As reported by Fox News and others last week, a recent study conducted at Johns Hopkins University found that psilocybin, the active hallucinogen found in some types of mushrooms, induces profound mystical experiences in certain takers. I for one am happy that the American academy has made this “discovery” even though people have known it for thousands of years. This recognition by the scientific community - and the federal funding that made it possible - are a huge departure from the beliefs and practices of the last 30 years. The “War on Drugs” made the therapeutic use of these drugs and detailed research about their effects impossible, and that's a damn shame.
Bharati’s book, while at times dry and hyper-academic, is the most lucid analysis of mysticism and altered consciousness I have come across; it represents the pinnacle of such research before it was pushed out of the mainstream. Even as a professor in the hippy era, he took considerable professional risk by tackling such topics. He takes even more risk by freely admitting his experimentation with LSD and his initiation into a Tantric cult. This sort of participant observation is frowned upon in the academy; anthropologists are expected to remain at a safe distance from the people they study, to handle with rubber gloves the traditions of other civilizations.
However, his book is as much a critique of the typical academic’s unwillingness to dive completely into his subject as it is a critique of the modern view of mysticism.
Bharati challenges the idea that the mystical experience is ennobling, that it confers upon us special powers or skills, that it makes us into different people. Bharati calls bullshit on the swamis and mystics who, for selfish or political reasons, try to claim privilege on the basis of their experiences.
He does however assert and explain the existence of a true mystical state, the “zero-experience” as he calls it. This experience consists of temporary ego death, a profound feeling of identification with the fundamental ground of being. In the wake of these episodes, people report them in vocabularies conditioned by their cultures and religious beliefs, but he argues that despite these rhetorical differences, the raw content of the experience is much the same across time and place. Large numbers of people everywhere and for all of recorded history have had the zero experience. Some have sought its recurrence, made careers of discussing it, spent their lives proselytizing. Most have remained silent.
