Do Drugs Have Religious Import?
Huston Smith, Ph.D.
©The Journal of Philosophy, Vol LXI, No. 18, September 17, 1964
Until six months ago, if I picked up my phone in the
Cambridge area and dialed KISS-BIG a voice would answer,
"Ifif." These were coincidences: KISS-BIG simply
happened to be the letter equivalents of an arbitrarily assigned
telephone number, while I.F.I.F. represented the initials of an
organization with the improbable name of the International
Federation for Internal Freedom. But the coincidences were
apposite to the point of being poetic. "Kiss big"
caught the euphoric, manic, life-embracing attitude that
characterized this most publicized of the organizations formed to
explore the newly synthesized consciousness-changing substances,
while the organization itself was surely one of the
"iffy-est" phenomena to appear on our social and
intellectual scene in some time. It produced the first firings in
Harvard's history, an ultimatum to get out of Mexico in five
days, and "the miracle of Marsh Chapel" in which during
a two-and-one-half hour Good Friday service ten theological
students and professors ingested psilocybin and were visited by
what they generally reported to be the deepest religious
experiences of their lives.
Despite the last of these phenomena and its numerous if less
dramatic parallels, students of religion appear by and large to
be dismissing the psychedelic drugs which have sprung to our
attention in the sixties as having little religious relevance.
The position taken in one of the most forward-looking volumes of
theological essays to have appeared in recent years (1) accepts R. C.
Zaehner's Mysticism Sacred and Profane as having
"fully examined and refuted" the religious claims for
mescaline which Aldous Huxley sketched in The Doors of
Perception. This closing of the case strikes me as premature,
for it looks as if the drugs have light to throw on the history
of religion, the phenomenology of religion, the philosophy of
religion, and the practice of the religious life itself.
1. Drugs and Religion Viewed Historically
In his trial-and-error life explorations man almost
everywhere has stumbled upon connections between vegetables
(eaten or brewed) and actions (yogic breathing exercises,
whirling dervish dances, flagellations) which altered states of
consciousness. From the psychopharmacological standpoint we now
understand these states to be the products of changes in brain
chemistry. From the sociological perspective we see that they
tended to be connected in some way with religion. If we discount
the wine used in our own communion services, the instances
closest to us in time and space are the peyote of The Native
American (Indian) Church and Mexico's 2,000-year-old
"sacred mushrooms," the latter rendered in Aztec as
"God's flesh"—striking parallel to "the body
of our Lord" in the Christian Eucharist. Beyond these
neighboring instances lie the soma of the Hindus, the haoma
and hemp, identical with and better known as marijuana, of the
Zoroastrians, the Dionysus of the Greeks who "everywhere..
. taught men the culture of the vine and the mysteries of his
worship and everywhere [was] accepted as a god," (2) the benzoin
of Southeast Asia, Zen's tea whose fifth cup purifies and whose
sixth "calls to the realm of the immortals," (3) the pituri
of the Australian aborigines and probably the mystic kykeon
that was eaten and drunk at the climactic close of the sixth day
of the Eleusinian mysteries. (4) There is no need to extend the list,
especially as Philippie de Felice's comprehensive study of the
subject, Poisons Sacrés, Ivresses Divines (Sacred Poisons,
Divine Raptures), is about to appear in English.
More interesting than the fact that consciousness-changing
devices have been linked with religion is the possibility that
they actually initiated many of the religious perspectives which,
taking root in history, continued after their psychedelic origins
were forgotten. Bergson saw the first movement of Hindus and
Greeks toward "dynamic religion" as associated with the
"divine rapture" found in intoxicating beverages; (5) more recently
Robert Graves, Gordon Wasson and Alan Watts have suggested that
most religions arose from such chemically-induced theophanies.
Mary Barnard is the most explicit proponent of this thesis.
"Which... was more likely to happen first," she asks
in the autumn 1963 journal of Phi Beta Kappa: "the
spontaneously generated idea of an afterlife in which the
disembodied soul, liberated from the restrictions of time and
space, experiences eternal bliss, or the accidental discovery of
hallucinogenic plants that give a sense of euphoria, dislocate
the center of consciousness, and distort time and space, making
them balloon outward in greatly expanded vistas?" Her own
answer is that "the [latter] experience might have had...
an almost explosive effect on the largely dormant minds of men,
causing them to think of things they had never thought of before.
This, if you like, is direct revelation." Her use of the
subjunctive "might" renders this formulation of her
answer equivocal, but she concludes her essay on a note that is
completely unequivocal: "Looking at the matter coldly,
unintoxicated and unentranced, I am willing to prophesy that
fifty theo-botanists working for fifty years would make the
current theories concerning the origins of much mythology and
theology as out-of-date as pre-Copernican astronomy." (6)
This is an important hypothesis—one which must surely
engage the attention of historians of religion for some time to
come. But as I am concerned here only to spot the points at which
the drugs erupt onto the field of serious religious study, not to
ride the geysers to whatever height, I shall not pursue Miss
Barnard's thesis. Having located what appears to be the crux of
the historical question, namely the extent to which drugs not
merely duplicate or simulate theologically sponsored experiences
but generate or shape theologies themselves, I turn to
phenomenology.
2. Drugs and Religion Viewed Phenomenologically
Phenomenology attempts a careful description of human
experience. The question the drugs pose for the phenomenology of
religion, therefore, is whether the experiences they induce
differ from religious experiences reached au nature and if so
how.
Even the Bible notes that chemically induced psychic states
bear some resemblance to religious ones. Peter had to
appeal to a circumstantial criterion—the early hour of the
day—to defend those who were caught up in the Pentecostal
experience against the charge that they were merely drunk:
"These men are not drunk, as you suppose, since it is only
the third hour of the day" (Acts 2:15); and Paul initiates
the comparison when he admonishes the Ephesians not to "get
drunk with wine... but [to] be filled with the spirit"
(Ephesians 5:18). Are such comparisons, paralleled in the
accounts of virtually every religion, superficial? How far can
they be pushed?
Not all the way, students of religion have thus far insisted.
With respect to the new drugs, Professor R. C. Zaehner has drawn
the line emphatically. "The importance of Huxley's Doors
of Perception," he writes, "is that in it the
author clearly makes the claim that what he experienced under the
influence of mescalin is closely comparable to a genuine mystical
experience. If he is right... the conclusions... are
alarming." (7)
Zaehner thinks that Huxley is not right, but Zaehner is mistaken.
There are, of course, innumerable drug experiences which
haven't a religious feature; they can be sensual as readily as
spiritual, trivial as readily as transforming, capricious as
readily as sacramental. If there is one point about which every
student of the drugs agrees, it is that there is no such thing as
the drug experience per se—no experience which the drugs, as
it were, merely secrete. Every experience is a mix of three
ingredients: drug, set (the psychological makeup of the
individual) and setting (the social and physical environment in
which it is taken). But given the right set and setting, the
drugs can induce religious experiences indistinguishable from
ones that occur spontaneously. Nor need set and setting be
exceptional. The way the statistics are currently running, it
looks as if from one-fourth to one-third of the general
population will have religious experiences if they take the drugs
under naturalistic conditions, meaning by this conditions in
which the researcher supports the subject but doesn't try to
influence the direction his experience will take. Among subjects
who have strong religious inclinations to begin with, the
proportion of those having religious experiences jumps to
three-fourths. If they take them in settings which are religious
too, the ratio soars to nine out of ten.
How do we know that the experiences these people have really
are religious? We can begin with the fact that they say they are.
The "one-fourth to one-third of the general populous"
figure is drawn from two sources. Ten months after they had had
their experiences, 24 percent of the 194 subjects in a study by
the California psychiatrist Oscar Janiger characterized them as
having been religious. (8)
Thirty-two percent of the 74 subjects in Ditman and Hayman's
study reported that in looking back on their LSD experience it
looked as if it had been "very much" or "quite a
bit" a religious experience; 42 percent checked as true the
statement that they "were left with a greater awareness of
God, or a higher power, or ultimate reality." (9) The statement that
three-fourths of subjects having religious "sets" will
have religious experiences comes from the reports of sixty-nine
religious professionals who took the drugs while the Harvard
project was in progress. (10)
In the absence of (a) a single definition of a religious
experience acceptable to psychologists of religion generally, and
(b) foolproof ways of ascertaining whether actual experiences
exemplify any definition, I am not sure there is a better way of
telling whether the experiences of the 333 men and women involved
in the above studies were religious than by noting whether they
seemed so to them. But if more rigorous methods are preferred,
they exist; they have been utilized and confirm the conviction of
the man in the street that drug experiences can indeed be
religious. In his doctoral study at Harvard University, Dr.
Walter Pahnke worked out a typology of religious experience (in
this instance of the mystical variety) based on the classic cases
of mystical experiences as summarized in Walter Stace's Mysticism
and Philosophy. He then administered psilocybin to ten
theology students and professors in the setting of a Good Friday
service. The drug was given "double-blind," meaning
that neither Dr. Pahnke nor his subjects would know which ten
were getting psilocybin and which ten placebos to constitute a
control group. Subsequently the reports the subjects wrote of
their experiences were laid successively before three
college-graduate housewives who, without being informed about the
nature of the study, were asked to rate each statement as to the
degree (strong, moderate, slight, or none) to which it
exemplified each of the nine traits of mystical experience as
enumerated in the typology of mysticism worked out in advance.
When the test of significance was applied to their statistics, it
showed that "those subjects who received psilocybin
experienced phenomena which were indistinguishable from, if not
identical with... the categories defined by our typology of
mysticism." (11)
With the thought that the reader might like to test his own
powers of discernment on the question being considered, I insert
here a simple test I gave to a group of Princeton students
following a recent discussion sponsored by the Woodrow Wilson
Society.
Below are accounts of two religious experiences. One
occurred under the influence of drugs, one without their
influence. Check the one you think was drug-induced.
I
Suddenly I burst into a vast, new, indescribably wonderful
universe. Although I am writing this over a year later, the
thrill of the surprise and amazement, the awesomeness of the
revelation, the engulfment in an overwhelming feeling-wave of
gratitude and blessed wonderment, are as fresh, and the
memory of the experience is as vivid, as if it had happened
five minutes ago. And yet to concoct anything by way of
description that would even hint at the magnitude, the sense
of ultimate reality... this seems such an impossible task.
The knowledge which has infused and affected every aspect of
my life came instantaneously and with such complete force of
certainty that it was impossible, then or since, to doubt its
validity.
II
All at once, without warning of any kind, I found myself
wrapped in a flame-colored cloud. For an instant I thought of
fire... the next, I knew that the fire was within myself.
Directly afterward there came upon me a sense of exultation,
of immense joyousness accompanied or immediately followed by
an intellectual illumination impossible to describe. Among
other things, I did not merely come to believe, but I saw
that the universe is not composed of dead matter, but is, on
the contrary, a living Presence; I became conscious in myself
of eternal life.... I saw that all men are immortal: that the
cosmic order is such that without any peradventure all things
work together for the good of each and all; that the
foundation principle of the world... is what we call love,
and that the happiness of each and all is in the long run
absolutely certain.
On the occasion referred to, twice the number of students
(46) answered incorrectly as answered correctly (23). I bury the
correct answer in a footnote to preserve the reader's opportunity
to test himself. (l2)
Why, in the face of this considerable evidence, does Zaehner
hold that drug experiences cannot be authentically religious?
There appear to be three reasons:
1. His own experience was "utterly trivial." This
of course proves that not all drug experiences are religious; it
does not prove that no drug experiences are religious.
2. He thinks that the experiences of others which appear to
be religious to them are not truly so. Zaehner distinguishes
three kinds of mysticism: nature mysticism in which the soul is
united with the natural world; monistic mysticism in which the
soul merges with an impersonal absolute; and theism in which the
soul confronts the living, personal God. He concedes that drugs
can induce the first two species of mysticism, but not its
supreme instance, the theistic. As proof, he analyzes Huxley's
experience as recounted in The Doors of Perception to show
that it produced at best a blend of nature and monistic
mysticism. Even if we were to accept Zaehner's evaluation of the
three forms of mysticism, Huxley's case, and indeed Zaehner's
entire book, would prove only that not every mystical experience
induced by the drugs is theistic. Insofar as Zaehner goes beyond
this to imply that drugs do not and cannot induce theistic
mysticism, he not only goes beyond the evidence but proceeds in
the face of it. Professor Slotkin reports that the peyote Indians
"see visions, which may be of Christ Himself. Sometimes they
hear the voice of the Great Spirit. Sometimes they become aware
of the presence of God and of those personal shortcomings which
must be corrected if they are to do His will." (l3) And G. M.
Carstairs, reporting on the use of psychedelic bhang (marijuana)
in India, quotes a Brahmin as saying, "It gives good
bhakti.... You get a very good bhakti with bhang," bhakti
being precisely Hinduism's theistic variant.
(l4)
3. There is a third reason why Professor Zaehner might doubt
that drugs can induce experiences that are genuinely mystical.
Professor Zaehner is a Roman Catholic, and Roman Catholic
doctrine teaches that mystical rapture is a gift of grace and as
such can never be reduced to man's control. This may be true;
certainly the empirical evidence cited does not preclude the
possibility of a genuine ontological or theological difference
between natural and drug-induced religious experiences. At this
point, however, we are considering phenomenology rather than
ontology, description rather than interpretation, and on this
level there is no difference. Descriptively, drug experiences
cannot be distinguished from their natural religious counterpart.
When the current philosophical authority on mysticism, Dr. W. T.
Stace, Professor Emeritus at Princeton University, was asked
whether the drug experience is similar to the mystical
experience, he answered, "It's not a matter of its being similar
to mystical experience; it is mystical experience."
What we seem to be witnessing in Zaehner's Mysticism
Sacred and Profane is a reenactment of the age-old pattern in
the conflict between science and religion. Whenever a new
controversy arises, religion's first impulse is to deny the
disturbing evidence science has produced. Seen in perspective,
Zaehner's refusal to admit that drugs can induce experiences
descriptively indistinguishable from those which are
spontaneously religious is the current counterpart of the
seventeenth century theologians' refusal to look through
Galileo's telescope or, when they did, their persistence in
dismissing what they saw as machinations of the devil. When the
fact that drugs can trigger religious experiences becomes
incontrovertible, discussion will move to the more difficult
question of how this new fact is to be interpreted. The latter
question leads beyond phenomenology into philosophy.
3. Drugs and Religion Viewed Philosophically
Why do people reject evidence? Because they find it
threatening, we may suppose. Theologians are not the only
professionals to utilize this mode of defense. In his Personal
Knowledge, Michael Polanyi recounts the way the medical
profession ignored such palpable facts as the painless amputation
of human limbs, performed before their own eyes in hundreds of
successive cases, concluding that the subjects were impostors who
were either deluding their physician or colluding with him. One
physician, Esdaile, carried out about 300 major operations
painlessly under mesmeric trance in India, but neither in India
nor in Great Britain could he get medical journals to print
accounts of his work. Polanyi attributes this closed-mindedness
to "lack of a conceptual framework in which their
discoveries could be separated from specious and untenable
admixtures."
The "untenable admixture" in the fact that
psychotomimetic drugs can induce religious experience is their
apparent implicate: that religious disclosures are no more
veridical than psychotic ones. For religious skeptics, this
conclusion is obviously not untenable at all; it fits in
beautifully with their thesis that all religion is at
heart an escape from reality. Psychotics avoid reality by
retiring into dream worlds of make-believe; what better evidence
that religious visionaries do the same than the fact that
identical changes in brain chemistry produces both states of
mind? Had not Marx already warned us that religion is the
"opiate" of the people? Apparently he was more
literally accurate than he supposed. Freud was likewise too mild.
He "never doubted that religious phenomena are to be
understood only on the model of the neurotic symptoms of the
individual." (15)
He should have said "psychotic symptoms."
So the religious skeptic is likely to reason. What about the
religious believer? Convinced that religious experiences are not
fundamentally delusory, can he admit that psychotomimetic drugs
can occasion them? To do so he needs (to return to Polanyi's
words) "a conceptual framework in which [the discoveries
can] be separated from specious and untenable admixtures,"
the latter being in this case the conclusion that religious
experiences are in general delusory.
One way to effect the separation would be to argue that
despite phenomenological similarities between natural and
drug-induced religious experiences, they are separated by a
crucial ontological difference. Such an argument would
follow the pattern of theologians who argue for the "real
presence" of Christ's body and blood in the bread and wine
of the Eucharist despite their admission that chemical analysis,
confined as it is to the level of "accidents" rather
than "essences," would not disclose this presence. But
this distinction will not appeal to many today, for it turns on
an essence-accident metaphysics which is not widely accepted.
Instead of fighting a rear-guard action by insisting that if drug
and non-drug religious experiences can't be distinguished
empirically there must be some trans-empirical factor which
distinguishes them and renders the drug experience profane, I
wish to explore the possibility of accepting drug-induced
experiences as religious in every sense of the word without
relinquishing confidence in the truth claims of religious
experience generally.
To begin with the weakest of all arguments, the argument from
authority: William James didn't discount his insights
which occurred while his brain chemistry was altered. The
paragraph in which he retrospectively evaluates his nitrous oxide
experiences has become classic, but it is so pertinent to the
present discussion that it merits quoting again.
One conclusion was forced upon my mind at that time, and
my impression of its truth has ever since remained unshaken.
It is that our normal waking consciousness, rational
consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of
consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the
filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of
consciousness entirely different. We may go through life
without suspecting their existence; but apply the requisite
stimulus, and at a touch they are there in all their
completeness, definite types of mentality which probably
somewhere have their field of application and adaptation. No
account of the universe in its totality can be final which
leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded.
How to regard them is the question—for they are so
discontinuous with ordinary consciousness. Yet they may
determine attitudes though they cannot furnish formulas, and
open a region though they fail to give a map. At any rate,
they forbid a premature closing of our accounts with reality.
Looking back on my own experiences, they all converge toward
a kind of insight to which I cannot help ascribing some
metaphysical significance. (16)
To this argument from authority, I add two that try to
provide something by way of reasons. Drug experiences that assume
a religious cast tend to have fearful and/or beatific features,
and each of my hypotheses relates to one of these aspects of the
experience.
Beginning with the ominous, "fear of the Lord,"
awe-ful features, Gordon Wasson, the New York
banker-turned-mycologist, describes these as he encountered them
in his psilocybin experience as follows: "Ecstasy! In common
parlance... ecstasy is fun.... But ecstasy is not fun. Your
very soul is seized and shaken until it tingles. After all, who
will choose to feel undiluted awe...? The unknowing vulgar
abuse the word; we must recapture its full and terrifying
sense." Emotionally the drug experience can be like having
forty-foot waves crash over you for several hours while you cling
desperately to a life raft which may be swept from under you at
any minute. It seems quite possible that such an ordeal, like any
experience of a close call, could awaken rather fundamental
sentiments respecting life and death and destiny and trigger the
"no atheists in foxholes" effect. Similarly, as the
subject emerges from the trauma and realizes that he is not going
to be insane as he had feared, there may come over him an
intensified appreciation like that frequently reported by
patients recovering from critical illness. "It happened on
the day when my bed was pushed out of doors to the open gallery
of the hospital," reads one such report.
I cannot now recall whether the revelation came suddenly
or gradually; I only remember finding myself in the very
midst of those wonderful moments, beholding life for the
first time in all its young intoxication of loveliness, in
its unspeakable joy, beauty, and importance. I cannot say
exactly what the mysterious change was. I saw no new thing,
but I saw all the usual things in a miraculous new
light—in what I believe is their true light. I saw for
the first time how wildly beautiful and joyous, beyond any
words of mine to describe, is the whole of life. Every human
being moving across that porch, every sparrow that flew,
every branch tossing in the wind, was caught in and was a
part of the whole mad ecstasy of loveliness, of joy, of
importance, of intoxication of life. (17)
If we do not discount religious intuitions because they are
prompted by battlefields and physical crises; if we regard
the latter as "calling us to our senses" more often
than they seduce us into delusions, need comparable intuitions be
discounted simply because the crises that trigger them are of an
inner, psychic variety?
Turning from the hellish to the heavenly aspects of the drug
experience, some of the latter may be explainable by the
hypothesis just stated; that is, they may be occasioned by the
relief that attends the sense of escape from high danger. But
this hypothesis cannot possibly account for all the
beatific episodes for the simple reason that the positive
episodes often come first, or to persons who experience no
negative episodes whatever. Dr. Sanford Unger of the National
Institute of Mental Health reports that among his subjects
"50 to 60 percent will not manifest any real disturbance
worthy of discussion," yet "around 75" will have
at least one episode in which exaltation, rapture, and joy are
the key descriptions. (18)
How are we to account for the drug's capacity to induce peak
experiences, such as the following, which are not preceded
by fear?
A feeling of great peace and contentment seemed to flow
through my entire body. All sound ceased and I seemed to be
floating in a great, very very still void or hemisphere. It
is impossible to describe the overpowering feeling of peace,
contentment, and being a part of goodness itself that I felt.
I could feel my body dissolving and actually becoming a part
of the goodness and peace that was all around me. Words can't
describe this. I feel an awe and wonder that such a feeling
could have occurred to me. (19)
Consider the following line of argument. Like every other
form of life, man's nature has become distinctive through
specialization. Man has specialized in developing a cerebral
cortex. The analytic powers of this instrument are a standing
wonder, but it seems less able to provide man with the sense that
he is meaningfully related to his environment, to life, the world
and history in their wholeness. As Albert Camus describes the
situation, "If I were... a cat among animals, this life
would have a meaning, or rather this problem would not arise, for
I should belong to this world. I would be this world to which I
am now opposed by my whole consciousness."
(20) Note that it is Camus'
consciousness that opposes him to his world. The drugs do not
knock this consciousness out, but while they leave it operative
they also activate areas of the brain that normally lie below its
threshold of awareness. One of the clearest objective signs that
the drugs are taking effect is the dilation they produce in the
pupils of the eyes, while one of the most predictable subjective
signs is the intensification of visual perception. Both of these
responses are controlled by portions of the brain that lie deep,
further to the rear than the mechanisms that govern
consciousness. Meanwhile we know that the human organism is
interlaced with its world in innumerable ways it normally cannot
sense—through gravitational fields, body respiration, and
the like; the list could be multiplied until man's skin began to
seem more like a thoroughfare than a boundary. Perhaps the deeper
regions of the brain which evolved earlier and are more like
those of the lower animals—"If I were... a cat..
. I should belong to this world"—can sense this
relatedness better than can the cerebral cortex which now
dominates our awareness. If so, when the drugs rearrange the
neurohumors that chemically transmit impulses across synapses
between neurons, man's consciousness and his submerged,
intuitive, ecological awareness might for a spell become
interlaced. This is, of course, no more than a hypothesis, but
how else are we to account for the extraordinary incidence under
the drugs of that kind of insight the keynote of which James
described as
invariably a reconciliation. It is as if the opposites of
the world, whose contradictoriness and conflict make all our
difficulties and troubles, were melted into one and the same
genus, but one of the species, the nobler and better one, is
itself the genus, and so soaks up and absorbs its opposites
into itself. (21)
4. The Drugs and Religion Viewed "Religiously"
Suppose that drugs can induce experiences that are
indistinguishable from religious ones, and that we can respect
their reports. Do they shed any light, not (we now ask) on life,
but on the nature of the religious life?
One thing they may do is throw religious experience itself
into perspective by clarifying its relation to the religious life
as a whole. Drugs appear able to induce religious experiences; it
is less evident that they can produce religious lives. It follows
that religion is more than religious experiences. This is hardly
news, but it may be a useful reminder, especially to those who
incline toward "the religion of religious experience,"
which is to say toward lives bent on the acquisition of desired
states of experience irrespective of their relation to life's
other demands and components.
Despite the dangers of faculty psychology, it remains useful
to regard man as having a mind, a will, and feelings. One of the
lessons of religious history is that to be adequate a faith must
rouse and involve all three components of man's nature. Religions
of reason grow arid; religions of duty, leaden. Religions of
experience have their comparable pitfalls, as evidenced by
Taoism's struggle (not always successful) to keep from
degenerating into quietism, and the vehemence with which Zen
Buddhism has insisted that once students have attained satori,
they must be driven out of it, back into the world. The case of
Zen is especially pertinent here, for it pivots on an
enlightenment experience—satori or kensho—which
some (but not all) Zennists says resembles LSD. Alike or
different, the point is that Zen recognizes that unless the
experience is joined to discipline, it will come to naught.
Even the Buddha... had to sit.... Without joriki,
the particular power developed through zazen [seated
meditation], the vision of oneness attained in enlightenment
... in time becomes clouded and eventually fades into a
pleasant memory instead of remaining an omnipresent reality
shaping our daily life.... To be able to live in accordance
with what the Mind's eye has revealed through satori
requires, like the purification of character and the
development of personality, a ripening period of zazen. (22)
If the religion of religious experience is a snare and a
delusion, it follows that no religion that fixes its faith
primarily in substances that induce religious experiences can be
expected to come to a good end. What promised to be a shortcut
will prove to be a short circuit; what began as a religion will
end as a religion surrogate. Whether chemical substances can be
helpful adjuncts to faith is another question. The
peyote-using Native American Church seems to indicate that they
can be; anthropologists give this church a good report, noting
among other things that members resist alcohol and alcoholism
better than do non-members. (23) The conclusion to which evidence
currently points would seem to be that chemicals can aid the
religious life, but only where set within a context of faith
(meaning by this the conviction that what they disclose is true)
and discipline (meaning diligent exercise of the will in the
attempt to work out the implications of the disclosures for the
living of life in the every day, common sense world).
Nowhere today in Western civilization are these two
conditions jointly fulfilled. Churches lack faith in the sense
just mentioned, hipsters lack discipline. This might lead us to
forget about the drugs, were it not for one fact: the distinctive
religious emotion and the one drugs unquestionably can
occasion—Otto's mysterium tremendum, majestas, mysterium
fascinans; in a phrase, the phenomenon of religious
awe—seems to be declining sharply. As Paul Tillich said in
an address to the Hillel Society at Harvard several years ago:
The question our century puts before us [is]: Is it
possible to regain the lost dimension, the encounter with the
Holy, the dimension which cuts through the world of
subjectivity and objectivity and goes down to that which is
not world but is the mystery of the Ground of Being?
Tillich may be right; this may be the religious question of
our century. For if (as we have insisted) religion cannot be
equated with religious experience, neither can it long survive
its absence.
References
1. Soundings: Essays Concerning
Christian Understandings, edited by A. R. Vidler. Cambridge:
The University Press, 1962, The statement cited appears on page
72. (back)
2. Hamilton, Edith. Mythology.
New York, Mentor Book, 1940, p. 55. (back)
3. Quoted in Alan Watts, The
Spirit of Zen. New York: Grove Press, 1958, p. 110. (back)
4. Mylonas, George. Eleusis and
the Eleusinian Mysteries. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton
University Press, 1961, p. 284. (back)
5. Two Sources of Morality and
Religion. New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1935, pp. 206-212. (back)
6. "The God in the
Flowerpot." The American Scholar (Autumn 1963), pp.
584, 586. (back)
7. Mysticism, Sacred and Profane.
New York: Oxford Galaxy Book, 1961, p. 12. (back)
8. Quoted in McGlothlin, William H.
"Long-lasting Effects of LSD on Certain Attitudes in
Normals." Printed for private distribution by the RAND
Corporation, p. 16. (back)
9. Ibid., pp. 45, 46. (back)
10. Leary, Timothy. "The
Religious Experience: Its Production and Interpretation." The
Psychedelic Review, vol. I, no. 3 (1964), p. 325. (back)
11. "Drugs and Mysticism: An
Analysis of the Relationship Between Psychedelic Drugs and the
Mystical Consciousness." A thesis presented to the Committee
on Higher Degrees in History and Philosophy of Religion, Harvard
University, June 1963. (back)
12. The first account is quoted
anonymously in "The Issue of the Consciousness-Expanding
Drugs." Main Currents in Modern Thought vol. XX, no.
I (September-October 1963), pp. 10-11. The second experience was
that of Dr. R. M. Bucke, the author of Cosmic Consciousness,
as quoted in James, William. The Varieties of Religious
Experience. New York: The Modern Library, 1902, pp. 390391.
The former experience occurred under the influence of drugs, the
latter did not. (back)
13. Slotkin, James S. Peyote
Religion. Glencoe, III.: Free Press, 1956. (back)
14. "Daru and Bhang." Quarterly
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15. Totem and Taboo. New
York: Modern Library, 1938. (back)
16. The Varieties of Religious
Experience, op. cit., pp. 378-379. (back)
17. Montague, Margaret Prescott. Twenty
Minutes of Reality. Saint Paul, Minn.: Macalester Park
Publishing Company, 1947, pp. 15, 17. (back)
18. "The Current Scientific
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Conference on Methods in Philosophy and the Sciences, New School
for Social Research, May 3, 1964. (back)
19. Quoted by Dr. Unger in the paper
just mentioned. (back)
20. The Myth of Sisyphus. New
York: Vintage, 1955, p. 38. (back)
21. James, William, op. cit.,
p. 379. (back)
22. Kapleau, Philip. Zen Practice
and Attainment. A manuscript in process of publication. (back)
23. Slotkin, James S., op. cit.
(back)