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An important First Edition that is becoming increasingly scarce especially in collector's condition--tight, bright and clean. Original price intact on dust jacket. Three institutions are overtly concerned with eliciting change or facilitating a change process in the minds and behavior of human beings: education, medicine, and religion. The nature of the change process that is the focus of each may at first glance seem quite specific to the institution: development being the province of education, healing that of medicine, and salvation, liberation, or enlightenment that of religion. Yet, the three were one in the past-when the shaman or primitive mystic was a medicine man, a wise man, a counselor, an initiator, and an artist. Today we seem to be rediscovering the unity of `ultimate concern" beyond the temporal purposes and the irrelevant concerns of education, psychiatry, and religion. Indeed, if we examine closely the nature of the separate quests for growth, sanity, and enlightenment, we may discover enough of a meeting ground among them to warrant the ambition of a unified science and art of human change. Drugs represent still another means of chemical influence upon psychological processes [in addition to various forms of asceticism and physical disciplines including posture]. Primitive cultures in general are very aware of their natural floral pharmacopoeia, and many of the drugs in our pharmacies are either extracts, synthetic analogues, or derivatives of such age-old remedies. Among such drugs in use by Indians of many localities, we are here interested in particular in the group which, like fasting and austerities, tend to produce altered states of consciousness. The common quality of such drugs is best conveyed by the term psychedelic proposed by Dr. Humphry Osmond, meaning mind-manifesting. Such a quality brings into the focus of awareness aspects of the inner or outer reality that are not normally conscious-a shift in perception that may be experienced as either ecstatic or terrifying according to the context of the situation and the person's psychological condition. The use of psychedelic substances provides another way of affecting one's experience of the self. Early in the experimentation with these substances, the users described the occurrence of death-rebirth experiences resembling those in mystic literature, and the term egoless has become standard in the description of reactions to LSD. It would seem that different drugs may temporarily suppress one or more aspects of the controlling and censoring mechanisms to which our ordinary sense of identity is linked, so that the person may experience his reality beyond the ordinary self-concept. Interestingly, the resulting experience of the self "when the doors of perception are cleansed" easily leads to the experience of oneness with other beings or forms of life, and this in turn to the mystical realm. Seller Inventory # 001785
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Bibliographic Details
Title: The One Quest
Publisher: The Viking Press, NY
Publication Date: 1972
Binding: Hard Cover in Dust Jacket
Condition: Near Fine
Dust Jacket Condition: Near Fine
Edition: First Edition, First Printing
