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Psychedelics and Religious Experience
by Alan Watts

The experiences resulting from the use of psychedelic drugs are often described in religious terms. They are therefore of interest to those like myself who, in the tradition of William James,1 are concerned with the psychology of religion. For more than thirty years I have been studying the causes, the consequences, and the conditions of those peculiar states of consciousness in which the individual discovers himself to be one continuous process with God, with the Universe, with the Ground of Being, or whatever name he may use by cultural conditioning or personal preference for the ultimate and eternal reality. We have no satisfactory and definitive name for experiences of this kind. The terms "religious experience," "mystical experience," and "cosmic consciousness" are all too vague and comprehensive to denote that specific mode of consciousness which, to those who have known it, is as real and overwhelming as falling in love. This article describes such states of consciousness induced by psychedelic drugs, although they are virtually indistinguishable from genuine mystical experience. The article then discusses objections to the use of psychedelic drugs that arise mainly from the opposition between mystical values and the traditional religious and secular values of Western society.

The Psychedelic Experience
The idea of mystical experiences resulting from drug use is not readily accepted in Western societies. Western culture has, historically, a particular fascination with the value and virtue of man as an individual, self-determining, responsible ego, controlling himself and his world by the power of conscious effort and will. Nothing, then, could be more repugnant to this cultural tradition than the notion of spiritual or psychological growth through the use of drugs. A "drugged" person is by definition dimmed in consciousness, fogged in judgment, and deprived of will. But not all psychotropic (consciousness-changing) chemicals are narcotic and soporific, as are alcohol, opiates, and barbiturates. The effects of what are now called psychedelic (mind-manifesting) chemicals differ from those of alcohol as laughter differs from rage, or delight from depression. There is really no analogy between being "high" on LSD and "drunk" on bourbon. True, no one in either state should drive a car, but neither should one drive while reading a book, playing a violin, or making love. Certain creative activities and states of mind demand a concentration and devotion that are simply incompatible with piloting a death-dealing engine along a highway.

I myself have experimented with five of the principal psychedelics: LSD-25, mescaline, psilocybin, dimethyl-tryptamine (DMT), and cannabis. I have done so, as William James tried nitrous oxide, to see if they could help me in identifying what might be called the "essential" or "active" ingredients of the mystical experience. For almost all the classical literature on mysticism is vague, not only in describing the experience, but also in showing rational connections between the experience itself and the various traditional methods recommended to induce it: fasting, concentration, breathing exercises, prayers, incantations, and dances. A traditional master of Zen or Yoga, when asked why such-and-such practices lead or predispose one to the mystical experience, always responds, "This is the way my teacher gave it to me. This is the way I found out. If you're seriously interested, try it for yourself." This answer hardly satisfies an impertinent, scientifically minded, and intellectually curious Westerner. It reminds him of archaic medical prescriptions compounding five salamanders, powdered gallows rope, three boiled bats, a scruple of phosphorus, three pinches of henbane, and a dollop of dragon dung dropped when the moon was in Pisces. Maybe it worked, but what was the essential ingredient?

It struck me, therefore, that if any of the psychedelic chemicals would in fact predispose my consciousness to the mystical experience, I could use them as instruments for studying and describing that experience as one uses a microscope for bacteriology, even though the microscope is an "artificial" and "unnatural" contrivance which might be said to "distort" the vision of the naked eye. However, when I was first invited to test the mystical qualities of LSD-25 by Dr. Keith Ditman of the Neuropsychiatric Clinic at UCLA Medical School, I was unwilling to believe that any mere chemical could induce a genuine mystical experience. At most, it might bring about a state of spiritual insight analogous to swimming with water wings. Indeed, my first experiment with LSD-25 was not mystical. It was an intensely interesting aesthetic and intellectual experience that challenged my powers of analysis and careful description to the utmost.

Some months later, in 1959, I tried LSD-25 again with Drs. Sterling Bunnell and Michael Agron, who were then associated with the Langley-Porter Clinic, in San Francisco. In the course of two experiments I was amazed and somewhat embarrassed to find myself going through states of consciousness that corresponded precisely with every description of major mystical experiences that I had ever read.2 Furthermore, they exceeded both in depth and in a peculiar quality of unexpectedness the three "natural and spontaneous" experiences of this kind that had happened to me in previous years.

Through subsequent experimentation with LSD-25 and the other chemicals named above (with the exception of DMT, which I find amusing but relatively uninteresting), I found I could move with ease into the state of "cosmic consciousness," and in due course became less and less dependent on the chemicals themselves for "tuning in" to this particular wave length of experience. Of the five psychedelics tried, I found that LSD-25 and cannabis suited my purposes best. Of these two, the latter-cannabis-which I had to use abroad in countries where it is not outlawed, proved to be the better. It does not induce bizarre alterations of sensory perception, and medical studies indicate that it may not, save in great excess, have the dangerous side effects of LSD.

For the purposes of this study, in describing my experiences with psychedelic drugs I avoid the occasional and incidental bizarre alterations of sense perception that psychedelic chemicals may induce. I am concerned, rather, with the fundamental alterations of the normal, socially induced consciousness of one's own existence and relation to the external world. I am trying to delineate the basic principles of psychedelic awareness. But I must add that I can speak only for myself. The quality of these experiences depends considerably upon one's prior orientation and attitude to life, although the now voluminous descriptive literature of these experiences accords quite remarkably with my own.

Almost invariably, my experiments with psychedelics have had four dominant characteristics. I shall try to explain them-in the expectation that the reader will say, at least of the second and third, "Why, that's obvious! No one needs a drug to see that." Quite so, but every insight has degrees of intensity. There can be obvious-1 and obvious-2, and the latter comes on with shattering clarity, manifesting its implications in every sphere and dimension of our existence.

The first characteristic is a slowing down of time, a concentration in the present. One's normally compulsive concern for the future decreases, and one becomes aware of the enormous importance and interest of what is happening at the moment. Other people, going about their business on the streets, seem to be slightly crazy, failing to realize that the whole point of life is to be fully aware of it as it happens. One therefore relaxes, almost luxuriously, into studying the colors in a glass of water, or in listening to the now highly articulate vibration of every note played on an oboe or sung by a voice.

From the pragmatic standpoint of our culture, such an attitude is very bad for business. It might lead to improvidence, lack of foresight, diminished sales of insurance policies, and abandoned savings accounts. Yet this is just the corrective that our culture needs. No one is more fatuously impractical than the "successful" executive who spends his whole life absorbed in frantic paper work with the objective of retiring in comfort at sixty-five, when it will all be too late. Only those who have cultivated the art of living completely in the present have any use for making plans for the future, for when the plans mature they will be able to enjoy the results. "Tomorrow never comes." I have never yet heard a preacher urging his congregation to practice that section of the Sermon on the Mount which begins, "Be not anxious for the morrow...." The truth is that people who live for the future are, as we say of the insane, "not quite all there"-or here: by over-eagerness they are perpetually missing the point. Foresight is bought at the price of anxiety, and when overused it destroys all its own advantages.

The second characteristic I will call awareness of polarity. This is the vivid realization that states, things, and events that we ordinarily call opposite are interdependent, like back and front, or the poles of a magnet. By polar awareness one sees that things which are explicitly different are implicitly one: self and other, subject and object, left and right, male and female-and then, a little more surprisingly, solid and space, figure and background, pulse and interval, saints and sinners, police and criminals, in-groups and out-groups. Each is definable only in terms of the other, and they go together transactionally, like buying and selling, for there is no sale without a purchase, and no purchase without a sale. As this awareness becomes increasingly intense, you feel that you yourself are polarized with the external universe in such a way that you imply each other. Your push is its pull, and its push is your pull-as when you move the steering wheel of a car. Are you pushing it or pulling it?

At first, this is a very odd sensation, not unlike hearing your own voice played back to you on an electronic system immediately after you have spoken. You become confused, and wait for it to go on! Similarly, you feel that you are something being done by the universe, yet that the universe is equally something being done by you-which is true, at least in the neurological sense that the peculiar structure of our brains translates the sun into light, and air vibrations into sound. Our normal sensation of relationship to the outside world is that sometimes I push it, and sometimes it pushes me. But if the two are actually one, where does action begin and responsibility rest? If the universe is doing me, how can I be sure that, two seconds hence, I will still remember the English language? If I am doing it, how can I be sure that, two seconds hence, my brain will know how to turn the sun into light? From such unfamiliar sensations as these, the psychedelic experience can generate confusion, paranoia, and terror-even though the individual is feeling his relationship to the world exactly as it would be described by a biologist, ecologist, or physicist, for he is feeling himself as the unified field of organism and environment.

The third characteristic, arising from the second, is awareness of relativity. I see that I am a link in an infinite hierarchy of processes and beings, ranging from molecules through bacteria and insects to human beings, and, maybe, to angels and gods-a hierarchy in which every level is in effect the same situation. For example, the poor man worries about money while the rich man worries about his health: the worry is the same, but the difference is in its substance or dimension. I realize that fruit flies must think of themselves as people, because, like ourselves, they find themselves in the middle of their own world-with immeasurably greater things above and smaller things below. To us, they all look alike and seem to have no personality-as do the Chinese when we have not lived among them. Yet fruit flies must see just as many subtle distinctions among themselves as we among ourselves.

From this it is but a short step to the realization that all forms of life and being are simply variations on a single theme: we are all in fact one being doing the same thing in as many different ways as possible. As the French proverb goes, plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose (the more it varies, the more it is one). I see, further, that feeling threatened by the inevitability of death is really the same experience as feeling alive, and that as all beings are feeling this everywhere, they are all just as much "I" as myself. Yet the "I" feeling, to be felt at all, must always be a sensation relative to the "other"-to something beyond its control and experience. To be at all, it must begin and end. But the intellectual jump that mystical and psychedelic experiences make here is in enabling you to see that all these myriad I-centers are yourself-not, indeed, your personal and superficially conscious ego, but what Hindus call the paramatman, the Self of all selves.3 As the retina enables us to see countless pulses of energy as a single light, so the mystical experience shows us innumerable individuals as a single Self.

The fourth characteristic is awareness of eternal energy, often in the form of intense white light, which seems to be both the current in your nerves and that mysterious e which equals mc2. This may sound like megalomania or delusion of grandeur-but one sees quite clearly that all existence is a single energy, and that this energy is one's own being. Of course there is death as well as life, because energy is a pulsation, and just as waves must have both crests and troughs, the experience of existing must go on and off. Basically, therefore, there is simply nothing to worry about, because you yourself are the eternal energy of the universe playing hide-and-seek (off-and-on) with itself. At root, you are the Godhead, for God is all that there is. Quoting Isaiah just a little out of context: "I am the Lord, and there is none else. I form the light and create the darkness: I make peace, and create evil. I, the Lord, do all these things."4 This is the sense of the fundamental tenet of Hinduism, Tat tram asi-"THAT (i.e., "that subtle Being of which this whole universe is composed") art thou."5 A classical case of this experience, from the West, is in Tennyson's Memoirs:

A kind of waking trance I have frequently had, quite up from boyhood, when I have been all alone. This has generally come upon me thro' repeating my own name two or three times to myself silently, till all at once, as it were out of the intensity of the consciousness of individuality, the individuality itself seemed to dissolve and fade away into boundless being, and this not a confused state, but the clearest of the clearest, the surest of the surest, the weirdest of the weirdest, utterly beyond words, where death was an almost laughable impossibility, the loss of personality (if so it were) seeming no extinction but the only true life.6
Obviously, these characteristics of the psychedelic experience, as I have known it, are aspects of a single state of consciousness-for I have been describing the same thing from different angles. The descriptions attempt to convey the reality of the experience, but in doing so they also suggest some of the inconsistencies between such experience and the current values of society.

Opposition to Psychedelic Drugs
Resistance to allowing use of psychedelic drugs originates in both religious and secular values. The difficulty in describing psychedelic experiences in traditional religious terms suggests one ground of opposition. The Westerner must borrow such words as samadhi or moksha from the Hindus, or satori or kensho from the Japanese, to describe the experience of oneness with the universe. We have no appropriate word because our own Jewish and Christian theologies will not accept the idea that man's inmost self can be identical with the Godhead, even though Christians may insist that this was true in the unique instance of Jesus Christ. Jews and Christians think of God in political and monarchical terms, as the supreme governor of the universe, the ultimate boss. Obviously, it is both socially unacceptable and logically preposterous for a particular individual to claim that he, in person, is the omnipotent and omniscient ruler of the world-to be accorded suitable recognition and honor.

Such an imperial and kingly concept of the ultimate reality, however, is neither necessary nor universal. The Hindus and the Chinese have no difficulty in conceiving of an identity of the self and the Godhead. For most Asians, other than Muslims, the Godhead moves and manifests the world in much the same way that a centipede manipulates a hundred legs-spontaneously, without deliberation or calculation. In other words, they conceive the universe by analogy with an organism as distinct from a mechanism. They do not see it as an artifact or construct under the conscious direction of some supreme technician, engineer, or architect.
If, however, in the context of Christian or Jewish tradition, an individual declares himself to be one with God, he must be dubbed blasphemous (subversive) or insane. Such a mystical experience is a clear threat to traditional religious concepts. The Judaeo-Christian tradition has a monarchical image of God, and monarchs, who rule by force, fear nothing more than insubordination. The Church has therefore always been highly suspicious of mystics, because they seem to be insubordinate and to claim equality or, worse, identity with God. For this reason, John Scotus Erigena and Meister Eckhart were condemned as heretics. This was also why the Quakers faced opposition for their doctrine of the Inward Light, and for their refusal to remove hats in church and in court. A few occasional mystics may be all right so long as they watch their language, like St. Teresa of Avila and St. John of the Cross, who maintained, shall we say, a metaphysical distance of respect between themselves and their heavenly King. Nothing, however, could be more alarming to the ecclesiastical hierarchy than a popular outbreak of mysticism, for this might well amount to setting up a democracy in the kingdom of heaven-and such alarm would be shared equally by Catholics, Jews, and fundamentalist Protestants.

The monarchical image of God, with its implicit distaste for religious insubordination, has a more pervasive impact than many Christians might admit. The thrones of kings have walls immediately behind them, and all who present themselves at court must prostrate themselves or kneel, because this is an awkward position from which to make a sudden attack. It has perhaps never occurred to Christians that when they design a church on the model of a royal court (basilica) and prescribe church ritual, they are implying that God, like a human monarch, is afraid. This is also implied by flattery in prayers:

O Lord our heavenly Father, high and mighty, King of kings, Lord of lords, the only Ruler of princes, who dost from thy throne behold all the dwellers upon earth: most heartily we beseech thee with thy favor to behold....7

The Western man who claims consciousness of oneness with God or the universe thus clashes with his society's concept of religion. In most Asian cultures, however, such a man will be congratulated as having penetrated the true secret of life. He has arrived, by chance or by some such discipline as Yoga or Zen meditation, at a state of consciousness in which he experiences directly and vividly what our own scientists know to be true in theory. For the ecologist, the biologist, and the physicist know (but seldom feel) that every organism constitutes a single field of behavior, or process, with its environment. There is no way of separating what any given organism is doing from what its environment is doing, for which reason ecologists speak not of organisms in environments but of organism-environments. Thus the words "I" and "self" should properly mean what the whole universe is doing at this particular "here-and-now" called John Doe.

The kingly concept of God makes identity of self and God, or self and universe, inconceivable in Western religious terms. The difference between Eastern and Western concepts of man and his universe, however, extends beyond strictly religious concepts. The Western scientist may rationally perceive the idea of organism-environment, but he does not ordinarily feel this to be true. By cultural and social conditioning, he has been hypnotized into experiencing himself as an ego-as an isolated center of consciousness and will inside a bag of skin, confronting an external and alien world. We say, "I came into this world." But we did nothing of the kind. We came out of it in just the same way that fruit comes out of trees. Our galaxy, our cosmos, "peoples" in the same way that an apple tree "apples."

Such a vision of the universe clashes with the idea of a monarchical God, with the concept of the separate ego, and even with the secular, atheist/agnostic mentality, which derives its common sense from the mythology of nineteenth-century scientist. According to this view, the universe is a mindless mechanism and man a sort of accidental microorganism infesting a minute globular rock that revolves about an unimportant star on the outer fringe of one of the minor galaxies. This "put-down" theory of man is extremely common among such quasi scientists as sociologists, psychologists, and psychiatrists, most of whom are still thinking of the world in terms of Newtonian mechanics, and have never really caught up with the ideas of Einstein and Bohr, Oppenheimer and Schrodinger. Thus to the ordinary institutional-type psychiatrist, any patient who gives the least hint of mystical or religious experience is automatically diagnosed as deranged. From the standpoint of the mechanistic religion, he is a heretic and is given electroshock therapy as an up-to-date form of thumbscrew and rack. And, incidentally, it is just this kind of quasi scientist who, as consultant to government and law-enforcement agencies, dictates official policies on the use of psychedelic chemicals.

Inability to accept the mystic experience is more than an intellectual handicap. Lack of awareness of the basic unity of organism and environment is a serious and dangerous hallucination. For in a civilization equipped with immense technological power, the sense of alienation between man and nature leads to the use of technology in a hostile spirit-to the "conquest" of nature instead of intelligent co-operation with nature. The result is that we are eroding and destroying our environment, spreading Los Angelization instead of civilization. This is the major threat overhanging Western, technological culture, and no amount of reasoning or doom-preaching seems to help. We simply do not respond to the prophetic and moralizing techniques of conversion upon which Jews and Christians have always relied. But people have an obscure sense of what is good for them-call it "unconscious self-healing," "survival instinct," "positive growth potential," or what you will. Among the educated young there is therefore a startling and unprecedented interest in the transformation of human consciousness. All over the Western world publishers are selling millions of books dealing with Yoga, Vedanta, Zen Buddhism, and the chemical mysticism of psychedelic drugs, and I have come to believe that the whole "hip" subculture, however misguided in some of its manifestations, is the earnest and responsible effort of young people to correct the self-destroying course of industrial civilization.

The content of the mystical experience is thus inconsistent with both the religious and secular concepts of traditional Western thought. Moreover, mystical experiences often result in attitudes that threaten the authority not only of established churches, but also of secular society. Unafraid of death and deficient in worldly ambition, those who have undergone mystical experiences are impervious to threats and promises. Moreover, their sense of the relativity of good and evil arouses the suspicion that they lack both conscience and respect for law. Use of psychedelics in the United States by a literate bourgeoisie means that an important segment of the population is indifferent to society's traditional rewards and sanctions.

In theory, the existence within our secular society of a group that does not accept conventional values is consistent with our political vision. But one of the great problems of the United States, legally and politically, is that we have never quite had the courage of our convictions. The Republic is founded on the marvelously sane principle that a human community can exist and prosper only on a basis of mutual trust. Metaphysically, the American Revolution was a rejection of the dogma of Original Sin, which is the notion that because you cannot trust yourself or other people, there must be some Superior Authority to keep us all in order. The dogma was rejected because, if it is true that we cannot trust ourselves and others, it follows that we cannot trust the Superior Authority which we ourselves conceive and obey, and that the very idea of our own untrustworthiness is unreliable!

Citizens of the United States believe, or are supposed to believe, that a republic is the best form of government. Yet vast confusion arises from trying to be republican in politics and monarchist in religion. How can a republic be the best form of government if the universe, heaven, and hell are a monarchy?8 Thus, despite the theory of government by consent, based upon mutual trust, the peoples of the United States retain, from the authoritarian backgrounds of their religions or national origins, an utterly naive faith in law as some sort of supernatural and paternalistic power. "There ought to be a law against it!" Our law-enforcement officers are therefore confused, hindered, and bewildered-not to mention corrupted-by being asked to enforce sumptuary laws, often of ecclesiastical origin, that vast numbers of people have no intention of obeying and that, in any case, are immensely difficult or simply impossible to enforce-for example, the barring of anything so undetectable as LSD-25 from international and interstate commerce.

Finally, there are two specific objections to use of psychedelic drugs. First, use of these drugs may be dangerous. However, every worth-while exploration is dangerous-climbing mountains, testing aircraft, rocketing into outer space, skin diving, or collecting botanical specimens in jungles. But if you value knowledge and the actual delight of exploration more than mere duration of uneventful life, you are willing to take the risks. It is not really healthy for monks to practice fasting, and it was hardly hygienic for Jesus to get himself crucified, but these are risks taken in the course of spiritual adventures. Today the adventurous young are taking risks in exploring the psyche, testing their mettle at the task just as, in times past, they have tested it-more violently-in hunting, dueling, hot-rod racing, and playing football. What they need is not prohibitions and policemen, but the most intelligent encouragement and advice that can be found.

Second, drug use may be criticized as an escape from reality. However, this criticism assumes unjustly that the mystical experiences themselves are escapist or unreal. LSD, in particular, is by no means a soft and cushy escape from reality. It can very easily be an experience in which you have to test your soul against all the devils in hell. For me, it has been at times an experience in which I was at once completely lost in the corridors of the mind and yet relating that very lostness to the exact order of logic and language, simultaneously very mad and very sane. But beyond these occasional lost and insane episodes, there are the experiences of the world as a system of total harmony and glory, and the discipline of relating these to the order of logic and language must somehow explain how what William Blake called that "energy which is eternal delight" can consist with the misery and suffering of everyday life.9
The undoubted mystical and religious intent of most users of the psychedelics, even if some of these substances should be proved injurious to physical health, requires that their free and responsible use be exempt from legal restraint in any republic that maintains a constitutional separation of church and state.10 To the extent that mystical experience conforms with the tradition of genuine religious involvement, and to the extent that psychedelics induce that experience, users are entitled to some constitutional protection. Also, to the extent that research in the psychology of religion can utilize such drugs, students of the human mind must be free to use them. Under present laws, I, as an experienced student of the psychology of religion, can no longer pursue research in the field. This is a barbarous restriction of spiritual and intellectual freedom, suggesting that the legal system of the United States is, after all, in tacit alliance with the monarchical theory of the universe, and will, therefore, prohibit and persecute religious ideas and practices based on an organic and unitary vision of the universe.11

Footnotes

See W. James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902).
An excellent anthology of such experiences is R. Johnson Watcher on the Hills (1959)
Thus Hinduism regards the universe not as an artifact, but as an immense drama in which the One Actor (the paramatman or brakman) plays all the parts, which are his (or "its") masks or personae. The sensation of being only this one particular self, John Doe, is due to the Actor's total absorption in playing this and every other part. For fuller exposition, see S. Radhakrishnan, The Hindu View of Life (1927); H. Zimmer, Philosophies of India (1951), pp. 355-463. A popular version is in A. Watts, The Book-On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are (1966).
Isaiah 45: 6, 7.
Chandogya Upanishad 6.15.3.
Alfred Lord Tennyson, A Memoir by His Son (1898), 320.
A Prayer for the King's Majesty, Order for Morning Prayer, Book of Common Prayer (Church of England, 1904).
Thus, until quite recently, belief in a Supreme Being was a legal test of valid conscientious objection to military service. The implication was that the individual objector found himself bound to obey a higher echelon of command than the President and Congress. The analogy is military and monarchical, and therefore objectors who, as Buddhists or naturalists, held an organic theory of the universe often had difficulty in obtaining recognition.
This is discussed at length in A. Watts, The Joyous Cosmology: Adventures in the Chemistry of Consciousness (1962).
"Responsible" in the sense that such substances be taken by or administered to consenting adults only. The user of cannabis, in particular, is apt to have peculiar difficulties in establishing his "undoubted mystical and religious intent" in court. Having committed so loathsome and serious a felony, his chances of clemency are better if he assumes a repentant demeanor, which is quite inconsistent with the sincere belief that his use of cannabis was religious. On the other hand, if he insists unrepentantly that he looks upon such use as a religious sacrament, many judges will declare that they "dislike his attitude," finding it truculent and lacking in appreciation of the gravity of the crime, and the sentence will be that much harsher. The accused is therefore put in a "double-bind" situation, in which he is "damned if he does, and damned if he doesn't." Furthermore, religious integrity-as in conscientious objection-is generally tested and established by membership in some church or religious organization with a substantial following. But the felonious status of cannabis is such that grave suspicion would be cast upon all individuals forming such an organization, and the test cannot therefore be fulfilled. It is generally forgotten that our guarantees of religious freedom were designed to protect precisely those who were not members of established denominations, but rather such (then) screwball and subversive individuals as Quakers, Shakers, Levellers, and Anabaptists. There is little question that those who use cannabis or other psychedelics with religious intent are now members of a persecuted religion which appears to the rest of society as a grave menace to "mental health," as distinct from the old-fashioned "immortal soul." But it's the same old story.
Amerindians belonging to the Native American Church who employ the psychedelic peyote cactus in their rituals, are firmly opposed to any government control of this plant, even if they should be guaranteed the right to its use. They feel that peyote is a natural gift of God to mankind, and especially to natives of the land where it grows, and that no government has a right to interfere with its use The same argument might be made on behalf of cannabis, or the mushroom Psilocybe mexicana Heim. All these things are natural plants, not processed or synthesized drugs, and by what authority can individuals be prevented from eating theme There is no law against eating or growing the mushroom Amanita pantherina, even though it is fatally poisonous and only experts can distinguish it from a common edible mushroom. This case can be made even from the standpoint of believers in the monarchical universe of Judaism and Christianity, for it is a basic principle of both religions, derived from Genesis, that all natural substances created by God are inherently good, and that evil can arise only in their misuse. Thus laws against mere possession, or even cultivation, of these plants are in basic conflict with biblical principles. Criminal conviction of those who employ these plants should be based on proven misuse. "And God said 'Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed- to you it shall be for meat.... And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good."

@Theaetetus,

One important question: even if psychedelics can have honest spiritual use, which is probably the case, is it better to enter on the path with psychedelics or without? Both seem possible, but which is healthier?

Can the psychonaut, someone seeking spiritual knwoledge through the use of psychedelics, reach enlightenment with psychedelics, or does the psychonaut, at some point, need to adopt a drug free practice for said end?

As I see it, the only legitimate spiritual use of psychedelics is to show a doubtful individual that there is more to reality than what is commonly perceived. Past this 'opening up' purpose, I'm not sure the practitioner should rely on psychedelics for spiritual awakening.

That enlightenment can be purchased for five bucks a hit is... well, dangerous. I don't recall the 60's and 70's, but I've read enough to know that the connection between psychedelic use and spiritual practice is at least more complex.

Great article: thanks!

@Theaetetus,

Alan Watts, thankfully, was one of the few people that experienced psychedelic drugs, wrote about them, but did not glamorize them for what they are not. They are a tool that can potentially waken the mind to its spiritual connection to the greater world when used properly. But as Watts warned it is a mistake to take a symbol for the real thing. The drug may alter consciousness, but it is up to the user to get any higher meaning out of the experience. Many indigenous Americans used psychedelics for spiritual practices, but that does not mean that they automatically open the user to the potential benefits. They are a tool much like meditation, but may offer some short cuts to experiences not open to everyday waking life. Its not that enlightenment could or can be purchased for $5 a hit, but instead can help open the mind to what it is capable if the user is willing. Its not that I condone use of these drugs for everyone, but for the responsible it may open them up to experiences only possible to those that have gone through rigorous spiritual training (i.e. extreme meditative practices).

The funny thing is that I have experimented with LSD, mushrooms, and mescaline in my late teen early 20s. My experiences confirm experiences that others I have talked to have experienced after years of rigorous meditation.

@Theaetetus,

I've been through the thing as well, my dear fellow psychonaut. But I still worry: is it better to pursue the spiritual path with or without the use of psychedelics? My intuition says without, but I wonder. Nothing against the Native Americans who use peyote and mescaline: from what I can tell, their practices are highly ritualized. They are, obviously, not just getting high. Much respect to those practices.

I very much enjoyed the article: and you're right in your praise of Watts. Though, I think the same is true of Aldous Huxley and Hunter Thompson. Well, maybe not so much Huxley, but he was close, not to mention the fact that his prose is excellent.

@Theaetetus,

I agree with you on both Huxley and Thompson. It has been a while since I have read it, but the Doors of Perception by Huxley was an awesome read. It was over my head at the time I read it, but I would like to revisit it again now that I have become a far better reader.

As to your question, I would say that it would be better to pursue the spiritual path without psychedelics. While they can open up the mind to what it was missing, it cannot replace authentic experience. Not that psychedelic experience is necessarily artificial, but it is much like reading Sparknotes rather than reading the actual book. It is a quick way to get familiar with the experience, but it comes without the rewarding struggle. Watts may have summed up psychedelics best in the 2nd edition of his book The Joyous Cosmology, "When you get the message, hang up the phone."

@Theaetetus,

I like that: psychedelics are the sparnotes for spiritual practice.

I first read Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell when I was, oh, maybe 14. Over my head. At 17 or 18 I revisited the book and fell in love. Since then I've reread the volume once every year. For some reason it just ends up close at hand.

George Carlin said something similar about LSD to what Watts said about psychedelics in general. I'm paraphrasing, but "once you've taken acid a few times you reach an understanding with the drug. Got what I needed, many thanks, now I'm done with it." Something to that affect.

As for Thompson, I'm very glad you agree with me. So many people read Las Vegas and think Thompson is glamorizing the excessive consumption of drugs, particularly psychedelics. I've even met people who claim that the "Gonzo" lifestyle is how they strive to live. Makes me wonder what they were on when they read his work in the first place; maybe they were a little too Gonzo to begin with.

@Didymos Thomas,

Didymos Thomas;45039 wrote:

I've been through the thing as well, my dear fellow psychonaut. But I still worry: is it better to pursue the spiritual path with or without the use of psychedelics? My intuition says without, but I wonder.

I was one of those hippie types who gleefully joined in with the psychedelic experimentation of the late 60s and early 70s. Well before I read Castaneda I somehow knew to treat the peyote experience with reverence. After over 200 journeys I started saying to myself, "Okay, this time you are going to remember EXACTLY what you are experiencing, and keep it for yourself from now on." Yet, no matter what I tried, somehow I lost the expanded, open, internally-silent experience the drug gave me.

My next step was to wonder if consciousness really was capable of achieving that experience naturally. Nothing in mainstream American culture addresses that, but as it turned out, there actually is a long history of people who sought the same natural way to the experience as I dreamed of, and who devoted their lives to achieving it.

In the East the experience is attained through through a practice that results in what's called samadhi; the result of the same practice in the West is called union.

A lot of people have heard of the Eastern term, but relatively few Americans know of the Western version. I myself was so surprised to find such a rich tradition that I changed my university major back in the '70s from biology to religious studies (specializing in Western Mysticism).

I highly recommend exploring (if you haven't already) the writings of the Desert Fathers, the writings of the early monks found in the Greek Philokalia, the writings of the discalced Carmelites (John of the Cross, Teresa of Avila, etc.), and a great many others who participated in this little-known Christian pursuit of a devoted few from shortly after Jesus well into the 18th century (I am only emphasizing Christians because your title here seems to suggest you trust Christian sources most; and of course, the gospel of Thomas offers the most mystical portrait of Jesus).

Now, you might wonder if my trust in this tradition is blind, or if I have tried it myself. I am able to report that as of last December it has been 35 years of daily practice of union for me, and therefore I can confidently say that it is not only possible to naturally achieve the experience peyote (mushrooms, etc.) give, but it is possible for one to realize something even better.

@LWSleeth,

Perhaps another dive into the professional Experimentation again.........With a mass of subjects. I volunteer.lol.

YouTube - Famous Timothy Leary Interview (1/2)

Some THC and reading Allen Ginsberg, you cant help but want to take a trip.

@Joe,

LWSleeth, thank you for such personal information. I have not studied, nor even read the mystics you mention: I've only sampled some of John of the Cross' material and managed to read some modern works which discuss these mystics. Brilliant stuff. I think many people are surprised when they learn that the west has an ages old mystic tradition. In fact, I've been in discussion with another forum member in the Philosophy of Religion section: one of his arguments was that this mystic tradition was new, having come into being in response to scientific advances. That the west has a rich mystic tradition was, I think, a bit of a shock to my friend; I'm not sure he even believes me.

Joe: Reading Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and you might think you are tripping. I've never been a Tim Leary fan; I mean, I respect what he was trying to do, but he was who I had in mind when I spoke of 'buying enlightenment for five bucks a hit'; of course, that line is borrowed from Thompson...

Remember, though: marijuana is a psychedelic drug. A massively mild form of LSD. Now, if you gentlemen will excuse me, I have a massively mild trip to attend to.

@Theaetetus,

Hi all - months since this post was active, but can't help making a comment or two.

I was also a teen in the sixties, and did partake of these substances. My view is that the insight you reach in these states is real but not sustainable. I got to the point where I realised that the perfection I saw in these states had to be real, i.e. there had to be a way to realise this perfection which seemed to abundantly obvious in this state, in real life. Subsequently learned and practise sitting meditation. Although I have to say, a lot of the time it is a real struggle. But there is no going back - drugs have too many downsides. So I have gone straight.

But sometimes I realise that I have seen something that hardly anyone else has seen. I don't really know how I know this, but it is certain. I think some of the Tibetan Buddhist teachers were hip to this possibility. They seemed to hint that through hallucinogens you could at least realise the 'unreality of normality', the fact that worldly people live in a kind of shared hallucination.

As for Alan Watts, I love his writings, but was dissappointed to learn that after all the brilliant ideas and insights he had, he still found it necessary to drink pretty hard and may indeed have died as a result. Mind you I am having a hard time being a teetotaler so the pot better not call the kettle black. Besides, I'll stick up for Watt's writings any day, Way of Zen and Supreme Identity are first rate books.

All of that said, I think - I am convinced - there is a legitimate place for hallucinogens in the realm of inner exploration. (There are only three that count - mescaline, psyclocibine and LSD.) You will see things through these that you won't any other way. You won't be able to stay there, or bring back souvenirs - except for maybe the knowledge of something that you didn't realise before.

@jeeprs,

Why only those three psychedelics, jeepers? (I assume you count peyote in with mescaline)

Salvia divinorum has a long history of use by Native American shaman. And newly discovered psychedelics like 2-ce are becoming popular; some people say that 2-ce has the same 'mind expanding' potential.

@Theaetetus,

You can't forget about DMT or pure MDMA as psychedelics (not the toxic stew called ecstasy). Even though methylenedioxymethamphetamine is technically in the class of drugs known as amphetamines, its effects are very similar to psychedelics. Nowadays though, people equate ecstasy with MDMA, but generally the stuff on the street contains other drugs (heroin, meth, etc) and very little to no MDMA along with chemicals probably more suited for household cleaners.

@Theaetetus,

Who's to say that my experience being drunk isn't religious? Or if I shoot up heroin, that that isn't religious? I always found it a bit humorous that there's this sort of elitist mentality within the community of druggies, that users of psychedelics are religious or spiritual while users of something else are just addicts.

How do we define a spiritual experience? How do we know that drinking isn't just as spiritual as mushroom eating? (Actually in many cultures, it is...)

@Pangloss,

Pangloss wrote:

Who's to say that my experience being drunk isn't religious? Or if I shoot up heroin, that that isn't religious? I always found it a bit humorous that there's this sort of elitist mentality within the community of druggies, that users of psychedelics are religious or spiritual while users of something else are just addicts.

How do we define a spiritual experience? How do we know that drinking isn't just as spiritual as mushroom eating? (Actually in many cultures, it is...)

I don't think anyone is saying that being drunk or shooting up heroin can not be religious, or that there is a sort of elitist mentality within the community of druggies.

What Watts and others, including myself postulate, is that there are many similarities to trance like spiritual effects from deep meditation and other ritual practices, and that of psychedelic drugs. Not to mention, many tribal cultures employed psychedelic drugs shamanistic and spiritual reasons (i.e. vision quests). Getting drunk is not typically seen as an spiritually enlightening experience by most people.

@Theaetetus,

Theaetetus wrote:

What Watts and others, including myself postulate, is that there are many similarities to trance like spiritual effects from deep meditation and other ritual practices, and that of psychedelic drugs.

Yes, I just fail to see how these experiences are deemed to be "religious".

Quote:

Not to mention, many tribal cultures employed psychedelic drugs shamanistic and spiritual reasons (i.e. vision quests). Getting drunk is not typically seen as an spiritually enlightening experience by most people.

Many have also used alcohol for spiritual reasons. As for psychedelics, most people use them to party or stare at visual hallucinations; they are not seeking god or enlightenment. They, like other drug users, are on a quest for pleasure and/or escape...

@Pangloss,

Pangloss wrote:

Yes, I just fail to see how these experiences are deemed to be "religious".

I see church on Sunday as religious, but a camping excursion involving psychedelics with friends with the purpose to try to understand the purpose of being and existence as a spiritual or vision quest of sorts. This is very similar to what a tribal culture of South or Central America used these substances to practice.

Pangloss wrote:

Many have also used alcohol for spiritual reasons. As for psychedelics, most people use them to party or stare at visual hallucinations; they are not seeking god or enlightenment. They, like other drug users, are on a quest for pleasure and/or escape...

Most people are not of tribal cultures. Sure many modern people living in a modern society do as you say looking for escape just as other drug users, but there are people that use psychedelics to experience higher states of consciousness. When I used to experiment with them with friends, we treated the experiences as transcendental ritual experiences. We tried to better understand our purpose, and connect to the greater sense of existence.

@Theaetetus,

I'm sure you can make anything "religious" if you smoke, shoot, or drink enough of it...

@Theaetetus,

Theaetetus wrote:

I see church on Sunday as religious, but a camping excursion involving psychedelics with friends with the purpose to try to understand the purpose of being and existence as a spiritual or vision quest of sorts. This is very similar to what a tribal culture of South or Central America used these substances to practice.

The ritualized use of psychedelic substances by traditional cultures is a much more sacred event than some college kids journeying out to the woods once a month for a "vision quest". It is ingrained into the lifestyle of the people, and it actually can be included within their "religion" as a legitimate religious practice (laws exist to this effect in the US, allowing native americans to use peyote).

Anyway, yea, i've heard drug users tell me before that they are going off on vision quests, etc., "just like the native americans", but it is anything but. The difference is that you have to be a member of that culture that includes the practice within their religion to understand any "religious" significance of the event.

Quote:

Most people are not of tribal cultures. Sure many modern people living in a modern society do as you say looking for escape just as other drug users, but there are people that use psychedelics to experience higher states of consciousness. When I used to experiment with them with friends, we treated the experiences as transcendental ritual experiences. We tried to better understand our purpose, and connect to the greater sense of existence.

The overwhelming euphoria, hilarity, and increased sense of camaraderie or social connection probably also had much to do with it...but it is interesting that modern/western psychedelic users are all seeking the "religious" or "spiritual", yet they share no fundamental beliefs or convictions like a religion, or like a traditional spiritual culture. The thing that links them in their "religion" is taking drugs.

@Theaetetus,

Quote:

Yes, I just fail to see how these experiences are deemed to be "religious".

Probably because you haven't had one!

A bit like a virgin saying 'I can't see what all this fuss is about sex:-)

@jeeprs,

jeeprs wrote:

Probably because you haven't had one!

A bit like a virgin saying 'I can't see what all this fuss is about sex:-)

Actually, the virgin is usually the one that *wants* the sex, and then usually realizes there is no fuss.

Would you really like to use that analogy here?

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