Author Topic: Rod Dreher: Psychonauts, Plinths, & Re-Paganizing Pop Culture  (Read 149 times)

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Offline Kamaji

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Rod Dreher: Psychonauts, Plinths, & Re-Paganizing Pop Culture
« on: February 01, 2023, 06:35:47 pm »
Psychonauts, Plinths, & Re-Paganizing Pop Culture

In our post-Christian chaos, seekers are exploring new spiritual avenues. But some doors should not be opened

Rod Dreher
Feb 1, 2023

Ross Douthat has a warning for those seeking enchantment:

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But precisely because an attitude of spiritual experimentation is reasonable, it’s also important to emphasize something taught by almost every horror movie but nonetheless skated over in a lot of American spirituality: the importance of being really careful in your openness, and not just taking the beneficence of the metaphysical realm for granted.

If the material universe as we find it is beautiful but also naturally perilous, and shot through with sin and evil wherever human agency is at work, there is no reason to expect that any spiritual dimension would be different — no reason to think that being a “psychonaut” is any less perilous than being an astronaut, even if the danger takes a different form.

There is plenty of raw data to indicate the perils: Not every near-death experience is heavenly; some share of DMT users come back traumatized; the American Catholic Church reportedly fields an increasing number of exorcism inquiries even as its cultural influence otherwise declines. And there should also be a fundamental uncertainty around even initially positive experiences: Not all that glitters is gold, and the idea that certain forces are out to trick you or use you recurs across religious cultures (and in the semireligious culture around U.F.O. experience today).

I’m writing as a Christian; my religion explicitly warns against magic, divination, summoning spirits and the like. (Atheist polemicists like to say that religious people are atheists about every god except their own, but this is not really the case; Christianity certainly takes for granted that there are powers in the world besides its triune God.) And it makes sense that in a culture where people are reacting against the Christian past there might be an instinct to ignore such prohibitions, to regard them as just another form of patriarchal chauvinism, white-male control.

But the presumption of danger in the supernatural realm is hardly confined to Christian tradition, and the presumption that pantheism or polytheism or any other alternative to Western monotheism automatically generates humane and kindly societies finds no confirmation in history whatsoever.

I cannot agree with this strongly enough. I believed it anyway before I started working on my book on re-enchantment, but now that I've been researching both the the occult, and the use of psychedelics by "psychonauts" to explore what they take to be the spiritual realm, I feel emphatically more convicted about this. Especially about the psychedelic stuff, which I was more agnostic on before.

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Source:  https://www.theamericanconservative.com/psychonauts-plinths-re-paganizing-pop-culture/

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Re: Rod Dreher: Psychonauts, Plinths, & Re-Paganizing Pop Culture
« Reply #1 on: February 02, 2023, 02:39:50 pm »
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Drugs are never worth the risk because they place us in a hyper-vulnerable cognitive state, ripe for demonic manipulation.
A very interesting comment from a former heavy drug user. My very, very nasty and hateful (and, I think, evil) older brother's use of drugs was enough for me to avoid them completely. Thank God.
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