Benjamin Cain
2 min readSep 22, 2020

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Your blog talks about psychedelic experiences and mass hallucinations. I’ve written about entheogens as the ultimate sources of religious experience (links below). I’ve heard many of Terence McKenna’s lectures. The question is whether the commonality of the hallucinations is due to the structures of the human brain in interaction with the psychoactive substance or whether extraterrestrial beings can or would communicate via drugs. What is it exactly that you don’t think I get?

Psychologists explain mass hallucinations along these lines: “In most cases, mass hallucination refers to a combination of suggestion and pareidolia, wherein one person will see, or pretend to see, something unusual (like the face of Jesus in the burn-marks on a tortilla, or the face of a kidnapped girl on a blank billboard) and point it out to other people. Having been told what to look for, those other people will consciously or unconsciously convince themselves to recognize the apparition, and will in turn point it out to others” (first link below).

You suggest I’ve been conditioned by nonsensical Western narratives. Actually, my writings critique many of those narratives, including political, sociological, pop cultural, and even atheistic ones (not to mention religious ones). This is because I take philosophical naturalism in the directions of existentialism and cosmicism. Thus, my philosophy is hardly congenial to the average Westerner—although indeed I understand the power of scientific methods of inquiry. At any rate, the personal attacks can go either way, since a believer in the paranormal could readily be the victim of some guru’s fraud or of conspiratorial thinking.

https://psychology.wikia.org/wiki/Mass_hallucination

http://rantswithintheundeadgod.blogspot.ca/2012/12/the-psychedelic-basis-of-theism.html

http://rantswithintheundeadgod.blogspot.com/2019/08/entheogen-source-substance-and-bane-of.html

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Benjamin Cain
Benjamin Cain

Written by Benjamin Cain

Ph.D. in philosophy / Knowledge condemns. Art redeems. / https://benjamincain.substack.com / https://ko-fi.com/benjamincain / benjamincain8@gmailDOTcom

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