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Dr. Smith:
Introduction
I want to welcome you to the Second Semi-Annual
Conference sponsored by our Psychopharmacological
Study Group. The topic for our conference today is
"The Religious Significance of Psychedelic Drugs”.
The Psychopharmacology Study Group is an on-campus
medical group whose purpose it is to compile and
disseminate objective information in the field of
psychopharmacology, particularly in the area of
psychedelic drugs. This group formed because of the
great concern on the part of its members regarding
what was felt to be the presence and distribution of
a tremendous amount of misinformation concerning
psychedelic drugs. It is our hope that we can serve
as a middle ground between the extreme polarities of
opinion that seem to exist in this fascinating but
highly controversial field.
I mentioned that this was the Second Semi-Annual
Conference. Our first conference, the topic of which
was "Psychedelic Drug s and the Law, " was held last
January. The proceedings of that conference are now
available in our journal entitled "The Journal of
Psychedelic Drugs," which is on sale outside the
conference room. In addition, the journal contains a
historical review of LSD and a brief summary of the
Haight- Ashbury Medical Clinic. This journal will be
published semi-annually, and will contain a
continuing progress report on the Haight-Ashbury
Medical Clinic, the idea for which originated in our
Psychopharmacology Study Group discussions relative
to what we felt was the poor handling of drug use
and abuse in the Haight-Ashbury district. Out of our
attempt to develop a more rational procedure came
the idea for a free general medical clinic, which is
now serving the medical needs of the Haight-Ashbury.
The clinic is supported by private donations and
staffed by volunteer people. Mr. Robert Conrich, the
administrator of the clinic, will be available to
talk with any of you who are interested in the
clinic in more detail. Also, we welcome any of you
who might wish to help or volunteer services to the
Haight-Ashbury Medical Clinic.
Mr. Charles Fisher, who is the student director of
the Psychopharmacology Study Group, will also be
available for any questions relative to our
organization, and again, we welcome those of you who
might wish to participate in the organization of
future symposiums, as well as those who wish to make
original contributions to our journal. I am the
editor of the journal, and contributions may be
submitted for consideration to me in care of the
Department of Pharmacology.
The motivation for the development of the topic of
our conference today, "The Religious Significance of
Psychedelic Drugs, " came about primarily because of
a prejudice which seems to prevail, particularly in
the medical community: that people take drugs of the
LSD type for kicks, for social status, and that use
of the psychedelic type drugs is similar to use of
alcohol or similar to narcotic drug use; that no
deeper meaning exists, at least in its motivational
aspects. However, to people working in the field, it
seems to have become apparent that most of the
motivation for the use of psychedelic drugs actually
stems from an entirely different source.
Now, if one is going to truly understand drug use,
the drug reaction, the context of the total
phenomena, then one has to go into great detail as
to why people are taking the drug. It does no good
to try to discuss a particular drug response with an
individual if you have no idea of why he is taking
the drug. Our purpose today, therefore, is to go
into detail concerning what is now considered to be
an important and significant motivation behind a
great deal of the psychedelic drug use, particularly
in this geographical area.
I would like to further illustrate why I think this
analysis is so important by giving you a
psychopharmacological example. Psychopharmacology is
the study of drugs which affect thought, mood, and
perception, and the total context of the experience
depends not only upon the drug itself but upon the
set or motivation of the person taking the drug, and
upon the setting in which he takes it. Both these
factors contribute to the total drug experience, and
the drug experience cannot be separated from the
total context. For example, one individual may feel
primarily anxiety. The first thing he wonders is why
he is feeling this anxiety--what is the cause of the
anxiety. Many times, however, the cause is so
complex and so deep-rooted that the individual has
great difficulty analyzing the reason he is feeling
anxiety, and he then often turns to anti-anxiety
drugs, which serve two purposes: first, the
anti-anxiety drug relieves the symptom of anxiety,
and secondly, by relieving the anxiety, the drug may
help the individual discover what the cause of the
anxiety was. Now, as a side-effect of using such
anti-anxiety medication, he may, for example,
develop vertigo. This has to be considered a
side-effect of the drug. But if one were to focus
primarily on just this side effect of the drug, and
say to the individual "you have to stop taking the
anti-anxiety drug because you are having dizziness,
" it would be a futile approach, because the basic
reason that the individual takes the drug, the
anxiety and the cause of the anxiety, are not
relieved by the mere elimination of the drug, and
the consequent elimination of the side-effect.
This example has great importance to the psychedelic
drug group of the LSD/marijuana type and we find we
can still utilize this format and formula, despite
the fact that the situation is much more complex
than the one just described.
The psychedelic toxic psychosis or "bad trip" that
is so often written about in the newspaper, the
thing with which the "straight" community seems to
be so enthralled, is actually a side-effect of the
basic reason why an individual is taking the drug. I
find so many experts in the field of psychedelic
drugs going into great detail listing side-effects,
proceeding on the assumption that if they can list
more and more and more side-effects, it will somehow
deter an individual from taking psychedelic drugs. I
think that many of these experts completely ignore
the basic cause, the basic symptom that the
individual seems to be trying to relieve, and I
think that this is why there are such communication
gaps between the medical community, the legal
community, and the actual drug-using population.
To be more specific, some of the motivations that
have been expressed for psychedelic drug use are
curiosity, escape, social status, and anxiety
relief. On the more positive side, however, both an
attempt at psycho-analysis and an attempt at the
achievement of a religious experience have also been
advanced as valid motivations. The latter reason is
what we are going to focus on today.
If someone desires to achieve a religious
experience, if this is the motivation for his drug
use, then there must be an underlying reason for
this desire. If an individual wants to achieve a
religious experience, it is implied that, at least
in many cases, there is a spiritual void in his life
which has not been filled by other techniques more
commonly offered by the society in which he lives.
The individual who takes the psychedelic drug is, in
effect, trying to find an alternative to what he
apparently considers a negative or absent
experience, in that society. We find that this is a
very valid concern on the part of many of the young
people now using psychedelic drugs, and they may be
seen to be rebelling in the true Camus-like sense of
the word. They are rebelling against a de-humanized
society, a society whose members go through a ritual
of religion on Sunday, yet whose behavior during the
week has no relation to the ritual that they have
undergone. One very important conclusion which may
be drawn from this observation is that religious
ritual does not imply religious experience.
Religious experience must come first, and the
behavioral change follows. An individual can go
through a set of ritualistic behaviors and it need
not have any effect upon his total social behavior.
In this context, then, it is implied that those
individuals who take psychedelic drugs for religious
purposes are individuals who, utilizing more common
social approaches, have not found religious
satisfaction, and because of the spiritual void in
their life, are seeking new alternatives.
Individuals who violently protest this situation
because of the incidence of adverse side-effects
that may result from psychedelic drug use are
perhaps best answered by Charles McCabe. In his
column he discusses a professor who writes in
reaction to an individual who had previously written
to the effect that "how can anybody use LSD because
of all the bad things that can happen." The
professor's final statement has, I think, tremendous
significance. In reference to the psychedelic
movement, he said, "there will be casualties, but if
the Great Society can assimilate a couple of million
alcoholics, and as many lung cancer cases, then it
should have little trouble taking care of the few
people that become psychotic through ingesting LSD.
"
To be more specific, there are many people who doubt
the sincerity of those individuals who profess to
take psychedelic drugs for religious purposes, and
certainly I agree that there is a large fringe
population which is utilizing other motives. But in
working in the field it has become very obvious to
me that many of the individuals involved in this new
community are quite sincere in their motivations. I
would like to read an article from the
Haight-Ashbury Oracle, which is really a paraphrase
of the Bible of the Hippy community. It begins by
saying:
"Start your own religion. The purpose of life is
religious discovery. The wise person devotes his
life exclusively to the religious search, for herein
is found the only ecstasy, the only meaning.
Anything else is a competitive quarrel. That
intermediate manifestation of the divine process
which we call the DNA code has spent the last few
million years making this planet a Garden of Eden.
An intricate web has been woven, a delicate fabric
of chemical, electrical seeds, seed tissue, organism
species, a dancing joyous harmony of energy
transformation rooted into 12" of top soil which
covers the rock metal fire core of the earth. In
this Garden of Eden each human being is born
perfect."
I found this particularly interesting in that it is
quite in opposition to the prevailing
Judea-Christian based religious ethic, that man is
born evil. In contrast, the religious philosophy of
the new community is that man is born intothe
world perfect, and that he is conditioned and
corrupted by de-humanizing influences which detract
him from his basic conception.
To continue: "We were all born divine mutants to the
DNA code's best answer to joyful survival on this
planet, an exquisite package for adaptation based on
two billion years of consumer research and product
design. When the individual’s behavior and
consciousness get hooked to a routine sequence of
external actions, he is a dead robot and it is time
for him to die and be reborn, time to drop out, turn
on and tune-in."
The article continues, further describing the
process of dropping out, turning on and tuning in.
"To turn on means to find a sacrament which returns
you to the temple of God, your own body, to go out
of your mind. To tune in means to be reborn; to drop
back in, to start a new sequence of behavior that
reflects your vision; in other words, to manifest in
a behavioral way the religious experience you have
had."
In the discussion of how to turn on, the article
states that "you must detach yourself from your
rigid addictive focus and refocus on the natural
energies within the body. You are a spiritual
voyager furthering the most ancient noble quest of
man. When you turn on you divert from the fake and
join the holy dance of visionary. Never
underestimate the sacred meaning of the turn-on. To
turn on you need a sacrament. A sacrament is a
visible external thing which turns the key to the
inner door. A sacrament must bring about bodily
changes. A sacrament flips you out of the studio
game and harnesses you to the two-billion-year-old
flow inside. A sacrament which works is dangerous to
the ruling establishment and to that part of your
mind which is hooked to the establishment game."
I think that this next is a very crucial part of the
philosophy: "The body-changing sacrament which is
needed is one that will flip out the mind of
society. Today, the sacrament is LSD. However,
sacraments wear out.
They become part of the social game. Treasure LSD
while it still works. In fifteen years it will be a
tame, socialized routine."
So, I now turn the meeting over to the Reverend
Robert Cromy.
Reverend Robert Cromy:
It seems to me that it is very important to what
presently is going on in our culture that we see
that drugs are not only being used as a sacrament,
but are sacramental in very traditional terms, in
terms of the Christian church, which is all I can
really speak about, and only a small portion of it
at that. The churches have a definition of sacrament
wherein drugs fit, and fit in rather nicely. First
of all, drugs are part of the creation of God. To
use illogical language in this scientific arena, God
created everything. He created all that is, and a
human being's response to this creation should be
use of the totality of this creation, responsibly,
joyously, happily, fully. Participating in all of
creation, however, includes participating in the
existence of drugs. Now, this is socially
permissible if you can define a direct healing
relationship, such as, you have a headache, you take
a drug, and you get over the headache for a little
while. That kind of drug-taking is OK. Every time I
lurch toward my toothpaste, which has marvelous
names all over it, all of them presumably very
scientific and full of drugs to take care of my
mouth, I assume that I am taking some kind of a drug
to take care of my --whatever the local oral problem
happens to be--fuzz, or something. This is a drug
taking scene. At least, to pedal the stuff, it is
implied that such is the case.
Drugs are a gift of God. As such, they are part of
the giveness of things, to be used responsibly and
to be seen as a gift, as something given, as
something that is there to be appreciated and taken
up. Let me say, then, to deal briefly with what a
sacrament is: we have talked about drugs as far as
being part of creation. A sacrament, in religious
terminology, is an outward, and visible form, or
sign, of an inward and spiritual grace. Now, this
betrays my bias toward the common prayer of the
English language, and this is the definition of
sacrament in our catechism--an outward, visible sign
of an inward and spiritual grace.
The clearest religious illustration of the
sacraments for Anglicans and Protestants generally
are those of Baptism and Holy Communion. These are
the two great sacraments. Obviously, in Baptism,
water is the outward, visible sign. It is the thing.
It is the agent. It is the actual or the secular
image which is used, and it is used in two ways. It
carries a spiritual meaning, if you will, the
spiritual meaning of life, like growth in a mother's
body in a sac of water. Water is the giver of life.
There is no life without water. Water is part of the
essence of living. In that sense, water is a part of
the meaning of the sacrament. Also, as one is
Baptized, we say that one joins the life-giving
community of Christians.
In a second dimension, water is that which cleanses.
It seems to me that original sin does not have much
to do with evil, but has a great deal to do with
imperfection. This is the way the world is. The
world is imperfect. It is not necessarily evil. And
I don't think evil is what Genesis is talking about.
But Genesis makes the very realistic observation
that we live in an imperfect world, that there is an
imperfection about life, and that we are not going
to find absolute perfection. We are always going to
fall short of the mark; we are always going to be
living in an imperfect situation. In fact, I think
that to seek perfection is the sign of a psychosis
of some kind. But to live realistically is to be
able to live with imperfection. I think that this is
what the doctrine of original sin is really trying
to say.
So when we talk of the water of Baptism, we assume
that man is imperfect. Man commits sins, outrages,
and somehow in Baptism, the water in Baptism
symbolizes that man can be cleansed. He can be
forgiven. He doesn't have to walk around with the
burden of guilt. He can be forgiven for his enormous incredibilities. These are the kinds of meanings of
the water in Baptism which are important. Water is
the outward, visible sign, bearing these inner
spiritual graces of forgiveness and new life.
In Holy Communion, the bread and the wind are the
sacraments, the outward visible signs which carry
inward and spiritual meaning. Bread and wine are
profane. They are secular. They are seen. Bread and
wind are not grown on trees, but are produced in
bake shops and wineries. They are not natural
products. They are the products of machinery and the
work of men. They are thus profane, and of the
world; they are secular. These outward, visible
signs are food. That is easy to understand. Bread is
the staff of life, it is the essence of life. And
wine; we have all heard about wine. Wine is known as
a life-giving thing. It does something to you,
whether it depresses or uplifts, whatever it does,
it change s your conscious state of mind. It changes
the situation. It, again, is something which changes
life. It gives a new dimension to living. We use the
bread and the wine to symbolize the life of Christ,
his body and his blood. In Christianity we have been
able to obscure the issue somewhat with endless
conversations about what really are body and blood,
and bread and wine, and how is it all related;
Christianity has fallen down and stood up all over
this issue. But, in any case, bread and wine are now
used to symbolize the life of Christ. Somehow, we
Christians feel that we are involved in the life of
Christ, and we proclaim this each week as we attend
Eucharist and eat some bread and drink some wine. We
thus proclaim our oneness with the life of Christ.
In the use of these profane things, like bread and
wine, we, on the one hand, relate to God in Christ,
and on the other hand, we eat with our brother. We,
for a moment, eat from the same dish; we, for a
moment, drink from the same cup, and are joined as
one with our brother. This is the sacrament of the
Holy Communion, the Eucharist, the drawing together
of the community, the holy union of men and men, and
men and God, symbolized in the breaking of bread and
the drinking of wine - outward, profane, secular
things used in the bringing about of spiritual inner
meaning.
We can thus go down through the seven sacraments,
the other five a bit more briefly, perhaps, because
I know less about them. Oil has been used in
Christianity, as it has been in many religions as an
outward sign. Oil is a profane thing. It is also a
product. Oil has always been a healing agent, but
not because when you rub it into your skin it makes
you feel good, and, in fact, has therapeutic
effects, but because it is an outward sign of an
inward grace. I remember Bishop Pike talking one
time about using the recipe which is given in the
Bible for oil for the confirmation of children and
adults. He was saying that when he used to have
large confirmation classes and he would use the
substance which had been made in a drug store nearby
Grace Cathedral, that in a hot church, with a lot of
people around, a lot of perspiring children in front
of him, the aroma and the fumes had a kind of effect
on him. As the drug and psychedelic issue was coming
alive for people, he said: "Good heavens, maybe
there really is something to this, right there in
the Bible. " That very recipe has a kind of
enervating effect, and he began to think seriously
about the relationship between drug use and the use
of this sanctioned oil. Perhaps this oil carries
with it the possibility of another dimension of
spirituality, as well.
In confirmation, the laying-on of hands is an
outward, visible sign.
Community begins to occur in the laying-on of hands.
As we touch, as we feel, people come together in a
oneness. The mere laying-on of hands is a sign,
carrying with it deep meaning, because when you
touch somebody you are saying "I love you." This is
what happens when you shake hands, when you give a
kiss, or an embrace. Indeed, the laying-on of hands
is a sacrament. The Bishop, when he receives new
members into the church in confirmation, lays his
hands upon them and says to them, "You are part of
the loving community, and the community of the
Beloved."
In Ordination the same thing occurs; a priest, or
minister, is set aside by the laying-on of hands. He
is given a special office in the Christian community
by this action of the laying-on of hands. In
Confession, when a penitent comes to a priest, that
is an outward, visible sign. Words are said, and
ideas are communicated about various problems or
difficulties this person has, which are shared with
you, a priest, as his brother, and in this sacrament
of words the priest can, under most circumstances,
pronounce absolution through the sacrament, the
outward, visible sign of words.
In marriage, the outward, visible sign is the
marriage ceremony. In the Anglican Church it is the
giving of the ring and the joining of hands. These
are the two meaningful actions, these are the two
sacramental actions in the marriage ceremony that
make marriage a sacrament.
Now, another way to say all this is to say that
artificial, secular, profane things are used
extensively in obtaining religious experience. In
the Church, architecture is used. The great soaring
points in a great cathedral are meant to uplift, to
help one get out of one's self and into a new
dimension, to help one reach beyond oneself. The
very purpose of the structure of a good church is to
move one up and out. One of the reasons that there
are so many bad churches is that many of them don't
succeed in doing this. The arches are so cluttered
or ill-constructed that the overall effect does
nothing except flatten you down. A good church is
one which lifts and broadens. One's experience
should be deepened just by walking into the
building. Such is the value of architecture, an
outward sign communicating an inward grace. The
light coming through stained glass of magnificent
color--all this adds to the experience. May I point
out here that people who have had psychedelic
experiences are enjoying more and more stained glass
all the time. As you walk through the Haight-Ashbury
you will see people painting their own stained glass
on their windows.
Consider the vestments worn by priests. The choirs
also wear vestments, varying in color and shape and
cloth, all of which are to help evoke the religious
experience. Incense is used, utilizing the sense of
smell, and the way the smoke billows up in a
beautiful cloud is a visual way of uplifting men
toward a religious experience. The use of music is a
most obvious kind of outward, visible sign
communicating an inward and spiritual grace. In my
opinion, most church music now is so terrible that
it doesn't do much good. But the point is that it
did help at one time. The great Gregorian music is
certainly one of the finest examples of church music
we know, and there are many other kinds as well. The
kind of doggerel verse and un-hip tunes that are
commonly sung in the hymnity of the church today
seem poor substitutes for what music really can and
should do. I would suggest to my congregation that
they think of hymns as folk songs and simply enjoy
the experience of singing, rather than get too
involved in what the words mean, because the words
tend to be just simple rationalities.
Paintings, statuary, processions, drama, words,
color, silence-all of these are outward, visible
signs which bear inward, spiritual meaning. Even the
use of various postures, to kneel, for example, for
prayer, to stand for praise, to sit to listen to the
preaching,-these postures, what we do with our
bodies, with our hands, are part of the religious
experience.
I have explored these areas because I think it is
very important that a sufficient foundation of
understanding be laid of what the sacramental life
of the Christian church and religion in general is
all about. Use of flowers is still another example.
We love flowers in a church, we spend a good deal on
flowers, whether or not they are well used. I
recently went to the wedding of a family of Spanish
extraction, and I was delighted. A little child
walked down after the bridal couple with flower
petals. It was a nice, kind of festive thing.
Religion has always used secular, profane, worldly
things as means and assistance to the religious
experience. And the religious experience can be
evoked by profane things, always has been, and
probably always will be. Now, to speak about the
void that Dr. Smith mentioned. One of the problems
in religion today is the fact that these
sacramentals have become so stylized, so sterile,
rigid, and often boring, that they no longer serve
to evoke the religious experience. It seems that for
some individuals, the last place to seek a religious
experience is in the liturgical life of most of our
churches, because the very stuff with which we have
to deal has become so set over time, so legalized,
that it doesn't do what, in the beginning, it was
meant to do. We seem to have taken these magnificent
secular things, these sacramental things used in
worship, and made them so rigid and tight that they
no longer communicate anything about the good news.
I was at a conference yesterday and the day before,
and Bishop Myers, our new Episcopal Bishop, has set
up a committee for restructure and renewal of our
diocese. Aside from a few theologians and priests,
he also insisted that ·there be some youth on this
committee. Teenagers had to be in on this august
commission, to sit with him and the other bishops,
because he felt that unless he had the voice of the
people under eighteen, he didn't have a true voice
to guide the restructuring and renewing of the
church. The chairman of the commission, Dr. Massy
Shepherd, was telling us yesterday that one of these
teenagers said, "you know, the reason I don't go to
church anymore, or to meetings, is that I don't see
anything of good news here. I see nothing of good
news when I go to church. "
The whole essence of gospel is good news, and Dr.
Shepherd said, "you know, we have been talking about
this for weeks. There is nothing "good news" here.
There is nothing joyous, nothing happy. It is all
sterile and rigid and tight, unhappy and unpleasant,
really." Supposedly, the purpose of a sacrament is
to assist a person in achieving a religious
experience. A sacrament is to help open people. A
sacrament is to help people turn on to self, to God,
and to community, to draw into a relationship with
God, although theologically we always have to say
that God uses the sacraments to relate to men.
We in the church always have to go back to the
concept of the gift. We realize that what we have in
the world is a gift, and that God uses sacraments to
reveal Himself to us. Therefore, it is up to man to
'get with' the things of the world, because that is
wherein God is revealed. That is the arena in which
God manifests himself.
Let me spend a few minutes now on an attempt at a
definition of a religious experience. I can really
only list descriptive terms, and I am not sure I can
be terribly rational about them. Perhaps one could
say that a religious experience is the sense of
oneness with God. A religious experience is a vision
of God. A religious experience is also a sense of
oneness with self, a sense of oneness with the
world; it is a sense of peace and harmony and love,
a sense of inward vision and understanding. It is a
sense of the service of love, and of merging toward
neighbor, a sense of the profundity of life, a sense
of insight into self. Religious experience is a
sense of creatureliness, the smallness of one's self
in comparison with the immensity of the universe, in
comparison with the immensity of God, and of the
creation. Religious experience is a sense of
loneliness, and the hope for community, and ecstasy,
a shuddering kind of ecstasy. John Wesley, the
founder of the Methodists, talks about one day in a
Bible study session wherein he spoke about his heart
being warm; out of this warmth of heart developed an
organization of 10 million Methodists in this
country. Certainly the Baptist church, which
evangelized the west in the days when things were
really hard, was a tremendous missionary field
coming out of this religious experience.
The writings of St. Theresa and of St. Francis talk
about this kind of visior of God, the sense of
oneness, the sense of uplift. Even Ralph Waldo
Emerson talks about the oversoul and the glimpse
into the transcendent, and the imminence of God in
the world. These are quite traditional religious
terms, describing what the religious experience is.
We Christians say it is a gift from God, and He is
the source of that experience. He alone is the
author of the religious experience. But, even though
we would say that God is the author of the
experience, we Christians for years have gone around
preparing for the experience. We have always talked
about ways of preparing for the religious encounter,
ways such as those of fasting, meditation, silence,
prayer, the relaxing of one's body, waiting for God.
Receiving the sacraments, and communion in
particular, are ways in which we prepare ourselves.
If this gift of the religious experience comes, we
are delighted and happy; perhaps often, it may not
come. But there is no question but that we prepare
for the experience. We do specific things with the
profanities and the secularities to prepare for the
experience of an encounter with God.
It must be said, however, that the religious
experience is terribly personal. I know of no
objective standards to determine whether or not an
individual has had a religious experience, an
experience of God. If you are asked, 'have you seen
the beatific vision, do you have faith', and if you
answer 'yes', you have no proof. There are no
objective standards, there are only personal ones.
One can only be a personal witness to one's own
religious experience. The fact is that no man, no
Christian, no Jew, no Muslim, no Saint, no Pope, no
Bishop nor priest, nor minister, nor rabbi, nor
layman really knows if his religious experience is
from God, or from gas on the stomach, not enough
sleep, menopause, hardening of the arteries, or the
first blush of youthful love. We cannot know. We
have no objective standards for determining whether
or not any religious experiences we have are truly
of God.'
Can there be no test for religious experience? Can
there be no way of knowing for sure that there is a
valid religious experience? I think of perhaps two
tests, and I can't say that they are objective, but
they are personal observations. If a person says he
has had a religious experience, I would like to know
these two things about that person: first, has his
experience made him more of a human being? Has it
made him more sensitive to his own being, his own
life, the dimension of himself as a person? And
secondly, what has this individual done about
becoming more sensitively human, in terms of loving
and serving his neighbors?
I think these two criteria are possibly useful for
determining whether or not a person has had a
genuine religious experience or whether he has had a
jag on. If one doesn't somehow come out of such an
experience as more of a human being, as somehow more
inclined to really serve his neighbor, then I, at
least as a Christian, would have to question whether
or not he had had an experience of any religious
significance, or whether perhaps he had just had a
nice experience.
With this kind of background, I think we can say
that perhaps drugs have a place in the religious or
sacramental life. First, as I stated earlier, drugs
are a part of the creation; drugs, like sex, booze,
money, power, food, can be put either to good or to
bad use. They are part of the giveness of things,
and they can be used just as we use the things I
listed earlier, like bread, wine, water, oil,
speech, the laying-on of hands, architecture,
stained glass, vestments, and so on. All of these
things can be put to good or bad use, can be used to
enhance or to deflower the religious experience. All
of these things are part of creation, as are drugs.
The psychedelic drugs, marijuana, LSD, and others,
may create the feeling of oneness, the feeling of
uplift, the feeling of closeness, feelings certainly
very akin to those mentioned previously. They can
create feelings in a person which are very similar
to the feelings traditionally accepted as belonging
to a religious experience. LSD, particularly, seems
to create the apocalyptic visions, almost like those
of Ezekiel or the Book of Revelation in the Bible.
LSD may also create a sense of peace and a sense of
insight into the world and into one's self. It is
interesting to note that the Essenes, the ancient
community about which we are learning more and more
from the recent discoveries of the Dead Sea Scrolls,
seem to have had at least one lunatic fringe who
were mushroom gatherers. This has just been reported
in a recent paper, and I was talking to Bishop Pike
about it the other day. He said "yes, there were
apparently three kinds of mushrooms which grew in
Palestine; there was the kind from which you made
soup, there was the kind that was poisonous, and
there was the kind that was psychedelic."
The Essences, apparently, were experts in
discovering which were which. And after sudden
rains, when some of these mushrooms grew rather
rapidly, especially the psychedelic ones, these
people went racing out to find the right mushroom.
Some of their literature is quite apocalyptic in
nature, quite fanciful, quite visionary, full and
expansive in the use of imagination. It may be that
the Dead Sea Scrolls will be of assistance in
determining at what level there was actual drug use
in the regular context of Christian or
Jewish-Christian worship in those very primitive and
early days. There seems to be a good deal of
evidence that there may well have been some kind of
drug use in connection with the creation of
apocalyptic literature, in particular. Some of you
remember the stories of flying horses, and smoke,
and incense and fire, and god-speaking flames and
tongues. This kind of literature has always been
thought to be sort of code literature, so that the
Christians could talk to the world without the
.Romans catching on to what they were talking about.
But evidence seems to be emerging that these visions
were the product of psychedelic experiences, and the
ingestion of drugs.
Isn't relating the religious experience to the
taking of drugs--isn't this really instant
mysticism? Isn't drug use instant mysticism? Yes, it
is. Drug use may short-cut the traditional religious
preparation, and suddenly open a person to God's
outreach. This is very definitely a possible
positive use of psychedelic drugs. In that sense, it
is instant mysticism; but on the other hand, I could
also answer no, it is not instant mysticism, it is
no more instant mysticism than is the use of the
techniques used by the mystics who control their
breathing, thereby cutting off oxygen to the brain
and getting a hallucinogenic reaction. There is a
good deal of evidence that this is part of what the
breathing exercises in Yogi and other religious
practices is all about.
The exercises cut off a certain amount of oxygen to
the brain, and various kinds of mental images occur
as a result. Now, is that instant mysticism, or is
it mysticism induced chemically by the absence of
oxygen! I would say it is the latter, and it may
take five or six years to learn how to breathe that
way, so don't rush out. My point is, can one say
that the taking of drugs is any more instant
mysticism because it chemically produces an effect
than controlling one's breath over a long period of
time which cuts off oxygen to the brain, producing
visions of one kind or another? Which is which? Is
one necessarily better than the other? Perhaps some
of you think it is.
Let me say that I think that in a deep sense,
smoking marijuana, or taking LSD, might be an
important religious experience. It can be religious
in the same sense that a meal between two people who
love each other can be religious. A husband and wife
taking time from a job and a busy family to have a
drink together, or two people taking a walk
together, can be religious. At these moments there
is communication, perhaps on a non-verbal level,
between human beings created by God. There is a
closeness and a love expressed.
It is not entirely an accident that many Hippies
both smoke pot and hate violence and war. Under the
influence of the drug they have experienced a sense
of peace and well-being, if only for a moment, and
this makes them want to work, and work actively
against war. Many Hippies are active in the civil
rights movement. They have experienced, if only for
a moment, a sense of deep personal brotherhood which
they translate into action by seeking justice for
all men. This is a religious activity of the most
profound kind. If a drug-induced religious
experience is valid, or, as one would say
theologically, of God, then there w ill be a
resultant push to serve the neighbor. I think this
has to be emphasized as a kind of test as to whether
or not an experience is validly religious.
Let me say finally, that I feel a person should be
free to try these various kinds of drugs as
possible means of access to a religious experience.
This is a civil liberties problem. The churches of
recent date have become concerned about civil
liberties in connection with the Negro community,
the homosexual community, concerns for all kinds of
the poor, all kinds of people who have difficulties
under the civil system.
The churches also ought to be involved in seeking
justice, and seeking change in the rather absurd
laws which presently restrict drug use.
The churches also should be much more involved in
the study of religious experience. I know, for
example, of no study group in any church like the
Medical Center Psychopharmacology Study Group, which
is trying to understand the relationship of drugs
to religion, or, for that matter, the relationship
of drugs to anything.
Let me conclude by repeating that it seems to me
that drugs may be seen as bearers of religious
experience just as are other profane or secular
products. The tests to see if the experience is
genuine or just a kick are whether the experience
results in service to all men as neighbors and
whether the experience has made that person more of
a human being.
Dr. Jack Downing:
I will be talking to you today out of both my own
psychedelic experiences and out of my endeavors to
learn as much as possible from the experiences of
others, both from the people I have treated with
psychedelic drugs and from the reading I have done.
The closer I approach the psychedelic experience,
the less certain I am as to its meaning and
validity. My uncertainty is not based on skepticism
regarding the profound insight generated by the
psychedelic experience, but rather it is based on
the problem that has just been discussed, that is,
the problem of the social value of the psychedelic
experience.
I see the religious dilemma as being well expressed
by a button that I have seen at times in the
Haight-Ashbury, which says simply Ecstasy Now. Up to
this point, religion, for the great majority of
humanity, has been a transmitted experience. In
other words, someone tells me about an experience
that someone else had, some time ago. Now, with the
drugs, people are having experiences which I do not
personally believe can be distinguished, or are
distinguishable, from the religious experiences that
many of the mystic saints, as well as ordinary
people, have had.
I base this opinion primarily on the kind of
discussion that William James gives in his book,
Varieties of Religious Experience. He deals in
passing with the drug-induced experiences, and with
the fairly clear evidence that a number of the
experiences which we have qualified in our religious
works as being validly religious, have been
drug-induced. The Bible contains descriptions of
many of these. The one recipe has already been
mentioned. The priests are instructed to put it on
their garments, on the tabernacle, and on the
hangings of the tent. I can guarantee you that if
the priests did so, whoever went into that tent for
longer than fifteen minutes was turned on, because
the ingredients of that oil are a volatile spice,
frankincense, and myrrh, the mixture of which will
produce a turned-on experience.
I feel that I, as a professional psychiatrist, do
not have much to contribute here, because my
professional task is a social task, relating to
behavior; I am supposed to judge and predict, and to
intervene, if possible, on the behavior of
individuals who have been brought to me, or who come
of their own accord, for help with behavior problems
that are disturbing to themselves or to others. As a
psychiatrist, I have to judge the person, called a
patient, by his verbal and non-verbal expressions
and attitudes and values, and by reports on these
same things from other people. From these
observations, I have to attempt to predict the
person's probable subsequent course of behavior.
Today, of course, the intermediate step of
intervention and changing behavior has become a
prominent portion of what the psychiatrist does, and
we call this psychotherapy. However, in general,
therapeutic intervention by psychiatrists has been
for the purpose of insuring or regaining socially
acceptable behavior, known in our professional
jargon as "an adequate life adjustment." Now,
definitions vary greatly as to what is 'an adequate
life adjustment'. I recall that I very nearly got
kicked out of my residency training in Topeka
because of a man who had a rather unfortunate
infection of the skull which did not particularly
affect his brain but which had eaten away most of
the cranium so that his brain was exposed. He was
incarcerated on the plea of his wife, who had
convinced the judge that the man was obviously
mentally ill because he would leave home, which was
over toward Kansas City, go to Kansas City, find a
brothel, and comfort himself there to the entire
satisfaction of the inmates therein, and then return
home. His wife said that anybody who did this was
crazy. My psychiatric report, on the other hand,
held that this man showed adequate judgment,
particularly in view of his wife, and that,
moreover, he should be released. This suggestion met
with some rejection.
We have similar things going on, I understand, in a
nearby psychiatric treatment center into which the
Hippies are being admitted. The doctor comes around
and says "what's wrong, what's your symptom, what's
your complaint," and the Hippie says "Nothing, man,
you know, groovy, dig." The doctor says "but you are
in the hospital. You must be sick." The Hippie says,
"No, I'm happy, you know." And so they keep him
awhile, two or three months, and they release him,
and they say "What are you going to do?" The Hippie
says "I'm going back to the Haight." Doctor: "Well,
you know, that's social maladjustment." Hippie:
"Yeah, man, it is, you know."
The only principal area of exception to this
judgmental value that the psychiatrist exerts for
society's sake, and this without any really good
studies on how good our judgments are, I might add,
is for those few individuals able to afford
psychotherapy for that state of disphoria that is
sometimes called Existential Anxiety. A briefer
term, for those of you who are not students of
Sartre, is "I'm hurting, man." However, if you go to
a psychiatrist and he asks you "what is your
complaint," and you say "I'm hurting, man," he
probably will not undertake psychotherapy with you,
saying that you are lower class, nonverbal and
non-amenable to treatment.
Generally, we psychiatrists do not view ourselves as
competent on matters spiritual, only on matters
temporal. As spiritual matters relate to the
intellectual and higher endowments of mind, as well
as to the moral feelings and states of the soul, it
appears that the larger areas of values in life, by
far, are specifically exempted from our areas of
psychiatric interest. Let me state more exactly that
we psychiatrists are mostly interested in knowing
the accepted values of our society in as wide a
range as possible, and in applying those e values to
the conduct of persons brought to, or voluntarily
coming to us, for attention. In general, we are
middle-class, compulsive, obsessive, over-educated,
under-experienced individuals; thus, as
professionals, we are not concerned with inner or
spiritual values except insofar as they present
social problems, and any time these come up, we
immediately call on a minister. When I say "we", I
am speaking generally, because there are certainly
very notable exceptions to this, and there are
individual psychiatrists who are greatly interested
in values. However, these persons, these
psychiatrists, are mostly interested in contemporary
social values that affect the relationship of person
to person, not the relationship of person to God.
This has been a long preamble intended both to wake
you up and also to say that I am not now feeling
that I can talk like a psychiatrist. I think that we
are heavily concerned here with values. I would
suggest to you that defining values is the primary
function of religion. It doesn't matter that a
businessman goes to church on Sunday and listens to
a very good sermon on "It's better to give than to
receive" (although I'll never forget the time that
our minister got those words reversed; the whole
congregation woke up) and then goes out and does his
dead-level best to receive and not to give, because
the values are still established, and it is around
values that we organize not only our social
structure but our very mind functions, the ways in
which we perceive the world. The way in which we
organize the world, the way in which we organize our
thoughts and our immediate perceptions, which, after
all, are the only means by which we know the
world--these ways are centered around the values
that we have received, those which are socially
reaffirmed.
It is around this area that I would like to point
out certain concomitants which seem to me very
important to the topic under discussion, one of
which has been amazing to those of us in the
clinical services, and that is the tremendous amount
of anxiety that is aroused in the middle-class
parent whose offspring goes off on psychedelic
drugs. I saw one young man yesterday, who is working
his way through college, and making good grades. He
is a nice fellow, he is well mannered--his hair is
long, but he is clean, and he is living at home. I'd
be proud to have him as a son, but he was referred
to me by his father for examination for psychiatric
treatment and possible commitment to a State
hospital because he had been taking LSD. And why? I
say to you I think it is because the psychedelic
movement, psychedelic drug use, is a value-changing
experience, and it is thus a very major threat to
the existing values of religion.
I would like to look at one aspect of the
psychedelic experience from two different
viewpoints. What I am speaking about has often been
called the oceanic experience. Let me read this
because I think it is pertinent. It is from
Civilization and It's Discontents, by Sigmund Freud.
It was written in 1930. Freud is speaking about an
acquaintance: "He said he was sorry I had not
properly appreciated the ultimate source of
religious sentiments. This consists in a particular
feeling which never leaves him personally, which he
finds shared by many others and which he may suppose
millions more also experience. It is a feeling which
he would like to call a sensation of eternity, a
feeling as of something limitless, unbounded,
something oceanic. It is, he says, a purely
suggestive experience, not an article of belief. It
implies no assurance of personal immortality, but it
is a source of the religious spirit and is taken
hold of by the various churches and religions and
directed by them into definite channels."
Freud goes on to say that he himself has never had
this feeling, but that he recognizes that he has
confidence in his friend's judgment, he recognizes
that this is a reality, and he continues to discuss
this in psychoanalytic derivational terms as being a
return to the undifferentiated state of the infant
or very young child before he begins to split
himself into Self and object. I assume that this is
somewhat familiar to many of you from your readings.
However, I would like to say that this is a very
common experience, and perhaps can be lumped
conveniently under the heading of the unity of all
experience in many religions. It is spoken of by the
Christian Mystics, as well as the Hindu Mystics.
They all get this feeling, and apparently the little
sixteen-year-old teenie-bopper that drops a capsule
down in the Haight-Ashbury gets it as well.
One thing that has rather surprised me, and I have
talked with quite a few people about their
psychedelic experiences, is the apparent reluctance
to talk about the religious aspect of the
experience. As a matter of fact, I might say that
people who take psychedelic drugs don't commonly
talk very much about it. I am forced to conclude
that either there is an amnesia for the experience,
or that people, for some reason, are unable or
unwilling, or feel that there is a certain
sacredness about the experience, which cannot be
discussed lightly or casually. I would like to
suggest to you a hypothesis as to the nature of this
oceanic experience, and I would also like to say
something about this ocean.
As we grow from childhood into adulthood, we develop
a number of coping mechanisms, of ways of dealing
with the world. We get toilet training, then we
learn to tie our shoes, and then we learn to say
"yes, mommy," and then we learn to say "yes,
teacher," and then we learn to blow our nose. From
what I have seen of people who have taken drugs,
these coping mechanisms, which come roughly under
the headings of ego and super-ego in psychoanalysis,
are identified as Self, as me. The me is felt to be
this part which receives and controls, and the great
source of anxiety and indeed, panic, in many
psychedelic experiences, is the fact that
psychedelic drugs seem to disrupt the ego. As far as
I'm concerned, to call psychedelic drugs
ego-expanding, or mind-expanding, is a misnomer,
except insofar as they are integration-inhibiting so
that things start letting go instead of being held
together. But this action takes place because the
controls, the integrated aspects of the person are
released, and this, to my mind, is the source of
anxiety about the psychedelic experience. This
release is felt as a loss of Self. When there is a
total letting-go, this can be felt as ego-death, or
death of Self.
You will recall that unless a man dies to the world,
he cannot be reborn. I think that is a slight
misquotation, but the essential is there. Unless a
person loses his individual ego, at least
temporarily, he simply cannot merge with his total
Self. Now, I am not even curious about theology. I
have enough trouble trying to figure out psychiatric
systems of thought. But my impression is that the
concept of God within the self is accepted, at least
in certain circles, and it would seem to me that it
would be a hypothesis worth looking at, to say that
what is happening is that at a certain point, mind
can observe Self, or that the observing function is
not lost along with this ego disruption. When I look
outside here, I have in my perception depth,
perspective, and differentiation. In other words, I
structure the universe around me, and if I do a
fairly decent job, I don't stumble when I go
upstairs. If I'm stoned on acid or grass or alcohol
or love, I may not perceive my universe correctly,
and I may stumble. But my internal perception, or my
mind function, doesn't have any of these spatial or
temporal boundaries. Therefore, I naturally,
internally, am in an oceanic state.
The nicest word you can call this state is a state
of narcissism, and you might even want to go on and
call it mental-onanism, I don't know. But it seems
to me that we can advance the hypothesis that many
types of mental phenomena, and religious phenomena,
particularly mystic phenomena, can be understood in
terms of awareness of the function of mind, of
observing the total Self, which everyone agrees is
an awful lot bigger than this narrow integrated
aspect of controlling self.
In our culture, we are controlled; in fact we tend
to be a paranoid control-mad culture. The effect on
the individual of growing up with this type of
control is to make much of myself inaccessible to me
because I am taught to set up barriers, walls,
fences against certain areas of function. For
example, tenderness in men is very commonly fenced
out of awareness. The expression of feeling by a man
in an Anglo-Saxon culture is frowned upon. Men don't
cry. This area is not accessible, and so on, and on,
and on. This could be called a culture in which the
model for the human being is the machine. We view
ourselves as machines, and we view others as
machines, and I suspect that generally, although
I've only seen this manifested by a couple of
people, we also view God as a machine. I won't
continue too far in this direction, except to say
that I have observed this attitude to be the source
of a good bit of psychopathological difficulty in
human beings today, and I feel that this attitude
is one of the main things that the Hippies, the
youth, are trying to escape from. This attitude is
predominant in the middle-class housewife, the
successful businessman, who are having strong
feelings of self-inundation, much like their
teen-age children.
I presented the hypothesis that much of the mystic
experience could be the experience of the death of
the controlling self, and the consequent awareness
of the total Self; and that this experience, as
Freud suggests, is the power from which the
motivations toward religion come, and hence, values.
It is the energy for the development of a value
system which the church represents in our world
today. To support this, I would simply point out to
you that mystics are hard to live with, whether in
the Haight-Ashbury, or in monasteries. All types of
mystical experience are highly personal, and hence
socially disruptive. I think we have to look at this
in terms of the Haight-Ashbury, and the surrounding
society attempting to find a way to integrate the
Haight-Ashbury. And I must say that I am very
ambivalent about this. I think I agree with Tim
Leary, that society will have to integrate the
psychedelic experience. We have already been given a
possible model by one of the great writers of our
time, Aldous Huxley. To any of you who are curious
about this, I recommend that you read his
essay-novel, Island. Island is not the great, happy
turn-on that Brave New World is, but it depicts the
legitimate, socially integrated, socially useful use
of psychedelic materials within the context of the
church.
I will add this, that it has been my personal belief
all along in the six years I have been working with
these materials, that probably the most
satisfactory, all-around solution is for the
psychedelic drug experience to be integrated into
the established church structure. As long as it is
outside the structure, it is going to be disruptive.
I must also add, however, that the structure will
have to change some, to accommodate it. And it won't
hurt the structure.
One source of my uneasiness about this whole area is
that I think that these drugs do lend themselves to
power formation and manipulation. Fortunately, to
this point no one has used them for these purposes.
I may be wrong. It may be that this experience is so
unique that it cannot be so misused. We did a survey
of middle-class, over-30-years-of-age users, asking
them whether they had had a religious experience.
About 80% of them answered, yes, they did. How did
this affect their attitude toward church-going and
the dogma of their church? Well, church-going was a
little bit better, not much. But the large majority
of the total sample, about 60%, said that they were
strengthened and affirmed in the belief of the
church of which they were members. There was only
one exception, and this seemed to be a sort of
fluttery agnostic who flipped over and was
completely out of it. In general, however,
previously gained religious belief was strengthened.
Before I finish, I would like to speak a little
about the oceanic experience, because this is a very
watery term. Anyone who has had a psychedelic
experience more than a few times, enough so that he
has some ability to know where he is, will tell you
that the mind is an ocean. The mind is an ocean, but
it is just like that ocean out there, in that it has
all sorts of features; It's got islands, and it's
got depths, and it's got shallows, and there are
some very queer fish running around in it To say
that the experiencing of mind is simple an oceanic
experience is similar to dismissing the Pacific
Ocean as being simply a lot of water. There is a
great deal to be learned about what goes on in those
depths by psychological scuba-divers, because I
believe that it can be charted. I must say that I
don't know anyone who has really started charting it
yet, but it can be charted. The adult individual who
takes a psychedelic drug and returns to this total
embracing state of infancy is still not an infant.
He is an adult with adult equipment, with adult
awareness, who is now going back and looking at
something in a very different way than he looked at
it when he was truly an infant. So to simply assume
that taking drugs drives you out of your mind and
back to infancy is just not so. We need
psychological underwater explorers, or in-the-mind
explorers. I personally believe that this is also
married with the church, and has a great deal to
offer, because anybody who has been there will tell
you that there are some very, very frightening
things to experience. Based upon the reality of
dualistic thinking, the dualistic pattern of thought
that seems to be inevitable to the functioning of
the human mind, there is the reality of good and the
reality of evil, and both are just there. There is
no getting around the fact that there is God, and
there is the Devil. Now, how does one interpret God,
and how does one interpret the Devil? Demons exist
in the mind, and an individual, to be able to meet
those demons, must have both support and courage,
and also some good demonology ahead of time, because
those demons can get loose. I'm not saying that any
of those demons with horns, hoofs, and a picturesque
name is going to come walking down the steps, but in
terms of what a person is, and I am still a psychic
rationalist, I must say, these demons do exist in
the world of human relationships as projections of
our fears.
One of the places in which my observations simply do
not agree with those of Freud, and I don't know why
this is true, is this: You will recall that Freud
states that there are both Eros, the constructive,
loving aspect of life, and Thanatos, the destructive
aspect. And he was very pessimistic about the basic
purpose of civilization and culture, which he saw as
being the control of aggression. There are other
purposes, but this is the basic one. But oddly
enough, in the close to 200 people that I have
observed, or treated, who have had psychedelic
materials, I have never once seen aggression,
hostility, or destructiveness. I have seen people
who got panicky and confused, and hurt themselves,
but this was because of a misinterpretation of
reality, and not because they were trying to commit
suicide. I won't say that aggression does not
appear. But I haven't seen it.
I have seen a lot of love, a lot of tenderness, a
lot of grief, a lot of fear, but I have not seen the
desire to destroy people. How this observation
relates to the drug experience, I don't know, except
that we do know, just by sheer observation, that
there are two rather odd characteristics common to
psychedelic drug users: one is that they are rather
passive people, and the other is that they are
uncommonly honest. They are so honest. Well, I can't
help but wonder if perhaps, and this is just a
perhaps, this kind of experience of being one with
everything leads to a particular kind of
identification with other people. I might say that
Freud wouldn't agree with me on this point, if I am
interpreting from his book correctly. But I wanted
to mention this here, because I am so intrigued by
the fact that one of the things that is happening in
the psychedelic culture is the revival of the
pre-Christian nature, or the so called Pagan cult.
It's there. You just walk down Haight Street and go
in and look. The astrology, atheism, fertility
rites, all of these nature-based religion
expressions are flowering. They are like those
mushrooms in the Sinai Desert. They are just coming
right up. I personally have been somewhat concerned
about the revival of the Black Mass, which is also
coming back, but I am sure that that will be all
right too.
I would also say, to the representatives of the
established church here, which in this country is
the Christian Church, that one of the things that
really strikes me is that the missionaries to the
Hippies are not Christians, with very few
exceptions. A missionary is a person who gets down
there and lives with them, lives their life. The
people who are doing this are the Buddhists. There
are all kinds of Buddhist's running around now, as
well as apostles of witchcraft, black magic,
astrology, and other occult groups as well. I ask
you, in terms of the social significance of the
psychedelic movement -- when are there going to be
missionaries to the Hippies ?
I would like to end with this remark, and this is a
non-psychiatric, entirely personal criticism; I'd
say that the chief characteristic of most protestant
churches today is that they are no fun. I'll say
this, echoing John Wesley, Why should the Devil have
all the tunes? It seems to me that unless we return
joy, "ecstasy now" to religion, (and this is a
social, psychiatric remark for which I do take
responsibility,) we are faced with either
suppressing a movement that involves a very tangible
faction of our young people, which would involve
none other than a witch hunt, or recognizing the
fact that this is a great religious revival akin to
the great Protestant revival of the last century. I
won't go so far as to say akin to the Reformation,
but it has significance far beyond the relatively
few young people that you see out here in the
Haight-Ashbury.
Thank you.
Reverend Laird Sutton:
I want to say a few words about how I see cultural
and religious factors and the current psychedelic
movement. You will understand that what I say is
only my vision. I want to describe some areas that I
consider to be what I call cultural vacuums existing
within our society, and I see the people involved in
the psychedelic movement as moving into these areas;
I also want to say something about the character of
religious experience as I see it.
One of the factors contributing to a cultural vacuum
in this society is an ethical problem. It seems that
our society, based on the Judeo-Christian religious
heritage, sees men's actions and reactions toward
one another as actions evolving out of a sense of
duty. This is not in keeping with the real heart of
the Judeo-Christian heritage, but it is what man
does today. We seem to react and do things in
relationship to one another mainly because of duty,
and this has been taught to us for a long time, in
our schooling, by the church, by our parents.
But it appears to me that one of the things that is
happening today is that some people are refusing to
act and react to one another primarily out of a
sense of duty. Rather, they are attempting the very
difficult and sometimes dangerous, sometimes
misunderstood action, of attempting to relate to one
another out of a concept of love. To react to one
another with an attitude of love is much different
than to react to one another out of an attitude of
duty. It is not always an easy thing to do, and it
leaves a person open for what might be called
situational ethics, rather than an ethic of duty.
But relating from a sense of duty seems to create
the vacuum I am trying to describe, and people are
moving into this, attempting to replace it with some
sort of semblance of unity, or meaning. We call this
manifestation the love community, wherein people are
attempting to relate to one another on the basis of
love, to compensate for what seems to be a very
decided lack of love-ethic within our society.
Many people apparently feel that they have not been
able to relate in terms of love in their homes,
their churches, or their communities, and they are
now attempting to do this, sometimes successfully
and sometimes not. But when they do succeed, it is a
fantastic and beautiful thing.
There are other vacuums, and I want to go through
them rather quickly, because of time. I think that
within our society there is what might be called a
spiritual vacuum. All these things tie in with one
another. But the spiritual vacuum existing within
our society has a number of different parts to it.
One of the important parts is that there seem to be
very few acceptable forms of worship today. By
acceptable, I mean forms of worship that are
relevant to man in terms of where he is and in terms
of his relationship to the world, and his deity, and
his understanding of himself. Forms of worship we
have inherited from the past have their own
validity, but today they may also be invalid and
unacceptable for a number of reasons. They may be
irrelevant in terms of language, irrelevant in terms
of contemporary issues, and highly irrelevant
because of the associations that accompany the forms
themselves. These forms carry with them many
hundreds of years of associations, during which time
there have been occasions when the Christian church
might be said to have defecated upon its own faith,
in terms of the enormous gap between what it has
preached and what it has done.
I believe that if you go to church and it doesn't
turn you on, you shouldn't bother about going.
Either you should find out why it doesn't turn you
on, and then see that it does, or you should engage
in another form of worship which does turn you on.
Another important part of the spiritual vacuum that
I see within contemporary Christianity is a
pronounced distrust of mysticism and the inner life
and spirituality of the individual. In many cases it
appears to me that the Christian church no longer
knows what it is attempting to do, in terms of
helping people to come to an understanding of what
it means to be involved in a spiritual movement or a
spiritual exercise, or a spiritual endeavor. Often
the Christian church today, out of a sense of guilt,
perhaps, engages upon highly successful social
action projects. But it seems to have become so
involved in social action and the establishment, and
political manipulative techniques, that it has more
or less set aside the full aspect of mysticism and
the validity that mysticism may have within
contemporary life.
In terms of the Christian tradition, this is nothing
new. The Christian church has always mistrusted the
mystic throughout all of history. It usually learns
to trust the mystic several hundred years after the
mystic is dead. But this is part of the game that we
have today, this distrust of mysticism, this
emphasis upon social action, which is quite evident
in terms of the Haight-Ashbury, even though the
Haight-Ashbury is only one part of the entire
psychedelic movement. The involvement of the
Christian church in the Haight-Ashbury is more in
terms of social action, in terms of doing good
things for people, while the spiritual guidance of
the Haight-Ashbury is left to other people. My only
hope is that these other people will do an adequate
job, because I don't know when the Christian Church
will be able to engage in leading or helping people
to understand what it is to be involved in the inner
mind.
A third part of the spiritual vacuum of today is the
lack of periods of intense, individual, religious
development. Within many of the other societies of
the world there is always built into a man's
development or a man's life a period of intense
religious instruction. There are initiation rites;
the initiation rites that we have in the church
today have been watered down to the point that they
seem little more than a social happening. There is
very little imparting of wisdom. There is very
little imparting of mystery. There is very little
imparting of this religious development which is so
necessary to the total development of man. Of
course, we have our Sunday school classes, and we
have our catechism classes, but if you listen
carefully to those who attend them, or if you have
attended them yourselves, you realize what they
really are.
Also contributing to this spiritual vacuum is the
lack of an adequate body of religious literature
dealing with either the psychedelic or the religious
experience. There are many things being written
today which ostensibly will deal with this, but most
of the time it is dealt with in such a narrow-minded
theological framework as to be almost totally
irrelevant to the place that an individual is in.
Every now and then, however, it is possible for
someone within the psychedelic movement to get hold
of some writings of the early Christian mystics and
find out that these fellows really knew what they
were talking about. Sometimes people begin to
re-read the Bible with an acid eye, and it is a gas
when you do it because it is quite a book. I think
that of all the body of world literature, perhaps
the New Testament is the only sacred literature that
can adequately deal with the whole concept of love
today, and when I speak about the New Testament I am
speaking about the gospel, and about some of Paul's
writings. People who validate with the New Testament
what is going on today are making very severe,
telling, and accurate judgments upon the church and
what it has done to the faith.
Still another aspect of this vacuum is that there
exist within our society few opportunities for a
person to engage in a philosophical or religious
search as to the meaning of man and his existence.
Of course, we have education. We have high school,
we have grade school, kindergarten, colleges, and
graduate schools, but these present very few
opportunities to really engage in either a
philosophical or a religious search. Allowances for
this to happen are simply not built into our
culture. Perhaps part of this is because of the
emphasis today upon the Protestant ethic of the
value of work, and the measurement of the value of a
man by how much money he can put in his pocket and
how much time he spends in the office.
As people involved in the psychedelic movement move
into this spiritual vacuum, attempting to fill a
lack within our culture, a new culture, a
subculture, is developing. And a new form of
religious expression is developing along with it.
One of the glorious things about man is that you can
bottle him up for a while, but pretty soon man goes
off the bottle, or off the top of his head, and he
then moves out and does those things the
opportunities for which do not exist within the
culture. I feel that the psychedelic movement, when
we look back upon it in twenty or fifty or a hundred
years, will be recognized as one of the most
profound and far-reaching movements that we have
seen, certainly within this century, and perhaps we
will compare it to the Reformation.
I think there are a number of changes in the
character of religious expression which are
developing today. They are not necessarily unique in
terms of the religious development of man throughout
history, but they are certainly worth looking at
closely today. One of the things that is very
prominent and extremely important is the re-emphasis
upon the primary religious experience of the
individual. Of all things that I find within the
psychedelic movement in terms of religious
expression, this is one of the most important. This
may be called tripping, it may be called a number of
different names, but the emphasis is upon the
primary religious experience of the individual.
Thus, the religious experience becomes not something
that someone tells you about, but something that you
experience for yourself. Those who know what they
are about understand that the pill is not the
experience, and they understand that God is not
being 'manufactured' today, and they understand that
this primary religious experience is the factor upon
which they wish to base the rest of their lives.
This factor, because of its importance, is also the
factor around which many hang-ups and difficulties
within the psychedelic movement, should they
develop, will do so. This happens again and again,
whenever a religious movement develops in history. A
group of people forms, who have their primary
religious experiences, and then gathering around
this group of people are other people who may not
necessarily have had this religious experience for
themselves. And because they have not had this
primary personal experience, they will not
understand what is really happening. Those of you
who live in the Haight-Ashbury, or who have been
there recently, will understand what I am
saying--that some of the difficulties and change of
atmosphere in the Haight-Ashbury can be understood
in terms of many individuals coming in and
attempting to assume the trappings without
undergoing the experience itself.
There is another very interesting thing which is
beginning to happen, and to find expression in terms
of character of religious expression, and that is
the movement of significant meaning from sign to
symbol, and one point past that, from symbol to
actual experience. Let me explain what I mean by
these words. A sign is a sign, and it points toward
something but it does not participate in what it
points to. A symbol not only points to something,
but it also participates in what it points to. In
terms of graphic illustration, in the Christian
tradition the cross is both sign and symbol, in that
it points both to and participates in what it points
to.
For a great part of our life we live on a sign level
of pointing to things, but not participating, but
sometimes we move past this and begin to exist on a
symbol level, a level of talking about something,
perhaps, but also participating in it at the same
time. My feeling is that the psychedelic movement
has pushed sign and symbol one step farther, and I
think that this third step is the most important.
This is the step of experience itself.
I think that this is what McCluhan is attempting to
say in all of his work-that we have moved from sign
to symbol to experience, and total experience is now
the important thing.
Let's think about this in terms of the church.
Reverend Cromy talked about the symbols used in the
church. It seems to me that the psychedelic movement
tries to push the movement one more step, revealing
that the preparation is itself the experience, as
much as is that for which the preparation prepares.
People today are beginning to understand this, as
their life patterns begin to take on a total meaning
of experience. People are finding that the religious
experience is not necessarily something that is
evoked. Men spend a lot of time trying to evoke the
religious experience. But I think we are beginning
to understand that the religious experience is not
necessarily something to be evoked, that what men do
is the religious experience itself. As we begin to
understand this, it seems to me that a totally
different view of life, and of man, and of his
relationship to the ground on which he walks, and
the deity within him and within which he is, becomes
very important. Life begins to take on a total
aspect, discarding the split aspect with which we
normally live. I am very encouraged that we are
moving from sign to symbol and finally to
experience.
I think that another change in the character of
religious expression today is a renewal of the whole
concept of worship for individuals and groups, a
concept wherein worship constitutes a total life
experience. It is not shut off into something which
is dull, or something which is gray, or something
which is evoked only by a particular type of action.
Those of the church who are worried about the
psychedelic movement ought to stand up and applaud,
because this is what they have been talking about
for several thousand years, and it is now beginning
to happen.
Another change appears in terms of models for life
and models for expression. One thing that
characterizes the contemporary psychedelic religion
is its extreme syncretism. It is a syncretistic
religious expression. It takes form from all the
religions of the world, and does so in a very
beautiful manner. When the psychedelic movement
first began, in the early 1960's, there was heavy
emphasis upon the religious expression of India, and
of Japan, and we still find these expressions within
the movement. Then things began to shift, and today
it would appear that the religious expression of the
American Indian is the most general model used. I
have the feeling that the outcome is going to be a
beautiful merging of East Indian, American Indian,
and Judeo-Christian heritage. These things will meld
together in a universally beautiful religious
expression.
I frankly don't know what is going to happen to the
psychedelic movement itself. I have a feeling that
within a year or two, all that will be left will be
a remnant. I have the feeling that a group of people
are going to remain within the movement, and that
when psychedelics move more and more into the
commercial life of the United States, that their
impact will be less and less. But I think that a
group of people, perhaps scattered all over the
world, will remain -- this seems to be something
that occurs within any religious movement -- and I
think that this remnant is going to continue to have
a decided influence upon the society in which we
live.
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