Timothy Francis Leary (1920 1996)
The Seven Tongues of God
First published in The Psychedelic Review, Number 3, 1964
The Turn-On
Once upon a time, many years ago, on a sunny afternoon in the garden of a Cuernavaca villa, I ate seven of the so-called sacred mushrooms which had been given to me by a scientist from the University of Mexico. During the next five hours, I was whirled through an experience which could be described in many extravagant metaphors but which was, above all and without question, the deepest religious experience of my life.
Statements about personal reactions, however passionate, are always relative to the speakers history and may have little general significance. Next come the questions Why? and So what?
There are many predisposing factors intellectual, emotional, spiritual, social which cause one person to be ready for a dramatic mind-opening experience and which lead another to shrink back from new levels of awareness. The discovery that the human brain possesses an infinity of potentialities and can operate at unexpected space-time dimensions left me feeling exhilarated, awed, and quite convinced that I had awakened from a long ontological sleep. This sudden flash awakening is called turning on.
Tuning In
A profound transcendent experience should leave in its wake a changed man and a changed life. Since my illumination of August 1960, I have devoted most of my energies to trying to understand the revelatory potentialities of the human nervous system and to making these insights available to others.
I have repeated this biochemical and (to me) sacramental ritual several hundred times, and almost every time I have been awed by religious revelations as shattering as the first experience. During this period I have been lucky enough to collaborate in this work with several hundred scientists and scholars who joined our various research projects. In our centers at Harvard, in Mexico, and at Millbrook we have arranged transcendent experiences for several thousand persons from all walks of life, including more than 200 full-time religious professionals, about half of whom profess the Christian or Jewish faiths and about half of whom belong to Eastern religions.
Included in this roster are several divinity college deans, divinity college presidents, university chaplains, executives of religious foundations, prominent religious editors, and several distinguished religious philosophers. In our research files and in certain denominational offices there is building up a large and quite remarkable collection of reports which will be published when the political atmosphere becomes more tolerant. At this point it is conservative to state that over 75% of these subjects report intense mystico-religious responses, and considerably more than 50% claim that they have had the deepest spiritual experience of their life.
The interest generated by the research at Harvard led to the formation in 1962 of an informal group of ministers, theologians and religious psychologists who met once a month. In addition to arranging for spiritually oriented psychedelic sessions and discussing prepared papers, this group provided the guides for the dramatic Good Friday study and was the original planning nucleus of the organizations which assumed sponsorship of our research in consciousness expansion: IFIF (the International Federation for Internal Freedom), 1963, the Castalia Foundation, 1963-66, and the League for Spiritual Discovery, 1966. The generating impulse and the original leadership of our work and play came from a seminar in religious experience, and this fact may be related to the alarm which we have aroused in some secular and psychiatric circles.
The Good Friday Miracle
The Good Friday study, which has been sensationalized recently in the press as The Miracle of Marsh Chapel, deserves further elaboration not only as an example of a serious, controlled experiment involving over 30 courageous volunteers, but also as a systematic demonstration of the religious aspects of the psychedelic revelatory experience. This study was the Ph.D. dissertation research of Walter Pahnke, at that time a graduate student in the philosophy of religion at Harvard University. Pahnke, who is, incidentally, both an M.D. and a bachelor of divinity, set out to determine whether the transcendent experience reported during psychedelic sessions was similar to the mystical experience reported by saints and famous religious mystics.
The subjects in this study were 20 divinity students selected from a group of volunteers. The subjects were divided into five groups of four persons, and each group met before the session for orientation and preparation. To each group were assigned two guides with considerable psychedelic experience. The ten guides were professors and advanced graduate students from Boston-area colleges.
The experiment took place in a small, private chapel at Boston University, beginning about one hour before noon on Good Friday. The dean of the chapel, Howard Thurman, who was to conduct a three-hour devotional service upstairs in the main hall of the church, visited the subjects a few minutes before the start of the service at noon and gave a brief inspirational talk.
Two of the subjects in each group and one of the two guides were given a moderately stiff dosage (i.e., 30 mg.) of psilocybin, the chemical synthesis of the active ingredient in the sacred mushroom of Mexico. The remaining two subjects and the second guide received a placebo which produced noticeable somatic side effects but which was not psychedelic. The study was triple blind: neither the subjects, guides, nor experimenter knew who received psilocybin.
A detailed description of this fascinating study can be found in Pahnkes thesis, available from the Harvard Library. I can say, in summary, that the results clearly support the hypothesis that, with adequate preparation and in an environment which is supportive and religiously meaningful, subjects who have taken the psychedelic drug report mystical experiences significantly more than placebo controls.
Our studies, naturalistic and experimental, thus demonstrate that if the expectation, preparation, and setting are spiritual, an intense mystical or revelatory experience can be expected in from 40 to 90 percent of subjects ingesting psychedelic drugs. These results may be attributed to the bias of our research group, which has taken the far out and rather dangerous position that there are experiential-spiritual as well as secular-behavioral potentialities of the nervous system. While we share and follow the epistemology of scientific psychology (objective records), our basic ontological assumptions are closer to Jung than to Freud, closer to the mystics than to the theologians, closer to Einstein and Bohr than to Newton. In order to check on this bias, let us cast a comparative glance at the work of other research groups in this field who begin from more conventional ontological bases.
LSD Can Produce a Religious High
Oscar Janiger, a psychiatrist, and William McGlothlin, a psychologist, have reported the reactions of 194 psychedelic subjects. Of these, 73 took LSD as part of a psychotherapy program and 121 were volunteers. The religious set would not be expected to dominate the expectations of these subjects. The results, which are abstracted from a paper published in the Psychedelic Review, are as follows:
Two other studies, one by Ditman et al., another by Savage et al., used the same questionnaire, allowing for inter-experiment comparison. Both Ditman and Savage are psychiatrists, but the clinical environment of the latters study is definitely more religious (subjects are shown religious articles during the session, etc.). Summarizing the religious items of their questionnaires:
Here, then, we have five scientific studies by qualified investigators the four naturalistic studies by Leary et al., Savage et al., Ditman et al. and Janiger-McGlothlin, and the triple-blind study in the Harvard dissertation mentioned earlier yielding data which indicate that (1) if the setting is supportive but not spiritual, between 40 to 75 percent of psychedelic subjects will report intense and life-changing religious experiences and that (2) if the set and setting are supportive and spiritual, then from 40 to 90 percent of the experiences will be revelatory and mystico-religious.
It is hard to see how these results can be disregarded by those who are concerned with spiritual growth and religious development. These data are even more interesting because the experiments took place at a time (1962) when mysticism, individual religious ecstasy (as opposed to religious behavior), was highly suspect and when the classic, direct, nonverbal means of revelation and consciousness expansion such as meditation, yoga, fasting, monastic withdrawal and sacramental foods and drugs were surrounded by an aura of fear, clandestine secrecy, active social sanction, and even imprisonment. The two hundred professional workers in religious vocations who partook of psychedelic substances (noted earlier) were responsible, respected, thoughtful, and moral individuals who were grimly aware of the controversial nature of the procedure and aware that their reputations and their jobs might be undermined (and, as a matter of fact, have been and are today being threatened for some of them). Still the results read: 75 percent spiritual revelation. It may well be that the most intense religious experience, like the finest metal, requires fire, the heat of police constabulatory opposition, to produce the keenest edge. When the day comes as it surely will that sacramental bio-chemicals like LSD will be as routinely and tamely used as organ music and incense to assist in the attainment of religious experience, it may well be that the ego-shattering effect of the drug will be diminished. Such may be one aspect of the paradoxical nature of religious experience.
What Is the Religious Experience?
The Religious Experience: You are undoubtedly wondering about the meaning of this phrase, which has been used so freely in the preceding paragraphs. May I offer a definition?
The religious experience is the ecstatic, incontrovertibly certain subjective discovery of answers to seven basic spiritual questions.
There can be, of course, absolute subjective certainty in regard to secular questions: Is this the girl I love? Is Fidel Castro a wicked man? Are the Yankees the best baseball team? But issues which do not involve the seven basic questions belong to secular games, and such convictions and faiths, however deeply held, can be distinguished from the religious. Liturgical practices, rituals, dogmas, theological speculations, can be and too often are secular, i.e., completely divorced from the spiritual experience.
What are these 7 basic spiritual questions?
1. The Ultimate Power Question
What is the basic energy underlying the universethe ultimate power that moves the galaxies and nucleus of the atom? Where and how did it all begin? What is the cosmic plan? Cosmology.
2. The Life Question
What is life? Where and how did it begin? How is it evolving? Where is it going? Genesis, biology, evolution, genetics.
3. The Human Being Question
Who is man? Whence did he come? What is his structure and function? Anatomy and physiology.
4. The Awareness Question
How does man sense, experience, know? Epistemology, neurology.
5. The Ego Question
Who am I? What is my spiritual, psychological, social place in the plan? What should I do about it? Social psychology.
6. The Emotional Question
What should I feel about it? Psychiatry. Personality psychology.
7. The Ultimate Escape Question
How do I get out of it? Anesthesiology (amateur or professional) . Eschatology.
While one may disagree with the wording, I think most thoughtful people philosophers or not can agree on something like this list of basic issues. Do not most of the great religious statements Eastern or monotheistic speak directly to these questions?
Now one important fact about these questions is that they are continually being answered and re-answered, not only by all the religions of the world but also by the data of the natural sciences. Read these questions again from the standpoint of the goals of (1) astronomy-physics, (2) biochemistry, genetics, paleontology, and evolutionary theory, (3) anatomy and physiology, (4) neurology, (5) sociology, psychology, (6) psychiatry, (7) eschatological theology and anesthesiology.
We are all aware of the unhappy fact that both science and religion are too often diverted toward secular-game goals. Various pressures demand that laboratory and church forget these basic questions and instead provide distractions, illusory protection, narcotic comfort. Most of us dread confrontation with the answers to these basic questions, whether the answers come from objective science or religion. But if pure science and religion address themselves to the same basic questions, what is the distinction between the two disciplines? Science is the systematic attempt to record and measure the energy process and the sequence of energy transformations we call life. The goal is to answer the basic questions in terms of objective, observed, public data. Religion is the systematic attempt to provide answers to the same questions subjectively, in terms of direct, incontrovertible, personal experience.
Science is a social system which evolves roles, rules, rituals, values, language, space-time locations to further the quest for these goals, to answer these questions objectively, externally. Religion is a social system which has evolved its roles, rules, rituals, values, language, space-time locations to further the pursuit of the same goals, to answer these questions subjectively through the revelatory experience. A science which fails to address itself to these spiritual goals, which accepts other purposes (however popular), becomes secular, political, and tends to oppose new data. A religion which fails to provide direct experiential answers to these spiritual questions (which fails to produce the ecstatic high) becomes secular, political, and tends to oppose the individual revelatory confrontation. The Oxford orientalist R. C. Zaehner, whose formalism is not always matched by his tolerance, has remarked that experience, when divorced from dogma, often leads to absurd and wholly irrational excesses. Like any statement of polarity, the opposite is equally true: dogma, when divorced from experience, often leads to absurd and wholly rational excesses. Those of us who have been devoting our lives to the study of consciousness have been able to collect considerable sociological data about the tendency of the rational mind to spin out its own interpretations. But I shall have more to say about the political situation in later chapters.
Religion and Science Provide Similar Answers to the Same Basic Questions
At this point I should like to advance the hypothesis that those aspects of the psychedelic experience which subjects report to be ineffable and ecstatically religious involve a direct awareness of the energy processes which physicists and biochemists and physiologists and neurologists and psychologists and psychiatrists measure.
We are treading here on very tricky ground. When we read the reports of LSD subjects, we are doubly limited. First, they can only speak in the vocabulary they know, and for the most part they do not possess the lexicon and training of energy scientists. Second, we researchers find only what we are prepared to look for, and too often we think in crude psychological-jargon concepts: moods, emotions, value judgments, diagnostic categories, social pejoratives, religious clichés. Since 1962 I have talked to thousands of LSD trippers, mystics, saddhus, occultists, saints, inquiring if their hallucinations, visions, revelations, ecstasies, orgasms, hits, flashes, space-outs and freak-outs can be translated into the language not just of religion, psychiatry and psychology but also of the and biological sciences.
1. The Ultimate-Power Question
A. The scientific answers to this question change constantly Newtonian laws, quantum indeterminacy, atomic structure, nuclear structure. Today the basic energy is located within the nucleus. Inside the atom a transparent sphere of emptiness, thinly populated with electrons, the substance of the atom has shrunk to a core of unbelievable smallness: enlarged 1000 million times, an atom would be about the size of a football, but its nucleus would still be hardly visible a mere speck of dust at the center. Yet that nucleus radiates a powerful electric field which holds and controls the electrons around it.
Incredible power and complexity operating at speeds and spatial dimensions which our conceptual minds cannot register. Infinitely small, yet pulsating outward through enormous networks of electrical forces atom, molecule, cell, planet, star: all forms dancing to the nuclear tune.
The cosmic design is this network of energy whirling through space-time. More than 15,000 million years ago the oldest known stars began to form. Whirling disks of gas molecules (driven, of course, by that tiny, spinning, nuclear force) condensing clouds, further condensations the tangled web of spinning magnetic fields clustering into stellar forms, and each stellar cluster hooked up in a magnetic dance with its planetary cluster and with every other star in the galaxy, and each galaxy whirling in synchronized relationship to the other galaxies.
One thousand million galaxies. From 100 million to 100,000 million stars in a galaxy that is to say, 100,000 million planetary systems per galaxy, and each planetary system slowly wheeling through the stellar cycle that allows for a brief time the possibility of life as we know it.
Five thousand million years ago, a slow-spinning dwarf star we call the sun is the center of a field of swirling planetary material. The planet Earth is created. In 5,000 million years the suns supply of hydrogen will be burned up; the planets will be engulfed by a final solar explosion. Then the ashen remnants of our planetary system will spin silently through the dark infinity of space. And then is the dance over? Hardly. Our tiny solar light, which is one of 100,000 million suns in our galaxy, will scarcely be missed. And our galaxy is one of 1,000 million galaxies spinning out and up at rates which exceed the speed of light each galaxy eventually burning up, to be replaced by new galaxies to preserve the dance equilibrium.
Here in the always changing data of nuclear physics and astronomy is the current scientific answer to the first basic question material enough indeed for an awesome cosmology.
B. Psychedelic reports often contain phrases which seem to describe similar phenomena, subjectively experienced.
(a) I passed in and out of a state several times where I was so relaxed that I felt open to a total flow, over and around and through my body (more than my body) All objects were dripping, streaming, with white-hot light or electricity which flowed in the air. It was as though we were watching the world, just having come into being, cool off, its substance and form still molten and barely beginning to harden.
(b) Body being destroyed after it became so heavy as to be unbearable. Mind wandering, ambulating throughout an ecstatically lit, indescribable landscape. How can there be so much light layers and layers of light, light upon light? All is illumination.
(c) I became more and more conscious of vibrations of the vibrations in my body, the harp strings giving forth their individual tones. Gradually I felt myself becoming one with the cosmic vibration In this dimension there were no forms, no deities or personalities just bliss.
(d) The dominant impression was that of entering into the marrow of existence It was as if each of the billion atoms of experience which under normal circumstances are summarized and averaged into crude, indiscriminate, wholesale impressions was now being seen and savored for itself. The other clear sense was that of cosmic relativity. Perhaps all experience never gets summarized in any inclusive overview. Perhaps all there is, is this everlasting congeries of an infinite number of discrete points of view, each summarizing the whole from its perspective.
(e) I could see the whole history and evolution along which man has come. I was moving into the future and saw the old cycle of peace and war, good times and bad times, starting to repeat, and I said, The same old thing again. Oh, God! It has changed, though, it is different, and I thought of the rise of man from animal to spiritual being. But I was still moving into the future, and I saw the whole planet destroyed and all history, evolution, and human efforts being wiped out in this one ultimate destructive act of God.
Subjects speak of participating in and merging with pure (i.e., content-free) energy, white light; of witnessing the breakdown of macroscopic objects into vibratory patterns, visual nets, the collapse of external structure into wave patterns, the awareness that everything is a dance of particles, sensing the smallness and fragility of our system, visions of the void, of world-ending explosions, of the cyclical nature of creation and dissolution, etc. Now I need not apologize for the flimsy inadequacy of these words. We just dont have a better experiential vocabulary. If God were to permit you a brief voyage into the divine process, let you whirl for a second into the atomic nucleus or spin you out on a light-year trip through the galaxies, how on earth would you describe what you saw when you got back, breathless, to your office? This metaphor may sound farfetched or irrelevant, but just ask someone who has taken a heavy dose of LSD.
2. The Life Question
A. The Scientific Answer:
Our planetary system began over five billion years ago and has around five billion years to go. Life as we know it dates back two billion years. In other words, the earth spun for about 60% of its existence without life. The crust slowly cooled and was eroded by incessant water flow. Fertile mineral mud was deposited now giving for the first time the possibility of harboring life. Thunderbolts in the mud produce amino acids, the basic building blocks of life. Then begins the ceaseless production of protein molecules, incalculable in number, forever combining into new forms. The variety of proteins exceeds all the drops of water in all the oceans of the world. Then protoplasm. Cell. Within the cell, incredible beauty and order.
When we consider the teeming activity of a modern city it is difficult to realize that in the cells of our bodies infinitely more complicated processes are at work ceaseless manufacture, acquisition of food, storage, communication and administration All this takes place in superb harmony, with the cooperation of all the participants of a living system, regulated down to the smallest detail. (G. Shenk, The History of Man, New York: Chilton, 1961, pp. 56 57.)
Life is the striving cycle of repetitious, reproductive energy transformations. Moving, twisting, devouring, changing. The unit of life is the cell. And the blueprint is the genetic code, the two nucleic acids the long, intertwined, duplicating chains of DNA and the controlling regulation of RNA which determine the structure of the living substance.
And where is it going? Exactly like the old Hindu myths of cyclical rotation, the astrophysicists tell us that life is a temporary sequence which occurs at a brief mid-point in the planetary cycle. Terrestrial life began around three billion years A.B. (after the beginning of our solar cycle) and will run for another two billion years or so. At that time the solar furnace will burn so hot that the minor planets (including Earth) will boil, bubble and burn out. In other planetary systems the time spans are different, but the cycle is probably the same.
There comes an intermediate stage in the temperature history of a planet which can nourish living forms, and then life merges into the final unifying fire. Data here, indeed, for an awesome cosmology.
The flame of life which moves every living form, including the cell cluster you call your self, began, we are told, as a tiny single-celled spark in the lower Precambrian mud, then passed over in steady transformations to more complex forms. We like to speak of higher forms, but lets not ignore or patronize the single-cell game. Its still quite thriving, thank you. Next, your ancestral fire glowed in seaweed, algae, flagellate, sponge, coral (about one billion years ago); then fish, fern, scorpion, millipede (about 600 million years ago). Every cell in your body traces back (about 450 million years ago) to the same light life flickering in amphibian (and what a fateful and questionable decision to leave the sea should we have done it?). Then forms, multiplying in endless diversity reptile, insect, bird until, one million years ago, comes the aureole glory of Australopithecus. (The fossils of the newly discovered Homo Habilis from East Africa are estimated to be 1,750,000 years old. New York Times, March 18, April 3 and 4, 1964. Another estimate traces human origins back about 15 million years! New York Times, April 12, 1964.)
The torch of life next passes on to the hand-ax culture (around 600,000 years ago), to Pithecanthropus (can you remember watching for the charge of southern elephants and the saber-tooth tiger?), then blazing brightly in the radiance of our great-grandfather Neanderthal man (a mere 70,000 years ago), suddenly flaring up in that cerebral explosion that doubled the cortex of our grandfather Cro-Magnon man (44,000 to 10,000 years ago), and then radiating into the full flame of recent man, our older stone age, Neolithic brothers, our bronze and iron age selves.
What next? The race, far from being culminated, has just begun:
The development of Pre-hominines Australopithecus to the first emergence of the Cromagnons lasted about fifteen thousand human life-spans . In this relatively short period in world history the hominid type submitted to a positively hurricane change of form; indeed he may be looked upon as one of the animal groups whose potentialities of unfolding with the greatest intensity have been realized. It must, however, by no means be expected that this natural flood of development will dry up with Homo sapiens recens. Man will be unable to remain man as we know him now, a modern sapiens type. He will in the courses of the next hundreds of millennia presumably change considerably physiologically and physically. (G. Shenk, The History of Man, p. 238.)
B. The Psychedelic Correlates of these evolutionary and genetic concepts are to be found in the reports of almost every LSD tripper. The experience of being a one-celled creature tenaciously flailing, the singing, humming sound of life exfoliating; you are the DNA code spinning out multicellular aesthetic solutions. You directly and immediately experience invertibrate joy; you feel your backbone forming; gills form. You are a fish with glistening gills, the sound of ancient fetal tides murmuring the rhythm of life. You stretch and wriggle in mammalian muscular strength, loping, powerful, big muscles; you sense hair growing on your body as you leave the warm broth of water and take over the earth.
The psychedelic experience is the Hindu-Buddha reincarnation theory experimentally confirmed in your own nervous system. You re-experience your human forebears, shuttle down the chain of DNA remembrance. Its all there in your cellular diaries. You are all the men and women who fought and fed and met and mated the ugly, the strong, the sly, the mean, the wise, the beautiful. Our fathers, who art protein in heaven within; and our round-fleshed holy mothers, hallowed be thy names. Endless chain of warm-blooded, sweating, perfume-smelling, tenaciously struggling primates, each rising out of darkness to stand for one second in the sunlight and hand on the precious electrical tissue flame of life.
The Seven Tongues of God
First published in The Psychedelic Review, Number 3, 1964
The Turn-On
Once upon a time, many years ago, on a sunny afternoon in the garden of a Cuernavaca villa, I ate seven of the so-called sacred mushrooms which had been given to me by a scientist from the University of Mexico. During the next five hours, I was whirled through an experience which could be described in many extravagant metaphors but which was, above all and without question, the deepest religious experience of my life.
Statements about personal reactions, however passionate, are always relative to the speakers history and may have little general significance. Next come the questions Why? and So what?
There are many predisposing factors intellectual, emotional, spiritual, social which cause one person to be ready for a dramatic mind-opening experience and which lead another to shrink back from new levels of awareness. The discovery that the human brain possesses an infinity of potentialities and can operate at unexpected space-time dimensions left me feeling exhilarated, awed, and quite convinced that I had awakened from a long ontological sleep. This sudden flash awakening is called turning on.
Tuning In
A profound transcendent experience should leave in its wake a changed man and a changed life. Since my illumination of August 1960, I have devoted most of my energies to trying to understand the revelatory potentialities of the human nervous system and to making these insights available to others.
I have repeated this biochemical and (to me) sacramental ritual several hundred times, and almost every time I have been awed by religious revelations as shattering as the first experience. During this period I have been lucky enough to collaborate in this work with several hundred scientists and scholars who joined our various research projects. In our centers at Harvard, in Mexico, and at Millbrook we have arranged transcendent experiences for several thousand persons from all walks of life, including more than 200 full-time religious professionals, about half of whom profess the Christian or Jewish faiths and about half of whom belong to Eastern religions.
Included in this roster are several divinity college deans, divinity college presidents, university chaplains, executives of religious foundations, prominent religious editors, and several distinguished religious philosophers. In our research files and in certain denominational offices there is building up a large and quite remarkable collection of reports which will be published when the political atmosphere becomes more tolerant. At this point it is conservative to state that over 75% of these subjects report intense mystico-religious responses, and considerably more than 50% claim that they have had the deepest spiritual experience of their life.
The interest generated by the research at Harvard led to the formation in 1962 of an informal group of ministers, theologians and religious psychologists who met once a month. In addition to arranging for spiritually oriented psychedelic sessions and discussing prepared papers, this group provided the guides for the dramatic Good Friday study and was the original planning nucleus of the organizations which assumed sponsorship of our research in consciousness expansion: IFIF (the International Federation for Internal Freedom), 1963, the Castalia Foundation, 1963-66, and the League for Spiritual Discovery, 1966. The generating impulse and the original leadership of our work and play came from a seminar in religious experience, and this fact may be related to the alarm which we have aroused in some secular and psychiatric circles.
The Good Friday Miracle
The Good Friday study, which has been sensationalized recently in the press as The Miracle of Marsh Chapel, deserves further elaboration not only as an example of a serious, controlled experiment involving over 30 courageous volunteers, but also as a systematic demonstration of the religious aspects of the psychedelic revelatory experience. This study was the Ph.D. dissertation research of Walter Pahnke, at that time a graduate student in the philosophy of religion at Harvard University. Pahnke, who is, incidentally, both an M.D. and a bachelor of divinity, set out to determine whether the transcendent experience reported during psychedelic sessions was similar to the mystical experience reported by saints and famous religious mystics.
The subjects in this study were 20 divinity students selected from a group of volunteers. The subjects were divided into five groups of four persons, and each group met before the session for orientation and preparation. To each group were assigned two guides with considerable psychedelic experience. The ten guides were professors and advanced graduate students from Boston-area colleges.
The experiment took place in a small, private chapel at Boston University, beginning about one hour before noon on Good Friday. The dean of the chapel, Howard Thurman, who was to conduct a three-hour devotional service upstairs in the main hall of the church, visited the subjects a few minutes before the start of the service at noon and gave a brief inspirational talk.
Two of the subjects in each group and one of the two guides were given a moderately stiff dosage (i.e., 30 mg.) of psilocybin, the chemical synthesis of the active ingredient in the sacred mushroom of Mexico. The remaining two subjects and the second guide received a placebo which produced noticeable somatic side effects but which was not psychedelic. The study was triple blind: neither the subjects, guides, nor experimenter knew who received psilocybin.
A detailed description of this fascinating study can be found in Pahnkes thesis, available from the Harvard Library. I can say, in summary, that the results clearly support the hypothesis that, with adequate preparation and in an environment which is supportive and religiously meaningful, subjects who have taken the psychedelic drug report mystical experiences significantly more than placebo controls.
Our studies, naturalistic and experimental, thus demonstrate that if the expectation, preparation, and setting are spiritual, an intense mystical or revelatory experience can be expected in from 40 to 90 percent of subjects ingesting psychedelic drugs. These results may be attributed to the bias of our research group, which has taken the far out and rather dangerous position that there are experiential-spiritual as well as secular-behavioral potentialities of the nervous system. While we share and follow the epistemology of scientific psychology (objective records), our basic ontological assumptions are closer to Jung than to Freud, closer to the mystics than to the theologians, closer to Einstein and Bohr than to Newton. In order to check on this bias, let us cast a comparative glance at the work of other research groups in this field who begin from more conventional ontological bases.
LSD Can Produce a Religious High
Oscar Janiger, a psychiatrist, and William McGlothlin, a psychologist, have reported the reactions of 194 psychedelic subjects. Of these, 73 took LSD as part of a psychotherapy program and 121 were volunteers. The religious set would not be expected to dominate the expectations of these subjects. The results, which are abstracted from a paper published in the Psychedelic Review, are as follows:
Two other studies, one by Ditman et al., another by Savage et al., used the same questionnaire, allowing for inter-experiment comparison. Both Ditman and Savage are psychiatrists, but the clinical environment of the latters study is definitely more religious (subjects are shown religious articles during the session, etc.). Summarizing the religious items of their questionnaires:
Here, then, we have five scientific studies by qualified investigators the four naturalistic studies by Leary et al., Savage et al., Ditman et al. and Janiger-McGlothlin, and the triple-blind study in the Harvard dissertation mentioned earlier yielding data which indicate that (1) if the setting is supportive but not spiritual, between 40 to 75 percent of psychedelic subjects will report intense and life-changing religious experiences and that (2) if the set and setting are supportive and spiritual, then from 40 to 90 percent of the experiences will be revelatory and mystico-religious.
It is hard to see how these results can be disregarded by those who are concerned with spiritual growth and religious development. These data are even more interesting because the experiments took place at a time (1962) when mysticism, individual religious ecstasy (as opposed to religious behavior), was highly suspect and when the classic, direct, nonverbal means of revelation and consciousness expansion such as meditation, yoga, fasting, monastic withdrawal and sacramental foods and drugs were surrounded by an aura of fear, clandestine secrecy, active social sanction, and even imprisonment. The two hundred professional workers in religious vocations who partook of psychedelic substances (noted earlier) were responsible, respected, thoughtful, and moral individuals who were grimly aware of the controversial nature of the procedure and aware that their reputations and their jobs might be undermined (and, as a matter of fact, have been and are today being threatened for some of them). Still the results read: 75 percent spiritual revelation. It may well be that the most intense religious experience, like the finest metal, requires fire, the heat of police constabulatory opposition, to produce the keenest edge. When the day comes as it surely will that sacramental bio-chemicals like LSD will be as routinely and tamely used as organ music and incense to assist in the attainment of religious experience, it may well be that the ego-shattering effect of the drug will be diminished. Such may be one aspect of the paradoxical nature of religious experience.
What Is the Religious Experience?
The Religious Experience: You are undoubtedly wondering about the meaning of this phrase, which has been used so freely in the preceding paragraphs. May I offer a definition?
The religious experience is the ecstatic, incontrovertibly certain subjective discovery of answers to seven basic spiritual questions.
There can be, of course, absolute subjective certainty in regard to secular questions: Is this the girl I love? Is Fidel Castro a wicked man? Are the Yankees the best baseball team? But issues which do not involve the seven basic questions belong to secular games, and such convictions and faiths, however deeply held, can be distinguished from the religious. Liturgical practices, rituals, dogmas, theological speculations, can be and too often are secular, i.e., completely divorced from the spiritual experience.
What are these 7 basic spiritual questions?
1. The Ultimate Power Question
What is the basic energy underlying the universethe ultimate power that moves the galaxies and nucleus of the atom? Where and how did it all begin? What is the cosmic plan? Cosmology.
2. The Life Question
What is life? Where and how did it begin? How is it evolving? Where is it going? Genesis, biology, evolution, genetics.
3. The Human Being Question
Who is man? Whence did he come? What is his structure and function? Anatomy and physiology.
4. The Awareness Question
How does man sense, experience, know? Epistemology, neurology.
5. The Ego Question
Who am I? What is my spiritual, psychological, social place in the plan? What should I do about it? Social psychology.
6. The Emotional Question
What should I feel about it? Psychiatry. Personality psychology.
7. The Ultimate Escape Question
How do I get out of it? Anesthesiology (amateur or professional) . Eschatology.
While one may disagree with the wording, I think most thoughtful people philosophers or not can agree on something like this list of basic issues. Do not most of the great religious statements Eastern or monotheistic speak directly to these questions?
Now one important fact about these questions is that they are continually being answered and re-answered, not only by all the religions of the world but also by the data of the natural sciences. Read these questions again from the standpoint of the goals of (1) astronomy-physics, (2) biochemistry, genetics, paleontology, and evolutionary theory, (3) anatomy and physiology, (4) neurology, (5) sociology, psychology, (6) psychiatry, (7) eschatological theology and anesthesiology.
We are all aware of the unhappy fact that both science and religion are too often diverted toward secular-game goals. Various pressures demand that laboratory and church forget these basic questions and instead provide distractions, illusory protection, narcotic comfort. Most of us dread confrontation with the answers to these basic questions, whether the answers come from objective science or religion. But if pure science and religion address themselves to the same basic questions, what is the distinction between the two disciplines? Science is the systematic attempt to record and measure the energy process and the sequence of energy transformations we call life. The goal is to answer the basic questions in terms of objective, observed, public data. Religion is the systematic attempt to provide answers to the same questions subjectively, in terms of direct, incontrovertible, personal experience.
Science is a social system which evolves roles, rules, rituals, values, language, space-time locations to further the quest for these goals, to answer these questions objectively, externally. Religion is a social system which has evolved its roles, rules, rituals, values, language, space-time locations to further the pursuit of the same goals, to answer these questions subjectively through the revelatory experience. A science which fails to address itself to these spiritual goals, which accepts other purposes (however popular), becomes secular, political, and tends to oppose new data. A religion which fails to provide direct experiential answers to these spiritual questions (which fails to produce the ecstatic high) becomes secular, political, and tends to oppose the individual revelatory confrontation. The Oxford orientalist R. C. Zaehner, whose formalism is not always matched by his tolerance, has remarked that experience, when divorced from dogma, often leads to absurd and wholly irrational excesses. Like any statement of polarity, the opposite is equally true: dogma, when divorced from experience, often leads to absurd and wholly rational excesses. Those of us who have been devoting our lives to the study of consciousness have been able to collect considerable sociological data about the tendency of the rational mind to spin out its own interpretations. But I shall have more to say about the political situation in later chapters.
Religion and Science Provide Similar Answers to the Same Basic Questions
At this point I should like to advance the hypothesis that those aspects of the psychedelic experience which subjects report to be ineffable and ecstatically religious involve a direct awareness of the energy processes which physicists and biochemists and physiologists and neurologists and psychologists and psychiatrists measure.
We are treading here on very tricky ground. When we read the reports of LSD subjects, we are doubly limited. First, they can only speak in the vocabulary they know, and for the most part they do not possess the lexicon and training of energy scientists. Second, we researchers find only what we are prepared to look for, and too often we think in crude psychological-jargon concepts: moods, emotions, value judgments, diagnostic categories, social pejoratives, religious clichés. Since 1962 I have talked to thousands of LSD trippers, mystics, saddhus, occultists, saints, inquiring if their hallucinations, visions, revelations, ecstasies, orgasms, hits, flashes, space-outs and freak-outs can be translated into the language not just of religion, psychiatry and psychology but also of the and biological sciences.
1. The Ultimate-Power Question
A. The scientific answers to this question change constantly Newtonian laws, quantum indeterminacy, atomic structure, nuclear structure. Today the basic energy is located within the nucleus. Inside the atom a transparent sphere of emptiness, thinly populated with electrons, the substance of the atom has shrunk to a core of unbelievable smallness: enlarged 1000 million times, an atom would be about the size of a football, but its nucleus would still be hardly visible a mere speck of dust at the center. Yet that nucleus radiates a powerful electric field which holds and controls the electrons around it.
Incredible power and complexity operating at speeds and spatial dimensions which our conceptual minds cannot register. Infinitely small, yet pulsating outward through enormous networks of electrical forces atom, molecule, cell, planet, star: all forms dancing to the nuclear tune.
The cosmic design is this network of energy whirling through space-time. More than 15,000 million years ago the oldest known stars began to form. Whirling disks of gas molecules (driven, of course, by that tiny, spinning, nuclear force) condensing clouds, further condensations the tangled web of spinning magnetic fields clustering into stellar forms, and each stellar cluster hooked up in a magnetic dance with its planetary cluster and with every other star in the galaxy, and each galaxy whirling in synchronized relationship to the other galaxies.
One thousand million galaxies. From 100 million to 100,000 million stars in a galaxy that is to say, 100,000 million planetary systems per galaxy, and each planetary system slowly wheeling through the stellar cycle that allows for a brief time the possibility of life as we know it.
Five thousand million years ago, a slow-spinning dwarf star we call the sun is the center of a field of swirling planetary material. The planet Earth is created. In 5,000 million years the suns supply of hydrogen will be burned up; the planets will be engulfed by a final solar explosion. Then the ashen remnants of our planetary system will spin silently through the dark infinity of space. And then is the dance over? Hardly. Our tiny solar light, which is one of 100,000 million suns in our galaxy, will scarcely be missed. And our galaxy is one of 1,000 million galaxies spinning out and up at rates which exceed the speed of light each galaxy eventually burning up, to be replaced by new galaxies to preserve the dance equilibrium.
Here in the always changing data of nuclear physics and astronomy is the current scientific answer to the first basic question material enough indeed for an awesome cosmology.
B. Psychedelic reports often contain phrases which seem to describe similar phenomena, subjectively experienced.
(a) I passed in and out of a state several times where I was so relaxed that I felt open to a total flow, over and around and through my body (more than my body) All objects were dripping, streaming, with white-hot light or electricity which flowed in the air. It was as though we were watching the world, just having come into being, cool off, its substance and form still molten and barely beginning to harden.
(b) Body being destroyed after it became so heavy as to be unbearable. Mind wandering, ambulating throughout an ecstatically lit, indescribable landscape. How can there be so much light layers and layers of light, light upon light? All is illumination.
(c) I became more and more conscious of vibrations of the vibrations in my body, the harp strings giving forth their individual tones. Gradually I felt myself becoming one with the cosmic vibration In this dimension there were no forms, no deities or personalities just bliss.
(d) The dominant impression was that of entering into the marrow of existence It was as if each of the billion atoms of experience which under normal circumstances are summarized and averaged into crude, indiscriminate, wholesale impressions was now being seen and savored for itself. The other clear sense was that of cosmic relativity. Perhaps all experience never gets summarized in any inclusive overview. Perhaps all there is, is this everlasting congeries of an infinite number of discrete points of view, each summarizing the whole from its perspective.
(e) I could see the whole history and evolution along which man has come. I was moving into the future and saw the old cycle of peace and war, good times and bad times, starting to repeat, and I said, The same old thing again. Oh, God! It has changed, though, it is different, and I thought of the rise of man from animal to spiritual being. But I was still moving into the future, and I saw the whole planet destroyed and all history, evolution, and human efforts being wiped out in this one ultimate destructive act of God.
Subjects speak of participating in and merging with pure (i.e., content-free) energy, white light; of witnessing the breakdown of macroscopic objects into vibratory patterns, visual nets, the collapse of external structure into wave patterns, the awareness that everything is a dance of particles, sensing the smallness and fragility of our system, visions of the void, of world-ending explosions, of the cyclical nature of creation and dissolution, etc. Now I need not apologize for the flimsy inadequacy of these words. We just dont have a better experiential vocabulary. If God were to permit you a brief voyage into the divine process, let you whirl for a second into the atomic nucleus or spin you out on a light-year trip through the galaxies, how on earth would you describe what you saw when you got back, breathless, to your office? This metaphor may sound farfetched or irrelevant, but just ask someone who has taken a heavy dose of LSD.
2. The Life Question
A. The Scientific Answer:
Our planetary system began over five billion years ago and has around five billion years to go. Life as we know it dates back two billion years. In other words, the earth spun for about 60% of its existence without life. The crust slowly cooled and was eroded by incessant water flow. Fertile mineral mud was deposited now giving for the first time the possibility of harboring life. Thunderbolts in the mud produce amino acids, the basic building blocks of life. Then begins the ceaseless production of protein molecules, incalculable in number, forever combining into new forms. The variety of proteins exceeds all the drops of water in all the oceans of the world. Then protoplasm. Cell. Within the cell, incredible beauty and order.
When we consider the teeming activity of a modern city it is difficult to realize that in the cells of our bodies infinitely more complicated processes are at work ceaseless manufacture, acquisition of food, storage, communication and administration All this takes place in superb harmony, with the cooperation of all the participants of a living system, regulated down to the smallest detail. (G. Shenk, The History of Man, New York: Chilton, 1961, pp. 56 57.)
Life is the striving cycle of repetitious, reproductive energy transformations. Moving, twisting, devouring, changing. The unit of life is the cell. And the blueprint is the genetic code, the two nucleic acids the long, intertwined, duplicating chains of DNA and the controlling regulation of RNA which determine the structure of the living substance.
And where is it going? Exactly like the old Hindu myths of cyclical rotation, the astrophysicists tell us that life is a temporary sequence which occurs at a brief mid-point in the planetary cycle. Terrestrial life began around three billion years A.B. (after the beginning of our solar cycle) and will run for another two billion years or so. At that time the solar furnace will burn so hot that the minor planets (including Earth) will boil, bubble and burn out. In other planetary systems the time spans are different, but the cycle is probably the same.
There comes an intermediate stage in the temperature history of a planet which can nourish living forms, and then life merges into the final unifying fire. Data here, indeed, for an awesome cosmology.
The flame of life which moves every living form, including the cell cluster you call your self, began, we are told, as a tiny single-celled spark in the lower Precambrian mud, then passed over in steady transformations to more complex forms. We like to speak of higher forms, but lets not ignore or patronize the single-cell game. Its still quite thriving, thank you. Next, your ancestral fire glowed in seaweed, algae, flagellate, sponge, coral (about one billion years ago); then fish, fern, scorpion, millipede (about 600 million years ago). Every cell in your body traces back (about 450 million years ago) to the same light life flickering in amphibian (and what a fateful and questionable decision to leave the sea should we have done it?). Then forms, multiplying in endless diversity reptile, insect, bird until, one million years ago, comes the aureole glory of Australopithecus. (The fossils of the newly discovered Homo Habilis from East Africa are estimated to be 1,750,000 years old. New York Times, March 18, April 3 and 4, 1964. Another estimate traces human origins back about 15 million years! New York Times, April 12, 1964.)
The torch of life next passes on to the hand-ax culture (around 600,000 years ago), to Pithecanthropus (can you remember watching for the charge of southern elephants and the saber-tooth tiger?), then blazing brightly in the radiance of our great-grandfather Neanderthal man (a mere 70,000 years ago), suddenly flaring up in that cerebral explosion that doubled the cortex of our grandfather Cro-Magnon man (44,000 to 10,000 years ago), and then radiating into the full flame of recent man, our older stone age, Neolithic brothers, our bronze and iron age selves.
What next? The race, far from being culminated, has just begun:
The development of Pre-hominines Australopithecus to the first emergence of the Cromagnons lasted about fifteen thousand human life-spans . In this relatively short period in world history the hominid type submitted to a positively hurricane change of form; indeed he may be looked upon as one of the animal groups whose potentialities of unfolding with the greatest intensity have been realized. It must, however, by no means be expected that this natural flood of development will dry up with Homo sapiens recens. Man will be unable to remain man as we know him now, a modern sapiens type. He will in the courses of the next hundreds of millennia presumably change considerably physiologically and physically. (G. Shenk, The History of Man, p. 238.)
B. The Psychedelic Correlates of these evolutionary and genetic concepts are to be found in the reports of almost every LSD tripper. The experience of being a one-celled creature tenaciously flailing, the singing, humming sound of life exfoliating; you are the DNA code spinning out multicellular aesthetic solutions. You directly and immediately experience invertibrate joy; you feel your backbone forming; gills form. You are a fish with glistening gills, the sound of ancient fetal tides murmuring the rhythm of life. You stretch and wriggle in mammalian muscular strength, loping, powerful, big muscles; you sense hair growing on your body as you leave the warm broth of water and take over the earth.
The psychedelic experience is the Hindu-Buddha reincarnation theory experimentally confirmed in your own nervous system. You re-experience your human forebears, shuttle down the chain of DNA remembrance. Its all there in your cellular diaries. You are all the men and women who fought and fed and met and mated the ugly, the strong, the sly, the mean, the wise, the beautiful. Our fathers, who art protein in heaven within; and our round-fleshed holy mothers, hallowed be thy names. Endless chain of warm-blooded, sweating, perfume-smelling, tenaciously struggling primates, each rising out of darkness to stand for one second in the sunlight and hand on the precious electrical tissue flame of life.