I recently received an email from my good friend, Ellis Potter, and wanted to pass it on to you. My review of Ellis’ fine book, 3 Theories of Everything, is available on Ransom’s website here. If you haven’t read it, please do so or order the audio version if you prefer.

Dear Friends:

            3 Theories of Everything (3TOE) is now available as an audio book.

            It is beautifully narrated by Ed Burrowes, who has a great voice and wonderful sense of drama and narration. Enjoy.

            Help make this news go viral. You know how.

            The audio book is available from:

                        Amazon here.

            Google here. 

            CD baby here.

            God bless and keep you.

            In Christ,

            Ellis

A friend (thanks, Rebecca Wimer!) alerted me to a website displaying the artwork of Bryan Lewis Saunders who “takes every drug known to man [and] draws [a] self-portrait after each use.” Saunders’ portraits, it is noted, “aren’t all that different from artist Bobby Baker’s self-portraits of mental illness.”

It would be easy to sneer at Saunders’ project, wondering why he would want to subject himself to such a drug regimen and whether the resulting artwork has any significance.

A lot could be said about this, and an excellent place to begin the conversation would be with an essay, “Altered States” (The New Yorker, August 27, 2012) by physician (neurologist) Oliver Sacks. Though the entire essay is worth reading and discussing, Sacks’ opening three paragraphs puts the topic in correct focus:

            To live on a day-to-day basis is insufficient for human beings; we need to transcend, transport, escape; we need meaning, understanding, and explanation; we need to see over-all patterns in our lives. We need hope, the sense of a future. And we need freedom (or, at least, the illusion of freedom) to get beyond ourselves, whether with telescopes and microscopes and our ever-burgeoning technology, or in states of mind that allow us to travel to other worlds, to rise above our immediate surroundings.

            We may seek, too, a relaxing of inhibitions that makes it easier to bond with each other, or transports that make our consciousness of time and mortality easier to bear. We seek a holiday from our inner and outer restrictions, a more intense sense of the here and now, the beauty and value of the world we live in.

            Many of us find Wordsworthian ‘intimations of immortality’ in nature, art, creative thinking, or religion; some people can reach transcendent states through meditation or similar trance-inducing techniques, or through prayer and spiritual exercises. But drugs offer a shortcut; they promise transcendence on demand. These shortcuts are possible because certain chemicals can directly stimulate many complex brain functions. (p. 40).

It seems undeniable that there is a link between psychotropic drugs and ways of seeing. I say it is undeniable not because I am up on the research on such things but because I was in college in the Sixties, and lived in a commune in New Mexico in the Seventies. Drugs of all sorts were part of the social fabric of my life, and long hours talking with people stoned on LSD or psychedelic mushrooms made it obvious that the drugs had changed their perception of reality—mostly for curse, and occasionally for blessing. Plenty of people got high merely because it was a fad, or through peer pressure, or because it was entertaining, or to escape the pain of coping with a broken world. But I met some who took drugs seriously, as part of a pilgrimage in which they wanted to know the truth of reality and had come to think that drugs might be a way to gain some insight into realities hidden from ordinary perception.

The belief that there is a mysterious link between spiritual realities, mental illness, and drugs was widely held during the Sixties but it was difficult to get many people outside the drug culture to take the idea seriously—especially Christians. We should be receptive to such things since we do believe that reality includes both the seen and unseen, and there are surprising times when the veil between the two is parted in some way. One time, we are told, St Peter was hungry, went up onto the flat roof of a house to pray, and “fell into a trance” (Acts 10:10). He saw a vision, spoke with God, and learned something that was crucial to the early church. Christ himself fasted 40 days and nights—now there is a radical use of a spiritual discipline—and had a personal encounter with the evil one (Matthew 4:1-11). Mystics over many centuries have used spiritual disciplines—silence, solitude, fasting—and sometimes found their perceptions altered.

I am not here arguing that drugs and spiritual disciplines are somehow parallel, but rather that we dare not be dismissive of the notion that spiritual realities are easily perceived and comprehended, or that there is not great mystery here, or that intelligent, sincere human beings can go to extreme lengths to find significance or to peer into the depths of reality.

With the rise of paganism and decline of Christianity in the West I suspect that once again the church will be asked to consider such things. I hope the watching world does not find us sneering.

Graphics: Drawing by Bryan Lewis Saunders, “‘Bump’ of Crystalmeth;” portrait of Dr. Oliver Sacks.