theoldjamestownchurch

"Brief, simple, and yet inexhaustibly rich. One of my favorite Ch'an meditations (I keep it in pamphlet form near at hand). My advice: take it slow and often."

The symbiotic ecology of the psychedelic realm (Quoting the author and a friend's comment):

"The basis for the present proposal comes from the contemporary confluence of comparative mythology and religion on the one hand, and on the other the renaissance of research on psychedelics. This convergence has its roots in the work of the patriarchs of the ‘perennial philosophy’ (William James, Huston Smith, Aldous Huxley, Alan Watts), who were themselves fascinated by the similarities between ancient myths and the phenomenological contents of non-ordinary states of consciousness. The implicit suggestion is that humans universally share the neurological capacity to enter into visionary states in which they experience interior but transpersonal events of the highest reality, value and meaning.

Comment: "Addison, I assess these experiences Neoplatonically and through Ibn Arabi. The forms as they exist in the Divine Nous are themselves living entities and must logically be infinite in number; Soul, perceiving them, reflects them in itself, and this is the imaginal realm, where "many paths and errands meet," to borrow from Tolkien. They also radiate downwards through the World Soul and into the kosmos, such that some of them are manifest in encosmic deities and spirits and the like; basically, everywhere there is Soul to contemplate Nous, which is to say everywhere, there is also an imaginal realm where the noetic is always becoming sensible."