EUROTAS est le principal rassemblement international de la Psychologie Transpersonnelle, qui vient d'avoir lieu en Toscane. C'est plus de 450 participants provenant de 43 pays. Parmi lesquels : Lama Michel Rinpoche, Ervin Laszlo, James Fadiman, Amit Goswami... etc.
Lors de sa conférence sur "la Sagesse Interdite", Stephan y a parlé notamment de dialogue entre science & spiritualité, de dérives dogmatiques et sectaires (scientisme, materialisme, religionisme) dans le milieu des enthéogènes et des psychédéliques.
Rendez-vous en septembre 2024 à Oxford pour la prochaine édition.
Our civilization evolved from a religious dogma to a scientific one. Metaphorically growing from childhood to teenage. Can we imagine an adult civilization that embraces these both paradigms, scientific and spiritual ?
We are living a psychedelic renaissance, which is not about simple molecules, but about something much deeper, something that cannot be fathomed by a pharmaceutical industry, and the reductionism of the scientific method, something that carries way deeper implications, that may change the world we live in, forever.
This is where we talk about psychedelics as entheogens. The psychedelic topic has now become a battle ground where the materialist scientific paradigm confronts a transpersonal approach. There is here the potential for a revolution that is comparable to the discoveries of fire, writing, or the anticipated impact of AI.
This renaissance can indeed be seen in a deeper way : a spiritual reaction of humanity to the decline of our civilization ; an archaic impulse of a society that consciously realizes the dramatic emergency of our situation: a system on the brink of a catastrophic collapse, endangering an entire biosphere with it.
Rather than a renaissance, I see it as one of the last convulsions of a dying collective organism crying out to nature, and its infinite intelligence, for help.
Today, there are companies actively devoting themselves to the task of removing the psychedelic effect of psychedelic substances, to avoid their so-called “side effects”. Calling the spiritual aspect a “side-effect”, is a direct symptom of the attempt to pathologize the mystical experience.
Psychedelics and entheogens wouldn’t anymore be used for exploring your own consciousness and transcend our cognitive filters to access a higher realities: they will be used to treat depression and anxiety, caused by a flawed capitalistic system, and used under the guidance of a state supported healthcare professional.
I ask you all a question that you can answer in yourself. Do you want to hand-over the right to use thousand years old traditional plant-medicines to a pharmaceutical industry, dismissing dimensions that humans consider for thousands of years as a sacred, and mystical?
Throughout history, the tools and techniques to access to the transcendent, have faced prohibitions and repression, even sometimes capital punishment. Today, they are essentially repressed because they may lead to emancipation of what a capitalistic culture needs you to be, and may lead to a deep consciousness shift, that threatens established powers.
As a simple example, consider how in the past, 80.000 people (essentialy women) were murdered accused by the church of being "witches". They were simply those who were practicing, herbalism, shamanism, healing with plants and entheogens, giving powerful eucharisties that were concurrencing the leading power.
This is partly how Shamanism, drifted to dogmatic religions, and the scientific method was the accurate response to that drift. But it threw away the baby with the bathwater of the religious dogma. Bloody bathwater. Today useful science is drifting to its dogma too, and the dogma of science is materialism and scientism.
Scientism is to science what dogmatic religion is to spirituality. Reductionism. It is a collective neurosis, an alarming symptom of the distancing from our deep nature, a new desperate attempt to control nature. Like so many, concrete layers, parking lots and highways recovering nature, forests and plains. Unable to grasp the perfection of nature, we multiply our attempts to cover it up. Leading us to the hard-discount of spirituality, serving spiritual fast food, very similar to religious dogma.
Scientific materialism, or materialistic reductionism, is a position that asserts that the only reality is the physical, material world. that all phenomena, including consciousness, can ultimately be explained in terms of physical entities and processes.
The idea that Transpersonal phenomenon can be approached through a materialistic lens comes from a collective trauma, a desire for conformity and safety. On an individual level, transpersonal, or mystical, or spiritual experiences don't require any attempts of explanation, neither the validation of any science, which is just another language, and no language has any primacy over another. They are something to be directly experienced not explained.
This materialist drift, this tendency, using confusion and reductionisms, tends to classify beliefs relating to the subjectivity of human experience to the rank of esotericism, nowadays having a pejorative meaning through media. Personal subjectivity, a place of unfathomable richness, has been dismissed by the fantasy of objectivity, conformity and uniformity.
I believe that this drift, the path that humanity is taking, is coming from mainly 4 collective trauma (Thanks Benjamin Casteillo for inspiration) :
- Domination, coming from the sense of danger of the natural environment in which it evolved.
- Accumulation, coming from the scarcity of resources in which certain groups may have evolved.
- Conformity, coming from the life-threatening consequences of group exclusion.
- Materialism, coming from a gradual identification to what spiritual traditions call maya or illusion, and the excess of dogmatic religions.
It is these precise traumatic reactions, that is leading humanity, and with it the whole biosphere, towards a wall at an exponential speed.
The capitalist society, by minor ecologic adjustments, is asking us to lower the temperature of the washing machine, modulating by millimeters the angle with which we are going to hit the wall at full speed. It is not a question of will we hit the wall or not, we will.
Smile and trust the process, folks.
This wall, as a death of a certain form of civilization, is a metaphor of our own death. From this collapse, this ontological shock, structures will disappear, values will be redefined, and consciousness will shift, expand. Something will die, and as in every grief process, transformation will occur and something new will be born…
On a spectrum that spread itself from religious dogma and materialist scientism, dwells a middle, a sacred sweetspot, dare I say the G-spot of life itself, where of course, lies an orgasm, first event of the long gestative process of giving birth.
The birth of everything, is submitted to an eternal dynamic, that can be metaphorized as a heartbeat… nature, menstrual cycle, day-night cycle, seasons. Everything is submitted to of contraction, and expansion (yin-yang)
Life itself, is not “love and light only”, life is movement, and happens in the union of polarities : Light and shadow, spirit and matter, science and spirituality. So how can we unite these polarities? Which we are, as individuals, the sacred temple, the alchemical clay pot, the nexus of spirit and matter.
Yorumlar