The irony is that, to my mind anyway, such literalism actually goes against one of the main features of psychedelic experience and psychedelic cognition, which is that the world, whatever else it is, is profoundly metaphoric. Our experience is not literal; the world is not literal. And yet people want to discover a literal drug at the heart of religious experience to reduce the latter to the former, just like good skeptics. For many I think it is so they don’t have to take religion seriously anymore. If it’s all just covert psychedelics, then you can just stick with the psychedelics and ignore
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