Entheogenic Visions: The Sacred Union of Word & Image

Brian Anderson, University of Pennsylvania

Document Type Presentation

2005-2006 Penn Humanities Forum on Word & Image, Undergraduate Mellon Research Fellows.

URL: http://humanities.sas.upenn.edu/05-06/mellon_uhf.shtml

Abstract

Imagine that there existed a drink that when consumed made you hallucinate and see vivid dreamscapes and colorful jungle images that seemed more real than what we normally call reality. Now imagine that this brew not only made you hallucinate, but it made you hallucinate the same thing as another person who was also drinking this potion. This purported phenomenon raises the question: If two people hallucinate the same image, does that then mean the image is real? And, if the image is not real, i.e. it does not exist in the physical realm, could it perhaps exist in a different realm, in the realm of the collective unconscious, or the spiritual realm?