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Weston La Barre Quotes
d. 1996 United States
Raoul Weston La Barre (13 December 1911 – March 1996) was an American anthropologist, best known for his work in ethnobotany, particularly with regard to Native-American religion, and for his application of psychiatric and psychoanalytic theories to ethnography.
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A religion is a kind of group dream—the subjective poetry in which, supporting one another’s faith or need to believe, we strive desperately to believe.
Hallucinogens and the Shamanic Origins of Religion (1972)
We have too long supposed that the Unknown mysterium tremendum et fascinosum of religion was outside us, when in fact that Unknown, although ego-alien or unconscious, was all the while within us: the alleged “supernatural” is the human “subconscious.”
Hallucinogens and the Shamanic Origins of Religion (1972)
A religion is a kind of group dream.
Like the paranoid schizophrenic, the vatic personality pretends to be talking about the grandiose outside cosmic world, but he is really talking grandiosely in symbolic ways only about his narcissistic self and his inner world. The mystic pretends to discard his sensory self in order to meld with the cosmic Self; but in discarding his senses he abjures his only connection with the cosmos and re-encounters only himself. The realities he expounds are inside him.
Hallucinogens and the Shamanic Origins of Religion (1972)
The subjective self emerges most purely in states of sensory deprivation, when the blank screen of consciousness has projected upon it only the individual hallucinatory subjective self, without sensory correction or editing, without reality testing or any such objective “noise.”
Hallucinogens and the Shamanic Origins of Religion (1972)
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