Timothy Leary on The 'Religious Experience' : Its Production and Interpretation c. 30 Aug., 1963

from a Lecture delivered at a meeting of Lutheran psychologists and other interested professionals, sponsored by the Board of Theological Education, Lutheran Church in America, in conjunction with the 71st Annual Convention of the American Psychological Association, Philadelphia, Bellevue Stratford Hotel, August 30 ,1963....from the pdf copy of The Psychedelic Review, Vol. 1, #3, 1964, Aldous Huxley Memorial Issue...at
http://www.maps.org/psychedelicreview/



What Is the Religious Experience?

The Religious Experience: You are undoubtedly wondering about the meaning of this phrase, which has been used so freely in the preceding paragraphs. May I offer a definition?

The religious experience is the ecstatic, incontrovertibly certain subjective discovery of answers to seven basic spiritual questions.

There can be, of course, absolute subjective certainty in regard to secular questions: Is this the girl I love? Is Fidel Castro a wicked man? Are the Yankees the best baseball team? But issues which do not involve the seven basic questions belong to secular games, and such convictions and faiths, however deeply held, can be distinguished from the religious. Liturgical practices, rituals, dogmas, theological speculations, can be and too often are secular, i.e., completely divorced from the spiritual experience.

What are these 7 basic spiritual questions?

1. The Ultimate Power Question

What is the basic energy underlying the universe—the ultimate power that moves the galaxies and nucleus of the atom? Where and how did it all begin? What is the cosmic plan? Cosmology.

2. The Life Question

What is life? Where and how did it begin? How is it evolving? Where is it going? Genesis, biology, evolution, genetics.

3. The Human Being Question

Who is man? Whence did he come? What is his structure and function? Anatomy and physiology.
http://www.luminist.org/archives/7tongues.htm

another version of Leary's Project here

The Seven Tongues of God

The lecture in which he presented his theory of human consciousness for the first time is a lecture he gave in 1963 at a meeting of Lutheran psychologists. By describing his model of the Seven Levels of Consciousness Leary tried to show that eastern philosophies and discoveries of western science do not contradict but rather complement each other . The lecture, which in The Politics of Ecstasy appears under the title "The Seven Tongues of God"(PE 13-58), was originally titled "The Religious Experience: Its Production and Interpretation." Leary begins this lecture by describing two formal experiments with psilocybin that were carried out at Harvard. (The description of the first experiment helps to see that his approach to psychotherapy was really revolutionary.)
http://www.geocities.com/arno_3/2/2-2.html