http://www.jhu.edu/gazette/2006/24jul06/24sacred.html
People have long sought meaning and significance in their
lives through a variety of spiritual practices including
prayer, fasting, chanting, solitude, and meditation. Historically,
some of these practices have included the use of
certain psychoactive plants. A common theme of these
experiences, with or without the aid of psychoactive agents,
has been to free oneself of the bounds of everyday
perception and thought in a search for universal truths and
enlightenment. To a large extent, this type of subjective and
uniquely human experience has enjoyed little credibility in
the mainstream scientific world and, thus, has been given
little scientific attention. However, it may be time now to
recognize these extraordinary subjective experiences, even
if they are, at present, not directly verifiable by objective
measures and even if they sometimes involve claims about
ultimate realities that lie outside the purview of science.
