There is a Buddhist centre in the Allgäu, in the far south of Bavaria, near Oy-Mittelberg, where the mountains stand behind mountains behind mountains. I have done many retreats there. The place is thought through to the last detail — and what it really hands you, on the first day, is a set of dials: the controls for what modern psychology calls set and setting.
You choose the depth of the container. You can take a fully secluded retreat, where your room holds an altar and a small bed and a tea kitchen shared with no more than three others, and you need not speak to a single person for your whole stay. You can eat with the residents and the others in retreat, half in the world. Or you can sit in the large gompa with everyone and take your meals in company. There is a stupa outside, and a yard where you can walk, or meditate, or do both at once. You set your own sittings. You can even volunteer to cook for the group, if that is the practice you need.
From the first hour, the conditions are in your hands. Nobody hands you a substance. They hand you the controls. Hold that image — a person at a quiet altar in the mountains, deliberately building the conditions of their own mind — because we are going to travel a long way from it, through fire temples and the water’s edge of riverbanks and thrones of smoke, and come all the way back to it, and you will understand it differently when we do.
Set and Setting Was Never About the Drug
The phrase entered modern speech through Timothy Leary and his circle in the early 1960s, and was systematised later by the psychiatrist Norman Zinberg, whose 1984 book took the two words as its title. In a clinical trial today the pair is handled with real care — set is the screening, the preparation, the intention; setting is the room, the eyeshades, the music, the guides who stay for the whole duration.
Then, quietly, the literature calls them non-specific factors: the parts of the outcome that are not the drug. The molecule is the specific factor, the thing under study; everything around it is scenery to be held constant so the molecule can be read cleanly. The container is filed as noise around the signal.
But fasting, isolation, sensory saturation, rhythmic ritual, sleep-incubation — these are all recognised, documented ways of shaping an altered state, and not one of them requires a substance. That is the floor this whole piece stands on, and it is solid ground: preparation and environment can engineer the state on their own. Every tradition that follows would have found the lab’s ranking exactly backwards.
The Machine Shown Whole in the Fire Temple
To read the sparse accounts, it helps to see one complete example first — a case where the entire apparatus of set and setting is written down and nothing is hidden. ⟵2
Sasanian Persia, in a season of religious doubt. The community wanted to know whether their own rituals still reached God, so they resolved to send one soul across to ask — and they did not call for a volunteer. They ran a selection. They gathered the whole community at the fire temple and set apart seven men who had not the slightest doubt of God and the religion, and whose own thoughts and words and deeds were most orderly and proper. From those seven, three. From the three, one: a man who comes down to us as Arda Viraf, Wiraz the just. His set was not a mood he summoned on the day. It was a qualification, verified by the community, before he was allowed anywhere near the door. Set and setting were not left to the morning of the ceremony. ⟵3
Then the setting. He washed, put on new clothes, perfumed himself, sat on a clean cloth on a prepared couch, ate, and made his devotions. The fire burned. His sisters and the priests kept vigil around him, reciting the scriptures, tending the flame, for seven days and nights. The fire temple was not a backdrop to the work — the fire temple was the work.
Only then the substance — wine and a plant the text calls mang, whose identity is still argued over, given in three cups keyed to the triad of good thought, good word, good deed. He drank, said grace, and slept.
— Yasna 71 · Avesta
🕯️ “As thou dost desire, O holy one, so shalt thou be; holy shalt thou cause thy soul to pass over the Chinvat Bridge; holy shalt thou come into Heaven.”
Count the lines. Almost none of them are about the plant. Nearly all are about the container — who was chosen, how he was prepared, who kept watch, what was recited, where the fire burned. The container is the technology, and the container has a modern name: set and setting. ⟵4 The altered state that followed was not manufactured by the cup. It was manufactured by everything standing around it.
And because Viraf came back, and dictated what happened to a scribe, we do not have to guess what all that set and setting bought him. We have his report. ⟵5
— ARDĀ WĪRĀZ NĀMAG · HAUG & WEST, 1872
🕯️ “In that first night, Srosh the pious and Adar the angel came to meet me, and they bowed to me, and spoke thus: ‘Be thou welcome, Arda Viraf, although thou hast come when it is not thy time.’ I said: ‘I am a messenger.’ And then the victorious Srosh the pious, and Adar the angel, took hold of my hand. Taking the first footstep with the good thought, and the second footstep with the good word, and the third footstep with the good deed, I came up to the Chinwad bridge, the very wide and strong and created by Ohrmazd.” Chinvat Bridge; holy shalt thou come into Heaven.”
Now read that last sentence beside the preparation. Three cups, keyed to good thought, good word, good deed. Three footsteps, taken with good thought, good word, good deed — and the third step lands him at the bridge. The ritual he was given in the fire temple is the same shape as the road he walks on the other side. The preparation did not merely qualify him for the journey. The preparation was the map. They built the crossing into him before he ever left the couch.
And catch what the angels say at the door: thou hast come when it is not thy time. They know. He is a living man standing where only the dead arrive, and he answers with his credential — I am a messenger. Sent, prepared, and expected back. That is the whole difference between a door walked through and a door fallen into. Set and setting matters.
— HADHŌKHT NASK 2 (YASHT 22) · DARMESTETER
🕯️ “It seems to him as if his own conscience were advancing to him in that wind, in the shape of a maiden fair, bright, white-armed, strong, tall-formed, high-standing, beautiful of body, noble, of a glorious seed, of the size of a maid in her fifteenth year, as fair as the fairest things in the world. And the soul of the faithful one addressed her, asking: ‘What maid art thou, who art the fairest maid I have ever seen?’ And she, being his own conscience, answers him: ‘O thou youth of good thoughts, good words, and good deeds, of good religion, I am thy own conscience!’”
She is not sent to him. She is not a reward kept in a storehouse and handed over at the gate. She is his own daena — his conscience, his religion, his vision, the word carries all three at once — and she has that face because he is the one who gave it to her, because his set and setting had been shaping her the whole time. ⟵8 Another telling puts it in her own mouth: I was lovely and thou madest me lovelier; I was fair and thou madest me fairer — through beautiful thought, through beautiful speech, through beautiful deed of thine.
So read her against the line this section opened with. As thou dost desire, O holy one, so shalt thou be. That is not a promise about the afterlife. It is a description of a mechanism, and the mechanism is set and setting. ⟵9 The preparation does not only qualify you for the crossing, and it does not only map the road. On the other side, your set and setting are standing there waiting for you, and they have a face, and the face is one you made. ⟵10 Every hour of the fast, every recitation held through the seven nights, every good word — all of it went somewhere. It went into her.
That is the most complete statement of set and setting anyone has ever written down. ⟵11 What you build before the door is what meets you after it. The fire temple, the vigil, the seven nights, the three cups — every one of them was set and setting, and every one of them walked across the bridge with him. ⟵12
The Same Machine, Half-Hidden
Now the sparse accounts of the altered state become legible, because you know what you are looking at.
Daniel gives you the clearest set and setting in Scripture, and it is not close. Before the great vision he mourned for three weeks; no rich food, no meat, no wine passed his lips, and he used no oil for the full twenty-one days. A deliberate, sustained preparation of his set and setting.
— Daniel 10:2–3 · KJV
✝︎ “In those days I Daniel was mourning three full weeks. I ate no pleasant bread, neither came flesh nor wine in my mouth, neither did I anoint myself at all, till three whole weeks were fulfilled.”
The setting is dated and placed to the line: the twenty-fourth day of the first month, standing on the bank of the great river. And the aftermath reads like a genuine altered state — his companions saw nothing but were seized with terror and fled, leaving him alone with no strength left, his face gone deathly pale, collapsed face-down and struck mute until he was touched. If one figure anchors they prepared for this like a ceremony, it is Daniel.
Ezekiel gives you the comedown. Among the exiles by the River Chebar the heavens open; the onset is marked each time by the same phrase — the hand of the LORD was upon him — functioning like a flag every time the altered state arrives. And after the first great vision he sits overwhelmed for seven days, a stupor that rhymes, across a thousand years and a different faith, with Viraf’s seven.
— Ezekiel 3:15 · KJV
✝︎ “Then I came to them of the captivity at Telabib, that dwelt by the river of Chebar, and I sat where they sat, and remained there astonished among them seven days.”
That is the integration beat: the return is part of the technology too, not an afterthought.
Enoch brings a second mechanism entirely. In the canon he is a single verse — walked with God, and was not. But in the older book that carries his name the model is not fasting, it is dream-incubation: he sits down by the waters, reads out the petition, and falls asleep — and only then does the ascent begin.
— 1 Enoch 13:7 · R.H. Charles, 1917
✝︎ “And I went off and sat down at the waters of Dan, in the land of Dan, to the south of the west of Hermon: I read their petition till I fell asleep.”
Sleep at the water’s edge as a deliberate induction. That this is recognisable incubation practice is my reading of the text, not a claim the text makes about itself.
And Isaiah — the smoke filling the temple, the coal pressed to the lips — is pure setting, the environment doing the whole job with no preparation on record. I will leave him mostly here; there is far more in that throne room than a blog post should spend.
The Glory Came Down. The Man Went Up.
Two of these men left us more than a preparation. They left us the report itself — what the state actually looks like from the inside. Set them side by side and something moves: the glory that comes down to one, and the man who is carried up to the other. The same crystal, the same wheels, the same fire, witnessed from opposite directions.
First, Ezekiel, at the river.
— Ezekiel 1 · KJV
✝︎ “And I looked, and, behold, a whirlwind came out of the north, a great cloud, and a fire infolding itself, and a brightness was about it, and out of the midst thereof as the colour of amber, out of the midst of the fire…”
“Also out of the midst thereof came the likeness of four living creatures… And every one had four faces, and every one had four wings…”
“Their appearance was like burning coals of fire, and like the appearance of lamps: it went up and down among the living creatures; and the fire was bright, and out of the fire went forth lightning. And the living creatures ran and returned as the appearance of a flash of lightning.”
“Their appearance and their work was as it were a wheel in the middle of a wheel… As for their rings, they were so high that they were dreadful; and their rings were full of eyes round about them four…”
“And above the firmament… was the likeness of a throne, as the appearance of a sapphire stone… This was the appearance of the likeness of the glory of the LORD. And when I saw it, I fell upon my face.”
Count the hedges. The likeness of. As the appearance of. As it were. Like unto the colour of. Ezekiel is not being vague — he is being scrupulously honest. That constant reaching, it was like this, no, more like that, is the exact signature of every serious trip report ever filed: a mind straining to map something that overflows the language it has. The wheels within wheels, the rings full of eyes, the darting lightning-creatures, the collapse at the end — this is not decoration. It is what the far side of the opened door looks like from the inside, written down by a man who had prepared his whole priestly life to bear it.
Now Enoch. Where Ezekiel stayed on the ground and the glory came down to him, Enoch is lifted off the earth entirely and carried up.
— 1 Enoch 14 · R.H. Charles, 1917
✝︎ “And the winds in the vision caused me to fly and lifted me upward, and bore me into heaven. And I went in till I drew nigh to a wall which is built of crystals and surrounded by tongues of fire: and it began to affright me. And I went into the tongues of fire and drew nigh to a large house which was built of crystals…”
“And lo! there was a second house, greater than the former… built of flames of fire… And I looked and saw therein a lofty throne: its appearance was as crystal, and the wheels thereof as the shining sun… And from underneath the throne came streams of flaming fire so that I could not look thereon.”
“And the Great Glory sat thereon, and His raiment shone more brightly than the sun and was whiter than any snow. None of the angels could enter and could behold His face by reason of the magnificence and glory and no flesh could behold Him…”
“And the Lord called me with His own mouth, and said to me: ‘Come hither, Enoch, and hear my word.’”
A living man ascends to the throne, looks on the face that no flesh could behold, and lives to write it down. And here is the part that should unsettle more than the fire and the crystal: this book was scripture to the people who wrote the New Testament. Jude quotes it by name — Enoch, the seventh from Adam, prophesied. An apostle cites him as a true prophet. And then the Church cut the book out.
That is the burial pattern in a single text. The vision was too hot, too strange, too first-person, so the institution kept the prophet’s name in a footnote and buried the report he actually filed. Ezekiel survived because he stayed inside the canon’s walls. Enoch flew higher — and was left outside them.
I will not edit this man of God out.
The Water’s Edge: A Set and Setting Pattern
Once you have the pattern, one detail starts repeating that I do not think is an accident. Ezekiel is by the Chebar canal. Daniel is on the bank of the Tigris. Enoch sits down by the waters. John receives the whole Apocalypse on an island. Four of the great visionary onsets in this tradition happen at the boundary between land and water.
And Daniel gives you a second kind of edge laid over the first. He is in a valley with the mountains climbing past it — grass giving way to rock, rock giving way to sky. A threshold stacked on a threshold: the water’s edge underfoot and the vertical seam overhead, land handing off to mountain handing off to heaven. The place where the vision lands is never neutral ground. It is always the seam.
I want to be careful about what I am and am not saying. I am not claiming a mechanism, and I am certainly not claiming anyone knew a reason. I am pointing at a setting pattern — the liminal edge, the threshold where solid ground gives way, chosen again and again as the place to stand when the door opens. Make of it what you will. But once you have seen it, you cannot un-see it, and no one seems to have named it out loud.
The Confound That Was the Cure
Put the two pictures side by side. The modern laboratory works hard to hold set and setting constant, so it can subtract them and see the drug alone — the container is the confound. The ancient temple worked hard to build set and setting as richly as it possibly could, because the container was the point.
Here is my reading of that gap — mine, not the scholarship. Both were doing something like science. One studied a molecule and treated the container as interference. The other studied a doorway and built everything else as the apparatus around it. And here is the part the tidied-up accounts hide: there very likely was a molecule, most of the time. It simply went unnamed — or was quietly edited out by the tradition that inherited the story and no longer wanted to admit how the door had been opened.
That does not weaken the preparation. It demands more of it. A chemical door thrown open in an unready mind is precisely the door that turns terrifying — and Muhammad in the cave is the evidence. The first encounter did not arrive as bliss. It arrived as something so crushing he thought he might die, and he came down shaking, needing Khadija and the cloak and Waraqa to hold and interpret it before it could be borne. The molecule, if it was there, was never the technology. The holding was.
That is also what actually went missing later. When the doors were closed, the first thing lost was never the plant. It was the container — the selection, the vigil, the people who stay in the room. Strip those and you do not get a safer door. You get an unheld one, and a hard passage through it.
The Preparation That Is the Whole Path
Now come back to the mountains.
That centre in the Allgäu, with its dials — I can tell you what those dials actually are, because you have seen the machine now. The secluded room with the altar is the fire temple built around Viraf. The silence, the withdrawal from company, the days that ask nothing of you but attention — that is the three weeks built around Daniel, the water’s edge chosen on purpose, the smoke that changes the air of the room. Every one of those choices is a hand on set and setting. You do it yourself — by choosing the seclusion, the silence, the altar, the mountain quiet — building the container deliberately, until the sitting itself becomes conducive to the state you are after.
This is why the preliminaries matter more than they look. In the Vajrayana I train in, you do not walk in and receive the pointing-out of the nature of mind on your first day. First come the preliminaries — the ngöndro: long, repetitive, deliberately unglamorous foundational practices whose whole function is to prepare the practitioner. It is set with no plant anywhere near it — the mind made ready over months and years, so that when the door is finally opened, someone is standing there prepared to walk through it, and to come back.
I used to think the preliminaries were the boring part before the real thing. I had it exactly backwards. The preparation is not the price of admission to the technology. The preparation is the technology.
— QP
And when the door opens for the one who prepared — when they walk through, and come back? Enlightened? That is the one word I will not assert for you. You have to go and see.
Empty first. Then prepare. Then look.
QP
Sound is Emptiness — Emptiness is Sound
Further Reading:
1. Empty First — fasting as a complete technology with no molecule in it. →
2. The Recipe You’d Die For — Dioscorides, and wine as the vehicle of the ancient world. →
3. Pharmakon — process over plant. →
4. The Purity Law — the first drug law, and legislating what may be in a cup. →
5. To Die Before You Die — rehearsal for death. →
6. Divine Madness — ego-death as metamorphosis rather than annihilation. →
7. Set and Setting — the container, and the prophets who engineered it. →
8. The Mithras Liturgy — the one manual that survived, and is useless. →
9. The Villa Vesuvio Apotheke — the evidence sitting unscraped on a shelf. →
10. They Lost the Ingredients — soma, and the only tradition that filed the paperwork. →
11. The Two That Survived — iboga and ayahuasca, and why. →
12. The Mechanism — the neuroscience, and where the instruments stop. →
Outbound:
“Arda Viraf” → — “The Machine Shown Whole”.
“Yasna 71” → https://www.zarathushtra.com/z/gatha/az/gathtml.htm — under the Yasna box.
“Daniel’s account” → — under the Daniel box.
🔗 “Ezekiel’s first vision” → https://www.kingjamesbibleonline.org/Ezekiel-Chapter-1/ — under the merkabah box.
🔗 “Ezekiel 1 (Bible Society KJV)” → https://www.biblesociety.org.uk/explore-the-bible/read/eng/kjv/Ezek/1/ — alternate.
🔗 “the book that carries his name” → https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Book_of_Enoch_(Charles)/Chapter_13 — under the Enoch 13:7 box.
🔗 “the ascent” → https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Book_of_Enoch_(Charles)/Chapter_14 — under the Enoch 14 box.
🔗 “1 Enoch 14 (sacred-texts)” → https://sacred-texts.com/bib/boe/boe017.htm — alternate.
“the preliminaries” → — “The Preparation That Is the Whole Path”.
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