I don't want my scientists talking about "sacred knowledge." To me that points to a problem with psychedelics.
Entheogen might mean 'generating god within' from a rather naive and reductionist translation of the greek, but in the field it has a more specific meaning relating to the use of a substance in a ritual context.
Entheogens, and using them in not-ritual contexts to try to replicate experiences reported by ritual participants, is interesting and broadly scientific. Religions are and have been wildly popular structures for guiding and interpreting subjective experiences, and in many cases the framework for pre-scientific medicine and mental health care. It is interesting to ask what kind of mental states they are better at generating and what effects those have.
To study that is not to admit that the religion has the right story of why those experiences arise and what they mean.
We can ask what the religious experience of 'transcendence' is and how it is induced and what is happening in the brain without buying into the idea that it is an experience of oneness with the infinity of the divine consciousness (or whatever story any particular user wants to tell). Such an explanation might be significant, without being true. In the same way one can study the stories and language and behavior of a pyramid scheme without giving credit to its claims.
If you've been bashed over the head with apologetics or evangelism, it can be hard to tune into the use of the language in a more rigorous context, but it has meaning and is not unscientific. Though there is, of course, room for an argument over how much any social science or field of psychology is 'real' science.
"Sacred knowledge" is neither meaningless, oxymoronic, nor mystical. Any more than a discussion of "Erotic knowledge" in the context of sex-research would be.
I'm reading this book at the moment, and so far it seems very good. Even the bit quoted about Jung is handled with more reasonableness than the article suggests (though I'm not sure I agree, yet).
That's different from a psychologist, in his role within the scientific medical community, talking about "sacred medicine" and "sacred knowledge."
I might read the book... but I'm still wary of scientists starting to use religious/mystical/visionary language.
You seem to be doubling down on interpreting 'sacred' in that context as the scholar saying 'something I believe is supernatural'.
Social scientists studying religion should use religious language, and scientists studying experience are fine to use mystical and visionary language, if they are describing something emically: i.e. the subject reports mystic or visionary experience. Terms like that even have an etic use, to refer to the pattern of experiences that are described that way, where they often become specific terms of art.
You didn't seem to engage with my point that you are misunderstanding the term: it is triggering your 'woo' detector, which is giving a false positive in this case.
"Sacred medicine" is not a problematic term, if you are studying medicine practiced in a sacred context. I have a book on "Shamanic medicine" - that doesn't indicate the author is a true believing shaman, just that they are the subject of his study. "Sacred knowledge" is a very good title for this book, because it is an attempt to look at what knowledge of psychoactive drugs is embedded into sacred frameworks cross-culturally, that can be reframed in a modern scientific context.
I think the misunderstanding is very understandable, because religious vested interests do a good job of preventing religious studies being widely known. Partly their concern is to keep sensible folks like you saying this kind of thing: words like 'sacred', 'mystic' and 'visionary' should not be used unless you are a believer.
But I think you misunderstand my concerns. I'm not really concerned with woo detectors. It's not that I think the word "sacred" implies some delusion or some new age nonsense. The concept of the sacred is indeed well established in theology and anthropology etc (I don't claim expertise in these subjects but I am somewhat familiar with what the word means).
There's no way to sincerely apply the word "sacred" while remaining in the sphere of secular discourse, as far as I can see. Scientists can study the function of sacrality, but I don't think science can make claims of sacrality.
Psychology is not religious studies... Maybe there is something about the framing I am missing here.
I think science is divorced from claims grounded in mystical insights. I think it cannot involve itself with normative/aesthetic/spiritual stuff like saying something is sacred.
And in any case, I do see problems with psychedelics and entheogebs related to all this. Namely how can we take the insights and thoughts and feelings that they tend to generate, and understand those things in a robustly secular way?
I don't have an answer. I've looked around. Lots of the people decades ago who got into the stuff, as far as I can tell, went kinda nuts. Like professor Tim Leary. Huge amounts of people end up in the meditation scene and go onto Buddhism or Advaita monism. That's fine for them—and I'm personally very interested in Buddhism, and to some extent a practitioner of the religion (taken refuge vows; meditate; love the culture; etc), and but still I'm not satisfied, from a scientific and psychological standpoint, with saying we need to bring in concepts of sacredness or mysticism.
That has to do with claims, arguments, reason, the public sphere, and the function of secular science.
I'm probably not expressing this very well.
What's a claim of sacrality? A claim that a particular set of behavior is concerned with the sacred is, as your second paragraph implied, an unremarkable claim. No more impressive that claiming some behavior is religious, or ritualistic.
This is where I'm struggling to understand you. Something is sacred, in the context of religious studies, if it is something set apart by a community and held deliberately in contrast with profane activities (following the Durkheim kind of definition - the older definition of folks like Otto is well out of favour now). To identify that certain activities, knowledge, experience, or behavior is commonly sacred, is just an observation about how communities organise their worldviews.
In a certain sense, no discussion of religion can be secular, by definition (religious and secular are as slippery to define precisely as sacred and profane). But in the sense that you can do secular religious studies, I don't know why 'sacred' for you is a special kind of topic that can't be admitted to the rest of the field.
On the 'people studying this go weird' tack. Yup! Very true. I think this is an issue with religious studies generally, and lots of related fields (biblical criticism, say). The people who are attracted to a field are probably more likely to have some affinity for what they are studying, and sometimes language can get a little to 'emic' for my taste. One does have to be careful to distinguish between the views someone will advocate and the positions they want to put forward as a scientist, or a secular scholar. Though sometimes people will blur those boundaries. Mind you, I get the same feeling from scientists and scholars with strong ideological opinions generally, not just religious folks. But all that said, the term 'sacred' is not unscientific that I can see, or at least, no more than any other term used to describe human religious activity.
Durkheim of course discusses the sacred at great length, tracing it in the case of Polynesian tribes to the social concept of mana. (Just showing that I've read the book!)
The reason he was able to present this theory in a convincing way that advanced the state of the art in anthropology and sociology and religious studies, it seems to me, is that he was well-trained in the scientific method and scientific writing, so he was able to discuss it all on a scientific basis—that is, I suppose, separating the etic from the emic.
Again I'm simply curious about how the scientist in the article manages that... and I've seen a lot of people get into psychedelics and then kind of lose their ability to talk clearly from a scientific, secular, non-mystic perspective.
Maybe you'll see my point of view more clearly if I say that I have absolutely nothing against the mystic perspective—I just think the value of science lies in its refusal to really "go native." And I think religious studies and religious psychology etc is more fascinating the more it sticks to the scientific/philosophical project of secular explanation.
My initial knee-jerk reaction was about a psychologist publishing a book with the title "Sacred Knowledge." I am probably mistaken about this reaction... it was bolstered by the article's quotes about "sacred molecules" and empirical proof of Jung and excitement about some guy who saw dancing gods on a drug trip, fractal patterns, and so on.
I'm super interested in how we could, with philosophical and scientific rigor, discuss whatever is the actual content of "mystical consciousness." James's work was an empirical and mostly anecdotal study of life-changing mystical experiences, and I thought it was very interesting. I think there are some interesting aspects in Heideggerian phenomenology that would be relevant. Mildly interesting: the reason why those deep learning pictures look like LSD visuals.
If I were to start studying this stuff myself in any serious way, I would also probably be likely to "go native" or "go weird" or blur the emic/etic, etc.
Still, the whole project is very interesting, and kind of seems to represent the whole "Enlightenment project" in a way. Using secular science to treat and collaborate on things that previously was the realm of shamans and priests. Just, how does the scientist not become the priest, even after 100 doses of entheogens?
Hm, could be. So you are acknowledging the feeling of sacredness, but you think there is no point in trying to evoke some sort of artificial 'sacredness' as that would defeat the very nature of it? That the moment you are trying to dissect it, it vanishes?
Hm, maybe, but that's what we humans tend to do, sharing and categorizing experiences and when we do it systematically, it's science.
I don't see why we shouldn't do this.
I don't have an open mind about sacredness or God being scientific concepts. That doesn't mean I'm closed-minded, as psychonauts like to imply. I'm just wary about scientists veering into this mystical, religious, shamanistic stance.
The point is that those experiences are real and have always been a part of the human condition. There is nothing supernatural about this, nothing bending the realms of physics.
It's all about psychology and how things 'feel', how consciousness works and how it goes beyond the single individual in a group setting.
All that mystical language imho is due to a lack of better words.