269:, fear of impending death, and visions of fire, serpents, light perceived as God, and entities whose faces aren't visible, are all experiences that Shanon has found to be common after ingesting ayahuasca, and most are "especially symptomatic" of ayahuasca. It is these experiences, among others, that Shanon parallels with the above events of Moses' life. He also makes note of the similarities between the three-day purification before the Ten Commandments were revealed and the traditional contexts of ayahuasca use; the "shining" appearance of people after taking ayahuasca with Moses' appearance after returning the second time from the Mount; as well as the responsiveness of the ayahuasca experience to certain personality traits that Moses possessed. He further corroborates his hypothesis with
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Taken together, the botanical and anthropological data on the one hand, and the biblical descriptions as well as later Jewish hermeneutics on the other, are, I propose, suggestive of a biblical entheogenic connection. Admittedly, the smoking gun is not available to us. However, so many clues present
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can induce. He writes that he had consumed ayahuasca himself several hundred times and gathered a corpus of empirical data from published literature, structured and unstructured interviews he conducted and his personal experience. In total the corpus comprises some 2,500 ayahuasca experiences.
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themselves which, like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, seem to cohere into an intriguing unified whole. I leave it to the reader to pass his or her judgment.
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published by Oxford
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The shining appearance of Moses' face when he brings back the Ten
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and the
Biblical entheogen hypothesis, the idea that the use of hallucinogenic drugs influenced religion.
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to ayahuasca. Shannon states that his hypothesis is "admittedly speculative". He concludes by saying:
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when he received the law, is referred to as the
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Antipodes of the Mind: Charting the
Phenomenology of the Ayahuasca Experience
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Antipodes of the Mind: Charting the
Phenomenology of the Ayahuasca Experience
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and holds the Mandel Chair in cognitive psychology and education. Born in
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abcnews.go.com, Moses Was High on Drugs, Israeli
Researcher Says
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texts, as well as data on the effects of a substance
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Encountering the Divine, altered perception of time,
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details parallels between the effects induced by the
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Academic staff of the Hebrew
University of Jerusalem
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