Psychedelic Immortality: Nietzschean Perspectives on Reincarnation, Femtheogens, and Philosophy

Recent research has revealed a psychedelic inspiration for Nietzsche’s philosophy and, far from being a novelty in the history of philosophy, there is significant evidence that several of the first western philosophers ingested psychedelics as well. In his first book, Joseph I. Breidenstein Jr, PhD, maintained that western philosophy began as what we today would call a feminist religious reformation in the sense that many prominent presocratic philosophers were reviving a paleo/neolithic goddess-centered religiosity of rebirth within the largely patriarchal and death-glorifying culture of archaic Greece. And, in this book, Dr. Breidenstein Jr proposes that the presocratics’ psychedelic-reincarnationist-feminine model of education and/or worldview is better suited for democracy in the twenty-first century than the economic model of education that takes the west’s mainstream materialistic-secular worldview for granted. For several decades now, researchers have acknowledged both that the empirical evidence for reincarnation is overwhelming and that psychedelics can evoke past-life recollections, but ‘explanations’ for either reincarnation or how psychedelics do this have yet to be offered. By combining Nietzsche’s philosophy with the work of other thinkers, ‘Psychedelic Immortality’ both provides explanations for each of these phenomena and explores how situating education and democracy within the context of reincarnation can incite a renaissance of American culture and politics. For Nietzscheans and philosophers in particular, this book illustrates the contemporary relevance of two neglected aspects of Nietzsche scholarship—i.e. psychedelics and reincarnation—and, for researchers in such fields as feminist philosophy of religion, ecotheology, philosophy of education, social-political philosophy, and eastern philosophy, it offers a more plausible and healthier worldview in which to explore possibilities in their respective fields that are diminished by the mainstream paradigm. For spiritual seekers of all paths, it offers a conception of philosophy as a practice of awakening goddess consciousness that unfolds over the course of successive lifetimes.

Abbreviations
Foreword
Preface
Chapter One
Procedure and Realities
Chapter Two
Adventures of Onto-Phenomenology
Chapter Three
Cosmopolitics in the Making
Chapter Four
Modes of Inversion
Chapter Five
Philosophy and the Postmodern World
Chapter Six
The Concept of Nurture
Bibliography
Index

After growing up between West Chester and Ardmore, Pennsylvania, and studying at Villanova University and Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, Joseph I. Breidenstein Jr earned his PhD in philosophy at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. His formal training in the history of western philosophy began at the same time as both his yoga practice and his informal research in eastern philosophy, and ‘Psychedelic Immortality: Nietzschean Perspectives on Reincarnation, Femtheogens, and Philosophy’ draws from Dr. Breidenstein Jr’s years of experience in both the academic and yoga/new-age worlds. His expertise in Nietzsche studies is evident in his previous publications such as ‘Nietzschean, Feminist, and Embodied Perspectives on the Presocratics: Philosophy as Partnership’ and “Nietzsche, the Stoics, and Philosophical Therapy” and, as his article “Cartesian Philosophy as Spiritual Practice” suggests, he also specializes in philosophical approaches to religion and vice versa. The theory of reincarnation presented in ‘Psychedelic Immortality’ is the result of Dr. Breidenstein Jr’s years of both thinking about reincarnation through the lens of his philosophical education and trying to talk about reincarnation within western philosophy departments but, if the former endeavor led him to use the work of philosophers like Nietzsche, Bergson, Deleuze, Peirce, and Whitehead to develop a theory of how reincarnation works, the latter endeavor has made it clear to him how resistant mainstream academic philosophy is to reincarnation. Conversely, while the yoga/new-age scene and eastern philosophy have provided him with a community and intellectual tradition that is more receptive to reincarnation, Dr. Breidenstein Jr has found them to be lacking in the philosophical and scientific resources needed to make the case for why we, as a species, should resituate education and democracy within the context of reincarnation. ‘Psychedelic Immortality’ utilizes the best of the academic and yoga/new-age worlds to encourage the mutual enrichment of both.

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Nietzsche, Bergson, Deleuze, Peirce, Whitehead, the presocratics, philosophy, philosophy of psychedelics, philosophy of education, philosophy of religion, reincarnation, goddess movement, feminism, democracy, ecotheology, environmentalism, 2024 American presidential election, identity politics, ontology, phenomenology, quantum mechanics, cosmology, eastern philosophy, Buddhism, Shaktism, Daoism, Zen