MAPS: Americas' "nature religion"

[TRoberts38@xxxxxxx]

These excerpts from from: Fuller, Robert C. (2000) Stairways to Heaven: Drugs in American Religious History. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.


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Perceiving God in the Natural Order

The following chapters examine the historical record of the role that drugs have played both in fostering personal religious experience and in helping to create solidarity among members of religious communities. It is important, however, that we remind ourselves that a great deal of religion in the United States exists outside of churches, temples, and synagogues. And while some drugs have functioned in the two sacred worlds associated with America's "churched" religions, others have functioned in the service of what might be called "unchurched" religion. 

This is particularly true in connection with what religious historians term "nature religion." Nature religion has been a persistent theme in American religious history. It is a form of spirituality that in independent of the doctrines or rituals of institutional religion. Nature religion doesn't define spirituality in terms of church attendance or adherence to any specific creed. Nor does it possess a sacred scripture or claim to have been granted absolute knowledge in the form of revealed truths. Instead, nature religion looks to human experience for intuitive knowledge of God. It is based upon the conviction that God is always and everywhere available to humans, if we but learn to become receptive to the subtle presence of divine spirit in and through the natural order. Whereas the biblical religion of America's churches stresses the transcendence of God, nature religion is based upon experiences of God's immanence. And, importantly, whereas biblical religion teaches that there is a gulf or chasm separating humans from God, nature religion is a form of spirituality that sees the "natural" and "supernatural" as intimately connected orders of life. 

The term nature religion is applicable whenever a form of spirituality is based upon the belief that "contact" with God can be initiated within nature. What distinguishes nature religion from the revealed religions of Judaism and Christianity, then, is this conviction that every human being can awaken to the presence of a divine power. Religious orthodoxy in both Judaism and Christianity teaches that any contact between the human and divine realms must be initiated by God (or perhaps by God's angelic messengers). â Mystical experiences imply that these individuals - on their own - have learned to initiate "contact" with the divine. This helps to explain why religious institutions often develop negative attitudes toward ecstasy-producing drugs (even when drug-induced mystical states were prevalent in the early development of this religion). Prohibitions against drugs are, as anthropologist Mary Douglas has demonstrated, frequently motivated by the desire to prevent individuals from having direct access to the divine. Conversely, advocacy of drug use to obtain religious experiences is often an _expression_ of commitment to some version of nature - rather than churched or biblical - religion. 
(pages 12 - 13)

Importantly, however, nature religion has an inherent tendency to quest for more ecstatic forms of mystical experience. Nature religion implies that every human being has the potential to experience a vivid connection with the divine spirit that flows through all things. Thus, when the nineteenth-century philosopher and mystic Ralph Waldo Emerson went alone into nature, he was moved to the mystical realization that the individual human mind can open itself to the influence of a divine power. Emerson wrote that in such moments, "all mean egotism vanishes, I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or parcel of God." With these words Emerson voiced what might be called the ecstatic form of nature religion.

Emerson was claiming that there are particular states of consciousness that create a connection between the divine and human realms. When "mean egotism" or the normal mind-set of everyday life is temporarily set aside, we make ourselves receptive to a range of sensations that are ordinarily excluded from awareness. Such nonegoistic states of consciousness enable us to become receptive to what Emerson described as "an influx of Divine Mind into our mind." Mystical ecstasy is thus an imminent possibility of experience. The path to achieving full communion with God is one that leads right through our own minds. (pages 14 - 15)

Those who yearn for a closer harmony with nature's sacred depths are attentive to those conditions that permit us easier access to the "recesses of consciousness." And this, of course, is precisely why certain drugs have been a continuous part of American religious history. Tobacco, datura, peyote, LSD, marijuana, wine, and coffee have all been seen as vehicles to direct, personal mystical experience. These elixirs of ecstasy are believed to open up a range of sensations ordinarily relegated to the margins of awareness. And, in so doing, they give persons a communion with nature and a divine reality that is beyond the mind's ordinary reach. (page 15)

â The history of religion in America is at least in part the story of how persons have sought pathways that might lead from the kingdom of nature to the Kingdom of God. And thus this study of Americans' attraction to various elixirs of ecstasy provides important clues about our enduring search for stairways to the  heaven of mystical experience. (page 16)