Our friend Cliff gave me the name of a book today, something he said a while back was blowing his mind: The Immortality Key, which sounds a bit naff at first (like a Dan Brown novel), before I read the subtitle The secret history of the religion with no name. This sounds right up my alley. And I’m fond of Graham Hancock, who wrote the Foreword and whose TED talk was a game-changer for me, pointing out the hypocrisy and injustice of governments prohibiting mind-expanding drugs while capitalising on all the drugs that numb us and bring us down.

I’ll share that video below because it seems to illustrate the theme of The Immortality Key.

The blurbs and praise I’ve read suggest that The Immortality Key goes much deeper than the modern prohibition of consciousness-altering substances, arguing that psychedelic experience was central to the practice and spirituality of ancient Western religions.

One reviewer described it as “a spiritual adventure page-turner”, and others have said the author spins humour and travelogue into the argument, which ranges among a laundry list of disciplines and subjects:

• history
• comparative religion
• linguistics
• pharmacology
• chemistry
• biology
• democracy
• the unity of mankind
• the religious war on women

No doubt there’s a bit of ethnobotany in there and some mythology — sounds fucking great! So I’m going to check it out and will let you know what I find. I feel confident it’s going to find it’s way onto my Goodreads shelf of books that have revolutionised my worldview.

The last book I added to that shelf was a book of trialogues between Rupert Sheldrake, Terence McKenna and Ralph Abraham, Chaos, Creativity and Cosmic Consciousness, which I highly recommend as a wild exploration of many things, but in particular the connections between million-year-old psychedelic sacraments and the origins/evolution of consciousness.

I can vouch for this one, because I’ve actually read it instead of just hearing about it, so that’s an affiliate link above — if you buy the book through there I’ll get some money for a coffee.

If you’ve read either of these books or others like them, I’d love to read your thoughts in the comments below.