Psychedelics: A First-Amendment Right
by a Psychedelicist
If certain chemicals open one up to religious
experience, should they be
protected by the
Constitution? ©Gnosis* Magazine,
No. 26, Winter 1993.
TODAY IS THE FOURTH OF JULY, and I just put out my family's flag in front of
our house. It is supposed to mean that America stands for freedom, including
freedom of religion.
But I can't practice my religion openly
in America, and although I am legally allowed to advocate it, if I do so openly,
I may find myself less respected in my town. My opportunities at work may be
limited. My family and I could have trouble receiving government services or aid
if we needed them.
In the opening line of The Reformation,
historian Will Durant writes, "Religion is the last subject that the
intellect begins to understand."[1] At least part of the difficulty that Durant points to is due to
the fact that the foundation of religion is not thought, not belief, but
experience. Currently this situation is often reversed, and the error of putting
the wagon of belief before the horse of experience has produced the sorry state
of religion today. Durant's wish to understand religion misses the point
that religion is primarily experiential, not conceptual.
Experience is the mother of thought, and religious experience is the mother of
religious thought. Church, book, and dogma are byproducts of experience. To ask
someone who has never had a deep spiritual experience to grasp such an event
intellectually is akin to asking someone who has never tasted salt to understand
saltiness intellectually. I don 't mean that we shouldn't use the intellect to
examine spiritual experiences, but such knowledge will be shallow and
incomplete.
Sacred texts such as the Bible, the Talmud, or the
Qur'an provide us with some knowledge; they do give us some inkling of the
divine. Words can help guide us toward the light, but sometimes psychedelics
unbind us so we can turn around and face the light. Psychologist Frances Vaughan
mentions some of the ways in which her psychedelic experiences changed her
thinking:
The perennial philosophy and the esoteric teachings of all time
suddenly made sense. I understood why spiritual seekers were instructed to
look within, and the unconscious was revealed to be not just a useful concept,
but an infinite reservoir of creative potential. I felt I had been afforded a
glimpse into the nature of reality and the human potential within that
reality, together with a direct experience of being myself, free of illusory
identifications and constrictions of consciousness. My understanding of
mystical teachings, both Eastern and Western, Hindu, Buddhist, Christian, and
Sufi alike, took a quantum leap. I became aware of the transcendent unity at
the core of all the great religions, and understood for the first time the
meaning of ecstatic states.[2]
It's important to note that Vaughan describes
what is both an exploration of her mind and a religious experience. Most
Psychedelicists believe that the human mind includes a spiritual dimension, and
that if one goes far enough into one 's mind, one can reach this level. Thus
mind exploration is not merely psychology or psychotherapy; it is also spiritual
development. Because LSD and other entheogens ("entheogen" is derived from Greek
roots meaning "that which engenders god within") assist one in mind exploration,
they are sacraments.
I hesitate to use the word "God" in this
article because it comes loaded with so much doctrinal meaning. I will use the
word "god," however, as it most accurately expresses my sensation of holiness. I
do not mean a personal deity; to me it is best thought of as a force or energy
such as gravity, magnetism, or light.
What religious
experiences can be produced by LSD, peyote, or similar entheogens? For me, they
include a sense that holiness permeates everything even though we are usually
not aware of it; a feeling of love, blessedness, and adoration, a feeling that I
am being blessed without being particularly deserving and am returning this love
toward god; and what I will call a sense of mystical oneness, in which any sense
of separation between myself and god disappears. This is not to say that I as my
usual ego am the same as god, but rather that I temporarily leave that ego
behind and realize that separateness as we normally experience it is an
illusion.
There are many books about the experience of
mystical oneness. I will not add further to what others have said, except to
point out that mysticism can be seen as the belief in an ultimate unity of the
universe that can be directly experienced. Because of psychedelics, I too find
these ideas credible. They are the core of my belief system. Without my
psychedelic experiences I doubt that I would have even considered them at all.
In a very real sense LSD helped me find god—the god within—and I feel that I am
a better person for it. I am eternally grateful for the blessings and spiritual
richness psychedelics have brought into my life. Without them I would be without
god. I know many of my coreligionists feel the same. I hope my descendants will
also be able to engage with these ideas through psychedelic experiences.
How does a Psychedelicist view other current religious
practices? Within their limitations, church and word can be useful spiritual
guides if they are understood as being guideposts to the divine parts of our
minds. To Psychedelicists, however, the current overemphasis on church and Bible
verges on idolatry. These worldly, secondhand manifestations of god are located
in time and space, while god is timeless and spaceless. In a sense church and
word are like a two-dimensional, black-and-white photograph of a
three-dimensional object. They are better than nothing. But they also miss the
color, movement, development, and most importantly the fragrance of the sacred.
They are also distorted, filtered, and polluted by history, culture, and
language. They are largely (though thanks to a few mystics not entirely)
artifacts of our ordinary state of consciousness, with its limited experiences,
perceptions, thoughts, beliefs, and feelings.
What do
established religions offer to psychedelic religions? First, through their
belief systems, they may prepare a person's mind and heart for these
experiences, pointing to the door, perhaps, though not opening it. In this way
they provide an expectation of the divine and a way of recognizing, accepting,
and thinking about these experiences when they do occur. On the other hand, I
have found that organized religion often fails at this task, so that its
followers are completely unprepared for deep mystical experience. No doubt
psychedelic training, or something similar, would provide excellent professional
education for the clergy of all faiths.
Second, religion may
prepare one for sacred experience by "cleansing one's heart and mind" through
service, prayer, meditation, or other ego-relaxing exercises. Current spiritual
disciplines are probably good "readiness" exercises.
Third,
through sacred rituals, established religions may facilitate direct experience
of the divine. Some find that ecclesiastical ritual does work for them, and they
do sometimes experience the divine through religious practice. But they often
make the major error of presuming that their own paths are the only path to god.
Fourth, religious texts and rituals take on deeper meaning and
significance when viewed from a sacred state of consciousness. Among the
two-dimensional words that suddenly become three-dimensional in meaning through
psychedelics are such statements as "The kingdom of God is within you"; "We are
all children of God"; "Be still and know that I am God"; "You must die and be
born again to enter the kingdom of heaven." As a Christian Psychedelicist, most
of my experience is with the Bible, but I understand from friends of other
religious backgrounds that their texts also become more meaningful.
Thanks to LSD, I now see church, religious practice, and dogma as derived
from spiritual experience, though not as the real thing. I am not saying that
beliefs, organized religion, and church-centered activities are useless or
unimportant. Many people find these things to be adequate spiritual foundations.
I'm glad they have found them, but their religions do not work for me. As
Psychedelicists, my coreligionists and I depend on direct, intense spiritual
experience.
Although the Bill of Rights says that the
government shall not establish any religion, those religions which are based on
church, book, or dogma are legally established in the sense that they and
their members alone receive constitutional protection for' their practices,
persons, and property. Followers of these religions are not persecuted;
Psychedelicists are. LSD and other sacraments are illegal, and those who use
them are subject to legal sanctions.
Psychedelic sacraments
are the sine qua non of our religion. Depriving a Psychedelicist of LSD,
sacred mushrooms, peyote, or other sacraments is akin to depriving a
fundamentalist of his Bible or a Catholic of her church. Psychedelic experience
is the foundation of my practice.
During the Reformation, many
clergymen feared that the printing press would make the Bible available to the
common person. They feared that the untutored and unwashed might criticize the
church and clergy or even set up their own churches. This is exactly what
happened, and the reformers came to be known as Protestants. From about 1300 to
1600, "heretics" such as John Wycliffe, Jan Hus, John Calvin, and Martin Luther
claimed that the Bible, as the word of God, was the most direct expression of
God. They held that church, dogma, and clergy could be judged by the standards
of the Bible.
Today psychedelics enable us to take
Protestantism a step further. Following in the tradition of William James, this
century's "heretics," including Aldous Huxley, Alan Watts, Huston Smith, Walter
Clark, Walter Pahnke, William Richards, and other Psychedelicists, claim that
the direct experience of god, undistorted by church, belief, or revealed word,
gives the purest sense of the divine. Today's Psychedelic Reformation carries
religious democracy a step further— to experience. No longer is the experience
of god limited to a few saints and holy people; each person can and should have
his or her own experience of god. Just as common access to the Bible was at one
time suppressed by church and state, so are psychedelics suppressed now. Just as
Protestants, reformers, and Puritans were seen as the heretics and traitors of
their times, Psychedelicists are misperceived as the religious heretics and
political traitors of our own times.
Without doubt the most
successful special-interest group in Washington today is the drug prohibition
lobby. My child is taught in school that my spouse and I are criminals because
our path to god uses psychedelics. When I was in school, we were taught that one
of the worst things about Nazi Germany and the communist countries was that
children were taught to spy on their families, neighbors, and friends. "Aren't
we glad we live in America," my teachers said, "where we don't do such things?"
Yet my child's school partakes in the DARE anti-drug program, which teaches
children to spy on their parents.[3]
How and why does the government persecute my coreligionists
and me?
By extending their fiefdoms beyond their original
borders, the Food and Drug Administration, the National Institutes of Health,
and the Public Health Service exercise control over the nonmedical uses
of psychedelics. It makes sense to me that they should have some control over
medical uses, but it does not make sense that they also exercise control
over religious, scholarly, artistic, and scientific uses of drugs.
By ignorantly promulgating the malicious idea that the only proper use of
drugs is medical, the DEA and other agencies, and self-serving politicians
including President Bush, have produced a destructive War on Drugs which kills
more people than drug abuse itself.[4] They do not realize that drugs have both medical and nonmedical
uses and have been used beneficially for tens of thousands of years.
By interpreting religion as being an organization or a set of beliefs and
by outlawing the use of psychedelics as sacraments, the government establishes a
preference for church-and word-based religions. It handicaps all
experience-based religions, psychedelic and nonpsychedelic. It persecutes my
psychedelic religion.
Today I changed to a new month on my
Girl Scout calendar. As is appropriate for July, it has a picture of a group of
Girl Scouts—a black, a blond, a Latina, and several generic whites—folding the
American flag. I wonder if these children are being taught that the essence of
America's freedoms is protecting the rights of minorities.
Almost 400 years ago, some of my ancestors left their native land to seek
religious asylum in Holland. Later they crossed the North Atlantic in a small
boat to come to what is now America. A portrait of them hangs in the Capitol
rotunda. Today I look at my flag and wonder. will I too have to leave my native
country to seek asylum because of religious persecution?
The author has requested anonymity.
FOOTNOTES
1. Will Durant, The Story of
Civilization, part 6: The Reformation (Springfield, Ill.: Simon &
Schuster, 1957), p. 3. (back)
2. Frances Vaughan,
"Perception and Knowledge: Reflections on Psychological and Spiritual Learning
in the Psychedelic Experience," in Lester Grinspoon and James Bakalar, eds.,
Psychedelic Reflections (New York: Human Sciences Press, 1983), p. 109.
(back)
3. Joseph Pereira, "The Informants in a Drug Program: Some
Kids Turn In Their Own Parents," The Wall Street Journal, April 20, 1992,
pp. 1, A4. (back)
4. Religious Coalition for a Moral Drug Policy, Reason,
Compassion, and the Drug War (Washington, D.C., 1990), p. 29. (back)
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