Applied Mysticism: A Drug-Enabled Visionary Experience Against Moral Blindness

Intellectuals such as William James and Aldous Huxley have thought it possible to develop a technique to apply to this world the mystical-type insights gained during drug-enabled experiences. Particularly, Huxley claimed that the visionary experience triggered by psychedelics could help us rethink o...

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Autres titres:DRUG‐ENABLED MYSTICAL EXPERIENCES
Auteur principal: Ballesteros, Virginia (Auteur)
Type de support: Électronique Article
Langue:Anglais
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Publié: Open Library of Humanities$s2024- [2019]
Dans: Zygon
Année: 2019, Volume: 54, Numéro: 3, Pages: 731-755
Sujets / Chaînes de mots-clés standardisés:B James, William 1842-1910 / Huxley, Aldous 1894-1963 / Expérience psychédélique / Moralité / Amélioration / Mysticisme
Sujets non-standardisés:B Morality
B Mysticism
B Imagination
B Technology
B Günther Anders
B Psychedelics
Accès en ligne: Volltext (Resolving-System)
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Résumé:Intellectuals such as William James and Aldous Huxley have thought it possible to develop a technique to apply to this world the mystical-type insights gained during drug-enabled experiences. Particularly, Huxley claimed that the visionary experience triggered by psychedelics could help us rethink our relationship with technology and promote a much-needed cultural change. In this article, we explore this hypothesis. To do so, we build a philosophical framework based on Günther Anders's philosophy of technique, presenting human beings as morally blind when facing technological development. Mystical experiences are then proposed as a means to improve our moral faculties-and psychedelic drugs as tools to enable them. We finally explore the empirical feasibility of such a hypothesis by thoroughly reviewing the recent scientific literature on the nature of the psychedelic experience, concluding that the long-term effects in the personality domain openness and in nature relatedness point to the emergence of a morally improved agent, thus providing substance to an application of mysticism.
ISSN:1467-9744
Contient:Enthalten in: Zygon
Persistent identifiers:DOI: 10.1111/zygo.12544