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At long last my philosophical novel is complete! A journey through space, time, and dreams, Planetary Messenger explores the social, scientific, and spiritual consequences of discovering another planet in the galaxy just like our Earth. I began this project as a NaNoWriMo entry in 2007 and continued editing and revising for a year and a half.
From the back cover:
Since the dawn of humanity we have gazed at the stars to ponder our existence. To the naked eye the skies are dark and lifeless, but what if, through a glass, we looked to the heavens and saw our mirror image, a twin Earth from afar? If we found our uniqueness shattered in the vast cosmic arena, then what, if anything, could we still hold sacred?
Planetary Messenger is now available either directly from Createspace or through Amazon. Thanks to all of you who have been part of my life so far and helped make this possible. Happy reading!
I came across this passage examining our culture’s attitude toward drug use, which I think extends beyond recreational psychedelic drugs to include drugs as a treatment for mental disorders. Physical substances that affect our mind and consciousness may lead us to a materialistic spirituality, in contrast with the dominant dualistic interpretation that asserts a non-physical mind or soul.
Deep-seated cultural biases explain why the Western mind turns suddenly anxious and repressive on contemplating drugs. Substance-induced changes in consciousness dramatically reveal that our mental life has physical foundations. Psychoactive drugs thus challenge the Christian assumption of the inviolability and special ontological status of the soul. Similarly, they challenge the modern idea of the ego and its inviolability and controls structures. In short, encounters with psychedelic plants throw into question the entire world view of the dominator culture.
From Food of the Gods (McKenna, 1992)
Lester Grinspoon gives an interesting insight describing the hippie movement of the 1960’s in terms of earlier bohemian cultures with the added component of LSD–a psychedelic experience once limited to a select few in a larger community.
The hippie movement constituted the mass following of the psychedelic ideology. It began to gather force around 1965 and reached its height between 1967 and 1969. Although the matter was often obscured for tactical reasons, there is no doubt that the initiating element, the sacrament, the symbolic center, the source of group identity in hippie lives was the psychedelic drug trip. To drop out, you had to turn on. It was not a question of how often the drugs were used; sometimes once was enough, and many people experienced a kind of cultural contact high without taking drugs at all.
Earlier bohemians had their unconventional dress, sexual and work habits, hairstyles and political attitudes; what distinguished hippiedom and expanded its population far beyond that of genuine literary and artistic bohemias was simply the extra ingredient of LSD. By democratizing visionary experiences, LSD made a mass phenomenon of attitudes and ideas that had been the property of solitary mystics, esoteric religions, eccentric cults, or literary cliques. Every teenager who had taken 500 micrograms of LSD could convince himself, with the help of teachers like Timothy Leary, that he was in some sense an equal of the Buddha or Einstein.
From Psychedelic Drugs Reconsidered (Grinspoon, 1979)
Technologically advanced civilizations in the galaxy may be short-lived because they inevitably destroy themselves, but perhaps extraterrestrials haven’t contacted us because they’re too introspective for space exploration:
One problem might be conflict resolution before they wipe themselves out. One problem may be a loss of interest. They might turn to internal religion, like Zen Buddhism, emphasizing the here and now.
From “The Lifetimes of Technical Civilizations” by Shklovsky, Platt, Stent, Minsky, & Gold in Communication with Extraterrestrial Intelligence (Sagan, 1973)
If religious knowledge, like any other form of knowledge, develops through a process of falsification, then an immutable religious tradition is unattainable. Cultural continuity, on the other hand, allows a given religion to develop with time–and even acknowledge past mistakes–without forsaking the tradition at hand.
To put it bluntly, classical Christianity is itself now our Old Testament… We have to use traditional Christianity in the same way as Christianity itself has always used the Old Testament. In both cases there is a great gulf but there is also continuity of spirit and religious values… When a Christian sings a psalm he knows there is a religion-gap and a culture-gap, but it does not worry him because he believes his faith to be the legitimate successor of the faith of the psalmist. Similarly, since the Enlightenment there has developed a religion-gap and a culture-gap between us and traditional Christianity, but we may still be justified in using the old words if we can plausibly argue that our present faith and spiritual values are the legitimate heirs of the old.
–Don Cupitt, Taking Leave of God (HT: Exploring Our Matrix)
Present-day fundamentalist theology makes a position of cultural continuity nearly impossible, though strangely enough almost no fundamentalist position (perhaps none at all) has remained constant with time.
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