The Psychedelics and Religion
Walter Houston Clark
Introduction by Peter Webster
In 1968 Ralph Metzner wrote of Walter Houston Clark, (in The
Ecstatic Adventure)
THERE ARE NOT too many men in their sixties, professional
academics at that, who have preserved sufficient openness to
experience and receptivity to new ideas to accept the idea of
personal experimentation with psychedelic drugs. Old age is
too often synonymous with rigidity rather than wisdom. Not so
with Walter Houston Clark, Professor of Psychology of
Religion at Andover Newton Theological School in Newton,
Massachusetts, former dean and professor at the Hartford
School of Religious Education, author of The Oxford Group
(1951) and The Psychology of Religion (1958), and founder of
the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion.
In an article on "Mysticism as a Basic Concept in
Defining the Religious Self," Professor Clark wrote that
The [psychedelic] drugs are simply an auxiliary which,
used carefully within a religious structure, may assist in
mediating an experience which, aside from the presence of the
drug, cannot be distinguished psychologically from mysticism.
Studies have indicated that, when the experience is
interpreted transcendentally or religiously, chances are
improved for the rehabilitation of hopeless alcoholics and
hardened criminals. Even though observations like these mean
that the psychologist can learn a little more of the
religious life, in no sense does it ultimately become any
less of a mystery. Though man may sow and till, winds may
blow and the rains fall, nevertheless it is still God that
gives the increase.
Today, amid the confusion of grave problems caused not so
much by decades of "drug abuse" as by decades of
increasingly futile attempts to legislate away the use of
prohibited substances by pious decree, it is all too easily
forgotten that the rediscovery of the psychedelic drugs mid-way
through the present century was as promising a find as mankind
has seen. A significant, if minority group of our best
scientists, doctors, philosophers, writers, artists, and
intellectuals of every description began explorations with the
psychedelics, a search that was really only the continuation of
an age-old quest involving the great majority of peoples and
tribes of the ancient world. Psychedelic drugs have, in fact,
been used as religious and curing aids since the very beginning
of human existence, and only in the 1950's was any significant
"scientific" research begun using them.
This research planted the seeds of a revolution of a kind
that science purportedly thrives upon, but the sprouting of the
seeds was aborted early on by scandal. In the following article
we read about some research that was later to be ignored not so
much because it was scandalous, but because it challenged some of
the underlying paradigms of the entire scientific enterprise.
Some of the findings of psychedelic research seemed to herald a
merging of the "scientific" and "religious"
or "mystical" viewpoints, despite very powerful
resistance by both sides to opposing views. The scientific
viewpoint had for a long time generally disdained religion as
primitive superstition, and religious thinkers of every
denomination had tended to view the destructive uses to which
science had been put as evidence of its ultimate inability to
advance the human condition. Yet some scholars such as Professor
Clark saw the rediscovery of psychedelics as the key to the
blossoming of a new view. In the words of Alan Watts,
For a long time we have been accustomed to the
compartmentalization of religion and science as if they were
two quite different and basically unrelated ways of seeing
the world. I do not believe that this state of doublethink
can last. It must eventually be replaced by a view of the
world which is neither religious nor scientific but simply
our view of the world. More exactly, it must become a view of
the world in which the reports of science and religion are as
concordant as those of the eyes and the ears. (Preface to
The Joyous Cosmology, 1962).
In retrospect, it will be seen by historians of the 21st
century that the scandal of the 1960's was not Dr. Timothy Leary
leading a generation down the road to a drugged oblivion, (for
that generation is today doing quite well!) but rather that such
Puritanical views of mere over-enthusiasm for a new discovery led
a generation of scientists and world leaders to throw away what
in any other epoch would have been a Holy Grail, a discovery of
such fundamental importance that the great discoveries that had
made modern technological civilization possible would seem almost
trivial by comparison. The situation continues today unabated,
despite the continued availability of the wisdom of Professor
Clark and the many other pioneers of psychedelic discovery.
The Psychedelics and Religion
Walter Houston Clark
from: PSYCHEDELICS, edited by Bernard Aaronson and
Humphrey Osmond,
Doubleday & Company, 1970. ©1970
Aaronson & Osmond.
The recent discovery of the religious properties of Lysergic
Acid Diethylamide-25 is not such a wholly new phenomenon as some
people seem to believe. There is some evidence to suggest that
the secret potion that was part of the ordeal of initiation into
the Eleusinian mysteries in ancient Greece contained a
psychedelic drug. The somewhat mysterious drug called soma, used
in India, sometimes for religious purposes, was psychedelic,
while the Mexican mushroom whose active principle is psilocybin
has been used by the Aztecs for centuries in their sacraments.
Their word for it, significantly, meant "God's flesh."
The peyote button, the top of a certain spineless cactus
plant, has been and is now used by some members of nearly all the
American Indian tribes in cultic ceremonies. The peyote religion
goes back nearly a century in historical records and certainly is
even more ancient. At present it is represented by the Native
American Church, a loose collection of some two hundred thousand
members, according to its claim. Peyote among the Indians has had
a history of controversy not unlike LSD among whites. However,
despite years of repressive laws and legal harassment, there has
been little or no hard evidence of claims made as to its
harmfulness, and some indication that it has done good. More
importantly, laws made to repress its use have been declared
unconstitutional in several states on the ground that they have
violated constitutional guarantees of freedom of religion.(1)
Perhaps the most distinguished and eloquent advocate of the
view that certain chemicals may promote religious states of mind
was William James, who some seventy years ago inhaled the
psychedelic of his day, nitrous oxide. He referred to this
self-experiment, in The Varieties of Religious Experience,
in his chapter on mysticism, where he wrote the often quoted
words:
. . . our normal waking consciousness, rational
consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of
consciousness, whilst all about it parted by the filmiest of
screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely
different.... No account of the universe in its totality can
be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness
quite disregarded.(2)
But "religion" is an elusive term, and whether or
not we can regard states associated with the psychedelics as
religious depends on how we define it. Doubtless there are those
who would regard any state initiated by the ingestion of a
chemical as by definition non-religious. For such people,
the reading of this chapter will be an idle exercise. Tillich
defines religion as "ultimate concern," while both
William James and W. R. Inge speak of the roots of religion as
ultimately mystical. Rudolf Otto, in The Idea of the Holy
(1958), speaks of the non-rational elements of the religious life
in terms of horror, dread, amazement, and fascination as the mysterium
tremendum, "the mystery that makes one tremble."
Certainly, as I will point out in more detail later, the subject
who has consumed the forbidden fruit of the psychedelics will
often testify that he has been opened to his own "ultimate
concern" in life and may even speak in terms reminiscent of
the medieval mystics. Furthermore, one of the chief objections of
the opponents of the psychedelics is that for many the experience
may be "dread-full," as cogent an illustration of
Otto's thesis as one could well expect to find.
Long before I took very seriously the claims that eaters of
psychedelic chemicals made as to their religious experiences, I
defined religion as "the inner experience of an individual
when he senses a Beyond, especially as evidenced by the effect of
this experience on his behavior when he actively attempts to
harmonize his behavior with the Beyond."(3) Consequently, it
would be to this standard that I would refer experiences
triggered by the psychedelic drugs, in order to determine whether
they should be called religious or not.
From the definition, it will be clear that the core of
religious experience is subjective therefore never to be fully
shared with another person. Consequently we are forced to rely to
a large degree on the words of the religious person for any
determination of religion. This necessity disturbs the modern
psychologist whose too-narrow conception of his discipline as a
science bars him from probing the nature of the religious
consciousness despite its cogency as a source of profound
personality change. As he observes the conventional churchgoer
and hears him glibly using such terms as "conviction of sin
"rebirth" "redemption" and
"salvation," the psychologist may too hastily conclude
that such terms are mere pious language that brings a certain
sentimental comfort to the worshiper but hardly represents any
marked change in his relations with his fellow men. The
psychologist has forgotten, if he ever knew, that such terms are
the echoes of experiences that, perhaps many years ago but also
today, have transformed the lives of prince and beggars enabling
them to unify their lives and attain heights that could have been
possible in no other way. It is this effectiveness, along with
the subjective reports by subjects of encounters filled with
mystery and awe, for which we must be on the lookout as we try to
appraise the religious significance and value of these strange
chemicals.
But before we start our survey I must say something about the
place of the non-rational in the religious life. Notice that I
call it non-rational, not irrational. The religious
life involves at least three basic factors: First is the life of
speculation and thought, the expression of the rational function
of the human mind. The second is the active expression of
religious principles, the concern for others and the observance
of ethics and other social demands that grow out of one's
religious commitment. Religion shares these two functions with
other interests and duties of humankind. But the third function
is unique, and without it no other function or activity can be
called religious in any but a very pale and secondary sense. This
third function is the experience of the sacred, the encounter
with the holy, which not so much logically, but intuitively, or
non-rationally, the subject recognizes as that which links him
with the seers and the saints of today and of yesterday. A
non-drug example will be found in Arthur Koestler's
autobiographical The Invisible Writing (1955), in the
chapter entitled "The Hours by the Window." It is this
non-rational perception of the holy that so moves the individual
and interpenetrates both his thinking and his activity, infusing
them with tremendous energy and giving to his whole life that
stamp we call religious. We must ask whether in any sense the
psychedelic substances arouse this factor, to determine whether
we can characterize the result as religion.
If we can accept the direction of the argument thus far, that
the essential core of religion may be found in the mystical
consciousness and the direct experience of the holy, I can show
considerable evidence that it is this aspect of the nonrational
consciousness that the psychedelic drugs release. I consider my
first example sufficiently persuasive to make the point.
Dr. Walter N. Pahnke of Spring Grove Hospital, Baltimore, in
a doctorate study at Harvard, used twenty theological students in
a double-blind study of the effects of psilocybin. All twenty
were given similar preparations; half were given the drug and
half placebos; then all attended the same two-and-one-half-hour
Good Friday service. The experimental group reported overwhelming
evidence of mystical experiences, while the control group
reported next to none.(4) The reports included intuitions and
encounters with ultimate reality, the holy, and God; in other
words the "Beyond" of my definition. Furthermore, a
six-month follow-up showed much evidence that the subjects felt
they had experienced an enlivening of their religious lives,
resulting in an increased involvement with the problems of living
and the service of others.
The previous sentence supports that aspect of my definition
that emphasizes the active functions of religion, the effect of
the experience of the Beyond on the individual when he
"actively attempts to harmonize his life with the
Beyond." Western prejudices in religion favor the pragmatic
test, so claims of encounter with God or ultimate reality are
always more impressive when they can be supported by concrete
evidence of benefit like this. Further cogent evidence is
supplied us in studies of alcoholics treated with LSD by Osmond
and Hoffer in the early 1950S in Saskatchewan. According to Dr.
Hoffer's report, of sixty difficult cases, half were no longer
drinking five years later, while there was a very high
correspondence between success and the report of the subject that
his experience had been transcendental in William James's sense
of the term.(5)
Still more evidence pointing in the same general direction
comes from work done by Dr. Timothy Leary when he was at Harvard.
He received permission from the State Commission of Correction to
give psilocybin to thirty-five inmates at Concord State
Reformatory. Since Dr. Leary had reported that the convicts were
having religious experiences and the work was controversial, I
persuaded him to introduce me to some of them so that I could
investigate at first hand. While unable to follow up all the
subjects, I talked with those who were still in prison—by and
large those who had committed the more serious crimes and so were
serving long terms. I found that it was indeed true that these
men referred to their experiences as religious in varying ways.
One reported a vision in which he had participated with Christ in
His Crucifixion. Shortly after this, he had looked out the
window. "Suddenly all my life came before my eyes,"
said this man, an armed robber of nearly forty who had spent most
of his adult life behind bars, "and I said to myself, What a
wasted Since that time these men have formed, within the walls,
an AA-type organization called the Self-Development Group, to
rehabilitate themselves and others. I could not deny that there
were profound religious forces at work among these men as the
result of the drug treatment (Leary and Clark, 1963).
In their book The Varieties of Psychedelic Experience
Masters and Houston present a wealth of cases illustrating
psychedelic experiences of various kinds. Though nearly all their
206 subjects reported religious imagery of some kind, only a few
demonstrated mystical experience of what the authors consider a
transforming and integrating kind at the deepest level; but they
believe that the drugs do facilitate the latter, making their
belief clear chiefly through a remarkable illustrative case in
their final chapter. The subject, a successful psychologist in
his late thirties, had been irresistibly attracted to what
society regards as "evil" from his earliest youth. He
believed in nothing, was a militant atheist, was sexually
promiscuous, and to his students "preached a gospel of total
debauchery." The appearance of neurotic symptoms had led him
into a process of self-analysis and therapy, which had been only
partly successful. But only three sessions with LSD led this
person, through an intricate series of shattering symbolic
experiences, to an almost total transformation of self. A year
afterward, this transformation was seen by the subject as an
encounter with God that had been both religious and lasting. This
fact was attested to by those who knew him.
The foregoing is just a sampling of many studies that report
religious elements following the ingestion of psychedelic drugs.
When the environment suggests religion, a higher proportion, up
to 85-90 per cent, of the experiences are perceived as religious
by the subjects. Those who resist the religious interpretation
are much less likely to experience it, but even some of these,
much to their surprise, may "experience God."
The following case is an illustration: As part of an
experiment at a mental hospital, I had occasion to guide a young
college graduate I will call Duncan Cohen. Brought up as a Jew,
he had become a strong atheist and married outside his faith. The
investigation required a number of sessions, and the study of its
religious aspects was only an incidental aspect of the
experiment. The setting aimed to be supportive, the surroundings
softened with flowers and music, and the subjects were encouraged
to bring with them into their private hospital rooms anything of
significance to them, including their choice of music if desired.
Duncan was given sixteen daily doses of 180 micrograms of LSD. He
was initially irritated by me as a person who taught in a
theological school; and, though he came to trust me more and more
as the sessions continued, he steadfastly resisted any religious
interpretation of the sessions, which, even from the first, he
regarded primarily as experiences of rebirth. The early sessions
involved a climactic series of symbolic encounters with various
members of his family, followed by a dramatic enactment of his
own death, in which he acted both as "corpse" and
"funeral director," while I was asked to pray as the
"officiating rabbi." Still the essentially religious
nature of much of these proceedings was either denied or only
dimly sensed. I tried to avoid pressing any religious
interpretation on him, though my interests doubtless acted
suggestively on him.
The climax came after the fifteenth ingestion. About four
hours after taking the drug on that day, he had been sitting on
the lawn outside the hospital watching two grasshoppers
maneuvering in what he interpreted as a kind of cosmic dance.
Suddenly, he felt at one with them and with the cosmos besides. I
was aware of it only after he caught sight of me and came running
over to me in great excitement calling, "Dr. Clark, I have
had a mystical experience; I have met God!"
A nine-month follow-up indicated that Duncan regards the
total experience as a most significant one. He has continued to
grow and mature, as he sees it. There have been some difficult
times. "What I regarded as the end of the experience when I
left the hospital," he told me, "was simply the
beginning of an experience of maturing which is still
continuing." He reports more tolerance and open-mindedness,
and he recoils when he thinks of what he now regards as his
former narrow-mindedness. He has reflected with increased insight
on the role of religion in history, history being a favorite
subject. I do not know that he is any more hospitable to
institutionalized religion, though now he is willing to accept a
view of life that for him is more, rather than less, religious
than that of the conventional churchgoer. At any rate,
psychedelic religious cults, like the League for Spiritual
Discovery, have an appeal for him that they did not have before.
Religion in a profound sense, in human nature and in history, has
more meaning to him.
In the middle 1950s Aldous Huxley published his influential The
Doors of Perception, describing an experience with mescaline
and advocating it as a means of vitalizing the religious life,
with particular emphasis on its mystical aspects. R. C. Zaehner,
in his Mysticism: Sacred and Profane (1957), takes issue
with Huxley and points out that while mescaline may be able to
release pantheistic or monistic types of religion, including
those closely associated with psychosis, it cannot be said to
stimulate a theistic religious experience. He does not see its
use justified by Christian doctrine. Zaehner's reasoning is based
partly on a self-experiment with mescaline, and so he cannot be
classified with those many critics of the psychedelics anxious to
make people's flesh creep without having any firsthand knowledge
of what they are talking about. But, commendable though Professor
Zaehner's effort may have been, he falls into a familiar fallacy
common to all users and non-users of the psychedelics, including
Huxley, namely, that of generalizing too widely on the basis of
his own personal experience and point of view.
It is true that the religious experience of many of the drug
users seems to them to fit more readily into pantheistic and
Eastern religious patterns. But the experience itself is
essentially non-rational and indescribable. In order that it may
be described, one is forced to use concepts of one type or
another, none of which seem to do justice to the experience.
Consequently these are of great variety, and while some will
agree with the Zaehner theological typology, others have no more
trouble seeing their experiences as essentially Christian than
did St. Teresa when she described one of her mystical visions as
revealing to her the secrets of the Trinity. I have known those
whose psychedelic experiences have returned them from atheism to
the Christian tradition in which they had been brought up, and I
have also known those who preferred Eastern concepts.
W. T. Stace, in Mysticisrn and Philosophy (1960),
distinguishes between the mystical experience itself, which he
finds to be universal in its characteristics, and the
interpretation of that experience, which differs from faith to
faith and from century to century. Thus the Christian will refer
his experience to Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, while the
Buddhist will explain an identical psychological experience in
terms of Nirvana. Stace further aids us in clarifying the nature
of a psychedelic experience in his "principle of causal
indifference." This states that what makes an experience
mystical is not what touches it off, whether drug or Christian
sacrament, but its experiential characteristics. It may then be
conceptualized in any way deemed suitable by the experiencer. I
may add that, just as a Christian sacrament may or may not
stimulate a mystical experience in any given worshiper, the same
thing may be said of mescaline or LSD. Stace gives us an example
of mystical experience meeting his specifications triggered by
mescaline.(6)
In another part of his book, he discusses the experience of
pantheism, which so often has gotten the mystic into trouble.
Calling the experience "transsubjective," he points out
its paradoxical character, in which the mystic may feel himself
both merged with the Godhead and infinitely the creature of God
at the same time. Consequently, we can understand how, in some
sense, mysticism can be felt to be compatible with theism by one
mystic and with atheistic Buddhism by another. The same argument
will help to explain the variety of theological and philosophical
concepts used to interpret the psychedelic experience.
There would be no greater mistake than to suppose, since the
psychedelics are frequently accompanied by religious experience,
that God, when He created these chemicals, baptized them and
segregated them for religious purposes. Indeed, had this been His
purpose, it would seem that He has not kept up with His
theological and medical reading, for He might have foreseen the
difficulties He was preparing for their users. As I have already
pointed out, there is no guarantee that a given person will have
what satisfies him as a religious experience. However, certain
conditions will favor this religious result, and I will indicate
briefly a few of the most important.
First of all, there is the subject himself—his nature, and
the desire he may have for the religious experience. A person
already religiously sensitive is more apt to have a religious
experience than one who is not, and one who deliberately prepares
himself is more apt to be rewarded than one who is indifferent or
unaware of the possibility. Vide the case of Duncan Cohen,
who had ingested LSD fourteen times without a religious outcome;
the only experimental subject in the Good Friday experiment who
failed to report a mystical experience was one who did not
believe it possible and deliberately set out to demonstrate this
belief, partly by omitting the religious preparation engaged in
by the other subjects.
The setting is another factor that favors or discourages
religion. If the drug is taken in a church or the subject is
surrounded by religious symbolism, he is more apt to obtain a
religious result. Appropriate readings at strategic points during
the period when the drug is active, say from the Bible or the
Tibetan Book of the Dead, particularly when accompanied by
religious music, are other favoring circumstances. If the guide
is a deeply religious person and anxious to promote a religious
outcome, this will be another plus factor. Subjects have reported
feeling this with respect to Dr. Leary, and doubtless this helps
to explain the high incidence of religious experiences reported
in his experiments. It is obvious that all these factors depend
for their influence on the suggestibility of the subject.
However, it would be a mistake to think that suggestibility will
explain it all, since, once the experience gets started, the
unconscious of the individual subject seems to take over the
direction of matters in large measure. But the initial
suggestibility of the subject and the manner in which it is
exploited, by himself or by others, will enhance the
suggestibility that most investigators feel to be one of the
salient characteristics of the psychedelic state.
Critics, to prove their point that psychedelic experiences
are not truly religious, often cite the fact that beneficial
results do not always last. But in this respect they are no
different from other types of religious experience. Every
evangelist is well acquainted with backsliders. If
personality-changes brought about through psychedelic experience
are to be made permanent, they must be followed up.
The issues that the psychedelics pose seem to most people to
be in the realm of therapy, health, and the law. They may be more
importantly religious. One of the functions of religion—perhaps
its chief function—is that of supplying life with meaning. The
most luminous source of this meaning, through the ages, has been
the religious experience of religiously gifted leaders, the
dreamers of dreams and the seers of visions, prophets, converts,
evangelists, seers, martyrs, and mystics. According to their
enlightenment, these men and women have stood before the Lord,
some in joy, some in vision, some in transport, and some in fear
and trembling. But however rapt, these are the people who have
made their mark on that profoundest function of man's strange
sojourn on this earth. Astonished, amazed, offended, and even
horror-stricken, the present generation of responsible defenders
of the status quo have seen many of those who have
ingested these drugs present pictures of such conditions as
capture the imagination of youth with a cogency that churches
find hard to match. The psychedelic movement is a religious
movement. The narrowly restrictive laws that have been passed
have made it a lawless movement with respect to the use of the
drugs, though generally it is not in other respects.
It has had its parallels in other ages, and it will be
instructive for us to take a brief look at history. The early
Christians were looked on with some alarm by that magnificent
peace-keeping agency, the Roman Empire. Because they refused even
that insignificant homage to the divine Emperor that would have
satisfied the State, these dissenters were persecuted and led to
death in the arena, their persecutors being among the more
conscientious of their rulers. Heretics and Jews during the
Middle Ages were burned at the stake for engaging in secret rites
and the holding of views disapproved by the Church. Among the
former were many mystics who had undergone experiences very
similar to, and probably often identical with, those of many of
the psychedelic hipsters of our times. Sitting in judgment on
these sensitive religious spirits (such as Meister Eckhart) were
not irresponsible sadists but sober clerics whose business it was
to protect other souls from heresy. These judges had no firsthand
knowledge of the mystic's vision. They were rational and
conscientious men charged with the duty of saving their fellows
from the flames of Hell, even as conscientious judges of our time
enforce the modern equivalent of the stake as they sentence to
long prison terms those whose visions and ecstasy they have never
shared. They only know that laws have been broken, and they wish
to protect society. They act according to their lights.
But religious people have never been notable for setting law
above the dictates of their consciences, and it is this stubborn
habit of the human mind that has brought us such protection as
religious conviction has against the state. It will also make
laws against the psychedelic drugs almost unenforceable. Yet it
has been religious conviction hardened into legalism, whether
theological or civil, that has led to intolerable controversy,
self-righteous cruelties, and some of the most savage wars of
history. This shameful record has led to the principle of
religious freedom such as that written into the American
constitution, which, nevertheless, only partially protects
religious minorities from the tyranny of the majority. In general
there is no type of religious experience for which the average
American, high or low, has so little tolerance as that type
fostered by the psychedelic drugs. The reason is that the
mystical side of human nature has been so repressed that it is
little understood. It has been looked on as esoteric and Eastern,
therefore vaguely opposed to the American way of life. Society
must be protected against it, say conservative churchgoers,
Daughters of the American Revolution, respected members of the
academic community, and the American Medical Association.
In order to call attention to a neglected aspect of the
controversy over the psychedelics, I have a little overstated a
case in order to make my point clear. For certainly I recognize
the fact that the drugs have their dangers and need to be
controlled, though I wish that legislators and enforcement
agencies would make greatly needed research much easier. Some of
the world's most experienced and eminent investigators in this
area find the drug denied to them. But it is not surprising that
cults that see in the psychedelics a sacramental substance of
great potency have been growing apace during the past few years,
from the Neo-American Church, whose leaders militantly stand on
their constitutional right to use the substances sacramentally,
to the Church of the Awakening, which is more conservative but
which nevertheless has applied to the FDA for the right to use
peyote as does the Native American Church. This right, like other
religious rights, has been hard won by the Indians through
loyalty of cult members, self-sacrifice, and the willingness of
individuals to go to jail if need be in support of their
convictions. If the Indians can use peyote, it is hard to see why
white churches cannot make good their right to do likewise. In
the meantime, both legal and illegal use of the psychedelics goes
on, sometimes religious and sometimes nonreligious, sometimes
with irresponsible foolhardiness and sometimes with the highest
resolution that such promising tools shall not be lost to
society, at least until their most cunning secrets be wrested
from them through careful research and responsible practice.
But there is no doubt that the drugs and their religious use
constitute a challenge to the established churches. Here is a
means to religious experience that not only makes possible a more
vital religious experience than the churches can ordinarily
demonstrate, but the regeneration of souls and the transformation
of personality are made possible to an extent that seems to be
far more reliable and frequent than what the ordinary churches
can promise. LSD is a tool through which religious experience
may, so to speak, be brought into the laboratory that it may more
practically become a matter for study. It is important that
religious institutions face the issues raised so that any
decisions they may have to make will derive from sound knowledge
rather than prejudice, ignorance, and fear. I do not have the
wisdom nor does anyone yet have the knowledge to say in advance
what the action of the churches will be or ought to be. But I do
say that if such decisions are to be sound, they must be based on
thorough information, freedom from hysteria, and above all,
open-mindedness to what may reliably be learned both of the great
promise and the dangers of these fascinating substances.
(1) See Aberle (1966) and Slotkin (1956) for full
anthropological accounts.
(2) P. 298.
(3) See my The Psychology of Religion (1958), Chapter
2, for a discussion.
(4) For a fuller report, see the Pahnke article in this
volume, "Drugs and Mysticism", Psychedelics,
Aaronson & Osmond; also Pahnke, "Drugs and Mysticism'
(1966)
(5) See remarks by Abram Hoffer in H. A. Abramson (ed.), The
Use of LSD in Psychotherapy (1960), pp. 18-19, 114-15.
(6) See p. 29 ff. for his "principle of
causal indifference."