LSD and the Divine Scientist by Albert Hofmann

Author:Albert Hofmann
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Pop Culture/Entheogens
Publisher: Inner Traditions / Bear & Company
Published: 2013-04-16T16:00:00+00:00

LIGHT—LOVE—LIFE

Evolution in three words:

Light of the sun is primordial energy,

it wakes and maintains

Life on earth,

the highest development of which

is Love.

3

MEDITATION AND SENSORY PERCEPTION

The Search for Happiness and Meaning

This lecture was presented at the annual meeting of the European College for Consciousness Studies on May 30, 1997, in Leipzig, Germany.

Meditation is defined in the Kröner Philosophisches Wörterbuch (Philosophical Dictionary) as “reflection, contemplation, and observation in the philosophical and metaphysical sense. In the religio-mystical sense, meditation is experienced as an immersion, as the means to the most profound understanding.”

What is it that we reflect upon, contemplate, and observe? What is it that we wish to understand in the most profound way? It is the content of our own consciousness. This content was brought in by means of sensory perception. Sensory perception precedes meditation.

Why do we meditate? What purpose does it serve? There must be a purpose and it must have a meaning, otherwise no one would do it. It could be said that by meditating one seeks new aspects or new depths of reality, or that one strives to know oneself better, or tries to comprehend a particular experience. There are infinite phenomena, concrete and abstract, which could be the object of meditation. But is there also a common denominator that includes all of the different types and goals of meditation? What lies at the root of all of this searching through meditation?

While I was pondering this question in preparation for today’s lecture I received an inquiry from the directors of this year’s Basel Psychotherapy Symposium asking if I was willing to present the opening speech at the conference. I agreed, because the congress was devoted to the theme of “The Search for Happiness and Meaning.” For ultimately, the search for happiness and meaning is not just the concern of psychotherapists, but also of chemists. It is, perhaps, the primary concern of all human beings.

With this, I had the answer to my question, “What lies at the core of the searching through meditation?” It is the search for happiness and meaning.

What just occurred was a typical case of synchronicity: two unconnected causes led to a complete and meaningful event.

“Meditation and sensory perception” and “the search for happiness and meaning” contain the same basic themes.

If we mean the “search for meaning” in the broadest sense, in other words, the meaning of human existence, then we can now clarify this meaning.

Basically all great religions and philosophies arise from the search for the meaning of creation and of human existence, and they also offer an answer to this all-encompassing question.

Although the answers that are given vary greatly from one another, each contains a promise of happiness: happiness of the eternal soul in the Christian heaven; the happiness of sensual pleasures in the Paradise of Islam; or the earthly happiness of the Epicureans.

More than two thousand years ago, at the beginning of his Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle asked the question, “What do humans seek?” And he discovered that their loftiest ambition and their greatest possession is happiness.

Thomas Aquinas arrived at the same answer when considering the question of the purpose of human existence.

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