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Entheogen
A narcotic substance that gives rise to strong visions and feelings, often described by the users in question as deeply religious experiences. Examples of entheogens are preparations such as LSD, DMT, ayahuasca, mescaline, psilocybin mushrooms and MDMA. The concept entheogen is of course closely related to the syntheist divinity Entheos.
The sexual revolution under capitalism was followed by the chemical liberation during informationalism (see The Global Empire). The development of a post-atheist religiosity, which is built around the need for a new metaphysics, spurred on by globally collaborative, syncretist and religio-social practices, and not least by the exploding plethora of entheogenic substances, laid the foundation for a resolution of the conflict between theism and atheism which, in a Hegelian dialectics, has grown into syntheism as the metaphysics of the Internet age. This occurred at the same time as the sexual revolution was rejected when its unavoidable flip side, the hypersexualisation of the individual, was exposed as the underlying engine of capitalist consumption society; the sexual revolution ended up being a straitjacket of the superego where the chemical liberation offered a possible way out.
Entheos is also the divinity we encounter when we experience what Sigmund Freud calls the oceanic feeling. To devote oneself to Entheos is to worship the brain’s and the body’s ability to carry out mental voyages and to emotionally experience the sacred, to allow oneself to be transcended into a new and qualitatively different subject. Entheos is therefore also the divinity of the sublime and of art. Syntheistic transcendence is entirely a subjective experience; it thus has nothing to do with any Platonist dualism or Kantian transcendentalism. Syntheistic transcendence takes place in a completely immanent world, just as the eternalisations of perception are housed within an otherwise completely mobilist world. Entheos is driven by the desire towards immanent change and the search for transcendental intensity; it is the divinity that we encounter in the psychedelic experience, which personifies the entheogenic worlds. Entheos is not just Nietzsche’s and Deleuze’s divinity, but also the god of Heraclitus and Lao Tzu, and is celebrated at the spring equinox, which is the syntheist calendar’s new year. The Spring equinox represents the celebration of the enormous and irreducible multiplicity of life and thereby also the celebration of our own human dividuality.
The sought-after sexual liberation under capitalism if anything gets its follow-up in the chemical liberation (for a more exhaustive treatment, see The Global Empire) under attentionalism. The development of a post-atheist religiosity founded on the need for a new metaphysics, spurred on by globally collaborating syncretistic, religio-social practices, and not least the explosive flora of entheogenic substances, lays the foundation for a dissolution of the conflict between theism and atheism; a conflict that, in a Hegelian dialectical process, transitions into a synthesis in the form of syntheism as the metaphysics of the Internet age. At the same time, sexual liberation is displaced when its underbelly, the hypersexualisation of the individual, is exposed as the capitalist consumption society’s underlying engine: sexualism ultimately became a straitjacket of the superego where chemical liberation offers the only possible way out. We do not lose liberated sexuality by returning to some kind of asceticism or abstinence with old-school religious overtones. We only gain access to means and ceremonies that finally enable us to start domesticating and mastering liberated sexuality to our long-term advantage. Indirect desire at last has the chance to balance the direct, vacuous, repetitive drive.
Syntheism is the home where psychedelic practices are carried out responsibly and with creativity with regard to what is best for the congregation and the participating agents. Where solid scientific facts meet reported spiritual experiences, a practice is constructed which is often carried out in defiance of prevailing norms and laws in the surrounding society. But psychedelic practice is an act of faith of the inquiring mind, a truth as an act, before which the syntheist never subordinates herself to the nation state and the narrow-minded and prejudiced norms of bourgeois society. This applies even if chemical liberation entails a syntheist martyrdom. The social arena is of course already filled with a host of different psychedelic practices. The Swedish historian Rasmus Fleischer also points to the fact that even pathologised psychological states such as eating disorders and other self-destructive behaviour must be regarded as psychedelic practices. Sexuality and entheogens are closely related to each other. This explains, for example, why it is extremely hard to be focused on both things at once. Both sexuality and entheogens are fundamentally a question of manifesting the drive, that is, to repeat what is meaningless ad infinitum. But through this meaningless repetition, meaning is created, where sexuality generates eros and the entheogens generate philia.
Practising sensual actions in the entheogenic state liberates the actions from all forms of sexuality; they can therefore advantageously assume a central role in the entheogenic ritual without the ritual thereby being sexualised. Entheogens namely make the subject aware of the meaningless emptiness of the sexual act, which means that the sensual act without sexuality – where Atheos transitions into Entheos – releases a powerfully transcendent ecstasy in the entheogenic state. Man constantly longs to get away from extimacy within himself towards intimacy with his closest friends. But intimacy is only possible when two or more agents really understand each other. Where language does not suffice to convey understanding, sensuality through eros and the entheogens through philia are used as precisely the spiritual tools that strengthen and maintain the intimacy between people. It is precisely because of their enormous existential and subversive potential that sexuality and the entheogens have regularly become the objects of the most false accusations, the most bizarre taboos and the most brutal persecutions throughout history. The forbidden fruit from the tree of knowledge is the oldest and probably best known euphemism for the psychedelic substance.
The reason for this moral panic and these eschatological propaganda campaigns is that sexuality and entheogens are associated with both pure pleasure and if possible even more so with subversive mysticism and its search for a mental, or if one prefers, a spiritual rather than a physiological pleasure. Under capitalism, sex and chemicals are regarded as incompatible with industrious work in the socio-economic-affluence-promoting factories. Sexual and chemical minimalism is therefore promoted for educative purposes and disseminated with vehement rabidness – as a kind of secular fundamentalism, with zero tolerance as the new utopian salvation – as soon as industrialism takes hold of Europe and North America during the 19th century. Pure and thus animalistic pleasure stirs up both envy and terror, for how does one go about domesticating unreserved pleasure? How does one accommodate it into civilisation’s death worship without castrating, distorting, prohibiting and destroying it?
Subversive mysticism injects yet another threat, since its practitioners are not perceived as difficult to control in the same way as the sexually experimenting. Rather – which is even worse – they are experienced as if in some obscure manner they actually control the suspicious one himself. Therefore throughout history, this eucharistiphobia repeatedly expresses itself either through sexuality being made taboo if entheogens are tolerated in any way, or that entheogens are banned if liberated sexuality happens to be tolerated. Most paradigms and societies hate and attempt to minimise and if possible exterminate these two phenomena. The esoteric is equated with the satanic. Only in the syntheist utopia with its theological anarchism can the dream of liberated sexuality be found side by side with the dream of a free usage of entheogens – with the express ambition of realising the enormous potential for humanity of both of these dreams. For what is the anarchist society if not the very community where human pleasure is no longer restricted? And from the reverse perspective, what is thought control in its deepest sense, if not in fact a quest to control sex and drugs? Or to express the matter as a popular, countercultural t-shirt slogan: Drug control is thought control.
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.
Both nature and the creative arsenal of Man himself are full of these entheogens – the term was coined by the historian Carl Ruck, as a more factual replacement for the erroneous term hallucinogens, and it is of course derived from syntheism’s Entheos, the god within ourselves – which have always been used for spiritual purposes. This was the case despite many nation states, on the pretext of the most bizarre and prejudiced excuses, assiduously trying to stop the use of entheogens in what must be regarded as the current paradigm shift’s most obvious form of bourgeois religious persecution of the emerging netocracy’s metaphysical lifestyle choice. It is from this radical equality, in this literally syntheist procedure, that the ethics of interactivity is born and developed – not in Levinas’ sentimental and anti-Nietzschean self-sacrificing romanticism.
Last modified 7. August 2016 at 00:05:58