The Immortality Key: The Secret History of the Religion with No Name

«“I’m an atheist, I don’t believe there is a God,” she affirms. “But then I began to feel this love. Just overwhelming, all-encompassing love.”» — la primera voz del libro no es la de Muraresku sino la de Dinah Bazer, la voluntaria del ensayo de psilocibina de la Universidad de Nueva York a quien entrevista; su declaración abre la Introducción

«And the way I describe it is being bathed in God’s love,” she goes on, her voice cracking, “because I find no other way to describe it. I felt that I belonged, that I was part of everything and had the right to be here. How else do I describe it? Maybe what your mother’s love felt like when you were a baby. This feeling of love was suffusing the entire experience.”» — Bazer, en la entrevista, explica por qué recurre al vocabulario religioso pese a declararse atea: no encuentra otra manera de describir lo que sintió

«Like Dinah, a full 70 percent rated their one and only dose of psilocybin as either the most meaningful experience of their entire lives, or among the top five.» — la cifra con que Muraresku mide el peso biográfico de una sola dosis: siete de cada diez voluntarios la colocaron entre las cinco experiencias más significativas de su vida

«The outcome is characterized as “unprecedented within the field of psychiatry.”» — la fórmula con que Muraresku cita la caracterización del resultado en la literatura psiquiátrica

«The real question wasn’t whether psychedelics might work for those confronting death, but why? And the initial answers had already led the scientists down a rather unscientific path, trespassing into corridors of the mind that once interested students of religion alone.» — Muraresku desplaza la pregunta del terreno terapéutico al religioso, y sostiene que fueron los propios investigadores quienes entraron en ese terreno

«In his 2016 TED Talk, Griffiths said the drug-induced ecstasy he routinely witnesses in the laboratory is “virtually identical” to that reported by natural-born prophets and visionaries throughout human history.» — según Muraresku, Roland Griffiths declaró en 2016 que el éxtasis inducido por la droga en el laboratorio es virtualmente idéntico al de los profetas y visionarios de la historia

«If we are essentially wired for mystical experience, it raises the intriguing prospect that, under the right mind-set and environment, any curious soul can be instantly converted into a religious savant.» — Muraresku enuncia en condicional la consecuencia que le interesa, y la marca como prospecto y no como hecho

«Griffiths’s colleague, Dr. William Richards, has been testing that hypothesis since the 1960s, when he codeveloped the very scale to measure these peak states of consciousness, the Mystical Experience Questionnaire.» — Muraresku presenta a William Richards como codesarrollador del Mystical Experience Questionnaire, la escala con que se miden esos estados

«In his 2015 book, Sacred Knowledge: Psychedelics and Religious Experiences, Richards maps out the essential features of the perfect psilocybin journey: transcending time and space, intuitively sensing the unity and sacredness of all things, accessing knowledge that is normally not available.» — según Muraresku, Richards describe en Sacred Knowledge los rasgos del viaje de psilocibina: trascender tiempo y espacio, percibir la unidad y la sacralidad de todo, acceder a un saber no disponible

«Oftentimes there is a merging of the everyday personality with a larger, more fundamental whole. Words fail to capture the unsinkable conviction that the experiencer has somehow glimpsed the ultimate nature of reality, an insight that seems “blatantly obvious” at the time, and is usually accompanied by intense feelings of joy, tranquility, exaltation, and awe.» — el resto del cuadro que Muraresku toma de Richards, con la fusión de la personalidad cotidiana en un todo más amplio y la convicción de haber entrevisto la naturaleza última de lo real

«“Because ‘God’ is as good as the ‘universe’ and the ‘cosmos’ and ‘nature.’ These are all things we really don’t know. I’ve always thought heaven and hell were absurd ideas. I am not interested in mysticism at all. I tend to think of it as a bunch of baloney. And I don’t think there’s any meaning to life. But it doesn’t matter to me, because my own experience is all I have. I’ve had very religious people ask me, ‘You don’t believe in God?’ And I say: ‘No, I believe in Love.’» — Bazer, interrogada por Muraresku sobre por qué dice dios y no universo o naturaleza, responde que los tres nombran lo mismo que no se sabe, y sustituye la creencia en dios por la creencia en el amor

«So she describes a process in which there was a “dissolution of the self” and a “melting away of barriers.”» — Bazer pide expresamente a Muraresku que no le atribuya la fórmula sentimental de ser uno con el universo, y ofrece en su lugar disolución del yo y desvanecimiento de las barreras

«Dinah arrived at the realization that “birth and death actually don’t have any meaning.” When forced to clarify, she adds, “It’s more of a state of always being.” “Always being?” “Always being. So being now and always. There’s no beginning or end. Every moment is an eternity of its own.”» — la formulación de Bazer sobre el tiempo, que el libro retomará como lo que llama el estado de siempre ser

«According to the findings of the randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial released in the respected Journal of Psychopharmacology in November 2016, the vast majority found clinical relief» — Muraresku resume los resultados del ensayo aleatorizado, doble ciego y con placebo publicado en el Journal of Psychopharmacology en noviembre de 2016; el tramo se corta en el cambio de plana y sigue con la cifra del 87 por ciento de los veintinueve voluntarios de la Universidad de Nueva York

«The underlying experience itself, whether activated by psilocybin or some spontaneous internal flood of neurotransmitters» — según Muraresku, la consecuencia que Griffiths saca es que la experiencia de fondo, venga de la psilocibina o de una crecida espontánea de neurotransmisores, es biológicamente normal; el tramo se corta en el cambio de plana y la continuación está en la p. 21

«Instead of “a bad death marked by needless suffering,” he sees psilocybin as a “meaning-making medicine” with enormous potential.» — según Muraresku, el psicólogo clínico Anthony Bossis, director de la investigación en cuidados paliativos del ensayo de la Universidad de Nueva York, llama a la psilocibina medicina que hace sentido; el verbatim se corta antes de la llamada de nota pegada

«Participants in our study often described this experience with the newfound knowledge that consciousness survives bodily death—that we are not only our bodies—which is a profound gift to a person with a body that is failing, and will soon stop functioning due to advanced disease. It has been described as a transcendence of past, present, future. Timelessness in the moment. I’ve heard participants speak about feeling “outside of time.” The insight that we are not bound by the material world is a powerful one. It is psychologically, existentially and spiritually liberating.» — Muraresku transcribe un correo de Bossis en el que este reporta lo que dicen sus participantes: que la consciencia sobrevive a la muerte del cuerpo y que no se está atado al mundo material; la voz es la de Bossis reportando a sus voluntarios

«When I visited William Richards at his oasis of a home outside Baltimore in the early summer of 2018, he distilled his decades’ worth of research like a Zen master: “Once you’ve plunged into the ocean, does it really matter whether or not you believe in water?”» — la réplica con que Richards, según Muraresku, responde a la cuestión de la creencia: lo que importa es la inmersión, no la fe en el medio

«Over a billion people across the planet are now religiously unaffiliated, including one in five Americans and Europeans, and almost half the British public.» — el dato demográfico con que Muraresku sitúa el público de su libro: mil millones de personas sin afiliación religiosa

«The God now rejected by America’s largest generation, 73 million people, is not the God of Dinah Bazer.» — Muraresku separa el dios institucional que la generación más numerosa de su país rechaza del dios experimentado por Bazer

«If there’s a spiritual crisis in the West, it’s because the defenders of the three great monotheistic faiths have forgotten their roots.» — el diagnóstico con que Muraresku abre su capítulo introductorio: la crisis espiritual de Occidente viene de que los defensores de los tres monoteísmos olvidaron su raíz experiencial

«When Yahweh appeared to Moses in a burning bush, it was a terrifying ordeal. The emancipator of the Israelites feared for his life and shielded his eyes from the God who would later warn, in Exodus 33:20, “You cannot see My face; for no man can see Me and live!”» — Muraresku recorre los relatos fundacionales como experiencias sobrecogedoras y no como doctrina, empezando por la zarza de Moisés y el pasaje de Éxodo 33:20 en la traducción que él usa

«Christianity’s greatest missionary, Saint Paul, was struck blind for three days on the road to Damascus by a flash of heaven-sent light, followed by an auditory hallucination of Jesus. Thereafter Paul would claim continued supernatural communication with the Son of God.» — el segundo caso de la serie: Pablo cegado en el camino de Damasco, que Muraresku describe como luz y alucinación auditiva

«The entire Qur’an was dictated to Muhammad word for word by the Angel Gabriel, who revealed Islam’s scripture in a series of trances. One of Muhammad’s earliest biographers, Ibn Ishaq, records the belief of family friends that the young prophet suffered a stroke. Modern scholars say he was prone to “ecstatic seizures.”» — el tercero: la dictación del Corán por el ángel Gabriel en trance, con la mención de Ibn Ishaq y de los estudiosos modernos que hablan de crisis extáticas; la atribución de esas lecturas es de Muraresku

«According to Brother David, “time has an influence on the system: the pipes tend to get rusty and start to leak, or they get clogged up. The flow from the source slows down to a trickle.”» — la imagen de las cañerías con que Steindl-Rast, citado por Muraresku, describe el desgaste institucional de la experiencia

«God does not reside in a holy book.» — la frase con que Muraresku enuncia lo que atribuye a la unanimidad de los místicos, aislada como párrafo propio en el libro

«For the mystics, the only way to know God is to experience God. And the only way to experience God is to unlearn everything the ego has been trying so vigorously to manufacture since our infancy. In order to stop wetting the bed and become productive members of society, that “deep, inner-peace circuitry of the right hemisphere” has been sidelined along the way. To bring it back online, say the mystics, the simplest and most effective method is to die before you die.» — la tesis operativa del libro, atribuida a los místicos: conocer a dios es experimentarlo, y el método es morir antes de morir

«It’s why the Sufis, the mystics of Islam, have been called “the impatient ones.” Rather than wait until their actual death, the spiritual experts of the world’s second largest religion rank one task more urgent than any other: recovering an “awareness of one’s full identity” in this lifetime.» — Muraresku trae el sufismo como caso de la misma urgencia, y traduce su tarea como recuperar en vida la consciencia de la identidad plena

«The twelfth-century Persian pharmacist Attar once said, “So long as we do not die to ourselves, and so long as we are identified with someone or something, we shall never be free.”» — la cita de Attar que Muraresku usa como formulación sufí de la muerte del yo; la traducción y el recorte son suyos

«“If you could get rid of yourself just once, the secret of secrets would open to you. The face of the unknown, hidden beyond the universe, would appear on the mirror of your perception.”» — la cita de Rumi con que Muraresku cierra el ejemplo sufí

«It’s why a fundamental concept for the Kabbalists, the mystics of Judaism, is Ayin (Nothingness). “When a man attains to the stage of self-annihilation he can thus be said to have reached the world of the divine Nothingness. Emptied of selfhood his soul has now become attached to the true reality.”» — según Muraresku, el Ayin o Nada de los cabalistas nombra el mismo estado de aniquilación del yo; la cita va sin nombrar a su autor en el cuerpo

«And it’s why the German theologian Meister Eckhart, the mystic par excellence of medieval Christianity, put so much emphasis on the “self-effacement” that is the one condition precedent to finding God: “If you could naught yourself for an instant, indeed I say less than an instant, you would possess all.”» — Muraresku trae a Meister Eckhart como caso cristiano medieval, con la fórmula del anonadarse por un instante

«Eckhart describes the nullification of the ego as a process of unlearning, in which “the soul must lose her being and her life” in something like Bolte Taylor’s “sea of silent euphoria.” “We cannot serve this Word better than in stillness and silence: there we can hear it and there too we will understand it aright —in the unknowing. To him who knows nothing, it appears and reveals itself.”» — la segunda cita de Eckhart que Muraresku encadena, sobre el desaprender y sobre el silencio como lugar de la comprensión

«To this day all visitors to Saint Paul’s Monastery on Mt. Athos in Greece, one of the most important sites of Orthodox spirituality, will come face-to-face with a beautiful Greek saying mounted on the wall of the reception area: “If you die before you die, you won’t die when you die.”» — el dicho griego del monasterio de San Pablo en el Monte Athos que Muraresku toma como emblema de su tesis

«Notice the complete absence of the word “God” in the preceding quotations. Something tells me that if the mystics were in charge of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, the world would be a very different place.» — Muraresku hace notar que en esas citas no aparece la palabra dios, y enuncia en condicional lo que pasaría si los místicos gobernaran los tres monoteísmos

«The written word that tries to capture the original encounter inevitably replaces the personal» — Muraresku formula con Steindl-Rast la secuencia que le interesa: la palabra escrita reemplaza la experiencia personal del asombro; el tramo se corta en el cambio de plana y sigue en la p. 27 con la doctrina viva fosilizada en dogmatismo

«Rabbi Lawrence Kushner has written extensively about the process that he calls a “rehearsal” for our moment of transition: “Just as the death of each creature is in turn a rehearsal for the death of a species and a galaxy and a cosmos. The great rhythm of going out and returning.» — Muraresku cita al rabino Lawrence Kushner, que llama ensayo a ese morir y lo encadena con la muerte de las especies, de una galaxia y de un cosmos

«That’s what British philosopher Aldous Huxley predicted back in the 1950s, in the wake of his sublime experience with mescaline, peyote’s visionary compound. In The Doors of Perception from 1954, Huxley recorded his own taste of “egolessness” resulting in the epiphany that “All is in all—that All is actually each.”» — según Muraresku, Aldous Huxley anticipó esta reforma en 1954 desde su experiencia con mescalina, y la fórmula del todo en todo es la que Huxley registra en The Doors of Perception

«Decades ahead of the unchurching of America and most of Europe, Huxley spotted an antidote to the “ninety minutes of boredom” that was already plaguing the “average Sunday churchgoer.”» — Muraresku toma de Huxley la fórmula de los noventa minutos de aburrimiento del feligrés dominical, que le servirá de contraste con el rito psicodélico

«“Nothing could be more alarming to the ecclesiastical hierarchy,” the philosopher Alan Watts once observed, “than a popular outbreak of mysticism, for this might well amount to setting up a democracy in the kingdom of heaven.”» — la observación de Alan Watts que Muraresku usa para explicar la persecución de los místicos: un brote popular de mística equivaldría a instaurar la democracia en el reino de los cielos

«The author and publisher have provided this ebook to you for your personal use only. You may not make this ebook publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this ebook you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify the publisher at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.» — el aviso de derechos del ebook, firmado por autor y editorial, que pide notificar cualquier infracción a Macmillan; es aparato editorial y no voz del libro

«For Julieta Belén and Alexa Paz without whom this book never would have been born and because of whom it was almost never finished And my PJ, the formosissima causa sine qua non» — la dedicatoria del autor, con la fórmula latina final tal como la imprime el ejemplar

«Like Brian C. Muraresku, author of the excellent Immortality Key that it is my pleasure to introduce to you here, I was raised in a Christian household. My family was Presbyterian, whereas Brian’s upbringing was Roman Catholic.» — Graham Hancock abre su Foreword situando su propia crianza presbiteriana frente a la católica de Muraresku

«I determined that henceforth I would question everything and never again take anything on trust just because some authority figure, or some musty book, said it was so.» — Hancock declara el principio con que rompió con la fe de su familia a los catorce años: cuestionarlo todo y no aceptar nada por la sola autoridad de quien lo dice

«I’ve stayed an atheist ever since, in the strict sense of the word— which derives from the Greek átheos and means literally “godless.”» — Hancock se declara ateo en sentido estricto y da la etimología griega del término

«Nevertheless certain experiences that have come my way during this past half century have changed my outlook profoundly and, while “god” remains an unproven hypothesis, the experiences I speak of have persuaded me of the existence of realms and realities other than our own that coexist with ours, and exert influence upon every one of us, but that largely go unseen and unrecognized in modern technological societies—particularly those that have suffered long exposure to Christian teachings.» — Hancock acota su ateísmo: dios le sigue pareciendo hipótesis no probada, y a la vez dice que sus experiencias lo persuadieron de que hay reinos y realidades coexistentes con el nuestro que las sociedades tecnológicas no ven

«One thing is for sure, however: hearing the lecture or reading the book or paper is categorically not the same as the experience I would enjoy if I were actually having sex.» — el símil con que Hancock separa el saber leído del saber experimentado, que es el eje de su prólogo

«My first encounter with psychedelics was in 1974 in England when I took LSD on impulse at a festival and was rewarded with twelve hours of bliss, revelation, scary challenges, time travel, and mystery.» — Hancock fecha en 1974, en un festival inglés, su primer encuentro con el LSD

«The book, published in 2005, was Supernatural: Meetings with the Ancient Teachers of Mankind, and in 2002 during the preliminary stages of research, I came across the work of David Lewis-Williams, professor of anthropology at the University of Witwatersrand in South Africa.» — Hancock nombra su propio libro de 2005 y al antropólogo David Lewis-Williams como la lectura que lo llevó al asunto

«David’s “neuropsychological theory of cave art” proposes that shamans of the Stone Age used a variety of means—notably psychedelic plants and fungi—to enter trance states in which they experienced powerful visions.» — según Hancock, la teoría neuropsicológica del arte rupestre de Lewis-Williams sostiene que los chamanes de la Edad de Piedra entraban en trance por varios medios, entre ellos plantas y hongos psicodélicos

«For my first research “trips” I chose to travel to the Amazon rain forest of South America to sit down with shamans and drink with them the sacred visionary brew known as Ayahuasca—“the Vine of Souls” or “Vine of the Dead”—in which the active ingredient is dimethyltryptamine (DMT), the most potent hallucinogen known to science.» — Hancock cuenta su viaje al Amazonas para beber ayahuasca con chamanes y nombra la dimetiltriptamina como principio activo

«All in all I had eleven Ayahuasca sessions in the Amazon in 2003, enough to provide me with the authentic firsthand experiences I felt needed to write my book.» — Hancock cifra en once las sesiones de ayahuasca que tuvo en el Amazonas en 2003

«The brew tastes obnoxious—a mixture of battery acid, rancid socks, raw sewage, and just a hint of chocolate—and routinely induces diarrhea, intense sweating, and projectile vomiting followed by exhausting bouts of dry retching.» — Hancock describe sin adorno los efectos físicos de la bebida, que es la contraparte del relato visionario

«Very commonly these entities appear as serpents or as serpent/ human hybrids, and “Mother Ayahuasca” herself, the entity believed by many to be the supernatural intelligence behind the brew, is frequently depicted in shamanic art as a serpent or as a serpent therianthrope.» — Hancock reporta la forma serpentina o de terianthropo con que se le aparecen las entidades y con que el arte chamánico representa a la llamada Madre Ayahuasca

«Those changes are real even if materialist science would like to reduce the entity who inspires them to a mere epiphenomenon of disturbed brain activity.» — Hancock sostiene que los cambios de conducta son reales aunque la ciencia materialista reduzca a epifenómeno cerebral a la entidad que los inspira

«For example, Dr. Jacques Mabit has for many years been offering heroin and cocaine addicts incredibly effective treatments with Ayahuasca at his Takiwasi clinic in Tarapoto, Peru, where they might typically undergo twelve sessions with Ayahuasca in the space of a month.» — Hancock nombra al doctor Jacques Mabit y su clínica Takiwasi de Tarapoto, Perú, como caso de tratamiento de adicciones con ayahuasca

«Meanwhile in Canada, Dr. Gabor Mate was offering phenomenally successful Ayahuasca healing sessions to his drug-addicted patients before the Canadian government stepped in and stopped his work on the grounds that Ayahuasca itself is an illegal drug.» — Hancock reporta que el gobierno canadiense detuvo las sesiones del doctor Gabor Mate por ser ilegal la ayahuasca

«But my experiences with Ayahuasca have convinced me, as no amount of reading or studying or listening to lectures or sermons ever could, that materialist-reductionism is a profound error, that to be alive and conscious at all is a mystery of enormous, immeasurable proportions and, in brief, as Shakespeare put it in Hamlet, that “there are more things in heaven and earth” than are presently dreamed of in our philosophy.» — Hancock declara su posición sobre la consciencia: la experiencia con ayahuasca, y no la lectura, lo convenció de que el reduccionismo materialista es un error profundo, y cierra con el verso de Hamlet

«although consciousness manifests in the body during life it is neither made by the body, nor confined to the body, nor inevitably extinct on the death of the body.» — la formulación con que Hancock enuncia su tesis sobre la consciencia: se manifiesta en el cuerpo pero ni la hace el cuerpo, ni queda confinada en él, ni se extingue necesariamente con su muerte

«About the Author Brian C. Muraresku graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Brown University with a degree in Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit. As an alumnus of Georgetown Law and a member of the New York Bar, he has been practicing law internationally for fifteen years. He lives outside Washington, DC, with his wife and two daughters.» — la solapa de autor del ebook, que no es voz de la obra sino aparato editorial: da su formación en latín, griego y sánscrito y su ejercicio del derecho

«First published in the United States by St. Martin’s Press, an imprint of St. Martin’s Publishing Group THE IMMORTALITY KEY. Copyright © 2020 by Brian C. Muraresku. Foreword © 2020 by Graham Hancock. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Publishing Group, 120 Broadway, New York, NY 10271.» — el pie editorial de la página de derechos

«Names: Muraresku, Brian C., author. Title: The immortality key: the secret history of the religion with no name / Brian C. Muraresku; foreword by Graham Hancock.» — la ficha de catalogación de la Library of Congress reproducida en la página de derechos, de donde salen el título y el subtítulo de esta ficha

«Subjects: LCSH: Christianity and other religions—Greek. | Christianity—Origin. | Greece— Religion. | Hallucinogenic drugs and religious experience. | Mysteries, Religious.» — las materias con que la Library of Congress clasifica el volumen, que resumen su asunto desde fuera

«Cover photograph of Demeter and Kore “Exaltation of the Flower,” Greek relief from Pharsalos, 470–460 BC © Erich Lessing / Art Resource» — el crédito de la fotografía de cubierta, que es el relieve de Deméter y Kore de Farsalia

«“beatific visions” and deeply meaningful experiences induced in both cases, however, appear to be quite remarkably the same.» — Hancock equipara en su Foreword las visiones beatíficas inducidas por dos vías distintas; el tramo abre la plana y viene de la p. 14

«Over the centuries, therefore, enormous and often deadly forces (with the power, for example, to burn people at the stake or imprison them for decades) have repeatedly been unleashed to prevent people from experiencing direct contact with realms and realities other than the mundane.» — la lectura de Hancock sobre las fuerzas desplegadas para impedir el contacto directo con otras realidades

«participated all around the world—ceremonies often led by women and held in secret like the Communion of the “primitive” Christians— have reintroduced spirituality into my life. For this I am deeply grateful. —Graham Hancock» — la firma del Foreword y la declaración final de Hancock sobre las ceremonias dirigidas por mujeres que le devolvieron la espiritualidad

«Throughout much of Western history, until the fourth century AD when early, “primitive” Christianity began to be systematically stamped out beneath the jackboots of the Roman Catholic Church, “beatific visions” were the primary recruitment tool of the enormously ancient and influential “religion with no name” that is the subject of The Immortality Key.» — Hancock enuncia en el Foreword la tesis del libro tal como él la entiende, con las visiones beatíficas como instrumento de captación de la religión sin nombre

«This religion could shift and morph into multiple forms—the Eleusinian and Dionysian Mysteries are among the examples Brian gives, and to these I would add the much older religion of the painted caves that I explored in Supernatural—but the common factor in every case was a psychedelic sacrament (sometimes food, sometimes drink, sometimes both) consumed by all participants.» — las formas que Hancock atribuye a esa religión y el factor común que le asigna: un sacramento psicodélico compartido