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13:54

(In »Participatory culture, religious rituals and psychedelic practices«)

An excellent theological starting point is the experience “the Universe rolled right over and crushed me, with colossal and indifferent weight, and this steam-rolling made me both religious and deeply grateful”, a reaction that witnesses recount time after time after having, for example, gone through the ayahuasca and huachuma rituals in South America or the iboga rituals in Central Africa, which are considered the most powerful but also the most traditional psychedelic practices that humanity has developed. It becomes even more interesting when these recurring testimonies are followed by the words “And aside from this there is nothing in the experience that can be verbalised”. This is the core of the syntheist spiritual experience. Its doctrine takes us the whole way to its practice. But the syntheist spiritual experience in itself can never be verbalised and it is precisely for this reason that it goes under the paradoxical name the unnamable. What we both can and should verbalise, however, is the logical insight that we attain after the life-altering meeting with the unnamable: The criminalisation of entheogenic substances must be regarded as the greatest and most tragic case of mass religious persecution in history. Rarely if ever has human evil been so simple-minded and banal. Therefore first and foremost syntheism strives for humanity at long last to have access to complete freedom of religion. It might be about time.