But however it works, and whatever vocabulary we use to explain it, this seems to me the great gift of the psychedelic journey, especially to the dying: its power to imbue everything in our field of experience with a heightened sense of purpose and consequence. Depending on one’s orientation, this can be understood either in humanistic or in spiritual terms—for what is the Sacred but a capitalized version of significance? Even for atheists like Dinah Bazer—like me!—psychedelics can charge a world from which the gods long ago departed with the pulse of meaning, the immanence with which they
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