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by Alan Watts
(Originally appeared
in the California Law Review, Vol. 56, No. 1, January 1968, pp. 74-85.)
Copyright 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).
[2]An excellent anthology of such
experiences is R. Johnson Watcher on the Hills (1959).
[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.
[5]Chandogya Upanishad 6.15.3.
[6]Alfred Lord Tennyson, A Memoir
by His Son (1898), 320.
[7]A Prayer for the King's Majesty,
Order for Morning Prayer, Book of Common Prayer (Church of England,
1904).
[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.
[9]This is discussed at length in
A. Watts, The Joyous Cosmology: Adventures in the Chemistry of
Consciousness (1962).
[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.
[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.
-THE END-
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