Posted 5:15 AM by Mark Kleiman
JOSH MARSHALL INTERVIEWS WESLEY CLARK

Not bad at all, for a rookie. Josh throws a high, hard one right off, and Clark hits it back, in a way that ought to put the "are you actually a Democrat" issue to rest.

TPM: Well let's start with--there's obviously a tradition in the officer corps of generals -- all officers -- having an apolitical stance when they're in the service. But people who vote in primary elections are very political people. Obviously you were in the Army for 34 years and you said that you were non-partisan during that time and then you came out and started thinking about your views and so forth. I think, again, for people who vote in primaries, that's a little hard to understand: You know, how can you be a man in your fifties and have put aside politics in that way? So how do you explain that? Again, for people who have really lived politics for most of their life and think about it a lot.

CLARK: I think it's a wonderful thing that people have dedicated their lives to politics because without that we wouldn't have a democracy. In our country, political parties perform an essential function. But for people in the military it's very hard to participate in party politics because you're always on the move and you don't have the time, the energy, the opportunities -- deployments and night maneuvers and so forth would screw up anybody. Sometimes some of the wives have been involved. But generally the men couldn't be. And there's also the Hatch Act, which says that you can't participate in uniform. So you can give money to a party or to a candidate, if you want, as an officer, but you can't do anything that indicates an official endorsement by people in uniform for someone in a political race.

It's a good thing. Because we don't want our military involved in partisan politics. Our military should be loyal to the commander-in-chief no matter who he is, no matter what party. Their job is to raise the professional military issues, and the big policy decisions ultimately have to be made by the people's elected representatives or their appointed representatives. That's civilian control of the military. It's the essence of democracy.

The old military tradition was that people in the armed forces didn't vote at all. Guys like George C. Marshall, they made a passion of not voting. The reason is, they said, "It's really up to the people, the electorate, to choose the president. I'll work for whoever, I don't want to get involved in trying to pick sides. Whoever the president is, I support him."

In the 1950s it became acceptable and expected -- well I shouldn't say expected because no one ever knew -- but acceptable to vote. And there were efforts made to make sure that soldiers got to vote through absentee ballots. We know after Florida that a lot of these ballots probably were never counted. There's no telling whether they were ever counted, and in most races they probably weren't. For me, I had served under a Republican president as a White House fellow. I was in the Office of Management and Budget--

TPM: This was President Ford?

CLARK: Ford. And I knew Dick Cheney and Rumsfeld -- I didn't know them personally or well; I was 30 years old and they were very important people. I was just a sort of special assistant to the director of OMB. But I knew him, and Paul O'Neill and other people, and respected them. Then I worked around with the Clinton administration when I was the J5 on the Joint Staff. I knew people there, high level officials, and respected them. And when I got out, I went into business and obviously I voted.

I voted for Al Gore in the election of 2000. I had voted for Bill Clinton previously. For me, the issue was: make sure before you pick a party -- you don't have to pick a party in Arkansas to vote, you just vote, and I voted in the Democratic primary, but that didn't mean becoming a member of the Democratic party. Before you pick a party, make sure you know why you're picking a party. Make sure you understand what the partisan political process is in America. What does it commit you to? What does it mean? How does it affect the rest of your life? What is it all about? And so I thought I'd take a look at both parties.

I was fortunate. I was well-enough known that both parties invited me to consider them. The Republican party invited me to participate in a fundraiser and run for Congress. The Democratic party invited me to be their nominee for governor of the state of Arkansas. I was tremendously honored by that. And it was clear as I looked at the parties, looked at the culture, watched the dialogue, it wasn't just that I had voted for Al Gore, I really believed in what the Democratic party stood for. And so when it came time to choose a political party, I chose the Democratic party.

Most of the discussion is substantive rather than political. Clark strikes a very hawkish note the problem of Islamist terror, taking a stance like both as a policy and as a platform against Bush:

TPM: I noticed that Doug Feith, who's obviously the Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, had a statement a while back saying that the connection between terrorist organizations and state sponsors was, I think he said, the principal strategic thought behind the administration's policy.

CLARK: It's the principal strategic mistake behind the administration's policy. If you look at all the states that were named as the principal adversaries, they're on the periphery of international terrorism today. Syria -- OK, supporting Hezbollah and Hamas -- yeah, they're terrorist organizations. They're focused on Israel. They're getting support from Iran. It's wrong. Shouldn't be there. But they're there. What about Saudi Arabia? There's a source of the funding, the source of the ideology, the source of the recruits. What about Pakistan? With thousands of madrassas churning out ideologically-driven foot soldiers for the war on terror. Neither of those are at the front of the military operations.

TPM: Well, those are our allies, our supposed--

CLARK: Mentioning those two countries upsets the kind of nineteenth century geostrategy and the idea--this administration is not only playing that game, but they're more or less settling scores against the Soviet surrogates in the Cold War in the Middle East.

TPM: That being Syria, Lebanon

CLARK: The proxy states, Syria, Lebanon, whatever. These states are not -- they need to transform. But, why is it impossible to take an authoritarian regime in the Middle East and see it gradually transform into something democratic, as opposed to going in, knocking it off, ending up with hundreds of billions of dollars of expenses. And killing people. And in the meantime, leaving this real source of the problems -- the states that were our putative allies during the Cold War -- leaving them there. Egypt. Saudi Arabia. Pakistan.

The whole thing is worth reading.

Full text here.l: "

Posted 5:03 AM by Mark Kleiman
Talking Points Memo: by Joshua Micah Marshall: "TPM: Well let's start with--there's obviously a tradition in the officer corps of generals -- all officers -- having an apolitical stance when they're in the service. But people who vote in primary elections are very political people. Obviously you were in the Army for 34 years and you said that you were non-partisan during that time and then you came out and started thinking about your views and so forth. I think, again, for people who vote in primaries, that's a little hard to understand: You know, how can you be a man in your fifties and have put aside politics in that way? So how do you explain that? Again, for people who have really lived politics for most of their life and think about it a lot.
CLARK: I think it's a wonderful thing that people have dedicated their lives to politics because without that we wouldn't have a democracy. In our country, political parties perform an essential function. But for people in the military it's very hard to participate in party politics because you're always on the move and you don't have the time, the energy, the opportunities -- deployments and night maneuvers and so forth would screw up anybody. Sometimes some of the wives have been involved. But generally the men couldn't be. And there's also the Hatch Act, which says that you can't participate in uniform. So you can give money to a party or to a candidate, if you want, as an officer, but you can't do anything that indicates an official endorsement by people in uniform for someone in a political race.
It's a good thing. Because we don't want our military involved in partisan politics. Our military should be loyal to the commander-in-chief no matter who he is, no matter what party. Their job is to raise the professional military issues, and the big policy decisions ultimately have to b"

Posted 11:17 PM by Mark Kleiman
George Mason University Scientists Suggest Link Between Smallpox Vaccination and HIV Infection

Posted 4:48 PM by Mark Kleiman


Awe inspring experiences:
Learning about them,
Learning from them

Mark Kleiman

This is an invitation to join a project of exploration. Our topic is "awe-inspiring experiences." What should that include?

At the center of interest are the occasional astounding, life-changing, sometimes world-changing experiences of what is encountered as ultimate truth: Moses at the burning bush, Saul on the road to Damascus, the Buddha under the Bodhi tree.

How frequent are such experiences?

What triggers them?

How are they experienced?

What are the correlative brain states?

How do the experiences vary, one from another?

What perceptions and beliefs do those who undergo them bring back, and how consistent across cultures are those perceptions and beliefs?

What are the consequences of such experiences, for those who undergo them and for those around them?

What are the correlates of variations in those consequences?
--Characteristics of the person?
--Of the trigger?
--Of the preparation?
--Of the follow-through?
--Of the social surround?

How lasting are the effects of such experiences, and how does that vary with circumstances?

How often are the changes beneficial, as perceived by the person directly involved and by those surrounding him?

To what extent, and by what means, can such experiences be deliberately induced, or at least have their probability increased, and how do the consequences of sought experiences differ from those of unsought experiences?

What evolutionary function, if any, can be ascribed to the capacity to experience such states? Or does that capacity somehow free-ride on some other set of capacities, capacities that do have direct survival value?

But if we call those full mystical states "Big Awe," what about all the experiences of "little awe?" In what ways are the two sets of states continuous, and in what ways discontinuous? Does it make sense to ask if watching a sunrise or going to church on Good Friday is 1% as awe-inspiring as a Near-Death Experience?

If quantitative relationships hold, are they the same for all measurements, or could a Little-a experience be, say, 10% of Big-A experience cognitively but only 2% of a Big-A experience behaviorally?

Are the two sorts of experiences complements to one another in bringing about lasting personal change?

All those questions are covered by the idea of learning about awe-inspiring experiences. But there is also the question of learning from them.

Those who have had a full mystical experience tend to return from them with claims of knowledge:

--I know that I am one with the universe, and that part of me is infinite.
--I know that the universe is precisely as it should be, and that all will be well.
--I know that it is better to suffer evil than to do evil.
--I know that death is not an evil.

Instead of merely standing with our clipbroards and recording these claims, we might also want to confront them: Are they true? And can they be reconciled with claims of knowledge made on the basis of more ordinary experiences and states of mind: with science, for example, or logic?

It has been said that all Western philosophy is a series of footnotes to Plato, and Plato is often thought of as an extreme rationalist. But Plato was an initiate of the Eleusinian Mysteries, and the dialogues are full of direct and indirect references to them.

The beginning of the 21st Century may seem a strange time to be asking these questions. But it seems to me rather a good time. The astonishingly rapid progress in the sciences of the brain and the mind is making it easier every day to study such phenomena, and perhaps to induce them as well.

The second half of the past century added substantially to the number of people with access to plants having potentially awe-inducing properties, such as peyote and the "magic" mushrooms, This happened because the knowledge that had been the preserve of a few isolated cultures spread around the globe. The Twentieth Century also saw for the first time the development of synthetics with similar potentiality, starting with LSD, which may be a chemical relative of the substance used at Eleusis. We may be entering an era in which experiences of profound awe are, at least potentially, available to a wider range of people than has been the case in the past few centuries.

Ask yourself, then: What would the consequences be if the annual number of experiences of profound awe were to double, or triple, or increase fivefold? Would enlightenment start busting out all over? The experience of the 1960s might well give pause to those who would think so.

And there were earlier warnings. The Talmud tells of four rabbis who had mystical experiences. One died on the spot. One went mad. One became an apostate. Only the fourth benefited, becoming a tzaddik (a saint). Rather daunting odds, in a game played for such high stakes.

The Arthurian legend conveys a similar warning. Into the cheerful, noble, and socially useful world of the Round Table comes the Hold Grail, and the result is disaster, both personal and social. The knights whose courage and prowess had served them well -- heroes such as Gawain and Lancelot -- find themselves utterly out of their depth in pursuing a spiritual quest, and the experience of failure leaves them worse off spiritually rather than better off. Parsifal, the holy idiot, alone achieves the vision, though Galahad gets a glimpse of it. All the rest fail utterly, and their fellowship is broken.

Will improved technologies for generating awe lead to similar disaster among those ill-prepared to deal with awe-inspiring experience and its aftermath? And, if not -- if the result of more awe really turned out to be more enlightenment -- how much enlightenment can post-industrial society handle?

It has been said, perhaps with with some exaggeration, that when an American starts wandering around saying, "I am God," our psychiatrists treat him for schizophrenia, while if someone in Bali or Uttar Pradesh does the same thing, the wise men and healers say, "Good! You finally noticed."

Without taking that little bit of satire as literal fact, one might still wonder what would happen if large numbers of correctional officers and construction foremen and advertising copywriters and human-resources managers started to act on deep mystical insight. How would their friends and families react? Could they keep their jobs? Could the institutions they serve keep running?

However we answer those questions, we then face the problem of what to do about it, in our own lives and through public policy. While religious freedom is a strongly-held value, the non-medical use of mind-altering drugs is an equally strong taboo, though an exception has been made for Native American use of peyote. Should that exception be extended to other religions, with different ethnic bases, using a wider range of plants and chemicals? And what if magnets or electrodes or sensory isolation and manipulation proved capable of mimicking the actions of the currently banned hallucinogens? How should the law deal with that?

The study of awe-inspiring experiences has great intrinsic interest, and it may also help us learn about the brain and the mind. But it may also be a topic of intense practical interest. As individuals and as a society, we may soon have some difficult choices to make. If this series of meetings helps get us ready to make those choices more wisely, it will have more than fulfilled our hopes.

Posted 10:54 PM by Mark Kleiman
Thanks to the generosity of the Templeton Foundation, a team of scholars centered on UCLA is engaged in a three-year process of exploring the world of awe-inspiring experience: also called mystical experience or primary religious experience. We invite your suggestions and your participation. Please send email to Mark Kleiman at kleiman@ucla.edu.

Awe-inspiring Experiences:
Natural, Unnatural, and Supernatural


ABSTRACT

Across time and space, apparently regardless of culture, some human beings report having profoundly awe-inspiring experiences involving direct perception of the sacred. They describe a unifying vision of the world, bound together by a living presence, in which nothing “really” dies; feelings of blessedness, peace, joy, and happiness; and a sense of paradoxicality. Some of these experiences are life-changing; a few are world-changing, resulting in the foundation of spiritual traditions or of organizations ranging from the Society of Jesus to Alcoholics Anonymous. Awe-inspiring experiences share some characteristics with less extreme spiritual, aesthetic, and emotional experiences, but they have enormously greater power.

Awe-inspiring experiences are at once natural, unnatural, and supernatural. Each guise raises its own set of questions for exploration.

They are natural in that the ability to experience awe seems to be a human universal. Looking at societies and periods that vary widely on just about every imaginable dimension, we find substantial overlap in the reports both of religious mystics, who repeatedly achieve a state of awe through meditation or by other means, and of ordinary people struck by single moments of sudden religious awakening or insight. Mystical experiences seem to vary far less than do popular creeds or theological doctrines.

What is it in the human brain that supports the experience of awe? What happens in the brain before and during the experience? What is the range of emotion and cognition associated with such experiences? What traces do they leave? How do they compare to less intense experiences with similar emotional valence, and to comparably intense experiences not involving awe? What internal or external factors trigger, intensify, or prevent such experiences? What might be the evolutionary function of the underlying capacity?

From another viewpoint, awe-inspiring experiences are unnatural. The sense of self is basic to ordinary human functioning. The process of development from baby to child to adult is largely a process of acquiring a sense of “I, me, mine.” A person missing that sense would ordinarily be considered mentally ill and would certainly have a hard time negotiating his or her way around the social world.

Awe-inspiring experiences are often described as involving a dissolution of the sense of self: “ego death.” Yet the result is often experienced, and described by others, as an improvement in mental health and social functioning. It is as if a ship’s sailing were improved by being hulled below the waterline.

What is the range of aftereffects – individual and social – of awe-inspiring experiences? How often do they result in greater happiness? In greater capacity or willingness to serve others (or serve larger goals) when that service involves apparent cost or risk? How do those aftereffects vary with the other characteristics of those who are awe-struck? What importance attaches to the social surround, the extent and nature of preparation, the triggering stimulus (or absence of any apparent stimulus), and the receptivity of existing religious traditions and institutions to mystical insight? How helpful is the presence of a group to which the one who has been awe-struck can report the event and get help in interpreting it and integrating its insights into daily life? Do the structure and pace of modern societies tend to decrease the prevalence of such experiences, or the capacity to benefit from them? What would the consequences be, in our society, of an increased prevalence of such experiences? What, if anything, ought to be done about it?

But if awe-inspiring experiences are natural or unnatural as seen by others, they appear to those who undergo them as supernatural. They are felt as direct encounters with realities not confined by natural laws, and superior to them. Even in recollection, their paradox is not seen as nonsense, but as a sense transcending ordinary logic. “All will be well, and all will be well, and all manner of thing will be well.”

How consistent are mystical insights with one another? With the dogmas of institutional religion? With a variety of sacred texts? With scientifically grounded views of the cosmos, the social world, and the brain? Are the apparent paradoxes genuine, or can an appropriate analysis of concepts reconcile them with standard logic?

We are working to gather a community of scholars to explore the natural, unnatural, and supernatural aspects of awe-inspiring experiences. The members of our group are drawn from Anthropology, Chemical Engineering, Communication Studies, East Asian Languages and Religion, History and Religion, Neurobiology, Neuropsychiatry, Political Science, Policy Studies, Psychiatry, and Psychology. We seek to understand how awe-inspiring experiences work and why human beings have the ability to experience awe. We will explore the religious, cultural, political, social, and policy implications of that ability.

OUR PLANNED PROGRAM

Let us learn to dream, gentlemen, and then perhaps we shall find the truth. But let us beware of publishing our dreams till they have been tested by the waking understanding.

—Friedrich August von Kekule
(Kekule intuited the ring structure of benzene after a dream in which he saw a snake biting its own tail)

Introduction

Awe-inspiring experiences show up in some of the earliest written records of the human race. In the modern world, they appear to be less prevalent than previously. (Or perhaps what has changed is the willingness of people to acknowledge having had such experiences, and the capacity of the broader culture and the dominant religious traditions to accommodate them.) The last half-century has brought a resurgence of interest in transcendent experiences and a growing tendency to reject what William James called a premature closing of the books on reality.

Historically, awe-insiring experiences arrived either seemingly unbidden (St. Paul on the road to Damascus, Ignatius Loyola on his sickbed) or as the result of demanding practices such as prolonged fasting, solitude, silence, or wakefulness; years of intense meditation or repetitive prayer; ecstatic dancing in the Sufi or Hasidic traditions; the deliberate frustration of the logical mind by Zen koan. In our time, the repertoire of techniques that free the mind from consensus reality has been extended and now includes innovative methods of breath control, the flotation tank, which radically reduces sensory input, and, according to some reports, electromagnetic stimulation of certain brain regions. The ingestion of plant and chemical preparations intended to facilitate such experiences – a practice that dates back at least as far as the Eleusinian Mysteries, but has been, until now, either esoteric or restricted to isolated small-scale cultures – has also enjoyed a resurgence, symbolized most dramatically by an Act of Congress authorizing the use of peyote in Native American rituals.

Coincidentally, it is only now that advances in neuroscience have made it possible to study scientifically what happens in the brain in connection with awe-inspiring and related experiences. At the same time, cognitive scientists and evolutionary psychologists are creating conceptual frameworks and research techniques that are improving our understanding of the development and function of specific human mental capacities, of which the capacity to experience awe is one.

We plan to gather an interdisciplinary community of scholars to study awe-inspiring experiences in a series of three annual conferences and many smaller gatherings, formal and informal.

Ours is first and foremost a research endeavor: the phenomenon of awe-inspiring experiences is of great intrinsic interest; studying it will point the way to deeper insights about human mental and social functioning; and it is ripe for the application of new scientific tools such as brain mapping.

But we also think of our project as having a practical dimension. If less demanding means of experiencing profound awe become more widely available, we will all — individuals, social groups, religious bodies, and governments alike — face difficult and important choices. Less effortful means of encountering awe need not be less dangerous means; the reverse might be true. Nor is awe itself free of personal and social risk, especially when it is encountered by those who have not prepared themselves to meet it. (The legend of the Quest of the Holy Grail is a cautionary tale; as Malory tells it, Percival achieves the quest, but the Arthurian fellowship is destroyed.) The history of mysticism has more than its share of false prophets and false Messiahs, from Sabbatai Zvi to Timothy Leary. There is no promise that techniques which might bring enlightenment will not be used instead for mind control.

Whether and how to seek the mystical vision may become a live question for an increasing proportion of the population. If so, existing congregations and denominations will have to decide what to say to their members, and how, if at all, to support those who choose to make the attempt. Governments will then confront some uncomfortable decisions, of which the Chinese crackdown on the Falun Gong illustrates one possible resolution. In the context of the enormous personal and social damage done by drug abuse, the use of plants and chemicals as means of creating awe raises especially tricky questions; thinking clearly about them will require getting past the slogans of drug warriors and drug legalizers alike.

New and systematic knowledge, if kept relatively free of disciplinary parochialism, might usefully inform decisions at all of these levels. Our group, which has expertise in policy analysis and drug abuse control as well as neurobiology and religion, is well-placed to make a contribution.

We need to confront squarely the question of the nature and value of awe-inspiring experiences, and the insights that come out of them. To assume away the possibility of spiritual realities, as so much of the “scientific” study of religion has done, would be as unscientific as accepting without investigation the sincerity of mystics’ reports as conclusive evidence about the structure of the cosmos.


Subjects

Below is a list of subjects we intend to cover. This list reflects an early, and very preliminary, stage of our thinking, and it is likely to be modified once we start meeting regularly. And it should be borne in mind that “A fool can ask more questions in an hour than a sage can answer in a lifetime.” We do not anticipate that we will find answers to all the queries below; we merely intend to be guided by them in our explorations.

Neurobiology What happens in the brain to trigger awe-inspiring experiences? What happens in the brain while they are taking place? What brain structures or subsystems are involved? Can particular neurotransmitter/receptor systems, or even particular receptor subtypes, be identified as giving rise to such experiences? What is the relationship between variations in measurable characteristics of brain activity and variations in reported subjective experience? How do measurable brain events vary across triggering stimuli?

Technology What is the range of external triggers and preparatory exercises that can intentionally bring about such experiences or that carry some probability of bringing them about without conscious intention? To what extent do different triggers or different preparations lead to different subjective experiences? To different consequences?

Phenomenology What is the range of subjective experience on such dimensions as imagery, cognitive content, intensity, and affective valence? Are there recognizable subtypes? How valid are claims of consistency in experience across cultures and creeds? How, if at all, do such experiences vary with the nature of the trigger or the prior preparation? With the characteristics of the subject? With the characteristics of the cultural surround?

Comparative religion and anthropology How does the prevalence of awe-inspiring experiences vary cross-culturally and over time? In particular, are such experiences less prevalent in industrial than in pre-industrial societies? What is the range of variation in the interpretation put on such experiences? (For example, how much of what the diagnostic manuals call schizophrenia would be called enlightenment in, say, Bali?) How do various religious communities and indigenous peoples incorporate such experiences, the practices leading up to them, and the insights emerging from them?

Outcomes What effects do such experiences have on subsequent emotion, cognition, and behavior? Insofar as virtues such as courage and magnanimity have objective correlates, is it the case that awe-inspiring experiences tend to help its subjects grow in virtue? In happiness? In cognitive function? What effects do awe-inspiring experiences have on the sense that life is purposeful and worth living? Again, what is the range, and what are the correlates, of variation? What is the frequency of bad outcomes? How closely do the evaluations of outcomes by the awe-struck individuals match reports from families, friends, co-workers, and fellow congregants? What activities subsequent to the experience influence outcomes, and how? How important is the existence of a religious (or other) community ready to support the awe-struck individual in the aftermath of the experience?

Health What are the likely effects of such experiences, their triggers, and follow-up activities on mental and physical health? Can their potential preventative or curative properties be harnessed, and with what accompanying risks? How does awe affect the experience of pain? Of stress?

Thanatology What effects do such experiences have on the fear of dying, both spread over the life course and as death approaches? What are the effects, in turn, of decreased fear of death? Is the experience of profound awe preparation for a serene death?

Epistemology What is the proper interpretation of mystical experiences? Are they potential sources of knowledge? If so, knowledge of what? How, if at all, can such knowledge-claims be validated or challenged?

Theology and metaphysics Mystical insight often clashes with established creeds and with non-theistic philosophical systems. Is the claimed consistency of mystical experience across cultures evidence for the reality of the spiritual realm? If Sufis, Tibetan Buddhists, and Christian mystics all see the same reality, what does that imply about the status of differences in creed across religions?

Aesthetics What effect does awe-inspiring experience have on the perception of beauty and order, both in nature and in art? What effect does it have on artistic (and other kinds of) creativity? What role does art (and perhaps especially architecture) play in bringing about awe-inspiring experiences? (We have Chartres Cathedral in mind.) What is the relationship between the ability to feel awe and the sense of beauty? Do they make use of the same, or closely related, brain functions? Do they share evolutionary origins?

Language What is the impact of awe-inspiring experiences on linguistic functioning, both during the experience and thereafter? For example, do people who have undergone such experiences make greater or less use than before of metaphor and other expressive techniques? What takes place in the language centers of the brain during awe-inspiring experiences? What metaphors are used to describe awe-inspiring experiences, and why? What effect does the reported inexpressibility of mystical experience have on subjects’ general attitudes about the relationship between language and the world it describes? What are the brain mechanisms of “speaking in tongues,” and how closely are they related to those of awe-inspiring experience?

Ethics What impact do awe-inspiring experiences have on values and modes of moral reasoning? How is that impact modified by the conditions under which such experiences take place? If awe-inspiring experiences change behavior, to what extent is that effect mediated by changes in values and modes of moral reasoning, as opposed to non-cognitive changes such as increased self-command or decreased fearfulness?

Sociology If changes in attitudes or in the availability of relevant technologies increased the prevalence of awe-inspiring experiences, what would be the impact on contemporary American society? On other societies, both rich and poor? How would those effects vary with the social conditions under which the experiences take place? With the social roles of the awe-struck?

Politics Political processes tend to be factional (“us” versus “them”), adversarial, ideological, and interest-driven. Does the mystical experience of transcending ordinary categories of division manifest itself in political magnanimity? Do awe-inspiring experiences have the potential to change political attitudes, opinions, and behavior? How do awe-inspiring experiences interact with sectarian political strife, e.g. in India, Bosnia, or Northern Ireland? Conversely, how do publics and elites react to the idea of awe-inspiring experiences? What political reactions might be expected were the prevalence of such experiences to rise?

Law Potential triggers of awe-inspiring experiences include plants and chemicals. How do current laws about pharmaceuticals on the one hand and controlled substances on the other deal with these issues, and what changes might offer themselves in the light of new knowledge? How does, and how should, the Food and Drug Administration deal with pharmaceutical products designed to improve normal performance rather than to treat disease? Can a substance be “safe and effective” in producing mystical visions? Does the Religious Freedom Restoration Act apply, and, if so, how? Are traditional indigenous practices entitled to special protections? Does offering such protections on an ethnically limited basis violate equal protection? Can Establishment Clause and Free Exercise Clause claims be reconciled?

Policy What should be done? Are there personal and social benefits from increasing the prevalence of awe-inspiring experiences? Can we increase the prevalence of such experiences? What are the risks of doing so? Of different means of doing so? How can those risks be managed?