Instant Mysticism

In every age, men have struggled to perceive God directly rather than as a tenuously grasped abstraction. Few succeed, and the visions of the world's rare mystics have normally come only after hard spiritual work--prayer, meditation, ascetic practice. Now a number of psychologists and theologians are exploring such hallucinogenic drugs as mescaline, psilocybin and LSD-25 as an easy way to instant mysticism.

In large enough doses, these drugs can simulate the effects of certain forms of psychosis--to the point, in some cases, of permanent derangement. But in controlled, minute doses the drugs produce weird and wonderful fantasies of sight and feeling; in Greenwich Village and on college campuses, they seem to be replacing marijuana as the hip way to get kicks. Some investigators who have tried the drugs claim to have undergone a profound spiritual experience, and these men are seriously, if gingerly, studying the undefined relationship between drug-induced visions and the classic forms of mystical ecstasy.

"The Void Was Lit Up." For at least 3,000 years, primitive tribes have had visionary orgies at feasts of certain sacred plants, often mushrooms. The use of the peyote cactus, from which mescaline is derived, is a regular part of the Communion services of the Native American Church, composed of 200,000 U.S. Indians. Novelist Aldous Huxley wrote, in The Doors of Perception, that mescaline produced in him an effect that seemed like seeing the beatific vision. Psychologist Timothy Leary, who was dropped from the Harvard faculty last spring after receiving strong criticism for his freewheeling research in the use of LSD and psilocybin, gave the drugs to 69 "fulltime religious professionals," found that three out of four had "intense mystico-religious reactions, and more than half claimed that they had the deepest spiritual experience of their life."

Such spiritual experiences range from heavenly to hideous: a number of subjects suffer through agonizing intimations of hell rather than of paradise. Most instant mystics feel that they have been "reborn," and have suddenly been given the key to existence, although their intuition usually appears in the form of an incommunicable platitude, such as "oneness is all." California Prison Psychologist Wilson Van Dusen, for example, imagined himself in a black void in which "God was walking on me and I cried for joy. My own voice seemed to speak of his coming, but I didn't believe it. Suddenly and unexpectedly the zenith of the void was lit up with the blinding presence of the One. How did I know it? All I can say is that there was no possibility of doubt."

Union With God. This kind of experience seems to be at least subjectively religious; but there are less convincing cases in which drug takers appear to have read religion into their visions or rigged the setting to induce a spiritual experience. One professor at a Protestant divinity school recalls that he was handed a rose to contemplate after taking his dose of LSD. "As I looked at the rose it began to glow," he said, "and suddenly I felt that I understood the rose. A few days later when I reread the Biblical account of Moses and the burning bush it suddenly made sense to me."

Perhaps the best-known deliberate effort to create religious experience with drugs was a special service in the basement chapel beneath Boston University's nondenominational Marsh Chapel on Good Friday last year. Organ music was piped into the dimly lit chapel for a group of 20 subjects, most of them divinity students, half of whom were given LSD while the rest took placebos. A minister gave a brief sermon, and the students were left alone to meditate. During the next three hours, all except one of the LSD takers (but only one of those who took placebos) reported "a genuine religious experience."

"I felt a deep union with God," reports one participant. "I remember feeling a profound sense of sorrow that there was no priest or minister at the altar. I had a tremendous urge to go up on the altar and minister the services. But I had this sense of unworthiness, and I crawled under the pews and tried to get away. Finally I carried my Bible to the altar and then tried to preach. The only words I mumbled were 'peace, peace.' I felt I was communicating beyond words."

End Run Around Christ. Most churchmen are duly skeptical about equating an afternoon on LSD with the intuitions of a St. John of the Cross or a Martin Luther. R. C. Zaehner of Oxford, a Roman Catholic and an expert on Eastern religions, holds that the drug-induced visions are simply one of many kinds of preternatural experience, and are qualitatively different from the ecstasies granted mystics. Presbyterian Theodore Gill, president of San Francisco Theological Seminary, wonders whether the drug experience might be a rival rather than a supplement to what conventional religion offers. Says he: "The drugs make an end run around Christ and go straight to the Holy Spirit." Clerics also charge that LSD zealots have become a clique of modern gnostics concerned only with furthering their private search for what they call "inner freedom."

Others feel that the church should not quickly dismiss anything that has the power to deepen faith. Dr. W. T. Stace, of Princeton, one of the nation's foremost students of mysticism, believes that LSD can change lives for the better. "The fact that the experience was induced by drugs has no bearing on its validity," he says. In an article on the drugs written with Leary for the journal Religious Education, Dr. Walter Houston Clark of Andover Newton Theological School argued that the structure of the drugs is similar to that of a family of chemicals in the body known as indoles. It may be, he suggested, "that a naturally occurring excess of the indoles might predispose some people to certain kinds of mystical experience." Says Paul Lee, an instructor at M.I.T. who took LSD while a student at Harvard Divinity School: "The pity is that our everyday religious experience has become so jaded, so rationalized that to become aware of the mystery, wonderment and confusion of life we must resort to the drugs. Nonetheless, many of us are profoundly grateful for the vistas opened up by the drug experience. It remains to be seen whether this experience is to be interpreted in religious language."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.