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The Joyous Cosmology
Alan W. Watts
Prologue
SLOWLY it becomes clear that one of the greatest of all superstitions
is the separation of the mind from the body. This does not mean
that we are being forced to admit that we are only bodies;
it means that we are forming an altogether new idea of the body.
For the body considered as separate from the mind is one thing—an
animated corpse. But the body considered as inseparable from the
mind is another, and as yet we have no proper word for a reality
which is simultaneously mental and physical. To call it mental-physical
will not do at all, for this is the very unsatisfactory joining
of two concepts which have both been impoverished by long separation
and opposition. But we are at least within sight of being able
to discard altogether ideas of a stuff which is mental and a stuff
which is material. "Stuff" is a word which describes
the formless mush that we perceive when sense is not keen enough
to make out its pattern. The notion of material or mental stuff
is based on the false analogy that trees are made of wood, mountains
of stone, and minds of spirit in the same way that pots are made
of clay. "Inert" matter seems to require an external
and intelligent energy to give it form. But now we know that matter
is not inert. Whether it is organic or inorganic, we are learning
to see matter as patterns of energy—not of energy as
if energy were a stuff, but as energetic pattern, moving order,
active intelligence.
The realization that mind and body, form and matter, are one is
blocked, however, by ages of semantic confusion and psychological
prejudice. For it is common sense that every pattern, shape, or
structure is a form of something as pots are forms of clay.
It is hard to see that this "something" is as dispensable
as the ether in which light was once supposed to travel, or as
the fabulous tortoise upon which the earth was once thought to
be supported. Anyone who can really grasp this point will experience
a curiously exhilarating liberation, for the burden of stuff will
drop from him and he will walk less heavily.
The dualism of mind and body arose, perhaps, as a clumsy way of
describing the power of an intelligent organism to control itself.
It seemed reasonable to think of the part controlled as one thing
and the part controlling as another. In this way the conscious
will was opposed to the involuntary appetites and reason to instinct.
In due course we learned to center our identity, our selfhood,
in the controlling part—the mind—and increasingly to disown
as a mere vehicle the part controlled. It thus escaped our attention
that the organism as a whole, largely unconscious, was using consciousness
and reason to inform and control itself. We thought of our conscious
intelligence as descending from a higher realm to take possession
of a physical vehicle. We therefore failed to see it as an operation
of the same formative process as the structure of nerves, muscles,
veins, and bones—a structure so subtly ordered (that is, intelligent)
that conscious thought is as yet far from being able to describe
it.
This radical separation of the part controlling from the part
controlled changed man from a self-controlling to a self-frustrating
organism, to the embodied conflict and self-contradiction that
he has been throughout his known history. Once the split occurred
conscious intelligence began to serve its own ends instead of
those of the organism that produced it. More exactly, it became
the intention of the conscious intelligence to work for
its own, dissociated, purposes. But, as we shall see, just as
the separation of mind from body is an illusion, so also is the
subjection of the body to the independent schemes of the mind.
Meanwhile, however, the illusion is as real as the hallucinations
of hypnosis, and the organism of man is indeed frustrating itself
by patterns of behavior which move in the most complex vicious
circles. The culmination is a culture which ever more serves the
ends of mechanical order as distinct from those of organic enjoyment,
and which is bent on self-destruction against the instinct of
every one of its members.
We believe, then, that the mind controls the body, not that the
body controls itself through the mind. Hence the ingrained prejudice
that the mind should be independent of all physical aids to its
working—despite microscopes, telescopes, cameras, scales, computers,
books, works of art, alphabets, and all those physical tools apart
from which it is doubtful whether there would be any mental life
at all. At the same time there has always been at least an obscure
awareness that in feeling oneself to be a separate mind, soul,
or ego there is something wrong. Naturally, for a person who finds
his identity in something other than his full organism is less
than half a man. He is cut off from complete participation in
nature. Instead of being a body he "has" a body. Instead
of living and loving he "has" instincts for survival
and copulation. Disowned, they drive him as if they were blind
furies or demons that possessed him.
The feeling that there is something wrong in all this revolves
around a contradiction characteristic of all civilizations. This
is the simultaneous compulsion to preserve oneself and to forget
oneself. Here is the vicious circle: if you feel separate from
your organic life, you feel driven to survive; survival—going
on living—thus becomes a duty and also a drag because you are
not fully with it; because it does not quite come up to expectations,
you continue to hope that it will, to crave for more time, to
feel driven all the more to go on. What we call self-consciousness
is thus the sensation of the organism obstructing itself, of not
being with itself, of driving, so to say, with accelerator and
brake on at once. Naturally, this is a highly unpleasant sensation,
which most people want to forget.
The lowbrow way of forgetting oneself is to get drunk, to be diverted
with entertainments, or to exploit such natural means of self-transcendence
as sexual intercourse. The highbrow way is to throw oneself into
the pursuit of the arts, of social service, or of religious mysticism.
These measures are rarely successful because they do not disclose
the basic error of the split self. The highbrow ways even aggravate
the error to the extent that those who follow them take pride
in forgetting themselves by purely mental means—even though
the artist uses paints or sounds, the social idealist distributes
material wealth, and the religionist uses sacraments and rituals,
or such other physical means as fasting, yoga breathing, or dervish
dancing. And there is a sound instinct in the use of these physical
aids, as in the repeated insistence of mystics that to know about
God is not enough: transformation of the self is only through
realizing or feeling God. The hidden point is that man cannot
function properly through changing anything so superficial as
the order of his thoughts, of his dissociated mind. What has to
change is the behavior of his organism; it has to become self-controlling
instead of self-frustrating.
How is this to be brought about? Clearly, nothing can be done
by the mind, by the conscious will, so long as this is felt to
be something apart from the total organism. But if it were felt
otherwise, nothing would need to be done! A very small number
of Eastern gurus, or masters of wisdom, and Western psychotherapists
have found—rather laborious—ways of tricking or coaxing the
organism into integrating itself—mostly by a kind of judo,
or "gentle way," which overthrows the process of self-frustration
by carrying it to logical and absurd extremes. This is pre-eminently
the way of Zen, and occasionally that of psychoanalysis. When
these ways work it is quite obvious that something more has happened
to the student or patient than a change in his way of thinking;
he is also emotionally and physically different; his whole being
is operating in a new way.
For a long time it has been clear to me that certain forms of
Eastern "mysticism"—in particular Taoism and Zen Buddhism—do
not presuppose a universe divided into the spiritual and the material,
and do not culminate in a state of consciousness where the physical
world vanishes into some undifferentiated and bodiless luminescence.
Taoism and Zen are alike founded upon a philosophy of relativity,
but this philosophy is not merely speculative. It is a discipline
in awareness as a result of which the mutual interrelation of
all things and all events becomes a constant sensation. This sensation
underlies and supports our normal awareness of the world as a
collection of separate and different things—an awareness which,
by itself, is called avidya (ignorance) in Buddhist philosophy
because, in paying exclusive attention to differences, it ignores
relationships. It does not see, for example, that mind and form
or shape and space are as inseparable as front and back, nor that
the individual is so interwoven with the universe that he and
it are one body.
This is a point of view which, unlike some other forms of mysticism,
does not deny physical distinctions but sees them as the plain
expression of unity. As one sees so clearly in Chinese painting,
the individual tree or rock is not on but with the
space that forms its background. The paper untouched by the brush
is an integral part of the picture and never mere backing. It
is for this reason that when a Zen master is asked about the universal
or the ultimate, he replies with the immediate and particular—
"The cypress tree in the yard!" Here, then, we have
what Robert Linssen has called a spiritual materialism—a standpoint
far closer to relativity and field theory in modern science than
to any religious supernaturalism. But whereas the scientific comprehension
of the relative universe is as yet largely theoretical, these
Eastern disciplines have made it a direct experience. Potentially,
then, they would seem to offer a marvelous parallel to Western
science, but on the level of our immediate awareness of the world.
For science pursues the common-sense assumption that the natural
world is a multiplicity of individual things and events by attempting
to describe these units as accurately and minutely as possible.
Because science is above all analytic in its way of describing
things, it seems at first to disconnect them more than ever. Its
experiments are the study of carefully isolated situations, designed
to exclude influences that cannot be measured and controlled—as
when one studies falling bodies in a vacuum to cut out the friction
of air. But for this reason the scientist understands better than
anyone else just how inseparable things are. The more he tries
to cut out external influences upon an experimental situation,
the more he discovers new ones, hitherto unsuspected. The more
carefully he describes, say, the motion of a given particle, the
more he finds himself describing also the space in which it moves.
The realization that all things are inseparably related is in
proportion to one's effort to make them clearly distinct. Science
therefore surpasses the common-sense point of view from which
it begins, coming to speak of things and events as properties
of the "fields" in which they occur. But this is simply
a theoretical description of a state of affairs which, in these
forms of Eastern Mysticism," is directly sensed. As soon
as this is clear, we have a sound basis for a meeting of minds
between East and West which could be remarkably fruitful.
The practical difficulty is that Taoism and Zen are so involved
with the forms of Far Eastern culture that it is a major problem
to adapt them to Western needs. For example, Eastern teachers
work on the esoteric and aristocratic principle that the student
must learn the hard way and find out almost everything for himself.
Aside from occasional hints, the teacher merely accepts or rejects
the student's attainments. But Western teachers work on the exoteric
and democratic principle that everything possible must be done
to inform and assist the student so as to make his mastery of
the subject as easy as possible. Does the latter approach, as
purists insist, merely vulgarize the discipline? The answer is
that it depends upon the type of discipline. If everyone learns
enough mathematics to master quadratic equations, the attainment
will seem small in comparison with the much rarer comprehension
of the theory of numbers. But the transformation of consciousness
undertaken in Taoism and Zen is more like the correction of faulty
perception or the curing of a disease. It is not an acquisitive
process of learning more and more facts or greater and greater
skills, but rather an unlearning of wrong habits and opinions.
As Lao-tzu said, "The scholar gains every day, but the Taoist
loses every day."
The practice of Taoism or Zen in the Far East is therefore an
undertaking in which the Westerner will find himself confronted
with many barriers erected quite deliberately to discourage idle
curiosity or to nullify wrong views by inciting the student to
proceed systematically and consistently upon false assumptions
to the reductio ad absurdum. My own main interest in the
study of comparative mysticism has been to cut through these tangles
and to identify the essential psychological processes underlying
those alterations of perception which enable us to see ourselves
and the world in their basic unity. I have perhaps had some small
measure of success in trying, Western fashion, to make this type
of experience more accessible. I am therefore at once gratified
and embarrassed by a development in Western science which could
possibly put this unitive vision of the world, by almost shockingly
easy means, within the reach of many who have thus far sought
it in vain by traditional methods.
Part of the genius of Western science is that it finds simpler
and more rational ways of doing things that were formerly chancy
or laborious. Like any inventive process, it does not always make
these discoveries systematically; often it just stumbles upon
them, but then goes on to work them into an intelligible order.
In medicine, for example, science isolates the essential drug
from the former witch-doctor's brew of salamanders, mugwort, powdered
skulls, and dried blood. The purified drug cures more surely,
but—it does not perpetuate health. The patient still
has to change habits of life or diet which made him prone to the
disease.
Is it possible, then, that Western science could provide a medicine
which would at least give the human organism a start in releasing
itself from its chronic self-contradiction? The medicine might
indeed have to be supported by other procedures—psychotherapy,
"spiritual" disciplines, and basic changes in one's
pattern of life—but every diseased person seems to need some
kind of initial lift to set him on the way to health. The question
is by no means absurd if it is true that what afflicts us is a
sickness not just of the mind but of the organism, of the very
functioning of the nervous system and the brain. Is there, in
short, a medicine which can give us temporarily the sensation
of being integrated, of being fully one with ourselves and with
nature as the biologist knows us, theoretically, to be? If so,
the experience might offer clues to whatever else must be done
to bring about full and continuous integration. It might be at
least the tip of an Ariadne's thread to lead us out of the maze
in which all of us are lost from our infancy.
Relatively recent research suggests that there are at least three
such medicines, though none is an infallible "specific."
They work with some people, and much depends upon the social and
psychological context in which they are given. Occasionally their
effects may be harmful, but such limitations do not deter us from
using penicillin—often a far more dangerous chemical than any
of these three. I am speaking, of course, of mescaline (the active
ingredient of the peyote cactus), lysergic acid diethylamide (a
modified ergot alkaloid), and psilocybin (a derivative of the
mushroom Psilocybe mexicana).
The peyote cactus has long been used by the Indians of the Southwest
and Mexico as a means of communion with the divine world, and
today the eating of the dried buttons of the plant is the principal
sacrament of an Indian church known as the Native American Church
of the United States—by all accounts a most respectable and
Christian organization. At the end of the nineteenth century its
effects were first described by Weir Mitchell and Havelock Ellis,
and some years later its active ingredient was identified as mescaline,
a chemical of the amine group which is quite easily synthesized.
Lysergic acid diethylamide was first discovered in 1938 by the
Swiss pharmacologist A. Hofmann in the course of studying the
properties of the ergot fungus. Quite by accident he absorbed
a small amount of this acid while making certain changes in its
molecular structure, and noticed its peculiar psychological effects.
Further research proved that he had hit upon the most powerful
consciousness-changing drug now known, for LSD-25 (as it is called
for short) will produce its characteristic results in so minute
a dosage as 20 micrograms, 1/700,000,000 of an average man's weight.
Psilocybin is derived from another of the sacred plants of the
Mexican Indians—a type of mushroom known to them as teonanacatl,
"the flesh of God." Following Robert Weitlaner's discovery
in 1936 that the cult of "the sacred mushroom" was still
prevalent in Oaxaca, a number of mycologists, as specialists in
mushrooms are known, began to make studies of the mushrooms of
this region. Three varieties were found to be in use. In addition
to Psilocybe mexicana there were also Psilocybe aztecorum
Heim and Psilocybe wassonii, named respectively after the
mycologists Roger Heim and Gordon and Valentina Wasson, who took
part in the ceremonies of the cult.
Despite a very considerable amount of research and speculation,
little is known of the exact physiological effect of these chemicals
upon the nervous system. The subjective effects of all three tend
to be rather similar, though LSD-25, perhaps because of the minute
dosage required, seldom produces the nauseous reactions so often
associated with the other two. All the scientific papers I have
read seem to add up to the vague impression that in some way these
drugs suspend certain inhibitory or selective processes in the
nervous system so as to render our sensory apparatus more open
to impressions than is usual. Our ignorance of the precise effect
of these drugs is, of course, linked to the still rather fumbling
state of our knowledge of the brain. Such ignorance obviously
suggests great caution in their use, but thus far there is no
evidence that, in normal dosage, there is any likelihood of physiological
damage.*
In a very wide sense of the word, each of these substances is
a drug, but one must avoid the serious semantic error of confusing
them with drugs which induce physical craving for repeated use
or which dull the senses like alcohol or the sedatives. They are
classed, officially, as hallucinogens—an astonishingly inaccurate
term, since they cause one neither to hear voices nor to see visions
such as might be confused with physical reality. While they do
indeed produce the most complex and very obviously "hallucinatory"
patterns before closed eyes, their general effect is to sharpen
the senses to a supernormal degree of awareness. The standard
dosage of each substance maintains its effects for from five to
eight hours, and the experience is often so deeply revealing and
moving that one hesitates to approach it again until it has been
thoroughly "digested," and this may be a matter of months.
The reaction of most cultured people to the idea of gaining any
deep psychological or philosophical insight through a drug is
that it is much too simple, too artificial, and even too banal
to be seriously considered. A wisdom which can be "turned
on" like the switch of a lamp seems to insult human dignity
and degrade us to chemical automata. One calls to mind pictures
of a brave new world in which there is a class of synthesized
Buddhas, of people who have been "fixed" like the lobotomized,
the sterilized, or the hypnotized, only in another direction—people
who have somehow lost their humanity and with whom, as with drunkards,
one cannot really communicate. This is, however, a somewhat ghoulish
fantasy which has no relation to the facts or to the experience
itself. It belongs to the same kind of superstitious dread which
one feels for the unfamiliar, confusing it with the unnatural—the
way some people feel about Jews because they are circumcised or
even about Negroes because of their "alien" features
and color.
Despite the widespread and undiscriminating prejudice against
drugs as such, and despite the claims of certain religious disciplines
to be the sole means to genuine mystical insight, I can find no
essential difference between the experiences induced, under favorable
conditions, by these chemicals and the states of "cosmic
consciousness" recorded by R. M. Bucke, William James, Evelyn
Underhill, Raynor Johnson, and other investigators of mysticism.
"Favorable conditions" means a setting which is socially
and physically congenial; ideally this would be some sort of retreat
house (not a hospital or sanitarium) supervised by religiously
oriented psychiatrists or psychologists. The atmosphere should
be homelike rather than clinical, and it is of the utmost importance
that the supervisor's attitude be supportive and sympathetic.
Under insecure, bizarre, or unfriendly circumstances the experience
can easily degenerate into a highly unpleasant paranoia. Two days
should be set aside—one for the experience itself, which lasts
for six or eight hours, and one for evaluation in the calm and
relaxed frame of mind that normally follows.
This is simply to say that the use of such powerful medicines
is not to be taken lightly, as one smokes a cigarette or tosses
down a cocktail. They should be approached as one approaches a
sacrament, though not with the peculiar inhibition of gaiety and
humor that has become customary in our religious rituals. It is
a sound general rule that there should always be present some
qualified supervisor to provide a point of contact with "reality"
as it is socially defined. Ideally the "qualified supervisor"
should be a psychiatrist or clinical psychologist who has himself
experienced the effects of the drug, though I have observed that
many who are technically qualified have a frightened awe of unusual
states of consciousness which is apt to communicate itself, to
the detriment of the experience, to those under their care. The
most essential qualification of the supervisor is, therefore,
confidence in the situation—which is likewise "picked up"
by people in the state of acute sensitivity that the drugs induce.
The drugs in question are not aphrodisiacs, and when they are
taken in common by a small group the atmosphere is not in the
least suggestive of a drunken brawl nor of the communal torpor
of an opium den. Members of the group usually become open to each
other with a high degree of friendly affection, for in the mystical
phase of the experience the underlying unity or "belongingness"
of the members can have all the clarity of a physical sensation.
Indeed the social situation may become what religious bodies aim
at, but all too rarely achieve, in their rites of communion—a
relationship of the most vivid understanding, forgiveness, and
love. Of course, this does not automatically become a permanent
feeling, but neither does the sense of fellowship sometimes evoked
in strictly religious gatherings. The experience corresponds almost
exactly to the theological concept of a sacrament or means of
grace—an unmerited gift of spiritual power whose lasting effects
depend upon the use made of it in subsequent action. Catholic
theology also recognizes those so-called "extraordinary"
graces, often of mystical insight, which descend spontaneously
outside the ordinary or regular means that the Church provides
through the sacraments and the disciplines of prayer. It seems
to me that only special pleading can maintain that the graces
mediated through mushrooms, cactus plants, and scientists are
artificial and spurious in contrast with those which come through
religious discipline. Claims for the exclusive virtue of one's
own brand is, alas, as common in organized religion as in commerce,
coupled in the former instance with the puritan's sense of guilt
in enjoying anything for which he has not suffered.
When I wrote this book, I was well aware that LSD in particular
might become a public scandal, especially in the United States
where we had the precedents of Prohibition and of fantastically
punitive laws against the use of marijuana—laws passed with
hardly a pretense of scientific investigation of the drug, and
amazingly foisted upon many other nations. That was nine years
ago ( 1961 ) and since then all that I feared would happen has
happened. I ask myself whether I should ever have written this
book, whether I was profaning the mysteries and casting pearls
before swine. I reasoned, however, that since Huxley and others
had already let the secret out, it was up to me to encourage a
positive, above-board, fearless, and intelligent approach to what
are now known as psychedelic chemicals.
But in vain. Thousands of young people, fed up with standard-brand
religions which provided nothing but talk, admonition, and (usually)
bad ritual, rushed immediately to LSD and other psychedelics in
search of some key to genuine religious experience. As might be
expected, there were accidents. A few potential psychotics were
pushed over the brink, usually because they took LSD in uncontrolled
circumstances, in excessive dosage, or in the arid and threatening
atmosphere of hospital research run by psychiatrists who imagined
that they were investigating artificially induced schizophrenia.
Because most news is bad news, these accidents received full coverage
in the press, to the relative exclusion of reports on the overwhelming
majority of such splendid and memorable experiences as I describe
further on. A divorce is news; a happy marriage isn't. There were
even deliberately falsified stories in the newspapers, as that
several young men taking LSD stared at the sun for so long that
they became blind. Phychiatrists raised alarms about "brain
damage," for which no solid evidence was ever produced, and
warnings were issued about its destructive effect on the genes,
which was later shown to be insignificant and more or less the
same as the effects of coffee and aspirin.
In view of this public hysteria the Sandoz Company, which held
a patent on LSD, withdrew it from the market. At the same time
the United States government, having learned absolutely nothing
from the disaster of Prohibition, simply banned LSD ( allowing
its use only in some few research projects sponsored by the National
Institute of Mental Health and by the Army, in its investigations
of chemical warfare) and turned over its control to the police.
Now a law against LSD is simply unenforceable because the substance
is tasteless and colorless, because effective dosages can be confined,
in vast amounts, to minute spaces, and because it can be disguised
as almost anything drinkable or eatable from gin to blotting paper.
Thus as soon as the reliable Sandoz material was withdrawn, amateur
chemists began to produce black-market LSD in immense quantities—LSD
of uncertain quality and dosage, often mixed with such other ingredients
as methedrine, belladonna, and heroin. Consequently the number
of psychotic episodes resulting from its use began to increase,
aggravated by the fact that, in improperly controlled situations
and under threat from the police, the LSD taker is an easy victim
of extreme paranoia. At the same time, some of these amateurs,
mainly graduate students in chemistry with a mission to "turn
people on," produced some tolerably good LSD. Thus there
were still so many more positive experiences than negative that
fascination with this alchemy continued and expanded, and though
the general public associates its use with hippies and college
students, it has been very widely used by mature adults—doctors,
lawyers, clergymen, artists, businessmen, professors, and levelheaded
housewives.
The blanket suppression of LSD and other psychedelics has been
a complete disaster in that ( 1 ) it has seriously hindered proper
research on these drugs; (2) it has created a profitable black
market by raising the price; (3) it has embarrassed the police
with an impossible assignment; (4) it has created the false fascination
with fruit that is forbidden; (5) it has seriously impeded the
normal work of courts of justice, and herded thousands of non-criminal
types of people into already overcrowded prisons, which, as everyone
knows, are schools for sodomy and for crime as a profession; (
6 ) it has made users of psychedelics more susceptible to paranoia
than ever. **
What, then, are the true dangers of real LSD? Principally that
it may trigger a short-or long-term psychosis in anyone susceptible,
and, despite all our techniques for psychological and neurological
testing, we can never detect a potential psychotic with certainty.
Anyone contemplating the use of a psychedelic chemical should
weigh this risk carefully: there is a slight chance of becoming,
at least temporarily, insane. The risk is probably much greater
than in traveling by a commercial airline, but considerably less
than in traveling by road. Every household contains things of
potential danger: electricity, matches, gas, kitchen knives, carbon
tetrachloride (cleaning fluid), ammonia, aerosol sprayers, alcohol,
slippery bathtubs, sliding rugs, rifles, lawn mowers, axes, plate-glass
doors, and swimming pools. There are no laws against the sale
and possession of such things, nor is one prevented from cultivating
Amanita pantherina (the most deceptive and poisonous mushroom),
deadly nightshade, laburnum, morning-glory, wood rose, Scotch
broom, and many other poisonous or psychedelic plants.
One of the most sensible tenets of Jewish and ( at least theoretically)
of Christian theology is that no substance or creature is, in
itself, evil. Evil arises only in its abuse—in killing someone
with a knife, committing arson with matches, or running down a
pedestrian while driving alcoholized. (But note that a highly
depressed, anxious, or angry driver is just as dangerous, for
his attention is not on the road. ) It seems to me a sound legal
principle that people should be prosecuted only for overt and
clearly specifiable deeds, damaging or clearly intended to damage
life, limb, and property. Laws which proscribe the mere sale,
purchase, or possession of substances ( aside from machine guns
and bombs ) which might be used in some harmful way invite the
worst abuses of police power for political ends or for the harassment
of unpopular individuals. (How easy to plant some marijuana on
an unwanted competitor in business!) All such sumptuary laws (regulating
private morals and creating crimes without unwilling victims )
are attempts to make personal freedom foolproof and without risk,
and thus to deprive the individual of responsibility for his own
life and of taking calculated risk for the achievement of political,
social, athletic, scientific, or religious objectives which he
feels well worth the dangers.
Adventurous and creative people have always been willing, and
have usually been encouraged, to take the most serious risks in
the exploration of the outer world and in the development of scientific
and technological skill. Many young people now feel that the time
has come to explore the inner world, and are willing to take the
unfamiliar risks which it involves. They, too, should be encouraged
and also assisted with all the care and wisdom at our disposal.
Why permit the purely athletic tour de force of climbing
Everest (using oxygen) and forbid the spiritual adventure of ascending
Mount Sumeru, Mount Zion, or Mount Analogue (using psychedelics)?
Superficially, the public and official fear of psychedelic drugs
is based on uninformed association with such addictive poisons
as heroin, amphetamines, and barbiturates. But drinking coffee
or whisky is also "using drugs," and this is allowed
even though the effects may be harmful and the creative results
negligible. Psychedelic drugs are feared, basically, for the same
reason that mystical experience has been feared, discouraged,
and even condemned in the Catholic, Protestant, and Islamic orthodoxies.
It leads to disenchantment and apathy toward the approved social
rewards of status and success, to chuckles at pretentiousness
and pomposity, and, worse, to disbelief in the Church-and-State
dogma that we are all God's adopted orphans or fluky little germs
in a mechanical and mindless universe. No authoritarian government,
whether ecclesiastical or secular, can tolerate the apprehension
that each one of us is God in disguise, and that our real inmost,
outmost, and utmost Self cannot be killed. That's why they had
to do away with Jesus.
Thus the possibility that even a preliminary glimpse of this apprehension
is available through taking a pill or chewing a plant threatens
mystical experience for the millions—that is, masses of people
who will be difficult to rule by force of "authority."
It is even now being recognized in the United States that the
real danger of psychedelics is not so much neurological as political—that
"turned-on" people are not interested in serving the
power games of the present rulers. Looking at the successful men,
they see completely boring lives.
In the Epilogue I shall make it clear that psychedelic experience
is only a glimpse of genuine mystical insight, but a glimpse which
can be matured and deepened by the various ways of meditation
in which drugs are no longer necessary or useful. When you get
the message, hang up the phone. For psychedelic drugs are simply
instruments, like microscopes, telescopes, and telephones. The
biologist does not sit with eye permanently glued to the microscope;
he goes away and works on what he has seen.
Furthermore, speaking quite strictly, mystical insight is no more
in the chemical itself than biological knowledge is in the microscope.
There is no difference in principle between sharpening perception
with an external instrument, such as a microscope, and sharpening
it with an internal instrument, such as one of these three drugs.
If they are an affront to the dignity of the mind, the microscope
is an affront to the dignity of the eye and the telephone to the
dignity of the ear. Strictly speaking, these drugs do not impart
wisdom at all, any more than the microscope alone gives knowledge.
They provide the raw materials of wisdom, and are useful to the
extent that the individual can integrate what they reveal into
the whole pattern of his behavior and the whole system of his
knowledge. As an escape, an isolated and dissociated ecstasy,
they may have the same sort of value as a rest cure or a good
entertainment. But this is like using a giant computer to play
tick-tack-toe, and the hours of heightened perception are wasted
unless occupied with sustained reflection or meditation upon whatever
themes may be suggested.
The nearest thing I know in literature to the reflective use of
one of these drugs is the so-called Bead Game in Hermann Hesse's
Magister Ludi (Das Glasperlenspiel). Hesse writes of a
distant future in which an order of scholar-mystics have discovered
an ideographic language which can relate all the branches of science
and art, philosophy and religion. The game consists in playing
with the relationships between configurations in these various
fields in the same way that the musician plays with harmonic and
contrapuntal relationships. From such elements as the design of
a Chinese house, a Scarlatti sonata, a topological formula, and
a verse from the Upanishads, the players will elucidate
a common theme and develop its application in numerous directions.
No two games are the same, for not only do the elements differ,
but also there is no thought of attempting to force a static and
uniform order upon the world. The universal language facilitates
the perception of relationships but does not fix them, and is
founded upon a "musical" conception of the world in
which order is as dynamic and changing as the patterns of sound
in a fugue.
Similarly, in my investigations of LSD or psilocybin, I usually
started with some such theme as polarity, transformation (as of
food into organism), competition for survival, the relation of
the abstract to the concrete, or of Logos to Eros, and then allowed
my heightened perception to elucidate the theme in terms of certain
works of art or music, of some natural object as a fern, a flower,
or a sea shell, of a religious or mythological archetype (it might
be the Mass), and even of personal relationships with those who
happened to be with me at the time. Or I would concentrate upon
one of the senses and try, as it were, to turn it back upon itself
so as to see the process of seeing, and from this move on to trying
to know knowing, so approaching the problem of my own identity.
From these reflections there arise intuitive insights of astonishing
clarity, and because there is little difficulty in remembering
them after the effects of the drug have ceased (especially if
they are recorded or written down at the time), the days or weeks
following may be used for testing them by the normal standards
of logical, aesthetic, philosophical, or scientific criticism.
As might be expected, some prove to be valid and others not. It
is the same with the sudden hunches that come to the artist or
inventor in the ordinary way; they are not always as true or as
applicable as they seem to be in the movement of illumination.
The drugs appear to give an enormous impetus to the creative intuition,
and thus to be of more value for constructive invention and research
than for psychotherapy in the ordinary sense of "adjusting"
the disturbed personality. Their best sphere of use is not the
mental hospital but the studio and the laboratory, or the institute
of advanced studies.
The following pages make no attempt to be a scientific report
on the effects of these chemicals, with the usual details of dosage,
time and place, physical symptoms, and the like. Such documents
exist by the thousand, and, in view of our very rudimentary knowledge
of the brain, seem to me to have a rather limited value. As well
try to understand a book by dissolving it in solution and popping
it into a centrifuge. My object is rather to give some impression
of the new world of consciousness which these substances reveal.
I do not believe that this world is either a hallucination or
an unimpeachable revelation of truth. It is probably the way things
appear when certain inhibitory processes of the brain and senses
are suspended, but this is a world in some ways so unfamiliar
that it is liable to misinterpretation. Our first impressions
may be as wide of the mark as those of the traveler in an unfamiliar
country or of astronomers taking their first look at the galaxies
beyond our own.
I have written this account as if the whole experience had happened
on one day in a single place, but it is in fact a composite of
several occasions. Except where I am describing visions before
closed eyes, and this is always specified, none of these experiences
are hallucinations. They are simply changed ways of seeing, interpreting,
and reacting to actual persons and events in the world of "public
reality," which, for purposes of this description, is a country
estate on the West Coast of America with garden. orchard, barns,
and surrounding mountains—all just as described, including the
rattletrap car loaded with junk. Consciousness-changing drugs
are popularly associated with the evocation of bizarre and fantastic
images, but in my own experience this happens only with closed
eyes. Otherwise, it is simply that the natural world is endowed
with a richness of grace, color, significance, and, sometimes,
humor, for which our normal adjectives are insufficient. The speed
of thought and association is increased so astonishingly that
it is hard for words to keep pace with the flood of ideas that
come to mind. Passages that may strike the reader as ordinary
philosophical reflection are reports of what, at the time, appear
to be the most tangible certainties. So, too, images that appear
before closed eyes are not just figments of imagination, but patterns
and scenes so intense and autonomous that they seem to be physically
present. The latter have, however, proved of less interest to
me than one's transformed impression of the natural world and
the heightened speed of associative thought, and it is thus with
these that the following account is chiefly concerned.
*Normal dosage for mescaline is 300 milligrams,
for LSD-25 100 micrograms, and for psilocybin 20 milligrams. The
general reader interested in a more detailed account of consciousness-changing
drugs and the present state of research concerning them should
consult Robert S. de Ropp's Drugs and the Mind (Grove Press, New
York, 1960). (back)
**For purposes of this summary I am including marijuana and hashish
as psychedelics, though they do not have the potency of LSD. (back)
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