Observations placeholder
Masters and Houston on the conscious
Identifier
004926
Type of Spiritual Experience
Background
About the addition of the conscious intellect with its will and reason and advanced memory added to the more primitive subconscious with its will driven by the autonomic system and more basic drivers
A description of the experience
The Varieties of Psychedelic Experience – Dr Robert Masters and Dr Jean Houston
Case Study 4; 40 year old editor, former medical student , LSD 250 micrograms
“Something cuts across the evolutionary process at this point. Something blasts into it! Cuts it clean in two! Changes its course! The severed chain snaps back together quickly, but although the evolutionary process is deflected only slightly, the consequences are enormous. “Had this not happened man would have evolved into another kind of animal” …..............
Returning to his main vision, S declares that if one is not to see man as only a machine then one must recognise that an 'alien force' has blasted into the evolutionary sequence at a certain point and altered its course in the direction of a higher, more sophisticated process.….........
S continues that man possesses two distinct varieties of consciousness. One is the higher consciousness that came into being at the time when the alien blast cut through evolution. The other primitive consciousness had its origins much earlier and is capable only of feeling and a very low order of intellection. The alien blast into matter initiated a process whereby the higher consciousness evolved along with but did not extinguish the lower primitive consciousness. The force that struck into the pre-established evolutionary animal pattern was God or Spirit”.
The subject later reported himself as profoundly antagonistic to religion and said that these ideas were previously certainly not his and quite foreign to his usual way of thinking