Firstly I apologize for making semi-snide remarks without having read the book. It does seem interesting and I appreciate your comments.<p>But I think you misunderstand my concerns. I&#x27;m not really concerned with woo detectors. It&#x27;s not that I think the word &quot;sacred&quot; implies some delusion or some new age nonsense. The concept of the sacred is indeed well established in theology and anthropology etc (I don&#x27;t claim expertise in these subjects but I am somewhat familiar with what the word means).<p>There&#x27;s no way to sincerely apply the word &quot;sacred&quot; while remaining in the sphere of secular discourse, as far as I can see. Scientists can study the function of sacrality, but I don&#x27;t think science can make claims of sacrality.<p>Psychology is not religious studies... Maybe there is something about the framing I am missing here.<p>I think science is divorced from claims grounded in mystical insights. I think it cannot involve itself with normative&#x2F;aesthetic&#x2F;spiritual stuff like saying something is sacred.<p>And in any case, I do see problems with psychedelics and entheogebs related to all this. Namely how can we take the insights and thoughts and feelings that they tend to generate, and understand those things in a robustly secular way?<p>I don&#x27;t have an answer. I&#x27;ve looked around. Lots of the people decades ago who got into the stuff, as far as I can tell, went kinda nuts. Like professor Tim Leary. Huge amounts of people end up in the meditation scene and go onto Buddhism or Advaita monism. That&#x27;s fine for them—and I&#x27;m personally very interested in Buddhism, and to some extent a practitioner of the religion (taken refuge vows; meditate; love the culture; etc), and but still I&#x27;m not satisfied, from a scientific and psychological standpoint, with saying we need to bring in concepts of sacredness or mysticism.<p>That has to do with claims, arguments, reason, the public sphere, and the function of secular science.<p>I&#x27;m probably not expressing this very well.