Onto the talk of Gaia, if I may contribute a little of my own spiritual perspective and the perspective of a geologist.. As for the totality of earth being alive and divine in nature, it sounds like the Gaia (mother earth) cult that began in ancient Greece , as in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaia_(mythology) . Despite having ‘tripped’ on LSD, Psilo. mushrooms, and Sage (salvia divinorum) enough times in the past, it never truly entered my thinking, but I can remember once telling my friend, while tripping as a teen (I had first done acid at age 12), of a current belief I had that I was actually God, or maybe that ‘we’ are all God, or perhaps that everything was God. It is, I know now, a form of the belief called pantheism. When I became a geologist, geology of course not being a religious or spiritual discipline and we were taught that all matter is either animate or inanimate (plants, animals, fungii, etc. vs. compounds, minerals, and elements; rocks). From the geology point of view that’s what I accept. From a spiritual view, I acknowledge that no one has seen or proven God. That being the case, He being ineffable (defying expression or description) while this world and it’s parts are seen and felt as long as we are alive. No tripping substance changes this state of affairs for me, but I am aware that hallucinogenic substances create illusions and impressions of knowing the unknowable, or ineffable. For the record, I believe Jesus to be the Son of God, God in the form of a man (the Son of man) and that the power behind my faith affects my life in many good ways. While the use of hallucinogens may leave lasting impressions on our souls/minds, it is not the same for me.

Of course, there are nutty folks that claim to be Christians, and nutty folks who trip. The fruit of our lives, our legacies of you will, will yield that final answer as to what was true or false, and what was good or bad.

May God bring about whatever is good for you

That seems very unfair to the post-LSD generations - as if my generation had used up all the endless summer afternoons with perfect babbling brooks, or something, and no generation will ever get that feeling again./blockquote>
I am the post-LSD generation, and I am saddened that all the ‘real’ LSD-25 has seemed to vanish. I have listened to stories of spectacular spiritual events from the LSD generation, if that is what they should be called. I admit I may be ‘too young’ to use “drugs”, but I use entheogens to develop a deeper spiritual bond, with not only my self, but the world around me. Now that the availability of these sacraments gradually decreases, I feel ( and I think that I speak for others) that we have been robbed of an experience of a lifetime. I do hope that people come to their senses and take another look at the true effects of things like Peyote and LSD-25. Also, it is a shame that street acid is being tainted, and the amount of actually, real, LSD is declining.

I heard a story about some guy who had over 6.00 mg/l alcohol (the limit is 0.08), and he was conscious. A veteran alcoholic, the stuff did next to nothing to him.

I bet I couldn’t reach 1.00 without being seriously messed up (I’m small, skinny, and I never drink).

From Elkins:
“Another thing to consider: do you get enough good sleep, karpad? I only ask because the things you are seeing sound identical to something that troubled me a few years back, when I was having a very serious problem with insomnia (and its attendant sleep deprivation). When the sleep deprivation went away, the scary, shadowy ‘just-out-of-the-corner-of-my-eye’ figure thingumabobs went away with it.”

Who knows if they don’t really exist and that you need to be out-of-phase with reality (altered mind, which sleep deprivation can do) to perceive them.

Anyone read John Dies at The End?

I won’t spoil the whole thing, but there’s a drug in that novel that’s pretty special (that they call soy-sauce, cause it’s black), it alters your mind rather profoundly. You can see the unseen and read minds and other stuff that I won’t spoil, but it’s pretty far out there, and it’s a state that can’t be attained without the drug (or serious godly meditation, but in the book, only the drug).

I didn’t think the concept was all that farfetched, because I do think there is more to this world than the physical. If we were meant to just reproduce and become more proefficient as a society, we wouldn’t need free-thinking, and someone/something designing a world where free-thinking exists, no doubt has plans for the minds once death claims the bodies.

And they don’t go “in the sky” or “in the fiery pits of hell” (as if those were physical places). Who knows where spirits go, but perhaps they never go that far, we just aren’t equipped, when alive, to perceive them in normal circumstances.