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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
(1) See W. James, The Varieties of Religious Experience
(1902). (back)
(2) An excellent anthology of such experiences is
R. Johnson Watcher on the Hills (1959). (back)
(3) 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).
(back)
(4) Isaiah 45: 6, 7. (back)
(5) Chandogya Upanishad 6.15.3. (back)
(6) Alfred Lord Tennyson, A Memoir by His Son (1898),
320. (back)
(7) A Prayer for the King's Majesty, Order for Morning
Prayer, Book of Common Prayer (Church of England, 1904). (back)
(8) 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. (back)
(9) This is discussed at length in A. Watts, The
Joyous Cosmology: Adventures in the Chemistry of Consciousness (1962).
(back)
(10) "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. (back)
(11) 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." Genesis
1:29, 31.
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