Hallucinogenics and the Eleusinian Mysteries

Jordan Peterson talking about Jung, The Red Book, Mircea Eliade, and the Eleusinian myth of Demeter and Persephone as a ceremony built around ingestion of psychedelic substances. So much win for me!!

Here's a link to the PDF (also linked under the video). Even if you don't watch the video (it's pretty long), the article is amazing. This is absolutely mind-blowing, quite literally in a way. I mean, I've long known much of this, but I had never heard the Eleusinian mysteries explained in such high resolution before. Lol, pun unintended, but there it is.

Let me see if I can find where I wrote about my single experience with LSD many years back.

Here it is:

It was one of my few experiences with LSD - and in fact the only time it had an effect on me. The other times I took too little and it had sat too long and probably lost its potency, and nothing happened. Or I got ripped off. Maybe some blank blotter - who knows? Anyway, the one time when it did take effect I was sitting in a friend's car and started to experience racing thoughts. It felt amazing - like my mind was rapidly expanding and I started to also feel physically incredible. I had a sort of literary or linguistic epiphany - a revelation through words. When I tried to describe it later the only idea that fit was it was a conversation with God, though all the thoughts were coming from inside me - being spoken through me. It wasn't really a dialogue, but it seemed the ideas were issuing from something inside me that I couldn't normally access.

It went something like this:

I became fascinated with a pine tree and started making statements about it in my head. As my mind started racing faster and faster my thoughts grew more profound and cosmic in scope, but I was still pondering the nature of the tree. And the nature of language too, at the same time. The tree was the object, and the revelation was really more about language itself, and how it shapes thought or something like that. Maybe how it reveals the nature of reality, if we're capable of seeing deep enough, which we normally aren't. I went through this progression - first I was excitedly noticing things like "When we say "the tree is green" it's really an imperfect attempt to just say "the tree IS" - but as imperfect humans we limit our understanding and focus only on one aspect of it - the greenness." My thoughts kept upgrading and expanding from there until I realized that using a tree - or any object - as a focal point was just an example, a single thing that represents Everything, or the All (I thought of it as Everything at the time). Incidentally, this is another example of "from the One come Many" (or All!). And my final revelation before my friend came out of his Grandma's house with the money we had earned by mowing her lawn that afternoon was this -

Every sentence we say is an imperfect
attempt at the Ultimate Sentence which is this -

EVERYTHING IS.​

This has remained the most profound moment of my life ever since, and many times I've pondered it and worked deeper into it. Tried to unravel its secrets. And now I feel like I have a flash of insight into it. I now believe this experience was an encounter with the Self - with the God Image inside - the Unconscious. It had given me a vision - a revelation in linguistic terms about the Pleroma - the Ein Sof, the Infinite - and about the normally limited/limiting nature of our feeble conscious minds. I suppose this was one of those experiences of the Sublime; of Oceanic Thoughts.


So.
I have personally had an experience similar to Jung's odyssey that resulted in the writing of the Red Book, though obviously not on the same scale and only lasting a few minutes. I think for him it had to be massive and difficult, because he was being given a huge revelation - a whole succession of them, transforming him into a modern prophet of sorts - a Gnostic seer. In my case it was a much smaller (but still incredibly profound) revelation. I'm not slated to change the world at a time of great turmoil (On the verge of WWI) like Jung was, or to bring a newborn psychology into the world. Well, that's sort of a relief! So when he indicates that it can take many years and you must go through hell seemingly endlessly and face demons of all descriptions - that's probably only for the high level dudes like him. The rest of us can experience it much more easily and faster - at least in certain circumstances. I have heard that LSD can have that kind of (revelatory) effect on a person if and only if they're philosophically or spiritually oriented to begin with - but if you approach it as a recreational drug then all you'll get from it is some trippy visuals and thoughts or something. Not sure if that's true - just relating it. I've sort of wanted to try more acid since then but haven't done it. I'm just glad I had a good trip and don't want to tempt fate. At least I have this one experience to dwell on and contemplate for the rest of my life. And now I'm very glad that reading about Gnosticism has allowed me to put it into perspective and understand it a lot better.
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Also, is it just me, or do those three guys in the video all have basically the same face? Especially eyebrows? they sort of look like the same man at three different ages. Or am I just trippin'?