Your True Nature: a "Garden of Eden” Discovery

In this day and age many feel disconnected—from ourselves, others, from our world. This sense of disconnection can feel painful, lonely, and isolating. We can act it out with addictions or destructive habits and escapes. This pain hinders us from feeling the happiness and joy that is possible in life.

Fortunately, it is not necessary to go a lifetime with this sense of pain and disconnection. World-renowned Professor of Psychology, Dr. Stanley Krippner offers unique insights about this disconnection and how to fix it. In an upcoming presentation for the Society for the Anthropology he writes:

“The very split from Nature that some Christian theologians claim occurred in the Garden of Eden may lie at the heart of many people’s current sense of separateness from their ecology.

Aldous Huxley witnessed this reunion through his experimental uses of mescaline: “I was seeing what Adam had seen on the morning of creation—the miracle, moment by moment of naked existence.”

Albert Hoffman reported that a mystical nature experience he had had when he was young prefigured his discovery of LSD.

Robert Masters and Jean Houston noted that Nature seems to the subject a whole of which he [or she] is an integral part, and from this characteristic feeling a being a part of the organic ‘body of nature’ the LSD subject readily goes on to identify with nature in its physical particulars and processes.

The shaman is a caretaker of Nature and a negotiator between people and “other-than-human persons,” as Graham Harvey called them in his 2005 “Animist Manifesto.”

Paul Starnets speculated that mushrooms have a hidden agenda to bring humans into communication with other species.

A survey into people’s exceptional experiences with psychedelics found that encountering the “spirit” of the ingested plant or fungus was the most widely reported of a range of 17 “paranormal” and “transpersonal” type experiences occurring with those taking psilocybin-containing mushrooms.

Andy Letcher warned that these experiences largely go ignored or are seen as symptoms of “madness.”

What is more “mad:” communicating with the spirits of Nature or sitting back while Earth’s ecology descends rapidly into the greatest wave of mass extinction in 65 million years?

Given that shamans have most likely been communicating with Nature in this way for thousands of years (Devereux, 2008), it might well be asked what can be gained for huimanity’s relationship with the ecosystem from such a dialogue and, more importantly, how can Nature benefit from this relationship?

This question is of central importance to ecological psychologists who attempt to understand behavioral and experiential processes as they occur within the environmental constraints of animal-environmental systems.

Psychedelic sensibility can play an important role in helping humans devote their efforts to attaining ecological sustainability before the time runs out and Nature’s clock winds down.”