual possibilities, governments around the world waded in with the so-
called “war on drugs”—the third psychedelic slapdown.
Over the centuries, therefore, enormous and often deadly forces (with
the power, for example, to burn people at the stake or imprison them for
decades) have repeatedly been unleashed to prevent people from
experiencing direct contact with realms and realities other than the
mundane. At the same time, however, even when it must have seemed that
the “religion with no name” had been deleted completely from the human
record, there were always—if I may extend the metaphor—multiple
“backup disks” in the form of psychedelic plants and fungi growing all over
the planet. There might be long gaps, lacunae of centuries even, but the
moment would always come when certain curious individuals, either by
accident or by design, would sample the plants and mushrooms that serve as
the permanent Hall of Records of the religion with no name, thus setting in
motion the experiences and subsequent processes of social organization that
would ultimately allow it to be restored in full force.
Brian tells us that he has never in his life had a psychedelic experience
—nor is there any reason why he should since The Immortality Key offers
hard factual data and empirical argument rather than a trip report.
Moreover, the author’s decision to remain a psychedelic virgin is, in my
view, a wise strategic move since it denies self-styled skeptics—of whom
there are legions—any lazy ad hominem dismissal of this important book as
the “ravings” of a “druggie” or other similar slurs.
my engagement with
psychedelics remains one of the main tools that skeptics use to ridicule and
dismiss my work.
“Always being?”
“Always being. So being now and always. There’s no beginning or end.
Every moment is an eternity of its own.”
The Immortality Key
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