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)
Obviously, these characteristics of the
psychedelic experience, as I have known it, are aspects of a
single state of consciousness--for I have been describing the
same thing from different angles. The descriptions attempt to
convey the reality of the experience, but in doing so they also
suggest some of the inconsistencies between such experience and
the current values of society.
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.