The Immortality Key: The Secret History of the Religion with No Name

by Brian C. Muraresku

Despite having to brace myself for the discomfort of the experience, it is these visions that draw me back to Ayahuasca year after year—this sense of gaining entry to a seamlessly convincing parallel universe and of being offered the opportunity to participate there in intriguing, meaningful, and sometimes life-changing encounters with seemingly otherworldly entities.

It is not an accident that the Mazatec shamans of southern Mexico refer to the psilocybe mushrooms used in their ceremonies as “little teachers,” and, in a sense, that is what all psychedelic plants and fungi are—literally the ancient teachers of mankind.

There’s not much money in a single-dose wonder drug. The pharmaceutical industry tends to prefer long-term users who get hooked on a steady regimen of renewable prescriptions.

To die before you die. Or rather, to psychologically maim the ego—even for a brief instant—in order to be initiated into an understanding of what lies beneath all the thoughts, feelings, and memories that have gone into the lifetime construction of our false, or at the very least incomplete, sense of self.

A God that you can actually experience in a direct and personal way is a God that makes sense. A God that erases depression and anxiety like a cosmic surgeon, obliterates the fear of death, and sends a shock wave of love through your fragile heart is a God that lives in high definition. And a God that could hardly be expected to start a war against nonbelievers.

From being an activity mainly concerned with symbols, religion will be transformed into an activity concerned mainly with experience and intuition—an everyday mysticism underlying and giving significance to everyday rationality, everyday tasks and duties, everyday human relationships.

It’s unavoidable: there was real religion before Christianity, which contradicts the running assumption that Greek spirituality was rather uninformed and idiotic.

What better disconnect than the swearing in of an American president? In recent times all the pomp and circumstance takes place on the western front of the United States Capitol Building, an explicit homage to the Greco-Roman Pantheon in Rome. Its creator wanted to link “the new republic to the classical world and to its ideas of civic virtue and self-government.

Are we a people of reason or faith? Is our society founded on science or religion? Whether the issue is climate change, reproductive rights, or a global pandemic, that stark divide between The School of Athens and The Last Supper continues to frame the national conversation on matters of life and death.

Back in the Garden of Eden, maybe the forbidden fruit was forbidden for a reason. Who needs the fancy building, the priest and all the rest of it—even the Bible—if all you really need is the fruit?

Whenever you accuse the founders of Western civilization of getting stoned out of their minds, and then turning that hallucinatory event into their most cherished religion, a little pushback is to be expected.

There’s the good ol’ American kind of irrationality, like the cowboys’ taste for whiskey and cigarettes. And then there are psychedelics.

A recent article in Psychology Today explains the phenomenon as “a sense of embeddedness into collective folds and an increase in pro-social behaviours such as kindness, self-sacrifice, co-operation and resource-sharing. Experiences that arouse awe can help us to re-conceptualize our sense of self, our role in society and from a more cosmic perspective, our place in the universe.”18

Isn’t it strange that the Christian holy family—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—is an all-male ensemble? And isn’t it even stranger that the only woman worshipped alongside the Trinity never becomes a grandmother?

Perhaps the founder of the National Resources Defense Council, Gus Speth, said it best: “I used to think the top environmental problems facing the world were global warming, environmental degradation and eco-system collapse, and that we scientists could fix those problems with enough science. But I was wrong. The real problem is not those three items, but greed, selfishness and apathy. And for that we need a spiritual and cultural transformation. And we scientists don’t know how to do that.”

Alienation from nature and the loss of the experience of being part of the living creation is the greatest tragedy of our materialistic era. It is the causative reason for ecological devastation and climate change. Therefore I attribute absolute highest importance to consciousness change. I regard psychedelics as catalyzers for this. They are tools which are guiding our perception toward other deeper areas of human existence, so that we again become aware of our spiritual essence. Psychedelic experiences in a safe setting can help our consciousness open up to this sensation of connection and of being one with nature. LSD and related substances are not drugs in the usual sense, but are part of the sacred substances, which have been used for thousands of years in ritual settings.

There’s little doubt that Christianity was born with all the trappings of a mystery cult. As the religion grew, however, the relationship between the initiated and uninitiated became a serious point of contention. Who should benefit from the young faith’s deepest secrets—the people or the priests?

Many elements of the Mysteries remain. But gone is the vision, the inner transformation, and the personal responsibility for one’s own spiritual development. The fate of the soul has been placed in the hands of the priest. Just as in the other 9,792 parish or monastery churches throughout Greece, or any of the myriad Roman Catholic basilicas and cathedrals across the planet, the priest calls the shots here and commands the blessing.19

January 6 is now celebrated by Christians around the world as their Epiphany—the day when the Three Wise Men legendarily descended on Bethlehem bearing gold, frankincense, and myrrh for the newly incarnate infant Jesus.

Though no visions of Osiris were recorded, the blue water lily was shown to have undeniable mind-altering effects, even at relatively low dosage. The whole trippy experiment makes for excellent YouTube viewing at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vx2AIBgnakI.

a two-thousand-year-old fit of cannibalism reenacted to this day, multiple times per day, in churches on every continent for billions of faithful.