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Psychedelics and Religious Experience
Psychedelics and Religious Experience
Alan Watts
The California Law Review, Vol. 56, No.
1, January 1968, pp. 74-85.
©Alan Watts & California Law Review.
The experiences resulting from the use of psychedelic drugs are
often described in religious terms. They are therefore of interest to those
like myself who, in the tradition of William James, (1) are concerned with the psychology of religion. For more than thirty
years I have been studying the causes, the consequences, and the conditions of
those peculiar states of consciousness in which the individual discovers
himself to be one continuous process with God, with the Universe, with the
Ground of Being, or whatever name he may use by cultural conditioning or
personal preference for the ultimate and eternal reality. We have no
satisfactory and definitive name for experiences of this kind. The terms
"religious experience," "mystical experience," and
"cosmic consciousness" are all too vague and comprehensive to denote
that specific mode of consciousness which, to those who have known it, is as
real and overwhelming as falling in love. This article describes such states of
consciousness induced by psychedelic drugs, although they are virtually
indistinguishable from genuine mystical experience. The article then discusses
objections to the use of psychedelic drugs that arise mainly from the
opposition between mystical values and the traditional religious and secular
values of Western society.
The Psychedelic Experience
The idea of mystical experiences resulting
from drug use is not readily accepted in Western societies. Western culture
has, historically, a particular fascination with the value and virtue of man as
an individual, self-determining, responsible ego, controlling himself and his
world by the power of conscious effort and will. Nothing, then, could be more
repugnant to this cultural tradition than the notion of spiritual or
psychological growth through the use of drugs. A "drugged" person is
by definition dimmed in consciousness, fogged in judgment, and deprived of
will. But not all psychotropic (consciousness-changing) chemicals are narcotic
and soporific, as are alcohol, opiates, and barbiturates. The effects of what
are now called psychedelic (mind-manifesting) chemicals differ from those of
alcohol as laughter differs from rage, or delight from depression. There is
really no analogy between being "high" on LSD and "drunk"
on bourbon. True, no one in either state should drive a car, but neither should
one drive while reading a book, playing a violin, or making love. Certain
creative activities and states of mind demand a concentration and devotion that
are simply incompatible with piloting a death-dealing engine along a highway.
I myself have experimented with five of the principal
psychedelics: LSD-25, mescaline, psilocybin, dimethyl-tryptamine (DMT), and
cannabis. I have done so, as William James tried nitrous oxide, to see if they
could help me in identifying what might be called the "essential" or
"active" ingredients of the mystical experience. For almost all the
classical literature on mysticism is vague, not only in describing the
experience, but also in showing rational connections between the experience
itself and the various traditional methods recommended to induce it-fasting,
concentration, breathing exercises, prayers, incantations, and dances. A
traditional master of Zen or Yoga, when asked why such-and-such practices lead
or predispose one to the mystical experience, always responds, "This is
the way my teacher gave it to me. This is the way I found out. If you're
seriously interested, try it for yourself." This answer hardly satisfies
an impertinent, scientifically minded, and intellectually curious Westerner. It
reminds him of archaic medical prescriptions compounding five salamanders,
powdered gallows rope, three boiled bats, a scruple of phosphorus, three
pinches of henbane, and a dollop of dragon dung dropped when the moon was in
Pisces. Maybe it worked, but what was the essential ingredient?
It struck me, therefore, that if any of the psychedelic chemicals
would in fact predispose my consciousness to the mystical experience, I could
use them as instruments for studying and describing that experience as one uses
a microscope for bacteriology, even though the microscope is an
"artificial" and "unnatural" contrivance which might be
said to "distort" the vision of the naked eye. However, when I was
first invited to test the mystical qualities of LSD-25 by Dr. Keith Ditman of
the Neuropsychiatric Clinic at UCLA Medical School, I was unwilling to believe
that any mere chemical could induce a genuine mystical experience. At most, it
might bring about a state of spiritual insight analogous to swimming with water
wings. Indeed, my first experiment with LSD-25 was not mystical. It was an
intensely interesting aesthetic and intellectual experience that challenged my
powers of analysis and careful description to the utmost.
Some months later, in 1959, I tried LSD-25 again with Drs.
Sterling Bunnell and Michael Agron, who were then associated with the
Langley-Porter Clinic, in San Francisco. In the course of two experiments I was
amazed and somewhat embarrassed to find myself going through states of
consciousness that corresponded precisely with every description of major
mystical experiences that I had ever read. (2) Furthermore, they exceeded both in depth and in a peculiar quality
of unexpectedness the three "natural and spontaneous" experiences of
this kind that had happened to me in previous years.
Through subsequent experimentation with LSD-25 and the other
chemicals named above (with the exception of DMT, which I find amusing but
relatively uninteresting), I found I could move with ease into the state of
"cosmic consciousness," and in due course became less and less
dependent on the chemicals themselves for "tuning in" to this
particular wave length of experience. Of the five psychedelics tried, I found
that LSD-25 and cannabis suited my purposes best. Of these two, the latter—cannabis—which
I had to use abroad in countries where it is not outlawed, proved to be the
better. It does not induce bizarre alterations of sensory perception, and
medical studies indicate that it may not, save in great excess, have the
dangerous side effects of LSD.
For the purposes of this study, in describing my experiences with
psychedelic drugs I avoid the occasional and incidental bizarre alterations of
sense perception that psychedelic chemicals may induce. I am concerned, rather,
with the fundamental alterations of the normal, socially induced consciousness
of one's own existence and relation to the external world. I am trying to
delineate the basic principles of psychedelic awareness. But I must add that I
can speak only for myself. The quality of these experiences depends
considerably upon one's prior orientation and attitude to life, although the
now voluminous descriptive literature of these experiences accords quite
remarkably with my own.
Almost invariably, my experiments with psychedelics have had four
dominant characteristics. I shall try to explain them-in the expectation that
the reader will say, at least of the second and third, "Why, that's
obvious! No one needs a drug to see that." Quite so, but every insight has
degrees of intensity. There can be obvious-1 and obvious-2—and the latter comes
on with shattering clarity, manifesting its implications in every sphere and
dimension of our existence.
The first characteristic is a slowing down of time, a concentration
in the present. One's normally compulsive concern for the future decreases,
and one becomes aware of the enormous importance and interest of what is
happening at the moment. Other people, going about their business on the
streets, seem to be slightly crazy, failing to realize that the whole point of
life is to be fully aware of it as it happens. One therefore relaxes, almost
luxuriously, into studying the colors in a glass of water, or in listening to
the now highly articulate vibration of every note played on an oboe or sung by
a voice.
From the pragmatic standpoint of our culture, such an attitude is
very bad for business. It might lead to improvidence, lack of foresight,
diminished sales of insurance policies, and abandoned savings accounts. Yet
this is just the corrective that our culture needs. No one is more fatuously
impractical than the "successful" executive who spends his whole life
absorbed in frantic paper work with the objective of retiring in comfort at
sixty-five, when it will all be too late. Only those who have cultivated the
art of living completely in the present have any use for making plans for the
future, for when the plans mature they will be able to enjoy the results.
"Tomorrow never comes." I have never yet heard a preacher urging his
congregation to practice that section of the Sermon on the Mount which begins,
"Be not anxious for the morrow...." The truth is that people who live
for the future are, as we say of the insane, "not quite all there"—or
here: by over-eagerness they are perpetually missing the point. Foresight is
bought at the price of anxiety, and when overused it destroys all its own
advantages.
The second characteristic I will call awareness of polarity.
This is the vivid realization that states, things, and events that we ordinarily
call opposite are interdependent, like back and front, or the poles of a
magnet. By polar awareness one sees that things which are explicitly different
are implicitly one: self and other, subject and object, left and right, male
and female-and then, a little more surprisingly, solid and space, figure and
background, pulse and interval, saints and sinners, police and criminals,
in-groups and out-groups. Each is definable only in terms of the other, and
they go together transactionally, like buying and selling, for there is no sale
without a purchase, and no purchase without a sale. As this awareness becomes
increasingly intense, you feel that you yourself are polarized with the
external universe in such a way that you imply each other. Your push is its
pull, and its push is your pull—as when you move the steering wheel of a car.
Are you pushing it or pulling it?
At first, this is a very odd sensation, not unlike hearing your
own voice played back to you on an electronic system immediately after you have
spoken. You become confused, and wait for it to go on! Similarly, you
feel that you are something being done by the universe, yet that the universe
is equally something being done by you-which is true, at least in the
neurological sense that the peculiar structure of our brains translates the sun
into light, and air vibrations into sound. Our normal sensation of relationship
to the outside world is that sometimes I push it, and sometimes it pushes me.
But if the two are actually one, where does action begin and responsibility
rest? If the universe is doing me, how can I be sure that, two seconds hence, I
will still remember the English language? If I am doing it, how can I be sure
that, two seconds hence, my brain will know how to turn the sun into light?
From such unfamiliar sensations as these, the psychedelic experience can
generate confusion, paranoia, and terror-even though the individual is feeling
his relationship to the world exactly as it would be described by a biologist,
ecologist, or physicist, for he is feeling himself as the unified field of
organism and environment.
The third characteristic, arising from the second, is awareness
of relativity. I see that I am a link in an infinite hierarchy of processes
and beings, ranging from molecules through bacteria and insects to human
beings, and, maybe, to angels and gods-a hierarchy in which every level is in
effect the same situation. For example, the poor man worries about money while
the rich man worries about his health: the worry is the same, but the
difference is in its substance or dimension. I realize that fruit flies must
think of themselves as people, because, like ourselves, they find themselves in
the middle of their own world-with immeasurably greater things above and
smaller things below. To us, they all look alike and seem to have no
personality-as do the Chinese when we have not lived among them. Yet fruit
flies must see just as many subtle distinctions among themselves as we among
ourselves.
From this it is but a short step to the realization that all
forms of life and being are simply variations on a single theme: we are all in
fact one being doing the same thing in as many different ways as possible. As
the French proverb goes, plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose (the
more it varies, the more it is one). I see, further, that feeling threatened by
the inevitability of death is really the same experience as feeling alive, and
that as all beings are feeling this everywhere, they are all just as much
"I" as myself. Yet the "I" feeling, to be felt at all, must
always be a sensation relative to the "other"-to something beyond its
control and experience. To be at all, it must begin and end. But the
intellectual jump that mystical and psychedelic experiences make here is in enabling
you to see that all these myriad I-centers are yourself—not, indeed, your
personal and superficially conscious ego, but what Hindus call the paramatman,
the Self of all selves. (3) As the
retina enables us to see countless pulses of energy as a single light, so the
mystical experience shows us innumerable individuals as a single Self.
The fourth characteristic is awareness of eternal energy,
often in the form of intense white light, which seems to be both the current in
your nerves and that mysterious e which equals mc2. This may sound like
megalomania or delusion of grandeur-but one sees quite clearly that all
existence is a single energy, and that this energy is one's own being. Of
course there is death as well as life, because energy is a pulsation, and just
as waves must have both crests and troughs, the experience of existing must go
on and off. Basically, therefore, there is simply nothing to worry about,
because you yourself are the eternal energy of the universe playing
hide-and-seek (off-and-on) with itself. At root, you are the Godhead, for God
is all that there is. Quoting Isaiah just a little out of context: "I am
the Lord, and there is none else. I form the light and create the darkness: I
make peace, and create evil. I, the Lord, do all these things." (4) This is the sense of the fundamental
tenet of Hinduism, Tat tram asi—"THAT (i.e., "that subtle
Being of which this whole universe is composed") art thou." (5) A classical case of this experience,
from the West, is in Tennyson's Memoirs:
A kind of waking trance I have frequently had, quite up from
boyhood, when I have been all alone. This has generally come upon me thro'
repeating my own name two or three times to myself silently, till all at once,
as it were out of the intensity of the consciousness of individuality, the
individuality itself seemed to dissolve and fade away into boundless being, and
this not a confused state, but the clearest of the clearest, the surest of the
surest, the weirdest of the weirdest, utterly beyond words, where death was an
almost laughable impossibility, the loss of personality (if so it were) seeming
no extinction but the only true life. (6)
Opposition to Psychedelic Drugs
Resistance to allowing use of psychedelic
drugs originates in both religious and secular values. The difficulty in
describing psychedelic experiences in traditional religious terms suggests one
ground of opposition. The Westerner must borrow such words as samadhi or
moksha from the Hindus, or satori or kensho from the
Japanese, to describe the experience of oneness with the universe. We have no
appropriate word because our own Jewish and Christian theologies will not
accept the idea that man's inmost self can be identical with the Godhead, even
though Christians may insist that this was true in the unique instance of Jesus
Christ. Jews and Christians think of God in political and monarchical terms, as
the supreme governor of the universe, the ultimate boss. Obviously, it is both
socially unacceptable and logically preposterous for a particular individual to
claim that he, in person, is the omnipotent and omniscient ruler of the
world-to be accorded suitable recognition and honor.
Such an imperial and kingly concept of the ultimate reality,
however, is neither necessary nor universal. The Hindus and the Chinese have no
difficulty in conceiving of an identity of the self and the Godhead. For most
Asians, other than Muslims, the Godhead moves and manifests the world in much
the same way that a centipede manipulates a hundred legs-spontaneously, without
deliberation or calculation. In other words, they conceive the universe by
analogy with an organism as distinct from a mechanism. They do not see it as an
artifact or construct under the conscious direction of some supreme technician,
engineer, or architect.
If, however, in the context of Christian or Jewish tradition, an
individual declares himself to be one with God, he must be dubbed blasphemous
(subversive) or insane. Such a mystical experience is a clear threat to
traditional religious concepts. The Judaeo-Christian tradition has a
monarchical image of God, and monarchs, who rule by force, fear nothing more
than insubordination. The Church has therefore always been highly suspicious of
mystics, because they seem to be insubordinate and to claim equality or, worse,
identity with God. For this reason, John Scotus Erigena and Meister Eckhart
were condemned as heretics. This was also why the Quakers faced opposition for
their doctrine of the Inward Light, and for their refusal to remove hats in
church and in court. A few occasional mystics may be all right so long as they
watch their language, like St. Teresa of Avila and St. John of the Cross, who
maintained, shall we say, a metaphysical distance of respect between themselves
and their heavenly King. Nothing, however, could be more alarming to the
ecclesiastical hierarchy than a popular outbreak of mysticism, for this might
well amount to setting up a democracy in the kingdom of heaven-and such alarm
would be shared equally by Catholics, Jews, and fundamentalist Protestants.
The monarchical image of God, with its implicit distaste for
religious insubordination, has a more pervasive impact than many Christians
might admit. The thrones of kings have walls immediately behind them, and all
who present themselves at court must prostrate themselves or kneel, because
this is an awkward position from which to make a sudden attack. It has perhaps
never occurred to Christians that when they design a church on the model of a royal
court (basilica) and prescribe church ritual, they are implying that God, like
a human monarch, is afraid. This is also implied by flattery in prayers:
O Lord our heavenly Father, high and mighty, King of kings, Lord
of lords, the only Ruler of princes, who dost from thy throne behold all the
dwellers upon earth: most heartily we beseech thee with thy favor to behold....(7)
The Western man who claims consciousness of oneness
with God or the universe thus clashes with his society's concept of religion.
In most Asian cultures, however, such a man will be congratulated as having
penetrated the true secret of life. He has arrived, by chance or by some such
discipline as Yoga or Zen meditation, at a state of consciousness in which he
experiences directly and vividly what our own scientists know to be true in
theory. For the ecologist, the biologist, and the physicist know (but seldom
feel) that every organism constitutes a single field of behavior, or process,
with its environment. There is no way of separating what any given organism is
doing from what its environment is doing, for which reason ecologists speak not
of organisms in environments but of organism-environments. Thus the words
"I" and "self" should properly mean what the whole universe
is doing at this particular "here-and-now" called John Doe.
The kingly concept of God makes identity of self and God, or self
and universe, inconceivable in Western religious terms. The difference between
Eastern and Western concepts of man and his universe, however, extends beyond
strictly religious concepts. The Western scientist may rationally perceive the
idea of organism-environment, but he does not ordinarily feel this to be true.
By cultural and social conditioning, he has been hypnotized into experiencing
himself as an ego-as an isolated center of consciousness and will inside a bag
of skin, confronting an external and alien world. We say, "I came into
this world." But we did nothing of the kind. We came out of it in just the
same way that fruit comes out of trees. Our galaxy, our cosmos,
"peoples" in the same way that an apple tree "apples."
Such a vision of the universe clashes with the idea of a
monarchical God, with the concept of the separate ego, and even with the
secular, atheist/agnostic mentality, which derives its common sense from the
mythology of nineteenth-century scientist According to this view, the universe
is a mindless mechanism and man a sort of accidental microorganism infesting a
minute globular rock that revolves about an unimportant star on the outer
fringe of one of the minor galaxies. This "put-down" theory of man is
extremely common among such quasi scientists as sociologists, psychologists,
and psychiatrists, most of whom are still thinking of the world in terms of
Newtonian mechanics, and have never really caught up with the ideas of Einstein
and Bohr, Oppenheimer and Schrodinger. Thus to the ordinary institutional-type
psychiatrist, any patient who gives the least hint of mystical or religious
experience is automatically diagnosed as deranged. From the standpoint of the
mechanistic religion, he is a heretic and is given electroshock therapy as an
up-to-date form of thumbscrew and rack. And, incidentally, it is just this kind
of quasi scientist who, as consultant to government and law-enforcement
agencies, dictates official policies on the use of psychedelic chemicals.
Inability to accept the mystic experience is more than an
intellectual handicap. Lack of awareness of the basic unity of organism and
environment is a serious and dangerous hallucination. For in a civilization
equipped with immense technological power, the sense of alienation between man
and nature leads to the use of technology in a hostile spirit—to the
"conquest" of nature instead of intelligent co-operation with nature.
The result is that we are eroding and destroying our environment, spreading Los
Angelization instead of civilization. This is the major threat overhanging
Western, technological culture, and no amount of reasoning or doom-preaching
seems to help. We simply do not respond to the prophetic and moralizing
techniques of conversion upon which Jews and Christians have always relied. But
people have an obscure sense of what is good for them-call it "unconscious
self-healing," "survival instinct," "positive growth
potential," or what you will. Among the educated young there is therefore
a startling and unprecedented interest in the transformation of human
consciousness. All over the Western world publishers are selling millions of
books dealing with Yoga, Vedanta, Zen Buddhism, and the chemical mysticism of
psychedelic drugs, and I have come to believe that the whole "hip"
subculture, however misguided in some of its manifestations, is the earnest and
responsible effort of young people to correct the self-destroying course of
industrial civilization.
The content of the mystical experience is thus inconsistent with
both the religious and secular concepts of traditional Western thought.
Moreover, mystical experiences often result in attitudes that threaten the
authority not only of established churches, but also of secular society.
Unafraid of death and deficient in worldly ambition, those who have undergone
mystical experiences are impervious to threats and promises. Moreover, their
sense of the relativity of good and evil arouses the suspicion that they lack
both conscience and respect for law. Use of psychedelics in the United States
by a literate bourgeoisie means that an important segment of the population is
indifferent to society's traditional rewards and sanctions.
In theory, the existence within our secular society of a group
that does not accept conventional values is consistent with our political
vision. But one of the great problems of the United States, legally and
politically, is that we have never quite had the courage of our convictions.
The Republic is founded on the marvelously sane principle that a human
community can exist and prosper only on a basis of mutual trust.
Metaphysically, the American Revolution was a rejection of the dogma of
Original Sin, which is the notion that because you cannot trust yourself or
other people, there must be some Superior Authority to keep us all in order.
The dogma was rejected because, if it is true that we cannot trust ourselves
and others, it follows that we cannot trust the Superior Authority which we
ourselves conceive and obey, and that the very idea of our own
untrustworthiness is unreliable!
Citizens of the United States believe, or are supposed to
believe, that a republic is the best form of government. Yet vast confusion
arises from trying to be republican in politics and monarchist in religion. How
can a republic be the best form of government if the universe, heaven, and hell
are a monarchy? (8) Thus, despite the
theory of government by consent, based upon mutual trust, the peoples of the
United States retain, from the authoritarian backgrounds of their religions or
national origins, an utterly naive faith in law as some sort of supernatural
and paternalistic power. "There ought to be a law against it!" Our
law-enforcement officers are therefore confused, hindered, and bewildered-not
to mention corrupted-by being asked to enforce sumptuary laws, often of
ecclesiastical origin, that vast numbers of people have no intention of obeying
and that, in any case, are immensely difficult or simply impossible to
enforce-for example, the barring of anything so undetectable as LSD-25 from
international and interstate commerce.
Finally, there are two specific objections to use of psychedelic
drugs. First, use of these drugs may be dangerous. However, every worth-while
exploration is dangerous-climbing mountains, testing aircraft, rocketing into
outer space, skin diving, or collecting botanical specimens in jungles. But if
you value knowledge and the actual delight of exploration more than mere
duration of uneventful life, you are willing to take the risks. It is not
really healthy for monks to practice fasting, and it was hardly hygienic for
Jesus to get himself crucified, but these are risks taken in the course of
spiritual adventures. Today the adventurous young are taking risks in exploring
the psyche, testing their mettle at the task just as, in times past, they have
tested it—more violently—in hunting, dueling, hot-rod racing, and playing
football. What they need is not prohibitions and policemen, but the most
intelligent encouragement and advice that can be found.
Second, drug use may be criticized as an escape from reality.
However, this criticism assumes unjustly that the mystical experiences
themselves are escapist or unreal. LSD, in particular, is by no means a soft
and cushy escape from reality. It can very easily be an experience in which you
have to test your soul against all the devils in hell. For me, it has been at
times an experience in which I was at once completely lost in the corridors of
the mind and yet relating that very lostness to the exact order of logic and
language, simultaneously very mad and very sane. But beyond these occasional
lost and insane episodes, there are the experiences of the world as a system of
total harmony and glory, and the discipline of relating these to the order of
logic and language must somehow explain how what William Blake called that
"energy which is eternal delight" can consist with the misery and
suffering of everyday life. (9)
The undoubted mystical and religious intent of most
users of the psychedelics, even if some of these substances should be proved
injurious to physical health, requires that their free and responsible use be
exempt from legal restraint in any republic that maintains a constitutional
separation of church and state. (10) To the extent that mystical experience conforms with the tradition
of genuine religious involvement, and to the extent that psychedelics induce
that experience, users are entitled to some constitutional protection. Also, to
the extent that research in the psychology of religion can utilize such drugs,
students of the human mind must be free to use them. Under present laws, I, as
an experienced student of the psychology of religion, can no longer pursue
research in the field. This is a barbarous restriction of spiritual and
intellectual freedom, suggesting that the legal system of the United States is,
after all, in tacit alliance with the monarchical theory of the universe, and
will, therefore, prohibit and persecute religious ideas and practices based on an
organic and unitary vision of the universe. (11)
Footnotes
(1) See W. James, The
Varieties of Religious Experience (1902). (back)
(2) An excellent anthology of such experiences
is R. Johnson Watcher on the Hills (1959). (back)
(3) Thus Hinduism regards the universe not as
an artifact, but as an immense drama in which the One Actor (the paramatman
or brakman) plays all the parts, which are his (or "its")
masks or personae. The sensation of being only this one particular self, John
Doe, is due to the Actor's total absorption in playing this and every other
part. For fuller exposition, see S. Radhakrishnan, The Hindu View of Life
(1927); H. Zimmer, Philosophies of India (1951), pp. 355-463. A popular
version is in A. Watts, The Book—On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are
(1966). (back)
(4) Isaiah 45: 6, 7. (back)
(5) Chandogya Upanishad 6.15.3. (back)
(6) Alfred Lord Tennyson, A Memoir by His
Son (1898), 320. (back)
(7) A Prayer for the King's Majesty, Order for
Morning Prayer, Book of Common Prayer (Church of England, 1904). (back)
(8) Thus, until quite recently, belief in a
Supreme Being was a legal test of valid conscientious objection to military
service. The implication was that the individual objector found himself bound
to obey a higher echelon of command than the President and Congress. The
analogy is military and monarchical, and therefore objectors who, as Buddhists
or naturalists, held an organic theory of the universe often had difficulty in
obtaining recognition. (back)
(9) This is discussed at length in A. Watts, The Joyous
Cosmology: Adventures in the Chemistry of Consciousness (1962). (back)
(10) "Responsible" in the sense that
such substances be taken by or administered to consenting adults only. The user
of cannabis, in particular, is apt to have peculiar difficulties in
establishing his "undoubted mystical and religious intent" in court.
Having committed so loathsome and serious a felony, his chances of clemency are
better if he assumes a repentant demeanor, which is quite inconsistent with the
sincere belief that his use of cannabis was religious. On the other hand, if he
insists unrepentantly that he looks upon such use as a religious sacrament,
many judges will declare that they "dislike his attitude," finding it
truculent and lacking in appreciation of the gravity of the crime, and the
sentence will be that much harsher. The accused is therefore put in a
"double-bind" situation, in which he is "damned if he does, and
damned if he doesn't." Furthermore, religious integrity-as in
conscientious objection-is generally tested and established by membership in
some church or religious organization with a substantial following. But the
felonious status of cannabis is such that grave suspicion would be cast upon
all individuals forming such an organization, and the test cannot therefore be
fulfilled. It is generally forgotten that our guarantees of religious freedom
were designed to protect precisely those who were not members of established
denominations, but rather such (then) screwball and subversive individuals as
Quakers, Shakers, Levellers, and Anabaptists. There is little question that
those who use cannabis or other psychedelics with religious intent are now
members of a persecuted religion which appears to the rest of society as a
grave menace to "mental health," as distinct from the old-fashioned
"immortal soul." But it's the same old story. (back)
(11) Amerindians belonging to the Native
American Church who employ the psychedelic peyote cactus in their rituals, are
firmly opposed to any government control of this plant, even if they should be
guaranteed the right to its use. They feel that peyote is a natural gift of God
to mankind, and especially to natives of the land where it grows, and that no
government has a right to interfere with its use The same argument might be
made on behalf of cannabis, or the mushroom Psilocybe mexicana Heim. All
these things are natural plants, not processed or synthesized drugs, and by
what authority can individuals be prevented from eating theme There is no law
against eating or growing the mushroom Amanita pantherina, even though it
is fatally poisonous and only experts can distinguish it from a common edible
mushroom. This case can be made even from the standpoint of believers in the
monarchical universe of Judaism and Christianity, for it is a basic principle
of both religions, derived from Genesis, that all natural substances created by
God are inherently good, and that evil can arise only in their misuse. Thus
laws against mere possession, or even cultivation, of these plants are in basic
conflict with biblical principles. Criminal conviction of those who employ
these plants should be based on proven misuse. "And God said 'Behold, I
have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the
earth, and every tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed-to you
it shall be for meat.... And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold,
it was very good." Genesis 1:29, 31.
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