Culture & Religion <p> Evil is not inherent to our nature. We have achieved so much because we are friendly and decent. The radical thinker Rutger Bregman paints a new, more beautiful portrait of humanity.</p><p>Try standing in front of the mirror and remember the worst things ever done – by you personally, and by <em>Homo sapiens</em> as a whole. And smile, because history shows that we are doing much better than you think. This subversive idea belongs to a Dutch historian, writer and TED lecturer. In his new book, <em>Humankind:</em> <em>A</em> <em>Hopeful</em> <em>History</em>, he finds out whether the conviction that humans are selfish, hostile and destructive by nature is actually true. And if we turn out to be intrinsically good after all, what would it change?</p><p>Rutger Bregman already shook up the minds of politicians, businesspeople and the general public several years ago in his book <em>Utopia for Realists And How We Can Get There</em>, in which he argued that a better world could be built straight away. Bregman's critics consider him a naïve fantast, but many CEOs and national leaders are seriously considering introducing his revolutionary postulates, such as much shorter workdays and universal basic income. In his new book, Bregman goes even further, proposing that we turn the world upside down. More precisely, he wants to put straight the image of humankind as created by philosophy, science and the media. And to change our behaviour for the better.</p><p>The author has created a daring, fresh story, filled with fascinating examples, analyses and discoveries, and constructed it as if it were an investigation. The accused was <em>Homo sapiens</em>, a species with alleged murderous tendencies since the dawn of time, seeing his own viciousness reflected in everything and everyone around. Bregman revised the evidence in question and tore the lining of this negative story, reaching deep into the discoveries of archaeologists, historians and biologists. He bursts through the philosophy of Hobbes, who had a defining influence on the image of humans, perceived as warmongering species who must be controlled by a powerful, Leviathan-like government at all times. Bregman uncovers swindles ensconced in the most famous psychological theses of the 20th century, laying bare the manipulations of such celebrities as Philip Zimbardo and Stanley Milgram, whose famous experiments are considered the final evidence that a Nazi and sadist is lurking in every one of us. Yet years later, those claims turned out to be a sham.</p><p><br/></p> <p>Bregman crushes the myths built by bestselling authors such as Nobel Prize laureate William Golding, best known for his novel <em>Lord of the Flies</em>, and by big media like <em>The New York Times</em>. He boldly debates the most popular authors of recent years: <a href="https://przekroj.pl/en/society/the-gospel-according-to-pinker-tomasz-stawiszynski" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Steven Pinker,</a> Yuval Noah Harari and Malcolm Gladwell. With the energy of a young and fearless researcher, he dug through all the critical files, finding new evidence in old cases. The turn of perspective is so surprising that <em>Humankind</em> keeps the reader on their toes. Whatever you think about humans, Bregman will derail your viewpoint. And there's probably nothing as baffling as how much we struggle with accepting the idea that we are better than we thought we were. The thought that most of us are intrinsically good turns out to be a challenge, as if the bar has suddenly gone higher. Such a positive image makes us want to try harder.</p><p>Bregman uses the phenomenon we call the Pygmalion effect, meaning that we become what others see in us. Those rats that researchers assumed to be intelligent did better with the tasks they encountered. Children with supportive parents and teachers do better at school and in life. And people who see good in themselves, start to cultivate it. Bergman believes cynicism to be an avoidance strategy.</p><blockquote>The belief that people are vicious and that the world is going to the dogs justifies passivity. Optimism, however, has an opposite effect – it requires us to strive for kindness, trust, and generosity in an active way.<br></blockquote><p>The common belief that crisis awakens the most primitive instincts in people is not reflected in the facts, writes Bregman. He calls it the greatest misunderstanding in history. "No, no, you go first…", "Please, you go ahead, I'll follow you," said the people leaving the towers of the World Trade Center, when their offices were ablaze and the building was starting to melt. There was no panic; almost everyone remained polite. This was confirmed by recordings and testimonies from the survivors.</p>
<p>On Christmas Eve of 1914, 100,000 soldiers, mostly German and French, left the trenches to meet. They exchanged gifts and sang carols. For years to come, most of them were shooting high above their enemies' heads, so as not to wound them. The same thing happened at other wars, before and after that one. After the Battle of Gettysburg in 1863, 90% of the guns were loaded and unused. The murderous instinct is a myth, Bregman insists.</p><p>Hitler's air force raided London in 1940 to break the spirit of the British. Instead, people put messages in their windows, such as: "More open than usual" or "Windows broken, booze still strong!" The English kept calm. Churchill was proud, but soon he made the same mistake, assuming he could break the Germans with air raids instead. After the bombing, Dresden responded in the same spirit as London – with acts of everyday kindness, help and optimism.</p><p>After the war and annihilation, many sought an answer to what made the German soldiers so persistent and determined. The reasons were said to be blind obedience and fanaticism. And yet, Bregman reveals data that was previously omitted and passed-over in silence: the main force keeping the soldiers going was the sense of solidarity and camaraderie. They didn't want to abandon their mates, with whom they grew up and trained. When presented in such light, those alleged beasts suddenly start looking a lot like boys from the yard. Like ourselves, even.</p>
<p>Think again, insists the Dutch historian, and see how tragedy brings out the best in people. Evil only exists in us when it masks as good and nestles in our system of beliefs as a sense of righteousness, something important to the world. And don't believe the media, he warns, because they feed on extremes. The media distort reality and teach us to believe in evil. For example, take the famous story of the New York woman named Kitty who was stabbed and died alone in front of her house in 1964, watched by her 38 indifferent neighbours, out of whom just one called the police, the rest declining to get involved. That's the version promoted by <em>The New York Times</em>, with alarming words about an "epidemic of callousness". The facts, as shown by Bregman, are very different. Most of the witnesses didn't see the attack – they just heard the noise. Half of them called the police, and Kitty died in her friend's arms. What happened to the perpetrator? He was caught soon later when he was leaving someone's apartment carrying a TV, and an alarmed neighbour stopped him. People can feel, express concern, and help others – those are the facts on which the media rarely report. There are over a dozen such spectacular deconstructions in Bregman's book, using new evidence he pulls out like trump cards, one after another.</p><p>We follow the rules of kindness and cooperation not only in times of crisis, but also in everyday life. Bregman echoes other researchers who describe the phenomenon of ordinariness as the dominant truth about the world. He refrains from promoting naïve theses, and the strength of his reasoning lies in returning to the right proportions. There is more good in the world, so much of it that we take it for granted and forget to define it. In his view, society is not founded on obedience to the government, which makes us aggressive and insensitive, but on the human trust. That's why real democracy (as opposed to the current rule of sociopath elites over the sensitive majority) is possible. More examples? In Venezuela and Brazil, budget management in many cities was passed over to the inhabitants. As a result, they saw an increase in social investments and education, while poverty and crime plummeted. In Norwegian prisons, guards and inmates spend time together, share duties and wear no uniforms. The outcomes were shorter times of imprisonment, fewer re-offenders, and a lot of savings. And so on.</p><p><em>Humankind</em> rearranges the mind like no other book published over the past few years. It should be mandatory reading in the 21st century, as it gives some balance to another milestone in the human autobiography, the bestselling <em>Sapiens</em> by Yuval Noah Harari from 2014. Bregman insists that optimism is solidly founded on facts. It is not a dream, just a new realism.</p><p><em>Translated from </em><a href="https://przekroj.pl/artykuly/recenzje/czlowiek-czlowiekowi-czlowiekiem" target="_blank"><em>the Polish</em></a><em> by Aga Zano</em></p><p>Reprinted with permission of <a target="_blank" href="https://przekroj.pl/en/" rel="noopener noreferrer" style="">Przekrój</a>. Read the <a href="https://przekroj.pl/en/culture/kind-by-nature" target="_blank">original article</a>. </p>
Culture & Religion <p>After a 20-year ban on clinical psychedelics research, the U.S. government approved trials on DMT in 1990. At first, Rick Strassman, a clinical associate professor of psychiatry at the University of New Mexico School of Medicine, only wanted to study the physiological strain of injecting DMT: heart rate, blood pressure, and so on. Given that psychedelics had been contentiously demonized for a generation, he wondered if physical consequences were as dangerous as advertised.</p><p>LSD had been administered tens of thousands of times in the 1950s and early 1960s. Did it really fry your brain like eggs, as the Reagans so confidently declared? </p><p>Over the next five years, Strassman administered 400 doses of <em>N,N-dimethyltryptamine</em> (DMT) to over 50 volunteers. It turned out that DMT, the fast-acting psychoactive ingredient in ayahuasca—the "soul vine" persists for hours only when blended with MAOIs to slow the breakdown of enzymes in your gut—has few negative effects. A longtime Zen Buddhist practitioner, Strassman noticed something else going on when over half of participants reported having profound religious experiences. </p><p>They were dying before dying. </p><p>Well, some of them were being visited by alien creatures, a phenomenon MAPS founder Rick Doblin possibly attributes to the "setting" part of "set and setting": tripping out in a sterile hospital room surrounded by clinicians in white lab coats certainly felt foreign, perhaps otherworldly. Other volunteers saw a beautiful light at the end of a tunnel and returned—a sensation noted in the ayahuasca literature for as long as we have records. </p><p>DMT is chemically related to serotonin and melatonin. The latter hormone is produced by the pineal gland, which is symbolically called the "third eye"—Descartes famously called it the "seat of the soul." Since every mammal that's been tested (including humans) produce endogenous DMT, could our third eye possibly release this structural analog of tryptamine at death? Is it a coincidence that the pineal gland, according to Strassman, appears in fetuses at 49 days, the exact duration of the "passage" of souls described in The Tibetan Book of the Dead? </p><p>Strassman admits this is speculation. The anecdotes are irrefutable, however. His clinical work led to Charles Grob's government-approved research on <a href="https://maps.org/research-archive/ayahuasca/hoasca.html" target="_blank">ayahuasca</a> and <a href="https://maps.org/research-archive/mdma/mdmaucla.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">MDMA</a> in the 1990s, which opened the door to Johns Hopkins researchers <a href="https://hopkinspsychedelic.org/achievements" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">studying psilocybin</a> to treat the existential dread hospice patients encounter, which opened the floodgates to the psychedelic revolution occurring today. </p>That initial Johns Hopkins study, which found that psilocybin (structurally similar to DMT) eases distress by helping initiates die before they die, helped give form to Brian Muraresku's 12-year journey while <a href="https://bigthink.com/culture-religion/psychedelic-christianity" target="_self">writing his debut book</a>, "The Immortality Key: The Secret History of the Religion With No Name."
<span style="display:block;position:relative;padding-top:56.25%;" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="9d12252d13cebc4f3ca73f98e47ba60b"><iframe type="lazy-iframe" data-runner-src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/jkL2DLBM1j0?rel=0" width="100%" height="auto" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" style="position:absolute;top:0;left:0;width:100%;height:100%;"></iframe></span><p>Muraresku has been getting a lot of press since the book's publication, in part boosted by his appearance on Joe Rogan's podcast. The classicist speculates that the Christian Eucharist is rooted in the Eleusinian Mysteries, which may have involved the ceremonial ingestion of wine spiked with psychedelic ingredients. The idea of a psychedelic Christianity is not new, but Muraresku brings a detailed level of scholarship and compassion to the topic.</p><p>As he told me in a <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0aogj-08AMo&t=222s" target="_blank">recent interview</a>, the "immortality key" is not psychedelics, but the concept of dying before dying. He opens his book with a Greek inscription: "If you die before you die / You won't die when you die." Muraresku, a devout Catholic raised in the Jesuit tradition, kicks off the discussion with an atheist from the Johns Hopkins trial. Despite her lack of faith, she felt an "overwhelming, all-encompassing love" that helped her deal with the inevitable consequences of mixed-cell ovarian cancer—really, the inevitable consequences of being an animal bound to die. </p><p>The Hopkins study went mainstream when Michael Pollan <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/02/09/trip-treatment" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">wrote about it</a> in the New Yorker. The results were stunning: 70 percent of participants felt a single dose of psilocybin produced the most meaningful (or among the top five) experience of their lives. Interestingly, the same result occurred after the famous Marsh Chapel experiment, when Timothy Leary and friends dosed Harvard Divinity School grad students with psilocybin; a quarter-century later, all but one rated the event in their top five. </p><p>Not only do you die before you die while under the influence of psychedelics, but you also gain a new perspective on life. The ego death that occurs during the ritual changes their orientation about existence. And what good is a religious experience if it can't be applied to living? </p><p>As Muraresku told me, </p><p style="margin-left: 20px;">"[Psychedelics] is one tool in the Spiritual Toolkit. What I mean by 'the key' is in Greek, which is preserved at St. Paul's monastery: <em>if you die before you die, you won't die when you die</em>. <em>That's</em> the actual key. It's not psychedelics, it's not drugs; it's this concept of navigating the liminal space between what you and I are doing right now, and dreaming and death. In that state, the mystics and sages tell us, is the potential to grasp a very different view of reality."</p>Muraresku taps into a growing consensus that humans are "wired" for mystical experiences. He points to lead Johns Hopkins researcher, Roland Griffiths, who <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=81-v8ePXPd4" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">believes</a> that mysticism is included in our operating system at birth. You just have to turn it on. While the effects of psychedelics can be replicated through the more arduous path of meditation, in the right set and setting anyone can tap into mystical states of consciousness. Psychedelics provide a shortcut to these states.
<img type="lazy-image" data-runner-src="https://assets.rebelmouse.io/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8yNDgwMDEwNi9vcmlnaW4uanBnIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTY2MjMzNTkxM30.v1whPhr51ijIHplKohusi_vIMpkbm2TCgX_K7Qx98iM/img.jpg?width=1245&coordinates=0%2C365%2C0%2C365&height=700" id="4a5b4" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="bcb1e9ab2c85c23cfe63b350a0504076" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" />
Credit: Galyna Andrushko / Adobe Stock
<p>Western religious leaders, especially those in Christianity and Islam, treat their prophets as standalone figures. The best you can hope for is being granted access to some special place after you die. Gnostics and Sufis—sects within those faiths that attempt to replicate their prophet's mysticism—are considered outcasts by mainstream religious figures. In some circumstances, they're outlawed, threatened, or even killed for their supposed heresy. </p><p>Sufis might spin for hours in ecstatic rapture to reach this mystical state, but as Muraresku's extensive research shows, psychedelics also tap into this "secret" knowledge that he believes to be at the heart of Christian—and if we extrapolate, <em>religious</em>—tradition. And to him, this is the essence of the religion, not a byproduct of the real faith. </p><p style="margin-left: 20px;">"I didn't write this book to be anti-organized religion. In some cases, it's the exact opposite. In the intro, I mentioned Brother David Steindl-Rast, a Benedictine monk who is a hero of mine. He talks about the tension between mystics and the dogma and doctrine of organized faith. I don't think you can have one without the other. The balance, as Brother David says, is to rediscover that original visionary power and <em>live in it as a lived experience</em>. This is what Joseph Campbell says of religion being a <em>lived experience</em>. We're talking about emotional potential. That's how the great anthropologist Clifford Geertz defines religion: these powerful, pervasive, long-lasting moods and motivations. That only happens when you're talking about something that gets inside of people's bones. That's what the mystical experience is; it's how these religions are born. Brother David says it's virtually impossible to start a religion without mystical experience, like Moses in the burning bush, Paul on the road to Damascus, or Peter, in Acts, caught up in a trance."</p><p>Campbell's conversation with Bill Moyers in "The Power of Myth" nicely ties together this idea:</p><p style="margin-left: 20px;">"People say that what we're all seeking is a meaning for life. I don't think that's what we're really seeking. I think that what we're seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances with our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive."</p><p>The mythologist also advocated for a reformation of religion every generation so that the faith speaks to the times. This is effectively what Muraresku advocates for in "The Immortality Key": an honest conversation regarding the historical circumstances that birthed the world's most-followed religion in the hopes of applying the foundational lessons to our current reality. If that means a psychedelic ritual that shows you how to die before you die so that you may better know how to live, then it's time to rethink the role of the sacrament. </p><p>Mysticism is a universal phenomenon. The "eternal return" Mircea Eliade wrote about has been experienced throughout history in disparate regions of the world. As Strassman's and Griffiths's work shows, we retain the capability of dying before dying. In fact, current research on psilocybin, LSD, iboga, DMT, and ayahuasca show that these substances are helping people gain a perspective of their lives, be it in depression treatment, addiction recovery, or easing the pain of hospice care. A little mysticism goes a long way. </p><p>Let's move beyond this notion that mysticism only applies to a chosen few. In fact, let's reconsider the role of consciousness in general. Every religion has its own take on what happens after we die. Yet we have tools at our disposal to show us how to exist now: a living religion that speaks to the entire planet. </p><p>--</p><p><em>Stay in touch with Derek on <a href="http://www.twitter.com/derekberes" target="_blank">Twitter</a> and <a href="https://www.facebook.com/DerekBeresdotcom" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Facebook</a>. His new book is</em> "<em><a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B08KRVMP2M?pf_rd_r=MDJW43337675SZ0X00FH&pf_rd_p=edaba0ee-c2fe-4124-9f5d-b31d6b1bfbee" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Hero's Dose: The Case For Psychedelics in Ritual and Therapy</a>."</em></p>
