The Great God Pan is Not Dead: Alfred North Whitehead and the Psychedelic Mode...

NOTE: See second post warning about the dangers of buying street psychedelics.

The Great God Pan is Not Dead: Alfred North Whitehead and the Psychedelic Mode of Perception

Apotheosis, elevation to divinity, is preconditioned by the being of that deific entity. Whitehead’s god is both immanent and transcendent, in the traditional senses—but Whitehead’s god is not the God of the Judeo-Christian tradition. The god’s being is not based on faith but, in part, on the logical necessity of Eternal Objects which constitute His transcendent nature.

Eternal Objects are Whitehead’s variant of Plato’s Forms, of Russell’s Universals, and of Santayana’s Essences. They are every potential form of mentality: ideas (numbers, classes, etc.), emotions (fear, joy, etc.), sensations (colours, tastes, etc.), and other human and inhuman forms. One must be careful to distinguish these potential forms of mentality from actual forms of mentality.  The latter exist in time as the subjective phases of an organism, for instance as the thoughts we harbour during the day. The former, the Eternal Objects, can exist in time when they so ingress into actuality; but they mostly subsist out of time—eternally—in their unprehended totality.

Viewed thus the objects of our mentality are eternal, though our mentality is temporal. As the reality of such metaphysical objects may seem dubious to many, let us take an example to demonstrate the reasoning. Consider the sensation whiteness as an Eternal Object, or as a Universal as Whitehead’s student, collaborator and friend Bertrand Russell calls such objects.

Going to add a warning because I was attacked by a friend in college who was high on psychdelics:

What do we know about the risks of psychedelics?

To complicate things further: People may think they’ve taken LSD when they’ve really taken something else. For example, a West Virginia man was charged with murdering his wife in 2013. He and his wife took what they thought was LSD and the wife started having convulsions and died. There were a number of media reports blaming her death on LSD, but it later came out that the couple had unwittingly taken a synthetic hallucinogen 25b-NBOMe, which isn’t illegal in West Virginia. The husband then pled guilty to a lesser charge: involuntary manslaughter.4 I also found a case report about an 18-year-old man who called 911 saying he’d tried to kill himself after taking two hits of acid. He’d actually taken NBOMe, as well, which seems to be more dangerous and potent than LSD.5

I can't imagine there is a way to guarantee what one is getting, in fact I'd recommend the free documentary What's in My Baggie? on the experiences of voluntary drug testers who'd go to concerts and raves.

The number of times people were given false information that could've led to their or others' deaths is disturbing.