Sky Gods and the Recipe for Immortality
The secret influence of psychoactivity over science, society, and the supernatural
“Truth cannot be suppressed and always is the ultimate victor.”
So proclaim the sacred Vedic texts — one of the oldest and most influential stories in human history. At Hinduism’s core, Veda means wisdom or to know in Sanskrit (the language of ancient India).
What is the secret recipe to the ancient wisdom revered by billions of people today? The Vedic influence over humanity rivals the Torah tracing Abraham’s lineage from ancient Sumer, the so-called cradle of civilization.
There are key parallels between the Hindu and Hebrew sacred texts. Both are spectacular accounts of ancient knowledge, clashes of civilization, and flying chariots in the sky. There is also significant evidence that psychoactive substances are at their roots.
From the Aboriginals in Australia to the Maya of Central America — ancient tribes across the world share supernatural legends and psychoactive knowledge. From Moses’ burning bush to the Vedic soma’s recipe for immortality… The Hindu, Abrahamic, and many other cultures are highly psychedelic.
While religion’s incredible accounts are debated in academic history, countless believers and skeptics have been influenced by sacred stories.
As a scientific paragon, Einstein professed belief in Spinoza’s God in that God is not necessarily the creator of the world — but that everything is part of God. This idea shares many parallels with Hinduism. Einstein, a proud Jew yet thoughtful critic of the Bible, once said:
“The word God for me is nothing more than the product and expression of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of many honorable but still primitive legends.”
So while sacred texts possess great wisdom, there are flawed aspects reflecting the human spirit itself. The Torah reflects the tension between science and religion as God forbade Adam and Eve from the Tree of Knowledge’s forbidden fruit. Einstein further explained:
“And the animistic conception of nature religions is not annulled in principle by monopolisation.”
The legendary scientist believed that groups of people or priests should not monopolize the universal mystical experience or what Einstein described:
“The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science… The insight into the mystery of life, coupled though it be with fear, has also given rise to religion.”
Humans engaging in mysticism — and often via psychoactive ritual — is a phenomenon that long precedes both modern science and organized religion. Einstein, contrary to his doctor’s suggestions, regularly smoked tobacco and once said:
“I believe that pipe smoking contributes to a somewhat calm and objective judgment in all human affairs.”
Although tobacco’s modern reputation has been ruined by dangerous additives, it has been used by shamans and native healers for millennia. In many native cultures, tobacco is considered medicinal for the body and spirit. A Yale doctor once noted tobacco’s deep shamanic link:
“Surveying nearly three hundred societies… South American Indians employ numerous means of nicotine application and a close functional relationship exists between tobacco and shamanism.”
In addition, the New York Botanical Garden reported how:
“Many other New World societies use tobacco in shamanistic practices. In many such practices, tobacco is often conceptually and functionally indistinguishable from true hallucinogens.”
While cigarette smoke is certainly harmful, nicotine itself has shown medicinal potential. Modern science corroborates centuries of tobacco use for spiritual healing. According to a scientific report via Nature:
“Cigarette smoke is a major health risk factor which significantly increases the incidence of diseases including lung cancer and respiratory infections. However, there is increasing evidence that smokers have a lower incidence of some inflammatory and neurodegenerative diseases…
Unlike cigarette smoke, nicotine is not yet considered to be a carcinogen and may, in fact, have therapeutic potential as a neuroprotective and anti-inflammatory agent…Nicotine is being considered as an anti-inflammatory agent for the treatment of some diseases such as Alzheimer’s Disease, Parkinson’s Disease, and Crohn’s disease….”
Psychoactive shamanism via myriad plants and fungi is older than science and civilization itself. An article published by the U.S. Forest Service notes:
“Early in our history, people discovered the psychoactive properties in the fungus kingdom. Fungi, most notably mushrooms, have been used and revered as sacramental tools to communicate with the spiritual world by many cultures for thousands of years.”
One of the earliest indications of humanity’s profoundly psychoactive past is an archaeological site in Northern Africa called Tassili n’Ajjer.
Homo sapiens originated in Africa, and this mysterious site has thousands of psychedelic designs by prehistoric humans. A mushroom shaman is etched alongside alien figures that have excited supernatural theorists for decades. UN archaeologists note how the site “evokes possible magic-religious practices some 10,000 years old.”
Around the site, researchers have discovered some of humanity’s earliest technology such as arrowheads, hearths, and pottery — indicating that shamanism and technology share psychoactive roots.
While the mystical experience is the source of creativity as Einstein once suggested, then psychoactive substances can be catalysts. At the same time, mystical experiences can be invoked naturally (such as via meditation, dreaming, and potentially during near-death states) without external psychoactive substances.
University of Michigan researchers have found widespread DMT, a naturally occurring psychedelic, within the mammalian brain. However, the idea that external substances can catalyze the mystical experience is also being supported by modern science.
Roland Griffiths of Johns Hopkins University has found that psilocybin (found in the mushrooms likely depicted in prehistoric art) can “occasion mystical-type experiences while having substantial and sustained personal meaning and spiritual significance.” Nobel laureate Francis Crick, who discovered the double-helix structure of DNA, favored similarly psychedelic LSD as a key creative catalyst.
Fellow Nobel-winning Kary Mullis (who discovered the DNA polymerase chain reaction a.k.a. PCR) further credited psychedelia with scientific insight. In his book, Dancing in the Mind Field, Mullis described extensive LSD experiences and a remarkably strange encounter:
“Some people have experiences that are so strange, they attribute them to alien intervention of some kind. Close encounters of the first kind, second kind, third kind, etc., as though alien intervention would always fall into certain categories. I had one of those experiences myself. To say it was aliens is to assume a lot. But to say it was weird is to understate it. It was extraordinarily weird.”
Nobel geneticist and psychonaut Francis Crick was also a founding member of Soma, a psychoactive substance legalization group named after the Vedic elixir of immortality — and its dystopian counterpart from sci-fi psychonaut Aldous Huxley.
OpenAI’s GPT-4, an advanced artificial intelligence, summarizes psychoactive soma in Huxley’s iconic Brave New World:
“In Aldous Huxley’s novel Brave New World, soma is a fictional drug used to keep citizens of the novel’s dystopian society in a state of constant happiness and contentment. The drug is used to suppress any negative emotions or dissent and to maintain social stability. The name soma is derived from an ancient Indian word for a plant-based potion that was believed to have healing properties and to promote religious euphoria.
In Huxley’s Brave New World, soma is used as a form of pacification by the government as a recreational drug, it is used to distract citizens from the unhappiness of their lives and from the government’s oppressive control over them. It’s also used as a tool to suppress individuality and creativity, and it serves to prevent the development of critical thinking and to discourage any form of nonconformity.”
While psychoactivity can potentially catalyze dystopia — it is also historically associated with divine revelation, liberation, and well-being. The BBC once reported how:
“In the Atharva Veda, one of the four sacred texts of Hinduism, cannabis is named one of the five most sacred plants on Earth. The text also refers to it as a source of happiness and a liberator’”
Whether psychoactive substances are good or evil depends on the human spirit itself. In addition to scientific evaluation otherwise suppressed by the failed War on Drugs.
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