To limit the analysis of psychedelic experience to problems of drug effects and drug abuse is to avoid the most important questions. As the choice of a term that means -mind manifesting- implies, the issue at stake is the human mind and its potentialities. Psychedelic drugs are a way of entering the country of lunatics, lovers, poets, and mystics. In the often-quoted words of William James, -Rational consciousness. . . is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different. We may go through life without suspecting their existence; but apply the requisite stimulus, and at a touch they are there in all their completeness- (James 1929 [1902], pp. 378379). By supplying that stimulus, psychedelic drugs provide an instrument for experimental investigation of what have come to be called altered states of consciousness. Beyond that, the question arises whether, like the deliverances of poets and mystics, they reveal truths that are a complement to those attained by the discursive intellect. We shall examine what they have to teach us about brain physiology, schizophrenia, dreams, birth and death, artistic and scientific creation, and the roots of religious belief.
 

Psychedelic Drugs and Neurotransmitters

Psychedelic drugs are easier to study by the methods of modern science than most other means of inducing altered states of consciousness, since they have known chemical structures and can be administered repeatedly under uniform experimental conditions. If we could find precise neurophysiological correlates for their effects, we would have an important clue to the structure and functioning of the mind. That was one of the aims of psychedelic drug research during the twenty years of its flowering, and remains an unfinished task today. Although very little is known for certain, some interesting speculations can be derived from examining possible mechanisms of psychedelic drug action and comparing them with the changes that occur in the brain during other unusual states of mind.

Most psychoactive drugs interfere with the communication between neurons (nerve cells) by modifying the chemical signals passed at the synapse or neural junction. Here the electrical impulse generated in a neuron causes the release of a substance that diffuses across a short space (the synaptic cleft) to receptor sites on adjoining neurons which generate other electrical impulses; in this v%"ay signals are broadcast through a nerve network. The signal-carrying chemicals, called neurotransmitters, are different in different parts of the nervous system; psychoactive drugs heighten or inhibit the effects of one or more neurotransmitters in the central nervous system and especially in its most important part, the brain.

It is not easy to establish relationships among psychedelic drugs, neurotransmitters, brain activity, and states of consciousness. The brain is complex and inaccessible to delicate experimental manipulation by chemical means. Within it each cell may have many synapses, associated with different neurotransmitters, and a drug can affect a neurotransmitter in several different ways. It may heighten the effect of the body chemical by displacing it from storage pools in the nerve terminal and provoking its release, or by preventing a process known as reuptake in which a neurotransmitter is partially inactivated through reabsorption by the brain cell that released it. The drug may also inhibit or distort the neurotransmitter's effect by taking its place at the receptor site or otherwise blocking its access to the adjoining neuron. A single drug may affect several neurotransmitters, intensifying or reducing their activity at different dose levels and in different brain areas. The ultimate consequence for thought, feeling, and behavior usually depends on the combined action of several neurotransmitters. And psychedelic drugs present special problems, not only because of the complexity of the mental alterations they produce but also because drugs with similar effects may vary considerably in their chemical structures and pharmacological mechanisms.

Even if we confine our attention to the major phenylalkylamine and indole alkaloids and synthetic drugs (mescaline, MDA, LSD, psilocybin, harmaline, DMT, and so on), the only reasonably sure conclusion we can draw is that their psychedelic effects are in some way related to the neurotransmitter 5- hydroxytryptamine, also called serotonin (see Trulson et al. 1976). Not much more than that is known. LSD and other psychedelic drugs certainly inhibit the effect of serotonin in some parts of the brain, but in other places they may mimic or intensify it. Secondarily, they also modify the action of two other neurotransmitters, dopamine and norepinephrine, which are known as catecholamines. It may be significant that serotonin is an indole (like psilocybin and LSD) and the catecholamines are phenylalkylamines (like mescaline); the structural similarity suggests a possible biological substitution. But many other substances, including some close chemical relatives of the psychedelic drugs, affect serotonin or the catecholamines in similar ways without producing the same changes in consciousness, and it is not easy to determine just how their action is different. Possibly some subtle interaction between catecholamine and serotonin neurons is responsible for psychedelic effects. But the experimental results are complicated, contradictory, and inconclusive.1 Instead of trying to review them in detail, we will mention one finding, probably the most promising so far.

In the midbrain or brain stem, an area lying just at the top of the spinal cord, there is a set of neurons called the midbrain raphe cells which send signals to higher brain regions by means of serotonin. By a feedback mechanism based on the sensitivity of certain spots on their own surface to serotonin, they are directed to stop broadcasting when they have released a certain amount of the neurotransmitter. Psilocybin, DMT, and LSD (and probably other psychedelic drugs) mimic the feedback effect of serotonin on the raphe cells and slow their activity. Messages from the raphe cells help to regulate the visual centers in the cerebral cortex and also certain areas of the limbic forebrain, a major center for control of the emotions. Lowering the rate of firing in the raphe cells causes hyperactivity in these brain regions; the familiar psychedelic visual and emotional effects are a possible consequence (Aghajanian and Haigler 1975).

But even if the existence of this mechanism should become well-established, as it is not today, it would probably be insufficient to account for all psychedelic effects. And much else about the action of these drugs remains doubtful or inexplicable. For example, researchers have tried with only partial success to find formulas that would correlate the potencies of psychedelic drugs with their chemical structures.2 Furthermore, none of the current explanations account for the peculiar effects of certain drugs like MDA and harmaline (see chapter 1). And we are even further from any neurochemical explanation for the psychedelic effects of substances like cannabis, ketamine, nitrous oxide, and carbon dioxide, which do not affect serotonin in any consistent way or bear a close resemblance to any neurotransmitters.

The Two Hemispheres

Clearly the chemistry of neurotransmitters, in its present state, takes us only a short way. Another approach to understanding the relationship between psychedelic experience and brain functioning involves the distinction between the right and left hemispheres of the cerebral cortex. Roughly speaking, the left hemisphere operates in an analytical and logical way; it is the main site of our capacity for speech, verbal memory, mathematical reasoning, and logical inference. The right hemisphere is more intuitive and holistic; it governs pattern recognition, spatial relations, recognition of faces, and the creation and appreciation of music and visual art. The left hemisphere is sometimes said to resemble a digital and the right hemisphere an analog computer. They are connected by a band of tissue called the corpus callosum, and when this connection is severed in an epileptic for therapeutic purposes, the patient acts as though he had two minds, two independent selves with different capacities occupying the same body without knowledge of each other. For example, a patient who saw an amusing cartoon in her left field of vision (connected to the right hemisphere) laughed, although she could not say what the joke was until the cartoon was presented to her right field of vision, which is connected to the left hemisphere (Bogen 1969; Galin 1974).

In the ordinary waking state we are constitutionally wary because the brain must be prepared to issue commands to the body's motor apparatus. This promotes left-hemisphere dominance, and right-hemisphere activity is subordinated or suppressed. It has been suggested that psychedelic drugs disrupt the mental functions normally performed by the left hemisphere while leaving those of the right hemisphere intact, thus shifting the focus of consciousness: mind-displacement more than mind-expansion. They present the left hemisphere with more than its analytical and logical powers can handle, and the right hemisphere takes over with its synthetic, nonlinear, and nonlogical modes of processing information. Another possibility is that psychedelic drugs somehow facilitate the transmission of nerve impulses through the corpus callosum, flooding awareness with right-hemisphere activity. In either case, functions usually relegated to obscurity come to the forefront of consciousness, and the consequences for psychological investigation might be compared to the opportunity provided for astronomy when the sun is eclipsed and the surrounding corona becomes visible. The activity of the right hemisphere has even been speculatively identified with what psychoanalysts call primary-process thinking, and the normal subordinate function of the right hemisphere with what is referred to as repression. In this view the right hemisphere is the site of the unconscious mind of psychoanalysis. There is actually some experimental evidence of a hemispheric difference in LSD effects. Temporal lobe epileptics with the epileptic focus in the right hemisphere show much more perceptual response to LSD than those with the epileptic focus in the left hemisphere (Serafetinides 1965). Certain changes in the pattern of brain waves under the influence of psychedelic drugs also suggest a shift in hemispheric dominance (Goldstein and Stoltzfus 1973).
 

Perception and Hallucination

If we leave aside speculations about neurotransmitters or changes in particular areas of the brain and search for a more general conception of psychedelic drug effects, we come to the central organizing idea mentioned in chapter 4: alteration or impairment of the filtering mechanisms that regulate the access of perceptual and emotional stimuli to consciousness. We saw how this impairment of selective attention could account for heightened perception, changes in time sense, symbolic projection, loss of the boundaries of the self, primitive intense emotions, and accretions of excess meaning in everything seen or done. In animal experiments using a behaviorist model, LSD not only heightens the significance of a given level of stimulus (its effect on the animal's reward-seeking or avoidance of punishment) but also increases generalization: the transfer of conditioned responses to stimuli that resemble but are not identical with the one to which the response was originally conditioned. This is the process that gives meaning (defined as behavioral effect) to a previously neutral stimulus (Bradley and Key 1963; Claridge 1970).

If the main function affected is the ordering and evaluation of sensory stimuli, a theory of psychedelic drug action should be related to a theory of hallucinations, in the broadest sense. The word -hallucinogenic" would in fact be accurate if -hallucination" still had its etymological root sense of mental voyaging or wandering, instead of suggesting an unequivocal distinction between what is real and what is not. Nothing infallibly distinguishes hallucinations and delusions from perceptions and thoughts. Perceptual characteristics like voluntariness, vividness, coherence, and intersubjective verifiability appear in different degrees on a continuum; the line between symbolic vision and illusion or between suspicion and paranoia is not always easy to draw. There is no objective, given world to be copied by our minds correctly or incorreetly. How we perceive things depends on the needs our perception serves.

The signals that reach us from the external and internal environment are used to make a construction of reality. In the process we discover symbolic meanings and metaphorical connections and undergo changes in time perception, bo'dy feeling, and the sense of self. Usually variations and novelties in the way we put together our world are confined to a fairly narrow range of consciousness defined by the need to foresee danger, make plans, control our actions, and generally adapt to a complex environment. But if the need for control is absent or cannot be satisfied, the mind takes strange directions. In computer language, the brain is not scanning input (environmental stimuli) or controlling output (behavior) as it ordinarily does. This situation arises when there are not enough novel external stimuli to keep the mind occupied; it also arises when the mind becomes so hypersensitive to stimuli, internal and external, that normal filtering and feedback mechanisms fail. The first situation is exemplified by REM sleep (dreaming sleep), during which the senses are delivering little new information and the skeletal muscles are immobilized, so that the body is not prepared for action, but the cortical centers of consciousness are at a high level of activity. There are also waking states in which the mind is deprived of novel stimuli—sensory deprivation in an isolation tank, certain religious exercises in meditative concentration, possibly some drugs like ketamine. Whether by countering the inhibitory effect of the raphe cells or by some other means, LSD seems to give the mind too much to cope with rather than too little (see West 1975).

The states of mind induced in these various ways are far from identical, but they all have something in common. Sensory deprivation or overload prevents the orderly processing of new information, and the idle or overworked brain begins to produce novel combinations of ideas and perceptions. Activity is heightened in the regions where memory traces enrich and transform one another and are subjected to interpretation and evaluation. Repressed feelings and memories are made available to consciousness, either in symbolic fantasy form or as relived experience. These experiences sometimes seem more direct and immediate, more real than ordinary reality, just because the mind is not using its familiar categories to divide, distinguish, and select.3

The fact that psychedelic experiences are produced by an unusual state of the nervous system is no reason to regard them as merely a pathological distortion of consciousness with nothing to teach us about the real world. That would be a genetic fallacy. It helps to recall, if only as a corrective, the Hindu and Buddhist judgment that everyday consciousness is maya, illusion. The combinations of the mind in altered states of consciousness are not random and senseless. Furthermore, the experiences produced with such intensity by psychedelic drugs also play a part in everyday life, where of course we properly take them only in small doses and in dilute form. There are many fruitful mixtures of what is usually called fantasy and what is usually called reality. Among the overinterpretations, misinterpretations, and delusions of altered mental states we also find the kind of creative interpretation that uncovers new realities; and we cannot always be sure which is which. To absorb in pure and concentrated form what we usually take in mixed and dilute form is not to turn away from reality but to investigate an important part of it. Placing these phenomena in an intellectual context that also includes the worlds of common sense and contemporary science is a difficult task that must be approached without too many preconceptions. In doing this it helps to consider more closely the relationship of psychedelic drug experience to other wanderings of the mind in the realms of madness, dream, artistic and scientific creation, and religious exaltation.

Psychosis
Nineteenth-century experimenters working with cannabis and mescaline noticed the similarity between some psychedelic experiences and endogenous or functional (natural) psychoses. An interest in psychedelic drugs as chemical models of psychosis began at that time and persisted into the 1950s. Today, although the term -psychotomimetic" is still occasionally used, that interest has almost disappeared. To understand why the model psychosis idea was taken so seriously and then became so unpopular, we must consider first, how psychedelic drug effects resemble and differ from endogenous psychoses, and second, whether they provide any clues to the cause or treatment of psychosis.

Psychedelic drug effects have usually been compared with schizophrenia, one of the two major categories of endogenous psychosis (the other comprises the affective disorders, including depressive and manic-depressive psychoses). Although symptoms vary greatly from person to person and from one moment to another, schizophrenics have certain common characteristics. Their intelligence (at least in the early stages) is normal, but they lack the capacity to construct reality in a coherent way compatible with the needs of daily life and the realities perceived by other people. They cannot separate external from internal events, and they confound perceptions with memories, wishes, and fears; their thinking and speech are of ten incoherent and incomprehensible; they may respond to the sound of others' words rather than their meaning, or to idiosyncratic associations rather than the intention of the speaker. Reading inappropriate meanings into innocuous situations, they often begin to believe that everything happening around them is somehow directed at them, and they develop what are known as ideas of reference, feelings of influence, and delusions of grandeur or persecution. They cannot understand the usual social cues, and they do not modulate their feelings according to changing situations in a normal way; this is called flat or inappropriate affect. They may be apathetic and withdrawn, childish and silly, terror-stricken, suspicious, angry, or megalomaniacally exhilarated. Of ten they hear hallucinatory voices mocking, threatening, accusing, or exalting them; occasionally they also have visual and other hallucinations.

There are several categories of schizophrenia: simple or undifferentiated (withdrawal, apathy, and disorders of thought), paranoid (delusions of persecution and megalomania), hebephrenic (shallow affect and giggly, silly behavior), and catatonic (excessive excitement alternating with paralyzed stupor). More important for our purposes is the distinction between acute or reactive (short-term) and chronic or process (long-term) schizophrenia. Acute schizophrenia has a relatively sudden onset (over a period of a few days or weeks), often in a previously normal person, and it often ends in full recovery after a period of several days to several months, although it may recur. The dominant symptoms are varied perceptual distortions, hallucinations, shifting delusions, and mood changes. In its early stages chronic schizophrenia is similar, but it usually sets in more insidiously and in a victim who has been eccentric and emotionally withdrawn—a schizoid or preschizophrenic personality. As it persists, the victim's condition degenerates. Apathy, flat affect, confused and disorganized thought, and regressive or childish behavior become the characteristic symptoms.

Consider these narratives by people who have recovered from attacks of acute schizophrenia, and compare them with the quotations from psychedelic drug users:

I thought about the things I had studied in religion, and about how much more of it seemed to make sense now. I had somehow touched what Jesus, Buddha, and others had been talking about. Formerly confusing phrases out of various scriptures came to me and each seemed perfectly beautifully clear. I became aware of a harmony and wholeness to life that had previously eluded me. Disconnectedness was very clearly illusory. . . .
 

Small tasks became incredibly intricate and complex. It started with pruning the fruit trees. One saw cut would take forever. I was completely absorbed in the sawdust floating gently to the ground, the feel of the saw in my hand, the incredible patterns in the bark, the muscles in my arm pulling back and then pushing forward. Everything stretched infinitely in all directions. Suddenly it seemed as if everything was slowing down and I would never finish sawing that limb. Then by some miracle that branch would be done and I'd have to rest, completely blown out. The same thing kept happening over and over. Then I found myself being unable to stick with any one tree. I'd take a branch here, a couple there. It seemed I had been working for hours and hours but the sun hadn't moved at all.
 

I began to wonder if I was hurting the trees and found myself apologizing. Each tree began to take on personality. I began to wonder if any of them liked me. (Vonnegut 1976 [1975], pp. 98-99)

I started falling deeply in love with the waitress and everyone else in the place. It seemed that they in turn were just as deeply in love with me. . . .

When I looked at someone they were everything. They were beautiful, breathtakingly so. They were all things to me. The waitress was Eve, Helen of Troy, all women of all times, the eternal female principle, heroic, beautiful, my mother, my sisters, every woman I had ever loved. Everything good I had ever loved. Simon was Adam, Jesus, Bob Dylan, my father, every man I had ever loved. Their faces glowed with incredible light. (Vonnegut 1976 [1975], P. 117)

One day, while I was in the principal's office, suddenly the room became enormous, illuminated by a dreadful electric light that cast false shadows. Everything was exact, smooth, artificial, extremely tense; the chairs and tables seemed models placed here and there. Pupils and teachers were puppets revolving without cause, without objective. I recognized nothing, nobody. It was as though reality, attenuated, had slipped away from all these things and these people. Profound dread overwhelmed me, and as though lost, I looked around desperately for help. I heard people talking but I did not grasp the meaning of the words. The voices were metallic, without warmth or color. From time to time a word detached itself from the rest. It repeated itself over and over in my head, absurd, as though cut off by a knife. And when one of my schoolmates came toward me, I saw her grow larger and larger. (Sechehaye 1970 [1951], p. 22)

. . It was the "System" that was punishing me. I thought of it as some vast world-like entity encompassing all men. At the top were those who gave orders, who imposed punishment, who pronounced others guilty. But they were themselves guilty. Since every man was responsible for all other men, each of his acts had a repercussion on other beings. A formidable interdependence bound all men under the scourge of culpability. Everyone was part of the system. But only some were aware of being part.
They were the ones who were "Enlightened," as I was. And it was at the same time both an honor and a misfortune to have this awareness. (Sechehaye 1970 [19511, p.36)

Going crazy is a symbolic experience. Reality is still there, but you keep interpreting it. Everything becomes symbolic. The symbols chase each other. They become overwhelming. The fact that you're wearing that striped tie could mean rivers to me, the Rhine, or the Niger. The ticking of a clock can be the chimes of the universe. My Venetian blinds changed color as I watched them during the night, and this became to me eons—I was going through cycles of life that were much larger than day or night, they were eons. . . .
Inside there was a water fountain. By now, I thought I was a holy man, and I blessed the water and drank it, and what I thought I was drinking was like a taste that I'd never had before, like breathing wind. I had blessed it. I had blessed the water, and the water had become sacred. It had become a nectar. (Friedrich 1977, p. 135)

. . . Then I started going into this. . . real feeling of regression in time. I had quite extraordinary feelings of—living, not only living but—er—feeling and—er—experiencing everything related to something I felt that was—well, something like animal life and so on.. . . And then—urn—going back to further periods of regression and even sort of when I was just struggling like something that had no brain at all and as if I were just struggling for my existence against other things which were opposing. And—um—then at times I felt as if I were like a baby—I could even—could even hear myself cry like a child. . . .
I read newspapers, because they gave me newspapers and things to read, but I couldn't read them because everything that I read had a large number of associations with it. (Laing 1968 [1967], pp. 150-151)

Here is a case that we have seen ourselves, a schizophrenic episode precipitated in part by amphetamine:

I felt special, destined, set apart. For the first couple of weeks I had super concentration on my homework, particularly anthropology and literature. I felt I really got inside what I read and had amazing insight. It seemed as though a genius in me was awakening.
I also got into music, classical music. It seemed fragmented and I could see sinister aspects of it. . . .
When my ability to concentrate on my studies disappeared, I often found myself staring at the walls, as though I were in a trance, for maybe an hour at a time.
I suddenly became a good dancer, and felt real sexual urges for the first time in my life. I had fantasies about a man in New York. . . .
The main problem (as it had always been, only now more intensified) was that I felt separate from myself. I felt as though I were both involved in the action and observing it neutrally, like a camera. I existed on different planes. My thoughts, moods, and emotions seemed to swim by with nothing to direct them or restrain them. I had amazing thoughts. I felt completely divided into different personalities, each one being observed by me. Sometimes the other personalities disappeared and I was totally the observer.
I often felt buoyed up to a high spiritual level by some intense mystical force.

The startling resemblance between schizophrenic and psychedelic experience has been elaborated in a number of scholarly papers that find the effects of psychedelic drugs and the symptoms of schizophrenia to be almost the same (Stockings 1940; Osmond and Smythies 1952; Savage and Cholden 1956; Bowers and Freedman 1966; Jones 1973; Young 1974). Both conditions involve heightened sensory responses, symbolic projection, changes in time sense and feelings of regression in time, preoccupation with usually disregarded details, impairment of judgment and reasoning, and unusually strong ambivalent emotions: on one hand, anxiety, dread, suspicion, guilt, fear of disintegration, and on the other hand, awe, bliss, a sense of certainty, feelings of extraordinary creative awareness or spiritual breakthrough, dissolution of the self in a greater unity. The extreme variability of schizophrenic symptoms also corresponds to the variety of psychedelic experiences. A condition similar in some ways to schizophrenia is acute delirium or toxic psychosis, which can be produced by high fever, extreme thirst and hunger, or any of hundreds of chemicals. But the differences between delirium or toxic psychosjs and schizophrenia—symptoms like clouded senses, disorientation, gross physical disturbances, and often subsequent amnesia—make the resemblances between schizophrenia and psychedelic drug effects all the more remarkable. It is not surprising that psychedelic drugs were long regarded as a potential tool of special value in the study of endogenous psychoses.

But the drug effects differ from schizophrenia in significant ways too. Visual hallucinations or rather pseudohallucinations are dominant rather than auditory ones (imaginary voices). There are more perceptual changes, including the characteristic dreamlike imagery. The drug taker's mood is more likely to be pleasant or euphoric, he is rarely apathetic and emotionally numb, he suffers less disorganization of thought, and he is much more subject to influence and suggestion (Kleinman et al. 1977). Besides, psychedelic drugs can mimic the symptoms of many other disorders besides schizophrenia—manic-depressive psychoses, hysterical conversion syndromes, and so on. In one experiment listeners who compared tape recordings of schizophrenics and LSD
subjects (about 50 to 100 micrograms) had no trouble distinguishing between them (Hollister 1962). But the drug takers' greater education and intellectual capacity may have given them away, and the dose may not have been high enough. A comparison between twenty hospitalized chronic schizophrenics and thirty LSD subjects (100 micrograms) showed that LSD effects did not resemble undifferentiated schizophrenia; one-fourth of the LSD subjects, said to have paranoid tendencies to begin with, suffered reactions that in some ways resembled paranoid schizophrenia. Two acute schizophrenics had much more intense and bizarre symptoms than the LSD subjects (Langs and Barr 1968). When LSD or mescaline is administered to schizophrenics, their responses vary as greatly as those of normal people. Apparently they can distinguish psychedelic drug effects from their own hallucinations and illusions (Feinberg 1962). Some studies suggest that psychedelic drugs intensify the symptoms of acute schizophrenia but produce little response in chronic schizophrenics. But other experiments show striking temporary changes in chronic schizophrenics: a hebephrenic who speaks seriously to the psychiatrist about his -pathetic- state, a mute catatonic who sobs, laughs, talks, and dances for the first time in years (Cholden et al. 1955).

Differences between the schizophrenic's social and personal situation and that of the psychedelic drug taker account for some of the differences in symptoms. The schizophrenic is taken by surprise and driven involuntarily into the altered state. (People given a psychedelic drug without their knowledge are more likely to show a classic psychotic reaction.) The crisis lasts much longer than the six to twelve hours of a drug trip, and the schizophrenic does not know why he feels the way he does or whether it will ever end. The drug user has undertaken his voyage freely, and he can almost always remind himself of what is going on, how it began, and when it will stop. The drug user goes into the wilderness at a time and place of his own choosing, with a near certainty that he will find his way home before the day is over; the schizophrenic is drawn by forces out of his control into an equally unknown country, with no assurance of return.

Especially if this point is given its full weight, the similarities between some kinds of psychedelic experience and some forms of schizophrenia remain impressive despite the divergences. If little attention is now paid to this resemblance, it is largely because the research it prompted on the cause and cure of endogenous psychosis was not very successful. One approach is to seek an endcgenous psychotogen, that is, a substance causing psychosis that might be produced by an abnormal brain and nervous system. Most psychedelic drugs cannot possibly play this role, because tolerance develops too quickly for a persistent effect. The main exception is DMT, and it has recently been identified as an endogenous compound in the brains of rats and human beings. The enzyme responsible for its synthesis and the sites where it is absorbed by nerve terminals have also been discovered (Christian et al. 1976; Christian et al. 1977). Both LSD and 5-Me0-DMT seem to displace DMT at those sites, which may also be serotonin receptors (all these substances are tryptamines).

If DMT is a neurotransmitter in man, as these experiments suggest, an excess of it might be a cause of schizophrenia. However, schizophrenics do not seem to have higher levels of DMT in their brains than control subjects (Corbett et al. 1978).

This work on DMT is just beginning, and its significance is uncertain. The best current opinion on schizophrenia and neurotransmitters is that the illness is somehow related to hyperactivity in the brain regions where the nerve terminals release catecholamines, especially dopamine. For example, the potency of phenothiazines as antipsychotic drugs varies with their capacity to inhibit the effects of dopamine; and amphetamine, which releases dopamine from neurons where it is stored, can produce a psychosis almost indistinguishable from acute paranoid schizophrenia. Phenothiazines do not significantly affect the serotonin systems in which the action of LSD and related drugs seems to be concentrated. But as we mentioned, dopamine may also play some part in the action of psychedelic drugs; for example, LSD has the same inhibiting effect on serotonin as a related psychologically inactive drug, 2- bromo-LSD (BOL-148); but unlike 2-bromo-LSD, it also activates dopamine neurons (Trulson et al. 1977). Nevertheless, this lead has not taken researchers very far, and most recent work on chemical models of psychosis has been concerned with amphetamine (and cocaine, which also affects catecholamines) rather than with psychedelic drugs.

We discussed changes in perceptual filtering and feedback, or control of selective attention, as a possible general explanation for psychedelic effects; they have also been proposed as the cause of endogenous psychosis. In this connection it is important that psychedelic drug effects resemble acute rather than chronic schizophrenia. All the experiences usually thought of as psychedelic or consciousness-expanding occur in the early stages of a psychotic episode, before apathy, withdrawal, thought disorder, and fixed delusions become dominant. It has been proposed that acute and chronic schizophrenia are two different kinds of disorder, with different causes and different sorts of victims; this idea is supported by research suggesting that there is a hereditary disposition to chronic schizophrenia but not to acute schizophrenia. It is even becoming common to suggest that acute psychoses should not be called schizophrenia, because their origin and symptoms are so different from those of the chronic condition. The psychedelic features of acute psychosis and the early stages of chronic schizophrenia may be results of a breakdown in perceptual filtering similar to the one produced by psychedelic drugs. In chronic schizophrenia, possibly because its origin is different, the overwhelming flood of sensations and emotions does not subside and the organism must eventually defend itself by permanent withdrawal and regression.

The Oxford psychologist Gordon Claridge has recently revived the neglected psychedelic drug model of schizophrenia, using this idea of a failure in perceptual and cognitive filtering. He notes that the most popular current chemical model, amphetamine psychosis, is limited because it resembles only paranoid schizophrenia. He points out that schizophrenia resembles psychedelic experience in the extreme variability of its symptoms, and he also finds certain experimental resemblances between schizophrenics and subjects under the influence of LSD. One shared peculiarity is the tendency to overgeneralize stimuli in conditioning, which makes them oversensitive to remote emotional cues. Another is that in both cases perceptual sensitivity (as measured by critical flicker fusion, the rate at which a flashing light begins to look like a steady one) and level of arousal (as measured by the response of the skin to an electric current) do not vary in the normal more or less linear way; perceptual responsiveness tends to be far too high at low levels of physiological arousal. Claridge concludes that LSD does not just lower the arousal threshold, like amphetamine, but rather, like an acute psychosis, causes a failure of the homeostatic mechanism regulating the relation between arousal and perceptual sensitivity; this heightens the sense of meaningfulness and may eventually produce disorders of thinking (Claridge 1978).

The relationship between psychedelic experience and schizophrenia has excited more than merely scientific controversy; it was one of the battlefields in the ideological wars of the 1960s. At first this was a simple matter of drug enthusiasts claiming new insights and the opposition denying their validity by calling them products of madness. But then the debate was given a new twist by the antipsychiatry movement associated with R. D. Laing. Consider how recovered schizophrenics sometimes talk:

Like acid revelations, some of it now looks trivial or meaningless, but much of it remains as valuable to me now as it was then. (Vonnegut 1975, p. 136)

As well as being one of the worst things that can happen to a human being, schizophrenia can also be one of the richest learning and humanizing experiences life offers. (Vonnegut 1975, p. 274)

Remember, when a soul sails out on that unmarked sea called Madness [it has] gained release. (Ferguson 1975 [1973], p. 212)

Narratives of schizophrenic episodes may also refer to voyages of discovery, initiation rites, experiences of cosmic catastrophe, and then rebirth and permanently improved health. Socrates said in Plato's Phaedrus, "Our greatest blessings come to us by way of madness," and he pointed out the common derivation of mantic  (prophetic) and "manic."

So to those who said that psychedelic experience was merely or mainly psychotic, Laing and others replied that psychosis itself was psychedelic, consciousness-expanding, a healing journey aimed at the realization of true sanity by a mind no longer able to tolerate the burdens of the "estranged integration- we call normality. The role of the psychiatrist should be to help the patient complete his involuntary journey instead of cutting it short out of misguided compassion and leaving him lost in the wilderness. The offensiveness of this idea was not in the suggestion that mental illness can be a breakthrough as well as a breakdown; that had been proposed before by other psychiatrists, including Karl Menninger. What seemed objectionable was the notion of ordinary sanity as a diseased condition that sometimes requires heroic measures of treatment. There is an obvious parallel with the position of the psychedelic rebels promoting LSD as the basis for a new kind of society and a new kind of humanity. In fact, Laing's conception of schizophrenia could have been derived directly from LSD trips and his idea of the psychiatrist's role from that of the psychedelic guide (see Laing 1968 [1967], 125-129). One reason for the decline of psychedelic drugs as chemical models of schizophrenia may have been a reluctance to grant respectability to Laing's transvaluation of the values of madness and sanity.

But we do not have to accept Laing's more radical views to make use of the idea that acute schizophrenia has something in common with a psychedelic voyage. The model of a guided LSD trip could be helpful in at least some cases of acute psychosis. It has been suggested that holding back antipsychotic drugs and allowing these patients to experience their madness fully in a protective setting might encourage a confrontation with internal conflicts, cathartic resolution, and genuine recovery; whereas suppression of the symptoms is more likely to produce persistent problems in the form of later acute psychotic episodes (analogous to flashbacks) or the defensive withdrawal of chronic schizophrenia (Rhead 1978). This method of treatment is obviously difficult, and not only for the patient; for the therapist, it is like serving as the guide on an LSD trip that continues for weeks or months. It would presumably be effective only for acute psychotics and only for a minority of them. Besides, opponents suggest that it may just allow the patient to become habituated to psychotic ways of coping with his problems. There is very little evidence either way. Nevertheless, this is one situation in which a model drawn from psychedelic drug experience might have some use in treating mental illness.

Psychedelic experience should not be identified with an acute endogenous psychosis, especially if the purpose is either to glorify psychotics or to denounce drug users. But it would also be a mistake to ignore the similarities. As we have seen, the overlap in symptoms is often striking, the causes might yet turn out to be related, and there might even be implications for treatment. To accept this we may also have to admit that psychosis can sometimes produce insights. William James once wrote that the least important objection to any statement is that the person who made it was emotionally disturbed or mentally ill. Another pathological condition that produces visions and ecstasies is epilepsy. One of its victims, Prince Myshkin in Dostoevsky's novel The Idiot, "often said to himself that all these gleams and flashes of the highest awareness and, hence, also of the 'highest mode of existence', were nothing but a disease, the interruption of the normal condition, and, if so, it was not at all the highest form of being but, on the contrary, must be reckoned the lowest" (Dostoevsky 1965 [1869], p. 226). Dostoevsky, who was himself an epileptic, ultimately has Myshkin resolve his doubts in favor of the timeless harmony of those peak moments, without denying that by ordinary standards of health it is a sign of deficiency. His answer is not necessarily valid for anyone else, but it reminds us of the seriousness and profundity of the question.

Dreaming and Other States

There are good reasons for applying the term "oneirogenic," producing dreams, to psychedelic drugs. In its imagery, emotional tone, and vagaries of thought and self-awareness, the drug trip, especially with eyes closed, resembles no other state so much as a dream. Ten to thirty micrograms of LSD taken before bedtime, a dose small enough to permit sleep and yet large enough to have some effect, increases the duration of REM sleep and also causes moments of dreaming to intrude into non-REM sleep (Muzio et al. 1964). LSD taken early in the day increases dreaming time not only that night but for the next two nights (Green 1965); this implies some mechanism independent of the immediate influence of the drug. And LSD trips not only resemble and produce dreams but form a kind of continuum of experience with them. As we have mentioned, dreams and hypnagogic states are among the most common occasions for what in a waking state would be called flashbacks. They not only recapitulate or elaborate on themes from psychedelic trips, but may also become as vivid, emotionally intense, and memorable as psychedelic experience, as though the drug has removed some inhibition. The primordial and oracular quality of these so-called high dreams may resemble that of Jung's archetypal dreams.

An explanation in terms of perceptual filtering and selective attention makes some sense of the similarity and continuity between dreaming and psychedelic experience. The idea of right-hemisphere dominance may also be useful; for example, split-brain patients fail to report dreams, apparently because there is no way for the dreaming faculty to transmit its information to the verbal hemisphere. A more specific neurophysiological connection at the level of neurotransmitters is also possible, since there is evidence that serotonin is one of the chemicals that confine our dreams to sleep. Serotonin secretion in the midbrain falls just before REM sleep begins. If the serotonin supply of a cat's brain is removed by the drug para-chlorophenylalanine, it will produce in a waking state the same EEG (electroencephalogram or brainwave) signals it normally produces during REM sleep; the reason may be that the raphe cells are no longer sending their inhibiting message to the visual cortex, limbic system, and other brain regions (Jacobs 1976).

Hypnosis also has many of the same effects as psychedelic drugs. It can produce everything from visual changes and time distortion to age-regression, past-incarnation experiences, and mystical self-transcendence. Simply by using hypnotic suggestion to manipulate a subject's depth perception and sense of time, it is possible to induce elation, depression, fear, anger, catatonic or paranoid states, changes in body image, sensory enhancement, and other 'psychedelic" alterations in consciousness (Aaronson 1970). The hypnotic sub- ject, like the psychedelic drug user, is highly suggestible, and the alleged healing powers of hypnotic and psychedelic states are similar. The neurophysiological basis of these similarities is not clear.

A number of other conditions provide analogies for psychedelic drug experience. In temporal lobe epilepsy, which is a seizure or trance state caused by disturbances in the electrochemical action of cells in the temporal lobe of the brain, the onset of the seizure is associated with the epileptic aura, which Dostoevsky refers to in the passage quoted earlier. In at least one experiment epileptics who took 100 to 200 micrograms of LSD were reminded of the aura (Balestrieri 1967). Wilder Penfield showed in a famous experiment that a whole train of relived experiences could be set off by applying an electrode to certain areas in the temporal lobe. The biochemical relationship between epilepsy and the effects of psychedelic drugs has not been elucidated—another suggestion of how many different pathways in the nervous system apparently lead to similar changes in consciousness.

The case studied by the Soviet psychologist A. R. Luria in his famous monograph, The Mind of a Mnemonist, represents a particularly interesting pathological condition with some of the properties of psychedelic experience. The mnemonist had a memory that was literally unlimited. He never forgot anything that he had observed with sufficient concentration. He could recall meaningless lists of letters or numbers that he had memorized during a public performance fifteen years before. The highly concrete quality of his memory was as significant as its extraordinary power. He relived past experiences by precisely reproducing the perceptual traces they had left, rather than reconstructing in the way most of us do. Anything that appeared to be a defect in his memory was actually a defect in perception or concentration, since nothing was lost once he assimilated it. Among the mental capacities and deficien-
cies that accompanied this extraordinary memory were the following:

1. Detailed and vivid recall of childhood scenes, which would often intrude on his mind when it was occupied with other matters.

2. A profusion of synesthesia of all kinds, mingling taste, touch, sound and color; for example, he found it difficult to read while eating because the taste of the food obscured the meaning of the words.

3. Difficulty in understanding metaphor or distinguishing homonyms, and an obsession with the sound of words and their appropriateness to the meaning; an expression like "weigh your words," was confusing to him because the concrete imagery of weighing that it immediately called up was incompatible with the abstract character of the object.

4. Difficulty (despite fairly high intelligence) in coping with abstractions, formulating rules, and understanding complex intellectual problems, because of distraction by the crowds of concrete images that arose with every word or thought; he found it hard to stick to a topic in conversation, since each image that came up begot further images in his mind.

5. Mental, jrnagery so vivid it was sometimes hard to distinguish from external reality, and magical thinking exemplified by a half-felt conviction that he could get others to do his will by concentrating hard enough.

6. Voluntary control of autonomic functions like heart rate and body temperature, by devices like imagining that he was running after a train or lying in bed; also, capacity to change EEG patterns deliberately, and to dispel pain by converting it to a visual image and dismissing it. (Luria 1968)

LSD trips also produce synesthesia, intense mental imagery, misinterpretation or overinterpretation of abstraction and metaphor, and occasionally total recall of childhood events. And the mnemonist's voluntary control of autonomic functions brings to mind the trained capacities of yogis. All his experience, in effect, had overtones of the psychedelic. In the writer Vladimir Nabokov, some of these same mental peculiarities (in a less disabling form) were accompanied by literary genius. Nabokov's novels and memoirs display unusual intensity and precision of visual observation, disdain for generalities and abstractions, and almost total visual recall of scenes from the distant past. He also confessed to experiencing synesthesia and vivid hypnagogic imagery. The gift that proved almost a curse to Luria's mnemonist was a blessing to Nabokov. The case of the mnemonist suggests that the capacity to forget is adaptive, since it allows us to generalize and so to solve problems and make plans. But obviously here, as in the examples of Prince Myshkin's epilepsy or Every-man's LSD trip, it is not easy to distinguish between the subnormal and the supernormal.

Birth and Death

Psychedelic drug research contemplates first and last things not only on religious and metaphysical levels but also on a biological level, in intrauterine, birth, and death experiences that suggest many speculations about human nature and destiny. If psychedelic drugs are regarded as enlarging the realm of the conscious in the most general sense, the importance of birth should not be surprising, since it is the one intense experience that all human beings have undergone. The extraordinary development of the cerebral cortex, recent in evolutionary history, makes the child's head too large to pass easily through the birth canal, and this causes human birth to be particularly prolonged and painful. In fact, childbirth is the only situation in which pain accompanies a normal physiological process. If the memories relived under psychedelic drugs and elsewhere are authentic, it suggests that the recording of this tremendous experience in the nervous system gives rise to deeply felt images of disaster and triumph that color all of later life, influencing religious ideas, social habits, and personality. As in the myth of Eden, excess of intellect (the enlarged cerebral cortex) is the source of our woe. The passage from the bliss of the undisturbed womb to the hell of the early stages of birth might be a source of belief in original sin and the Fall of Man: we must have done something to deserve this punishment. Hindu and Buddhist holy men might have been interpreting such experiences, along with reincarnation visions, when they introduced the idea of karma, the influence of past lives on our fate in the present one. Both the Christian doctrine of atonement and the Buddhist goal of leaving the wheel of death and rebirth may reflect disappointment at the loss of a paradise in the womb; the angel with the flaming sword who guards the gates of Eden symbolizes the impossibility of returning. Grof has even speculated on possible social consequences of this universal calamity. Finding that activation of perinatal memories reproduces all the horror and agony of war, he concludes that some of man's irrational violence is a residue of the birth struggle. He even calls wars and revolutions a "group-fantasy of birth," and suggests that the experience of death and rebirth can influence the psychological causes of war, tyranny, and violent rebellion (Grof 1977).4

These ideas may seem farfetched, but some of them at least could be tested. For example, if a new scientific insight into birth were brought back from a psychedelic drug trip, that would tend to substantiate the authenticity of the reliving. It would also be interesting to study the later lives and psychedelic birth experiences of people born by elective Caesarean operations (increasingly common in recent years), since they have not undergone the ordeal of normal birth and therefore presumably have not known either its terror or its triumph. The birth trauma might serve as a psychological and physical test of fitness; it might also have an evolutionary adaptive role in making us always dissatisfied and striving for a Utopia to replace the lost Eden. Would people born by elective Caesarean section be somewhat deficient in that adaptive discontent?5 All these speculations, of course, depend on the assumption that intrauterine and newborn children have sufficient capacity to distinguish, register, and suffer the emotional influence of events in their environment. That used to be considered unlikely, on the ground that their brains and nervous systems were insufficiently developed; but the more evidence accumulates, the more complex these structures appear to be earlier and earlier in life. In any case, some experiences might leave somatic memories—permanent marks on the organism that never reach consciousness until they are released by drugs or other means. The direction of research could go both ways here: using the results of experiment and observation to check the authenticity of psychedelic and other subjective experiences of regression, and using the subjective experiences to provide new suggestions for testing.

The idea of the birth trauma has had a difficult and unsuccessful career in the psychoanalytic tradition. In an early essay Freud wrote:

Birth is in fact the first of all dangers to life as well as the prototype of all the later ones we fear; and this experience has probably left its mark behind it on that expression of emotion we call anxiety. Thus it was that Macduff of the Scottish legend, who was not born of his mother but -ripp'd from her womb," knew no fear. (Freud 1957 [1910], p. 201)

And when Rank's The Trauma of Birth was published, Freud wrote in a circular letter to his disciples, "I do not hesitate to say that I think it a very important book, that it has given me a great deal to think about. ." (Abraham and Freud 1965, p. 347). But soon afterward he decided that all talk of birth trauma led to a depreciation of the Oedipus complex, for if Rank were right, "Then, instead of our sexual aetiology of neurosis, we should have an aetiology determined by physiological chance, because those who became neurotic would either have experienced an unusually severe birth trauma or would bring an unusually 'sensitive' organization to that trauma" (ibid., pp. 353- 354).

In a late work, The Problem of Anxiety, Freud takes up the topic again. He admits that too little is known about the mind of the newborn child to sayi how it experiences birth. Nevertheless, he again criticizes Rank, suggestingi that the danger of birth has no psychological content for the infant and repre-; sents only "a gross disturbance in the economy of its narcissistic libido"' (Freud 1963 [1936], p. 73). Furthermore, intrauterine life and early infancy form a continuum in which there is "no room for an abreacting of the birth trauma" (ibid., p. 78) and no room for birth as a primary source of anxiety. Ignoring the physical peculiarities of human birth, he also cites as evidence against Rank the fact that we share the birth process with other mammals in which it does not produce neurosis. He adds that Rank's theory disregards constitutional and phylogenetic factors, without explaining why that is any less true of his own ideas. Contradicting his earlier comments in correspondence, he now admits that the idea of a birth trauma is not incompatible with the sexual theory of neurosis as long as it is not taken as an exclusive explanation. His main objection to Rank's theory is that "it hangs in mid-air, instead of being based upon verified observation" (ibid., p. 96), by which he means empirical studies relating difficult births to neurosis. He concludes that "it cannot yet be decided how large a contribution. . it [Rank's theory] actually makes" (ibid., p. 97), and that in any case there is no single ultimate. cause of neurosis.

Freud thought of deviations like those of Rank and Jung as attempts to make psychoanalysis more acceptable to conventional society by abandoning its truly radical content, the scandalous primacy of sexuality. But today the sexual theory of neurosis has become conventional, and the idea of the birth trauma is scandalous. Obviously that does not make it correct, but the clinical material suggests that it ought to be reexamined. The respected English psychoanalyst Donald W. Winnicott provides some of this material from his own practice, where he has seen experiences that strikingly resemble psychedelic death and rebirth—experiences that he distinguishes carefully from mere fantasies. In a paper published in 1949, he writes, "In my psychoanalytic work I sometimes meet with regressions fully under control and yet going back to prenatal life. Patients regressed in an ordered way go over the birth process again and again, and I have been astonished by the convincing proof that I have had that an infant during the birth process not only memorizes every reaction disturbing the continuity of being, but also appears to memorize these in the correct order" (Winnicott 1958, p. 248). His illustration is a case in which "I recognized how this patient's wish to relive the birth process underlay what had previously been a hysterical falling off the couch" (ibid., p. 249) during psychoanalysis. She relived her birth a dozen times, and "at the bottom of the regression there came a new chance for the true self to start" (ibid., p. 252). In the reliving it became clear that -every detail of the birth experience had been retained, and not only that, but the details had been re-
tained in the exact sequence of the original experience" (loc. cit.). As he tells it

Gradually the re-enactment reached the worst part. When we were nearly there, there was the anxiety of having the head crushed. . . . This was a dangerous phase because if acted out outside the transference situation it meant suicide. . . .
Ultimately the patient had to accept annihilation. . . . It appears that in the actual experience there was a loss of consciousness which could not be assimilated to the patient's self until accepted as death. When this had become real the word death became wrong and the patient began to substitute "a giving-in", and eventually the appropriate word was "a not-knowing". (ibid., p. 250)

He later wrote, -I cannot help being different from what I was before this analysis started. . . . this one experience. . . has tested psychoanalysis in a special way, and has taught me a great deal. . . . I have needed to re-examine my technique, even that adapted to the more usual case" (ibid., p. 280).

In a related theoretical paper on the birth trauma and its relation to anxiety, Winnicott says that Freud never came to a conclusion about the subject because he -lacked certain data which were essential" (ibid., p. 175). He suggests that birth not only leaves memory traces that contribute to organizing the anxiety patterns of later life, but also serves to libidinize certain body parts. He refers to the helplessness of the fetus -experiencing something without any knowledge whatever of when it will end" (ibid., p. 184), which is one of the effects often reported in psychedelic drug research. He also associates the birth trauma with psychosomatic symptoms like headaches, chest constriction, and feelings of asphyxiation, as well as some forms of -congenital paranoia." He concludes:

As I see it, the trauma of birth is the break in the continuity of the infant's going on being, and when this break is significant the details of the way in which the impingements are sensed, and also of the infant's reaction to them, become in turn significant factors adverse to ego development. In the majority of cases the birth trauma is therefore mildly important and determines a good deal of general urge towards rebirth. In some cases this adverse factor is so great that the individual has no chance (apart from rebirth in the course of analysis) of making a natural progress in emotional development, even if subsequent external factors are extremely good. (ibid., p. 189)

Since they apparently provide a quicker way to arrive at the level of regression Winnicott and others have seen in psychoanalysis, psychedelic drugs might be especially useful in studying the subtler effects of birth that have been disregarded because of an understandable preoccupation with gross physical and neurological damage.6

Psychedelic research also has theoretical implications for the study of death and dying. People who suffer an accident where death seems imminent, or whose hearts stop beating during surgery or a heart attack, often report panoramic memories, visions of brilliant white light and dead relatives, spectral self-projection, and sensations of leaving the body as a soul or spirit. These experiences carry enormous conviction and are a powerful impetus to belief in an afterlife (Moody 1975). They also occur, of course, in other situations besides impending death. For example, patients who have had operations under general anesthesia may later recall under hypnosis having floated away from their bodies toward the ceiling of the room, watched the surgery, and listened to the talk of the surgical team—which they accurately reproduce (Mostert 1975). A subjective quality of sober realism, with no overtones of dream, fantasy, or delirium, is reported in these cases as well as in near-death experiences.

Such apparitions and ecstatic states, like many other altered states of awareness, are the products of a brain free of the need or lacking the capacity to issue a motor command. They might be adaptations to a situation in which further struggle for control by the ego is useless. The neurophysiological mechanisms involved are unclear. Maybe the brain is releasing a substance similar to ketamine or some other psychedelic drug. Another possibility is diminution of oxygen in brain cells and a parallel accumulation of carbon dioxide, the product of the body's combustion of oxygen. It has been found that psychedelic effects are produced by a mixture of 30 percent carbon dioxide and 70 percent oxygen (Meduna 1958); and certain other ways of inducing altered states of consciousness, such as hyperventilation, have the effect of inhibiting the respiratory center and thus reducing the level of oxygen in the brain. Since the effects of breathing carbon dioxide continue long after the oxygen level returns to normal, some neurochemical triggering mechanism must be involved.

Another lesson from psychedelic experience is the apparent interchangeability of birth and death in the unconscious. Borrowing the idea of preexistence from Plato for poetic purposes, Wordsworth wrote: "Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting." He was applying to the process by which we come into the world the words usually reserved for going out of it. It may be that the fear of dying is in part a projected memory of birth, and that what Freud called the death instinct is also related to a desire to return to the womb. If the birth agony is experienced as a death agony, this life is in a sense already life after death, and its beginning might provide our images of a future life.

That would suggest reasons for the visions of tunnels, brilliant white light, and godlike (parental) figures in near-death experience. The experience of birth may also be reflected in myths of cyclical death and resurrection, including eschatological myths of the destruction and recreation of the cosmos. And the doctrine of reincarnation may have roots in a deep feeling that the introduction of new life to this world through birth implies death and oblivion for something that went before.

Learning and Creativity

What can psychedelic experience contribute either to artistic and scientific achievement or to our knowledge about it? LSD has sometimes been said to be capable of inspiring artists to new heights of originality and productivity, and cutting Gordian knots in various fields of intellectual endeavor. The question whether this or any other drug can promote the work of art and science is an obscure one, and it is complicated by the inadequacy of all theories about creativity. Freud, wisely avoiding the platitudes in which this problem is usually discussed, said that here psychoanalysis throws down its arms. Nevertheless, we can at least distinguish several kinds of effect on creativity and learning. A drug may simply supply the will to work by dispelling pain, depression, fatigue, or anxiety. Used therapeutically, a psychedelic drug might help to resolve a neurosis or other psychological problem and therefore release creativity. Possibly the altered states of consciousness produced by drugs, like those produced by hypnosis and sleep, can also be put to use in making learning more efficient. And drug experiences, like all novel experience, can provide themes and material for the artist's or scientist's imagination to work on. But usually the suggestion that psychedelic drugs enhance creativity means something more important but also subtler and more elusive: that they somehow have a direct effect on the faculty of insight, providing original solutions to artistic and intellectual problems through new combinations of ideas and feelings.

On the use of psychedelic drugs as therapeutic agents for artists, there is not much to be added to what we have said in the last chapter. Ling and Buckman cite the cure of a writer's block with LSD treatment; the patient has been able to write fast and fluently since, and his books have been translated into twelve languages. He is quoted as saying, "LSD has revolutionized my life, and there is no doubt about this at all. It has made me confront many things that one did not want to confront. It has also made me a much happier person and a successful writer- (Ling and Buckman 1963, p. 61). Presumably any effective psychotherapy might do the same. The proposals for psychedelic drugs as learning devices have been scattered and never carefully followed up. In any case, it is absurd to think of students taking LSD as they take amphetamines, to prepare for exminations. The idea of learning through psychedelic drug trips is similar to the idea of hypnotic and sleep learning; one special interest is taking advantage of an expansion of subjective time to accomplish in hours what would otherwise take weeks. The occasional impressive anecdotes about this usually involve states of consciousness not induced by drugs, and in any case, the educational revolution implied in any reliable use of such methods shows no signs of arriving yet.

There is no doubt that altered states of consciousness, including those induced by drugs, can heighten esthetic sensitivity and provide a source of material for the creative imagination to work on. Probably the best historical study of this subject is Alethea Hayter's Opium and the Romantic Imagination (1968). Much of what Hayter says about the effects of opium on the minds and art of men like Coleridge, De Quincey, and Poe would apply to LSD as well, with due allowance for the apparently greater depth of psychedelic experience and the absence of addiction with its particular terrors and despairs. Others have described the influence of cannabis and opium on Eastern art (see Gelpke 1966) and the reproduction of peyote visions in Huichol yarn paintings or ayahuasca imagery in Amazon Indian decoration. It is well known that marihuana can enhance appreciation of art and music; for example, Allen Ginsberg has described how it gave him an insight into Cézanne's landscapes that seemed permanently valid (Grinspoon 1977, pp. 104-105). Greater interest in classical music has in fact been experimentally demonstrated to be one common effect of taking LSD (McGlothlin et al. 1970).

In the realm of verbal art, the main effect of psychedelic drugs is a better understanding of the visionary and mystical language of poets like Blake, Wordsworth, and Whitman. Some readers, granted access to the ranges of consciousness investigated in the work of these poets, literally come to see for the first time what they are talking about. In Poetic Vision and Psychedelic Experience (1970), R. A. Durr has shown the resemblance by quoting passages of poetry interspersed with accounts of psychedelic drug trips that represent, in Wordsworth's familiar phrases, the world "apparelled in celestial ight," and "a sense sublime/of something far more deeply interfused." Make above all other poets in English seems to have been able to enter voluntarily into states of consciousness that others reach only by means of psycheielic drugs, and the shock of recognition has caused many drug users from Huxley on to borrow his words to describe their experience.

Blake's visionary powers were exceptional, but many other writers and painters have shown how much can be derived artistically from close attention to trance, dream, and hypnagogic imagery, as well as mystical states. Hieronymus Bosch and Pavel Tchelitchew, for example, are often cited as painters with a psychedelic vision. The surrealist movement of the 1920s and 1930s shows special affinities and parallels with the psychedelic movement. It began with the discovery by André Breton and Max Ernst of the state of half-sleep, and like the later drug revolution, it aimed to free the imagination by penetrating the unconscious and deepening encounters between altered states of awareness and the everyday. In attempting both an inner transformation of the individual and a social revolution, it was forerunner of the drug culture of the 1960s. The split between political radicals and hippies was analogous to the break in the surrealist movement that separated communists from dreamers in the early 1930s. Both movements, despite their failure to transform the world, had a significant influence on language, art, and social behavior. As the resemblance between hypnagogic imagery and LSD visions would suggest, surrealist painting may have been the first psychedelic art and, as exemplified in the works of Ernst and others, it is probably still the best.

But enhancing creativity means something more than heightening enjoyment of art, providing new experiences for the imagination to feed on, or even dissolving a neurotic writer's block. It is not easy to determine what this something more might be and how to identify it. Is there any evidence that the strong subjective sense of heightened creative powers sometimes induced by drugs is more than an illusion? If so, how does it come about?

There are many spectacular claims about psychedelic drugs as a source of creative ideas, but little reliable evidence. Some of the most interesting testimony comes from architects and designers; for example, the August 1966 issue of the journal Progressive Architecture contained four articles on the use of psychedelic drugs in design problems. One architect has described how an LSD trip helped him in designing a mental hospital by giving him an appreciation of the needs and fears of patients (Izumi 1970; see also Bull 1968). Painting under the influence of psychedelic drugs becomes bolder in line, more vivid in color, and more expansive emotionally, but technique is impaired. In one experiment artists under the influence of LSD and mescaline showed little interest in painting, but when they did paint, the results were judged by other artists to be more pleasing esthetically than their usual work (Berlin et al. 1955). But the lasting effects of psychedelic experience on artists are undoubtedly more important than anything done under the immediate influence of a drug. In a survey of 180 artists who had used psychedelic drugs, Stanley Krippner found that 114 of them thought the drugs had affected their work. The imagery supplied by psychedelic visions was most important, but many also said that they now used color more boldly, worked more enthusiastically and spontaneously, or attained more emotional depth in their art (Krippner 1970b).

A professional artist, Arlene Sklar-Weinstein, has described the effect of LSD on her work this way:

Work prior to LSD, developed over a twenty-year span, was competent but largely derivative since there was no clear center of emanation. Areas of color and detail were arbitrarily closed. In effect, the LSD experience made available again the "lost" and forgotten visual modalities one has as a child.
The unbelievably beautiful, strange imagery, the expanded concept of time and life in terms of millennia, not years, and most importantly the sharpened sense of the multi-dimensional qualities in my character, are products of the LSD experience too powerful not to have found their way into my work. (Masters and Houston 1968, pp. 119-120)

The work done before and after her LSD experience that is published alongside this statement tends to confirm it. Krippner also reports a casein which psychedelic drugs seem to have released latent artistic interest and talent in a person who had shown none before (Masters and Houston 1968, pp. 176- 178).7

Testing creativity and imagination is a dubious practice, but a few experiments are worth mentioning. In a controlled study Leonard S. Zegans and his colleagues found that a moderate dose of LSD produced no significant changes on the Witkin Embedded Figures Test, which measures the degree of field-independence of perception, a characteristic supposedly related to fluency in the formation of new concepts and resourcefulness in ambiguous situations. LSD also produced no change in a mosaic design test, but it increased the number of imaginatively remote word associations (Zegans et al. 1967). Willis W. Harman and his colleagues conducted the most interesting experiment on the use of psychedelic drugs in creative problem-solving. They chose 27 talented people—engineers, physicists, mathematicians, a designer, and an artist—and tried to measure their creativity by tests before and after giving them a moderate dose (200 mg) of mescaline. Scores improved on the Witkin Embedded Figures Test, on a test of visualization, and on the Purdue Creativity Test, in which the subject is asked to find as many uses as possible for pictured objects. Then the subjects were allowed to work on problems that they had brought with them. Several found solutions or new avenues of exploration with what they regarded as remarkable ease. The following quotations are typical:

I began to see an image of the circuit. The gates themselves were little silver cones linked together by lines. I watched this circuit flipping through its paces.. . . The psychedelic state is, for me at least, an immensely powerful one for obtaining insight and understanding through visual symbolism....

 .. brought about almost total recall of a course that I had had in thermodynamics; something that I had never given any thought about in years.

The next insight came as an image of an oyster shell, with the mother-of-pearl shining in different colors. I translated it [into] the idea of an interferometer. (Harman et al. 1972 [1969], pp. 466-469)

The solutions included improvements in a magnetic tape recorder, a chair design accepted by the manufacturer, design of a linear electron accelerator steering-beam device, and a new conceptual model of the photon. Some subjects reported heightened creativity in their work weeks later. Since the experiment was not controlled, there is no way to be sure that the results were produced by the drug and not by preparation, concentration, and expectation. The FDA cut off this research in 1966, and nothing has been done in the field since then. More studies of this kind are needed: not formal attempts to measure the unmeasurable by testing a random group of subjects, but experiments in which gifted people are asked to solve concrete problems that have arisen in their work.

The relationship of psychedelic states to creative inspiration is like that of dream, madness, and mystical ecstasy: complex, subtle, and not subject to summary judgment. The rock music, light shows, posters, underground comics, and mixed-media spectacles that were the specific contribution of the psychedelic drug scene may not be major art. But serious writers like Huxley, Ginsberg, Burroughs, Michaux, and Watts have taken a serious interest in psychedelic experience, doing for LSD and mescaline what their nineteenth-century predecessors did for opium and hashish. And, as Krippner's survey of artists suggests, subtler influences are likely as well. Alethea Hayter points out that in the nineteenth century opium rightly or wrongly was believed to have the capacity to stimulate imaginative powers by sweeping away the intellect's fixed categories and definitions, exciting new associations of ideas, and shaping abstractions into symbolic patterns. The images of Coleridge's poem -Kubla Khan,- as everyone knows, came to him during an opium reverie.

Walter Scott's The Bride of Lammermoor and Wilkie Collins' The Moonstone were written under the influence of opium in a state so alien to the authors' normal consciousness that they hardly recognized the novels afterward as their own. These works are still read, and Burroughs' Naked Lunch, written under the influence of marihuana, is also likely to survive.

Artistic and scientific insight requires a touch of the same kind of loose thinking or craziness that is found in altered states of consciousness. As the poet Schiller put it, -Intellect has withdrawn its guard from the gates, and the ideas rush in pelhmell.- With reason's guard down, the artist or scientist gains access to the region of the mind that has been called the unconscious as opposed to the conscious, intuition as opposed to intellect, primary-process as opposed to secondary-process thinking, or, more recently, the right hemisphere as opposed to the left hemisphere. Separated internal worlds are joined, and new relationships and patterns emerge. This establishment of new meanings by poetic metaphors and scientific models is a disciplined form of the same process of meaning-creation that goes on in dreams and madness; the inspired madness of the poet through whom the Muse speaks is a theme at least as old as Plato's dialogues. There is also an element of mysticism in all creativity: the creator's power to make unity out of variety (Coleridge's definition of beauty), self-forgetful exhilaration, humility, awe, and wonder.

It is easy to see the inchoate creative potential in psychedelic states, and in fact the accounts of problem-solving under the influence of LSD and mescaline are reminiscent of Kekulé's envisioning the structure of the benzene molecule in a dream, or Poincaré's description of the part played by the unconscious and involuntary in one of his important mathematical discoveries. The reports of conscious participation in cellular and even atomic processes during LSD trips, like the reports of reliving conception and phylogenetic memories, are no doubt just extraordinary and powerful fantasies. If they did prove to be more than that, a trained biologist or physicist might presumably bring back some knowledge from a psychedelic trip that could be translated into language or mathematical symbolism and make a contribution to science. So far, apparently, drug trips have produced no important scientific discoveries, but Kekulé's and Poincaré's stories and Harman's experiments on creativity are suggestive. It might seem that we are ignoring a necessary distinction here, since enhancing the scientific imagination by withdrawing reason's watcher at the gates is not the same as achieving some peculiarly immediate insight into or participation in biochemical and physical processes. But here we are at the edge of the known, and an image like Poincargs mental picture of the Fuchsian functions or Kekulé's dream of the benzene ring might be regarded as first cousin to psychedelic participatory visions of embryos, body organs, cells, and atoms; at such points fantasy and intellectual insight can converge.

In any case, a drug can never do the main work of creation. Just as LSD cannot produce magical personality transformations, it cannot supply the talent and training that make a master of language, natural science, mathematics, music, or visual forms. Baudelaire warned:

And yet what if—even at the price of his dignity, integrity, and free will—man could derive some great intellectual benefit from hashish, making it a sort of thinking-machine, a productive implement? This is a question that I have often heard asked, and I will answer it. First of all . . . hashish reveals nothing to the individual but the individual himself. . . . the thoughts they are counting on to yield such great advantage are not really as beautiful as they appear beneath their temporary disguise, draped in magic tinsel. . . . Let us admit, for the moment, that hashish yields talent or at least increases it; they are still forgetting that it is in the nature of hashish to diminish the Will, so that with one hand it imparts what it snatches back with the other. (Baudelaire 1971 [1860], pp. 80-81)

It should be noted that Baudelaire was more familiar with opium (in the form of laudanum) than with hashish (see Grinspoon 1977, pp. 79-83); narcotics are often ultimately dulling and deadening, unlike hashish and the stronger psychedelic drugs. Nevertheless, the feeling of insight that is so easy to come by, in drug-induced exaltation as in dreams and madness, does not guarantee—and-if premature may even prevent—establishment of the checks and balances between intuition and analytic reason required for genuine creation. Whether or not psychedelic drugs have any potential as tools for artists and scientists, they surely have the same capacity that Hayter ascribes to opium: providing new insights into the psychology of creation by intensifying and lengthening the subjective duration of the kind of subtle mental activity in which original productions begin and new meanings are created. They are a new way to read the forgotten languages of the mind, a highway to the unconscious to put beside Freud's royal road of dreams. It has been said that modern art is at one with radical politics and psychotherapy in its f ascination with the abyss of lost forms and powers" (Rosenberg 1975, p. 140). Psychedelic drugs provide one kind of glimpse into that abyss.

Psychedelic and Mystical Experience

It should not be necessary to supply any more proof that psychedelic drugs produce experiences that those who undergo them regard as religious in the fullest sense. We could introduce quotations from mystics and other religious figures in the same way that we have used the words of poets and psychotics.

Every kind of typically religious emotion, symbol, and insight appears during psychedelic drug trips. For example, Masters and Houston report that 96 percent of their 202 experimental subjects had some religious imagery, with or without religious feeling. Forty-nine percent saw devils, 7 percent angels, 60 percent numinous visions, and 55 percent images of religious figures (1966, p. 205). Six of the 202 had what Masters and Houston regarded as a full-blown experience of mystical union (ibid, p. 301). In another sample of forty-two LSD users, 60 percent said that their feelings about religion had changed. Thirty percent felt closer to their church, 40 percent felt less fear of death, 30 percent a surer conviction of God's existence, and 60 percent a greater trust in God or, in the case of atheists and agnostics, in life. (Downing and Wygant 1964). This experiment changed no one's religious views drastically, but Grof mentions a Czech patient employed as a Marxist antireligious lecturer whose dogmatic convictions were so shattered by LSD that he gave up his job and went to work as a librarian at lower pay. Walter Clark conducted an experiment in which he gave LSD to eight subjects; nine to eleven months later he asked them to rate the intensity of the experience on a scale of one to five in various categories. The most common single rating was five--"beyond anything ever experienced or even imagined"—on measures like timelessness, spacelessness, paradoxicality, presence of God, ultimate reality, blessedness and peace, mystery, and rebirth (Clark 1974).

Drug-induced religious and mystical experience is often reported to be unusually intense. Clark and John Knight found that psychedelic drugs produced more profound transcendental states than the services of charismatic religious faiths, especially in the categories of blessedness, peace, holiness, timelessness, loss of self, terror, dying, and rebirth (Knight and Clark 1976). Alan Watts describes his second and third LSD trips as deeper than his previous spontaneous ecstatic experiences (Watts 1970, p. 133). John Blofeld, an American who had long practiced Buddhist meditation in an effort to reach enlightenment, recounts that he took mescaline and, surrendering to what seemed like madness and death after an hour of mental torture, attained a state of profound peace in which the truths of Buddhism were revealed to him in immediate awareness. He says that mescaline provided (momentarily) what he had not achieved in long years of meditation (Blofeld 1968).

Although psychedelic drugs are apparently capable of producing the whole range of religious experiences, special interest has centered on the supreme ecstasy of mystical union. The subject is too complicated to investigate very deeply here, but some distinctions are worth making. Rudolf Otto uses the term mysterium tremendum to describe the fundamental religious emotion, that which is felt in apprehending the numinous or holy. The mysterium represents something hidden that is being disclosed, and the tremendum a trembling or shuddering before it in dread and awe. Numinous horror and loathing are as genuine as numinous serenity, bliss, and love; Otto cites the German mystic Jakob Boehme's words about the -ferocity of God.- In its lower forms—magic, taboo, spirit visions, ancestor worship—the sense of the numinous is attached to finite objects; in the highest forms its object is a single ultimate universal principle (Otto 1958 (19321).

In the broadest sense, then, the mysterium tremendum and therefore a kind of mysticism is present in visions like those of Blake, Swedenborg, or Ezekiel, illuminations like Mohammed's or St. Paul's and other varieties of religious experience. But when the encounter with the numinous takes the form of mystical union in the strict sense, those who achieve it usually regard all the rest as secondary or a distraction. Various attempts have been made to define this union more precisely. James, for example, described its characteristics as ineffability, a noetic quality (a sense of ultimate knowledge), transiency, and passivity. A rationalist writer on religion, Walter Kaufmann, challenges James' list and offers his own, more adequate because it defines mysticism more specifically:

(1) A break from everyday perception, recognized as such by the mystic (not delusional)

(2) which is regarded as infinitely more important than everyday perceptions

(3) without an objective correlative in nature but

(4) having as its object either nature as a whole or something beyond nature (Kaufmann 1961 [19581 p. 325).

On either of these definitions of mystical experience, psychedelic drugs clearly have the capacity to produce it.

There are at least two kinds of mystical experience: the pantheistic extravertive kind, exemplified by some of Wordsworth's poetry, in which the subject blissfully merges with a sacred living presence in nature; and the rarer and deeper introvertive mysticism, in which the external world has no part, a state described as identification of the self with the Godhead or of Atman with Brahman. The philosopher W. T. Stace has defined the characteristics of introvertive mysticism as follows:

(1) unitary consciousness,

(2) nonspatial and nontemporal awareness,

(3) sense of reality and objectivity,

(4) blessedness,

(5) sacredness,

(6) paradoxicality,

(7) ineffability (Stace 1960).

These categories were used in a famous experiment in which Walter N. Pahnke, then a resident in psychiatry at Massachusetts Mental Health Center in Boston, created a psychedelic mystical experience under controlled experimental conditions. Twenty divinity students attended a service at Marsh Chapel, Boston University, on Good Friday in 1962. Ten of them took 30 mg of psilocybin and the rest a placebo. All were asked to write a detailed account of their experience and to fill out questionnaires one week and six months later. Pahnke compared the results with a definition of mystical experience derived from Stace's list, adding two items of his own: transiency and subsequent improvement in life. The experience of more than half of the subjects taking psilocybin showed to some degree all nine of the features listed by Pahnke; the percentage for those who took the placebo was much lower (Pahnke and Richards 1966; Pahnke 1970a).

Despite all this, there has been a stubborn reluctance to concede that drug-induced religious or mystical experience can be even subjectively as powerful and authentic as religious visitations from other sources. The topic seems to evoke the same annoyance and resentment as claims of consciousness expansion (see Laski 1968, pp. 263-273). Obviously there is no way to convince an unyielding skeptic about this, since the quality of two subjective experiences can never be shown to be identical, and there is no infallible authority—not even a modest consensus—on what qualifies as genuine religious experience. All we can say is that the testimony of those who have undergone psychedelic religious experiences suggests that the drug-induced kind is not obviously different or inferior in its immediate quality.8

The best-known critic of psychedelic religiosity is the Roman Catholic scholar R. C. Zaehner. He admits that psychedelic drugs can produce a sense of the holy and a form of nature-mysticism. He is even willing to allow the possibility that they might give a glimpse of a timeless and selfless state resembling the Enlightenment of Buddhism. But he denies that drugs ever lead anyone to the exclusive love of a personal God, which he as a Christian regards as the highest form of religious experience; he also denies that drug users ever feel the gratitude and humility appropriate to this experience of being at once united with and the creature of a transcendent God (Zaehner 1974 [1973]). Zaehner is partly right, since psychedelic drug users often tend to describe the central revelation, the one that somehow includes and subsumes all others, in terms set by Eastern religion. But on another level, he is wrong. It is quite easy to find psychedelic experiences that are interpreted theistically, with a full sense of creatureliness, gratitude, love, and humility. If that were not so, Christians, including the peyote eaters of the Native American Church, would not be able to reaffirm their faith with the help of these drugs.

It is also sometimes said that however perfect the mimicry of authentic religious insight by drugs may seem, it can only be a counterfeit, a chemical confidence trick played on our brains and nervous systems. Leary provocatively invited this response by declaring that in the LSD era religion without drugs would be unnatural and pointless, like astronomy without telescopes. No wonder Zaehner thinks of psychedelic drugs as an "extension of soulless technology to the soul itself" (p. 84). To accept drug-induced religion and mysticism as genuine, it is said, would be to reduce the most profound human experiences to a brain malfunction. We have commented on this genetic or reductionist fallacy more than once. In this case, the point is that even if it were correct, it could not be used to give a special low status to drug mysticism. As Huxley often insisted, from a purely materialist and determinist point of view, all intense religious experience is a product of chemical and neurological imbalance. We have seen the connections with epilepsy and psychosis. Techniques like fasting, sexual abstinence, breathing exercises, prolonged wakefulness, and monastic isolation, used in both East and West, are designed to alter the mind in the process of altering body chemistry. Altered states of consciousness often occur at moments of crisis, when the body and mind are not working normally. Why should a mystical experience produced by drugs be regarded differently from one produced by illness, imprisonment, or the threat of death? For that matter, chemical substances in the form of neurotransmitters operate as a cause of all human experiences and ideas—the healthy man's as well as the sick man's, the materialist's as well as the mystic's. To single out drugs for special contempt is therefore completely unjustifiable.

Behind the rather superficial comments about the impure nature of drugs as such lies a more interesting and plausible argument: that religious experience attained in this way is too easy, unearned, and therefore inauthentic or at least in some sense second-rate. (The hostility to pleasure derived from marihuana has something to do with a similar feeling that it comes too easily.) The man who has driven his car to the top of the mountain, it is said, does not see the same view as the hiker who has struggled up it on foot. The wish here optimistically metamorphosed into a fact is that religious revelations should be granted only to exceptional persons after great and prolonged effort. The trouble is that life does not conform to this rule, whether or not drugs are involved. 9

The Christian idea of God's grace is one attempt to account for the fact that the light often descends spontaneously, without any conscious preparation or any apparent desert on the part of its beholder. Huxley borrowed the Roman Catholic term "gratuitous grace- when he wanted to describe mescaline as a gift that can in no way be earned. Besides, psychedelic drug mysticism is by no means always "easy- or "instant.- As the emphasis on set and setting implies, the mind must be prepared and the conditions right for a profound mystical or religious experience to occur. And even then, as we have seen, it may require courage and hard work; the drug user may go through a descent into madness and torment and even a seeming death agony before attaining joyous unity and rebirth.

The heart of both these objections to drug-induced religious experience—its biochemical determination and its alleged ease of access—is an interest in devaluating and degrading the drug experience in order to prevent religion from being devaluated and degraded by the association (this is of course no problem for the irreligious). Drug users themselves are usually willing to allow neither the devaluation nor the dissociation. Nevertheless, even when they cannot be convinced that drug-induced revelations are inauthentic, they often come to consider them incomplete and inadequate, requiring to be supplemented and then replaced. As one writer has put it, religious experiences are not the same as a religious life—and we can add that they are not the same as religious belief. Max Weber wrote scornfully, in a sentence that certainly applies to much psychedelic religiosity, "At the present time, it matters little in the development of a religion whether or not modern intellectuals feel the need of enjoying a 'religious' state as an 'experience,' in adAition to other sorts of sensations, in order to decorate their internal and stylish furnishings with paraphernalia guaranteed to be genuine and old- (Gerth and Mills 1958, p. 280). Huxley's term "gratuitous grace- was carefully chosen: in Catholic theology this gift provides an opportunity that is nevertheless neither necessary nor sufficient for salvation. In Eastern spiritual disciplines, too, the transient visionary, ecstatic, or mystical state is not an end in itself but at most a beginning. Although many Indian holy men use hashish, they do not regard it as a major vehicle of enlightenment. These teachers usually tell their disciples that drugs are ultimately a hindrance to spiritual progress.

The religious life, holiness, salvation, enlightenment, satori, molcsha—no matter how this elusive condition is described, it can never be guaranteed by a momentary ecstasy, however profound and however often repeated; it requires some form of tradition, discipline, and practice. That was what counterculture leaders like Kesey and Ram Dass meant when they told their admirers to go beyond LSD. To cite Weber again, "Formulated abstractly, the rational aim of redemption religion has been to secure for the saved a holy state, and thereby a habitude that insures salvation. This takes the place of an acute and extraordinary, and thus a holy, state which is transitorily attained by means of orgies, asceticism, or contemplation" (Gerth and Mills 1958, p. 325). In this respect drug-induced moments of realization are no different from others, spontaneous or sought after. They are potentially a starting point for a religious life, but they can also be relegated to the files of memory as nothing more than interesting experiences, neglected, or even misused.

Drugs and Religious Origins

When such experiences are taken seriously, prophets rise up, religious beliefs are formulated, and religious institutions are founded. The gift of illumination received through an altered state of consciousness is transformed into the common social dreams of mythology. Ultimately all knowledge of the supernatural or spiritual beings comes from statements by visionaries and ecstatics. The revelation may be mystical in the strict sense, or it may be rooted in other forms of inspiration, possession, or frenzy. It may involve guardian spirits or a central divinity. It may be sought voluntarily, as by the shaman undertaking a wilderness ordeal in quest of his vision, or the anchorite subjecting himself to solitary privations; and it may also arrive spontaneously, either in "healthy" peak experiences or in the "diseased" form of epilepsy (Mohammed and St. Paul may have been epileptics), manic-depressive psychosis (the seventeenth-century false messiah Sabbatai Zevi was certainly a manic-depressive), or acute schizophrenia. The social situation and the prophet's or shaman's personal qualities determine whether this charisma, whatever its source, becomes the basis of a religious movement or system. To do so it must evoke some recognition and sympathetic response in others, who dimly see that the charismatic individual has been granted—spontaneously by good luck or a combination of good and ill luck, or by his own painful efforts—some insight, ineffable in its deepest reaches and yet communicable to the extent that human minds have a common structure and human beings have common ends. Just as a few create art and many appreciate it, a few create religious life and many participate in it.

It should be clear from our account that plant alkaloids are not intrinsically different from any other source of religious ideas and institutions. We are forced to recognize this not only by general considerations but also by concrete historical and anthropological research, some of which is described in chapter 2. For many years Western scholars have greatly underestimated the importance of these drugs to the cultures that use them. For example, Mircea Eliade, one of the best contemporary historians of religion, insists, even in writing about the shamans of Siberia, that drugs could never be a primary source of religious experience, but only a degenerate substitute for some original pure vision and a symptom of social decadence (Eliade 1964, p. 401). Eliade was forced to speak explicitly in discussing mushroom-eating Siberian shamans, but usually the view he expresses has been implicit and unargued. When psychedelic drugs came to prominence in our own society and Western researchers began to gain some personal experience of their powers, there was a natural and somewhat angry reaction. In an article in The American Scholar, Mary Barnard introduced the term "theo-botany," and wrote, "I am willing to prophesy that fifty theo-botanists working for fifty years would make the current theories concerning the origins of much mythology and theology as out-of-date as pre-Copernican astronomy. I am the more willing to prophesy, since I am, alas, so unlikely to be proved wrong" (Barnard 1963, p. 586). The aggrieved tone is significant, but Barnard was unnecessarily pessimistic. The study of the cultural and religious influence of psychedelic plants is now a modest but growing field of research; there is a scholarly organization called the Ethno-Pharmacology Society and a Journal of Ethnopharmacology. If this work has not transformed all ideas about the origins of religion, it has nevertheless thrown some light into obscure corners. Since even our elaborate modern resources for explanation and rationalization did not prevent the development of cults surrounding psychedelic drugs, it is easy to see ho vi ergot, fly agaric, and peyote must have affected the primitive men who first tasted them. The divinities embodied in plants must have been a powerful influence on the minds of the shamans who created and preserved the religious lore of the human species in the hunting cultures that dominated the greater part of its history.

The same divinities must have influenced later stages of human development as well. For example, if Wasson, Hofmann, and Ruck are right about the use of a psychedelic potion at Eleusis (chapter 2), it raises interesting questions about the artistic, religious, and philosophical life of ancient Greece. Sophocles, who was probably an initiate, wrote in a fragment of a lost drama: "Thrice happy are those of mortals who having seen these rites depart for Hades; for to them alone is it granted to have true life there; to the rest all there is evil." Aeschylus is said to have narrowly escaped death at the hands of an audience who thought he was divulging the Eleusinian secret in one of his plays, now also lost. The poet Pindar wrote, "Happy is he who, having seen these rites, goes below the hollow earth; for he knows the end of life and its god-sent beginning." Cicero wrote that Athens had given the world nothing more excellent or divine than the Mysteries (for these references, see Mylonas 1961, pp. 284-285). The Mysteries also unquestionably influenced Aristotle and Plato. The great classical scholar Werner Jaeger wrote:

How often do Plato and the early Aristotle borrow their language and symbols to give colour and form to their own new religious feeling! The mysteries showed that to the philosopher religion is possible only as personal awe and devotion, as a special kind of experience enjoyed by natures that are suitable for it, as the sours spiritual traffic with God; and this insight constitutes nothing less than a new era of the religious spirit. It is impossible to estimate the influence of these ideas on the Hellenistic world, and on the spiritual religion that was in process of formation. (Jaeger 1962 [1955], p. 161)

Aristotle refers sympathetically to the Mysteries in one of his early dialogues; Plato may have taken part in the ceremony, and something experienced at Eleusis might have contributed to the theory of Ideas and the allegory of the Cave. We know that the Neoplatonist philosopher Plotinus used opium; his metaphysics of the exalted One and the successively lower emanations that constitute individual souls and the world of the senses bears a striking resemblance to one of the visions reported near the end of chapter 4.

The power of drugs—or any altered state of consciousness—to sustain religious cults and world views has weakened. We know too much, have too many contexts in which we can place them, and too many ways to dismiss them. The feelings of awe and sacredness that must have overwhelmed the Aztecs and the Greeks now come up against strong defenses: not only our institutionalized science and medicine, but also our institutionalized religion. And yet even today, sophisticated people who take these drugs, like Sophocles and Pindar at Eleusis, are left with a sense of a mystery that none of their rationalizations have plumbed. Psychedelic drugs present these mysteries to others besides the few—unusually gifted, or sick, or both—who would otherwise encounter them, and thereby help even skeptics and materialists to understand why religious and metaphysical ideas can have such power over men's minds.

Health, Morality, and Truth in Psychedelic Religious Experience

Let us grant that drug-induced religious and mystical experience cannot be dismissed to an intellectual and cultural ghetto. Then the question of its nature, cause, and objective reference is part of the question of the nature, cause, and objective reference of religious experience itself. Without trying to take on this vast subject, we can discuss what psychedelic drug research has to tell us about a few aspects of it: the relationship of mystical and religious experience to sickness and health; the moral validation of religious insight; and the question of whether and in what sense religious experience can be said to reveal truths about the universe.

Since religious and mystical experiences often occur in conditions that are pathological by ordinary standards of health, skeptics have always been attracted to the idea that religious belief is a disorder, and the conventionally religious to the idea that mysticism (or any -enthusiasm-) is a diseased form of religion. George Santayana put it this way:

Every religion, all science, all art, is accordingly subject to incidental mysticism; but in no case can mysticism stand alone or be the body or basis of anything. In the Life of Reason it is, if I may say so, a normal disease, a recurrent manifestation of lost equilibrium and interrupted growth.. . . Both in a social and a psychological sense revelations come from beneath, like earthquakes and volcanic eruptions; and while they fill the spirit with contempt for those fragile structures which they so easily overwhelm, they are utterly incapable of raising anything on the ruins. (Santayana 1962 [1905], p. 189)

Even Prince Myshkin admitted to himself that it is not always easy to distinguish between pathological phenomena, religious phenomena, and pathological religious phenomena. Psychedelic drug use ought to provide some evidence on this question, since it involves a deliberate chemical disturbance of the brain that is often induced for religious or quasi-religious purposes. It gives us a new opportunity to bring the categories of biochemistry, neurology, and psychiatry into some relationship with those of religion, instead of treating them as fixed, mutually exclusive alternatives.

The most widely known attempt to do this, of course, is Freud's. He accounts for religion clinically by reference to the family conflicts of early childhood. Spiritual beings are seen as projections of parts of the self and family members, and God the Father as a product of the Oedipus complex. Freud regards religion in general in the perspective of mental disorder as a wish-fulfilling illusion or delusion and a universal obsessional neurosis. Many psychedelic drug users and investigators, even those who start out as convinced Freudians, tend to find his reductive explanations inadequate. Instead of discovering the elementary feelings of which religious faith is a derivative and disguise, they often think they have had experiences for which the primary interpretive language must be religious. On one point, however, psychedelic drug research seems both to confirm and to go beyond Freud's insights. He explains the sense of mystical fusion, self-loss and bliss as a regression to the condition of a baby at the breast: primary narcissism, infantile omnipotence, or the oceanic experience. At worst it may be the product of a disordered mind, at best a temporary adaptive mechanism, a regression in the service of the ego. From this point of view the wordless but all-embracing knowledge attained in the mystical state is simply the cognitive aspect of the child's inability to distinguish itself from its mother. When the ego and its object are inseparable, there can be no sense of limitation or doubt, and knowledge is perfect, without concepts and without rationally communicable content. Psychedelic-experience confirms the association between mysticism and regression, but suggests that Freud was wrong in limiting the regression to early childhood, since deeper sensations of mystical bliss seem to go with feelings of returning to the womb.

But even if the intrauterine condition is the first occasion for mystical experience, that does not mean that mysticism is nothing but regression to a fetal state. If it is, there is much more going on in the womb than we have realized. In any case, psychedelic experience of the oceanic bliss of the womb is of ten distinguished from elemental merging with the Universal Mind or submission to the Void. This might represent a still earlier fetal or embryonic stage of consciousness, or it might be something else entirely.

To associate religion and mysticism with regression, even if correct, does not settle the issue of health and sickness. The problem is to determine when the regression is doing the ego some service. All mysticism, like psychedelic experience, is related to madness. James said of these regions that -seraph and snake abide there side by side.- A dark night of the soul may precede (or follow) the momentary rapture and serenity. Often it takes very little to alter the balance from the demonic to the angelic, despair to bliss, madness to superlative sanity. The mystic, like the psychedelic drug user, is usually distinguished from the psychotic by the voluntary and controlled nature of his journey, its healing effect, and the return to a subtly but profoundly transformed ordinary world (Zen Buddhists, for example, say that all beings are in nirvana all the time, here and now, if they only knew it). But these distinctions are not infallible; mysticism may be spontaneous and uncontrolled, psychotics sometimes claim to have achieved insight and healing, and after all the years of research on psychedelic drugs, there is still no general agreement on whether they have therapeutic value.

If we cannot say whether these states are subnormal or supernormal, sickness or transcendent health, maybe they can be justified or rejected on moral grounds. James asked that mystical and religious experiences be judged by immediate luminousness, philosophical reasonableness, and moral helpfulness (James 1929 [1902], p. 19). But if the first two criteria are ambiguous, the third is also subject to dispute. Mysticism may be seen as morally empty because it implies a denial of the world of finite values and meanings in which we all must live: the life of love and work to which Huxley (1977, pp. 217- 233) as well as Freud expressed devotion. Santayana writes:

The Life of Reason, in so far as it is a life, contains the mystic's primordial assurances, and his rudimentary joys; but in so far as it is rational it has discovered what those assurances rest on, in what direction they may be trusted to support action and thought; and it has given those joys distinction and connexion, turning a dumb momentary ecstasy into a many-coloured and natural happiness. (Santayana 1962 [1905], p. 190)

On the other hand, Benjamin Paul Blood could say about the nitrous oxide revelation, "This has been my moral sustenance since I have known WI (James 1929 [1902], p. 382). In any case, no common social or ethical vision emerges from the varieties of psychedelic or mystical revelation, no program for action in the world, no uniform improvement (or, obviously, decline) in character and morals. Mystics and prophets have varied greatly in personality, too—some gentle, some ironical, some aggressive. And no single blissful or timeless moment grants permanent freedom from fanaticism, folly, and fraud. As Rudolf Otto put it, borrowing his terminology from Kant, the mysterium tremendum can be "schematized" by the rational and moral faculties in many ways. Naïveté about this was one reason for the pretensions of the drug culture, and loss of that naïveté was one reason for its collapse.10

But neither health nor morality need be regarded as central to this question. It is possible to insist on a criterion of value that transcends all medical, ethical, and social issues. Prince Myshkin "had said to himself at that second, that for the infinite happiness he had felt in it, that second really might well be worth the whole of life" (Dostoevsky 1965 [1869], p. 226). If any category can be applied to this sense of the supreme importance of a moment of heightened experience, it is that of the esthetic. The inspired state in which beauty is created and the absorption in which it is contemplated have obvious affinities with mystical experience—a fact that often seems particularly clear during psychedelic drug trips. This connection is perhaps best recognized by Zen Buddhists, whose conception of satori or Enlightenment is based on an ecstatic moment of realization which is supposed to imbue all life thereafter with a certain grace that is indefinable but might be called ultimately an esthetic quality. We have described psychedelic drugs as providing in a concentrated form perceptual and emotional states that are ordinarily experienced only in dilute form. It is this concentration that constitutes the esthetic aspect of mystical or religious awareness and makes it something without which—apart from all questions of health, morals, and truth—human experience would be poorer.

We are coming closer now to the problem of objective reference, or at least intersubjective verification. For the kinship between the religious visionary and the religious believer resembles the kinship between artist and art lover. There is something here that all men have potentially in common. Anyone who has felt even for a moment with Blake that as finite selves we are -shut in narrow doleful form," or with Plato that there is a world beyond appearances, can respond with some sympathy, if not with conviction, to such words as these of Benjamin Paul Blood: "I know—as having known—the meaning of Existe'nce: the same center of the universe. . . for which the speech of man has as yet no name—but the Anesthetic Revelation- (James 1929 [1902], p. 382). But what is it in us that responds this way to such experiences, and is it ultimately trivial, marginal, even a dangerous illusion, or is it important to a proper view of the human condition and the nature of the universe? Freud classified it as unconscious longing for infantile bliss and the infantile illusion of omnipotence. Jung conceived of a matrix in each mind that embodied the archetypal forms of the collective unconscious of the species. Plato saw a recognition or rather recollection of the archetypes of all things, the Ideas. Psychedelic drug users sometimes speak of a peculiarly immediate conscious access to the inner workings of the central nervous system. Hindu metaphysics sees an inarticulate recognition of the underlying unity of Atman, the deepest self of each being, and Brahman, the universe as a whole, expressed in the phrase "Thou art That."

There may be no intellectual solution here, no puzzle with an unambiguous answer. What is going on is at a level either lower or higher than the conceptual. Stace says of the unitary mystical experience that it can be neither objective reality nor subjective delusion. It is not objective because there is no judging subject and no separate object; it is not a delusion because it can never come into conflict with any other, better evidence about the world. Since it cannot be shown by argument or evidence whether the mystic is faced with Reality or a hallucination, faith must be invoked. James said that the feeling of reality and truth in such experiences can dominate a whole life without ever being available to the mind for definition and description. Primary religious and mystical awareness may inspire philosophical systems, but it cannot provide a touchstone for their truth, and in fact the symbols and concepts that describe these states are as often brought to them as derived from them. Despite the fundamental sameness of the experiences in all ages and cultures, these symbols and concepts vary amazingly. Similar sensations of unity and bliss may be translated theistically or atheistically, monistically or dualistically; they may be interpreted as union with the loving creator God of Christianity or as a foretaste of the serene and detached self-transcendence of the Buddhist nirvana. There is no philosophical essence of mysticism. The Buddha must have seen this when he brushed aside metaphysical questions as ultimately unanswerable and irrelevant to the central issue of what should be done to achieve salvation.

Psychedelic Research and Science

There is one partial exception to the rule that psychedelic experience supports no particular religious and metaphysical beliefs. The spread of Hindu and Buddhist terminology and concepts in the drug culture—the talk of maya, karma, reincarnation, satori, nonattachment, and so on—represented more than fashionable orientalism or youthful rebellion. The West had simply never paid much attention to the experiences on which these ideas are based, much less tried to find a vocabulary and intellectual context for them. They were regarded with some suspicion, rarely sought after in a systematic way, and never interpreted in any sense that would cast doubt on the primacy of the transcendent creator God and other fundamental creedal principles. The East, it seemed, approached these matters with fewer preconceptions. Eastern spiritual masters not only cultivated such experiences deliberately with and without drugs, but also founded a philosophy of life on them. They had explored and mapped territories of the mind labeled by Western cartographers as domains of heresy and madness, beyond the edge of any inhabitable human world. This is not to say that psychedelic drugs could confirm the truth of a Buddhist or Hindu world view, any more than Buddhism or Hinduism could validate psychedelic experience. But the convergence suggests that we are confronting a more important and pervasive aspect of the human universe than most of us have been willing to recognize. When drug users found an intellectual tradition in which these matters were considered worth thinking about systematically and seriously, they almost had to make use of it in an attempt to master experiences that would otherwise be incomprehensible and overwhelming.

A picture of the world tends to emerge from the deepest levels of psychedelic drug experience—not uniformly or universally, but with surprising insistency—that has close affinities with the cosmos of Indian religion (and to a lesser extent with Western pantheistic, idealistic, and mystical philosophies like Neoplatonism, Gnosticism, and the Kabbalah). In its fundamental image the universe is a Cosmic Game or Cosmic Dance (the Dance of Shiva, in Hindu myth). All individual beings, including our self-conscious selves, are steps in a dance of energy, transitory combinations of an infinite number of patterns. And this pervasive energy is not only "Eternal Delight" (as Blake put it) but also in some sense mind or consciousness. Before anything else, there is a field of awareness. The limited ego is a fiction, and the underlying One or Universal Mind or Brahman is at the same time the deepest self of each of us. The play of consciousness that is our world constitutes samsara or maya, the Net of Illusion. The individual person or thing is a means by which the ultimate Reality projects itself here and now, making its experiments, playing its games, dancing its dance. Space, time, causality, and material substance are necessary illusions, forms assumed by the One as it manifests itself in us. At certain moments (not to be thought of, however, as temporal), these limiting structures fall away, the infinite process becomes conscious of itself, the illusion of separateness dissolves, and the original wholeness is restored, the forgotten source remembered. Psychedelic drugs are one way to realize this vision of a game or dance; but we cannot live with or in it for long, and must return to our own little games and dances.

In other related images, which also have counterparts in Indian religion, the Universal Mind is an actor which has differentiated itself into the myriads of individual beings in order to play all the roles in an immense theatrical pageant in which we are its personae or masks; or it may be seen as a great child that transforms itself into many unknowing selves in order to play hide-and-seek with itself. In this metaphor the fundamental principle of the universe is the hidden actor and director of a drama, who, if we but knew it, is also ourselves. The Buddhist ideal of nonattachment implies a recognition of the illusory nature of all human roles and the capacity to go through life playing one's parts like a gifted actor. This vision of man and the universe generates the references to existence as a -movie- or a series of -games- that fill the drug-culture literature of the 1960s.

All of this can be seen as simply evocative myth and metaphor, one among many symbolic descriptions of the human condition, which will only be distorted and overvalued if it is treated as though it were a theoretical insight. z, There is no way to prove that certain kinds of experience reveal what is onto- 3 logically primary, first in order of being. For example, we might reduce this view of the universe to its proper proportions by calling it the world view of .1 the right brain hemisphere in a chemically pure form. It could also be seen as the product of a kind of mental mimicry of entropic disorganization. The mental categories by which the individual human organism defines itself as a structure independent of the environment normally accompany and reinforce the actions and physiological processes by which it preserves its stability as a functioning system against the tendency to degradation and uniformity expressed in the second law of thermodynamics. If this activity is severely disrupted in the central nervous system while the physiological processes that sustain life go on as before, the distinction between organism and environment is lost to consciousness, and familiar categories seem to lose their validity; finite individuality and the phenomenal world in all their varied glory appear as illusory, maya. Even the dim memory of such experiences can be very potent, because they bring us close to realizing immediately things we otherwise know only abstractly: the transient and fragile nature not only of the self but also of the world it perceives and conceives, which after all has evolved along with the organism and derives its defining features (though of course not its physical substance) from the survival needs of that organism.

Other questions are raised by the convergence, at least on a metaphorical level, between these visions and some of the findings of modern physics. The universe of the twentieth-century scientific revolution has a great deal in common with that of Indian religion. The dance of Shiva (energy), many worlds, cycles of creation and destruction through endless eons, and the whole operating without the plans and purposes of a watchful Creator standing outside it—all that seems much more compatible with the modern scientific vision than the neat, small world of Jewish and Christian tradition, bounded in time and space, with its presiding monarchical father-God.

In both systems of thought the ordinary categories of causality, matter, space, time, and perhaps logic break down as reality is penetrated more deeply. The theory of relativity transforms our fixed notions of time and space and dissolves the distinction between matter and energy. And quantum mechanics presents even deeper obscurities and paradoxes, challenging not only the reliability of the senses but our capacities of imagination and intuition. Commonsense notions of causality are impugned by the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, and the wave-particle duality cannot be conveyed by any single visual model or picture. When physicists say that a given particle neither exists nor does not exist at a certain place and time, or that it is neither at rest nor in motion, it suggests to some a need to revise logic as well. Linguistic and visual symbols fail, and yet the mathematical language in which the theory is stated strikes even physicists themselves as incomplete and unsatisfying to the mind. It is as though, like mystics, they are in the presence of something ineffable, beyond all words and concepts. And like the cosmos of Eastern religion, the universe of quantum mechanics is not a structure put together out of isolated substantial building blocks but a web of relations in which everything is implicated in everything else, the scientific observer included. What Alfred North Whitehead called the fallacy of simple location is exposed. The vaunted objectivity of science, the distance between the observer and his object of study, breaks down in the experiments of quantum physics as it does in the quite different experiments of the mystics; the observer becomes a participant who changes the particle as he measures it.

Many of the greatest modern physicists, including Bohr, Heisenberg, and Oppenheimer, noticing these analogies, have been drawn toward a Hindu, Buddhist, or Taoist vision of the universe (Einstein himself, unwilling to give up the old causal principles and distrustful of quantum mechanics, inclined toward a pantheism resembling Spinoza's). When Bohr was knighted by the King of Denmark, he took for his coat-of-arms the Yin-Yang symbol of the Tao, using it to represent the physical principle of complementarity. And it was no idle fancy when the image of Shiva, Destroyer of Worlds, came to the mind of Oppenheimer as he watched the first atomic explosion. One famous quantum physicist, Erwin Schr6dinger, has elaborated metaphysical ideas that owe a great deal to the Hindu scriptures, the Upanishads. He says that Western science must recognize that the individual self is as deceptive an entity as the elementary particles. He regards the separateness of minds as illusory, and even proposes the view that consciousness—the intelligent dance of energy—is associated throughout nature with phenomena at the quantum level (see Schrödinger 1958, 1964). Another physicist, Geoffrey Chew, in his speculative bootstrap theory repudiates not only the idea of elementary particles but even that of fundamental laws. In his opinion, to explain anything fully we would have to explain everything, including ourselves the explainers, and physics must make provisional use of -fundamental- constants and -basic- laws just because its theories, like any discursive explanations, are necessarily incomplete.

The fact that these connections are all analogical or metaphorical is a bad reason for not taking them seriously; science itself proceeds by constructing analogies and metaphors. The question is whether the analogies are superficial fancies or deeper imaginative identifications that point to some unifying principle. If they are taken seriously, the energy that is eternal delight can be identified with the mathematically choreographed dance of energy that is each subatomic particle. The experimental investigations of physics and those of mysticism can be seen as approaching the same reality from two different directions. Objectivity is dissolved in the deepest explorations of the external world, just as subjectivity is transcended in the deepest explorations of the internal world, and the distinction between knowledge of the mind and knowledge of the universe disappears. There are serious objections to this way of thinking, of course. From either side, it can be said that trying to validate one of these systems of thought by using the other is explaining the obscure by the more obscure. Religious seekers may find the work of science irrelevant to their fundamentally moral and soteriological concerns. Scientists may complain that religions habitually claim to have anticipated the latest discoveries of science in some vague symbolic form, once they can no longer be ignored or suppressed. If completely different orders of thinking are involved, there is no point in talking about convergence or reconciliation. When Santayana called himself an atheist, a materialist, and a Roman Catholic, he was not showing disdain for consistency but suggesting that compatibility between scientific and religious world views should not be sought on an intellectual level. Nevertheless, the influence of these analogies on some of the physicists themselves suggests that they should not be dismissed utterly. At least, in the spirit of cosmic play, we might entertain them awhile.11

This possible convergence of scientific and prescientific traditions, exemplified strikingly in psychedelic drug research and more dubiously in the paradoxes of quantum physics, may be a sign of crisis at the heart of science itself. Noam Chomsky thinks it possible that in the twentieth century humanity has been reaching the limits of its capacities, and therefore of intelligibility, in both art and science. He suggests a distinction, strangely reminiscent of modern religious formulations, between -problems- that are subject to scientific solution and -mysteries- that are not (Chomsky 1975). Chew, on the other hand, proposes -a new form of intellectual endeavor, one that will not only lie outside of physics but will not be describable as 'scientific'" (Capra 1975, p. 301). Is it possible that science will have to transform itself or be left behind as a guide, like Virgil at the gates of Paradise?

A deeply antiscientific response to this question is expressed theoretically in interesting recent works like Theodore Roszak's Where the Wasteland Ends (1972) and Unfinished Animal (1975) and Huston Smith's Forgotten Truth (1976). At least since the Romantic era some thinkers have sought an antidote to the supposed dehumanizing and nihilistic effects of science—what Blake called "single vision and Newton's sleep." Today their successors advocate what Roszak calls the Old Gnosis and Smith the Primordial Tradition: an age-old wisdom of humanity, neglected only where modern science and secularism rule, its truths revealed to the interior eye in altered states of consciousness and now, finally, in natural science itself as it reaches its limits and begins to glimpse something beyond. In this way of thinking the search for scientific truth becomes largely a distraction from the striving after genuine wisdom, and even an obstacle to it. Such views may become attractive to people who are disturbed by the inadequacy of science as a moral guide and by the unfortunate social effects of some of its practical applications. Too many problems seem not amenable to its procedures, which nevertheless tend to preempt the field and drive out other moral and metaphysical systems.

This disparagement of modern science sometimes goes along with what may perhaps unfairly be called an attempt to borrow its prestige by describing the recommended form of spiritual investigation as a science. Certainly some Eastern disciplines, especially yogic techniques, show formal resemblances to scientific research. Both systems of inquiry involve a quest for the reality behind appearances, in which we find theories alleged to be verifiable in repeatable experiments conducted by properly trained persons. Jacob Bronowski writes, "The sanction of experimental fact as a face of truth is a profound subject, and the mainspring which has moved our civilization since the Renaissance" (Bronowski 1956, p. 39). But he is mistaken in contrasting this with the Eastern doctrine of "mystic submission" to truth as self-evidence, for one of the most striking features of. mystical practice, as opposed to pure metaphysical or theological speculation, is its experimental character: the teacher says that if you do X you will experience Y. If this analogy between science and mysticism eventually breaks down, it is not mainly because science is "rational" and other branches of wisdom "irrational" (we are not so certain of the scope of rationality), nor even because mysticism cannot express its experimental results unambiguously in words or mathematical symbols (scientific language is not free of ambiguity either). The difficulty is rather that none of the ancient paths of knowledge (nor all of them together) provides a plausible alternative to science. There is no single Old Gnosis or Primordial Tradition to be set in opposition to the scientific heresy, nothing at all comparable even in coherence as a system of inquiry, much less in intellectual intricacy, beauty, and subtlety. There is no consensus approximating that of scientific research; as we have pointed out, the symbols and explanations differ enormously even when they seem to point to the same ineffable reality.

The virtue of the various and inconsistent ways of thought subsumed under terms like Old Gnosis or Primordial Tradition is that they incorporate much neglected experience. Science could make no sense of certain evidence about the world (or the mind) that had been considered central in older traditions, and therefore paid as little attention as possible to that evidence. Whole areas of experience and fields of intellectual endeavor were relegated to the domain of religious faith or consigned to the categories of fraud, folly, and disease. This did not happen quickly or easily. The term "natural philosophy" as used by the founders of modern physics and astronomy covered much more than would have been admitted within the precincts of science by the positivism of the last two centuries. It remains an embarrassment that Kepler and Newton could practice astrology and alchemy without feeling that they were abandoning reason and serious inquiry. Eventually, however, natural science was able to enforce the self-imposed limits that seemed necessary to preserve its rigor and intellectual honesty.

There are good reasons for this neglect of mystical and visionary experience. It is a difficult field to study, lacking in elegant deductions, beautiful theoretical models, or established principles of order. There is disagreement about what (if any) training is needed to achieve the experimental results. Mediocrity is common, and fraud and credulity abound. The literature is often boring, exasperating, and even repellent to people unfamiliar with the experiences on which it is based. William James addressed this problem at the high point of triumphant scientific positivism and materialism: . . . few species of literature are more intolerably dull than reports of phantasms.... Every other sort of fact has,some context and continuity with the rest of nature. These alone are contextless and discontinuous" (James 1956 [1897], p. 317). He describes and even sympathizes with the "loathing" for this subject felt by scientists of his day. But then he speaks of the need to reconstruct science so that it provides a place for "phantasms," and adds, "It is the intolerance of science for such phenomena as we are studying, her peremptory denial either of their existence or of their significance (except as proofs of man's absolute innate folly), that has set science so apart from the common sympathies of the race" (James 1956 [1897], p. 326).

The problem described by James persists wherever science takes over the old religious function of providing a view of the world as a meaningful totality, a cosmos. The greatest historian of this modern development was Max Weber, who wrote, "The general result of the modern form of thoroughly rationalizing the conception of the world and of the way of life, theoretically and practically, has been that religion has been shifted into the realm of the irrational" (Gerth and Mills 1958, p. 281). Even in the 1960s it could be said that

the current academically attractive distinction between the scientific and the prescientific cannot be upheld.... What is classified as pre-scientific ... subsumes all the rationality and experience which are excluded from the intellectual determinations of reason.... In the disreputable realm of the pre-scientific, those interests meet which are severed by the process of scientization.... The more science is rigidified ... the more what is ostracized as pre-scientific becomes the refuge of knowledge. (Adorno 1976 [19691 p. 19)

All this rationality and experience may continue to lie outside the scope of science, or on its fringes. But another possibility, suggested by Chew's reference to -a new form of intellectual endeavor,- is that science will transform or redefine itself to provide the context and continuity that James missed. In fact, a process of redefinition has been going on for the past few decades, not only in physics but also in the history and philosophy of science. Careful investigations of the actual working operations of scientists by such scholars as Thomas Kuhn, Imre Lakatos, Stephen Toulmin, Michael Polanyi, and Paul Feyerabend have dissolved the old positivist simplicities and certainties about scientific method and scientific rationality. The theories of science are seen to be impregnated with metaphor and metaphysics. The facts and observations that it recognizes are revealed to be dependent for their very formulation on larger conceptual frameworks and world views. It has become harder to say confidently just what scientific method is, or to speak of testing scientific theories as though experimental verification could unambiguously guarantee a permanent accretion of knowledge. Systematic ways to distinguish genuine scientific discoveries from untenable admixtures and unprovable fancies no longer seem easy to find. Amid the talk of -natural selection of concepts" (Toulmin), "paradigm changes" (Kuhn), "progressive and degenerating research programs" (Lakatos), "tacit knowledge" (Polanyi), and "epistemological anarchism" (Feyerabend), all backed by lessons from the history of science, the reasons for accepting and rejecting scientific theories come to seem as complex as the reasons for social acceptance and ostracism. So science loses some of its hard, sharp outline, its position of standing out against all other forms of inquiry through a unique rationality and objectivity. Instead of contrasting science with the pseudoscientific and antiscientific, we can speak of the more and less scientific.

William James said that verifications are only experiences agreeing with more or less isolated systems of ideas framed by our minds, and added that 1 we should not assume that only one such system of ideas is true. Charles T. Tart has recently developed a related idea of "state-specific sciences" that owes a great deal to psychedelic drug research. Tart regards the dispute between those who have experienced certain altered states of consciousness and ; those who have not as a paradigm conflict in the sense introduced by Kuhn. He suggests that the knowledge acquired in altered states demands new kinds of scientific theory, and he proposes that trained professionals communicate with one another while in these states to establish consensually validated laws 1 that would be complementary to those of ordinary awareness. In this way a disciplinary matrix for consciousness research would be created, say, by scientists smoking marihuana (Tart 1972; Tart 1975).

Most people would probably find the notion of distinct sciences for distinct ; states of consciousness unattractive. They are more likely to be impressed by the unique richness of what Michaux calls the "marvellous normal"—everyday waking awareness, with its rational controls and creative penumbra, including its moments of artistic and scientific inspiration. The use of psychedelic drugs, like the use of timeless ecstatic moments, must be in defining and enriching the wonder of normality. If temporary dissolution of everyday consciousness (the ordinary ego) seems like a liberation, to form it in the first place, as Freud taught, was a greater liberation. Psychedelic drug use reveals perhaps more immediately and overwhelmingly than any other experiment what an achievement of balance ordinary consciousness is. It makes sense to experience and study altered states of awareness, not to find an alternative set of scientific laws, but to learn about the nature of our world by directing attention to aspects of it that usually remain peripheral. We learn about the blazing sun by studying the corona that is normally invisible in its glare. Daylight and nighttime consciousness are complementary manifestations of mind. To cite James again, continuing the passage quoted at the start of this chapter:

No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded. How to regard them is the question—for they are so discontinuous with ordinary consciousness. Yet they may determine attitudes though they cannot furnish formulas, and open a region through which they fail to give a map. At any rate, they forbid a premature closing of our accounts with reality. (James 1929 [1902], p. 379)

Since James' time there has been a "return of the repressed" into science. In psychology it has been achieved through the psychoanalytic tradition and now through mystical experiments; in physics, through the revolutions of quantum and relativity theory; and in the philosophy of science through the abandonment of positivism. Harold Rosenberg has written, "Ours is an epoch of excavations—archaeological, psychoanalytical, philological—which keep emptying into contemporary culture the tombs of all the ages of man" (Rosenberg 1975, p. 139). In this salvaging operation that ransacks the past and the depths for materials with which to construct a more adequate picture of man and the universe, we may have to redefine science as well as demystif y mysticism.

The crisis presents the danger of a surrender to irrationalism only if we identify reason with Weber's instrumental rationality. It would be a mistake to respond with fear, like a primitive tribe terrified by an eclipse of the sun, and then disguise this fear as a defense of reason and beat our drums to make the eclipse stop. Scientists will have no right to complain of the spread of an antiscientific mood and pseudoscientific belief systems if they continue to regard all these matters as unworthy of respect or attention. And science no longer has to "repress" or ignore large areas of experience in order to retain its integrity and fight off the assaults of ignorance and illusion. Freud saw this, and yet his vision too may have been clouded. He thought that he had subjected visionary, religious, and mystical phenomena to the dominion of science by relating them to infantile traumas and fantasies. When Jung suggested that he had not done the subject justice, Freud replied that he could not permit destruction of the bulwarks erected by reason against -the black flood of the occult.- That might be interpreted as the language of fear; it is curiously to the language of those who thought Freud himself had released a black flood of perverse sexuality.

These things need not be a "black flood" (the image suggests a drowning ego) or even "occult" if they are fully confronted. It is best to avoid thinking too much in the dualities of reason versus unreason, science versus nonscience, illusion versus reality. These strange forms of research and experimentation are not implacable rivals but potential partners of science. (A simple and uncontroversial example is the research into voluntary control of heart rate and body temperature inspired by the accomplishments of yogis.) Neither kind of inquiry can be shown to be unreal, superficial, or irrelevant, and it is not clear whether the findings of traditional consciousness research could be reduced to those of science in its present form. Freud's famous formula for the therapeutic enlargement of consciousness-"Where id ["it," instinct] was, there shall ego ["I," the self] be"--not only expresses the aims of psychedelic self-exploration but also, with a slight twist of interpretation, resembles mystical prescriptions for the merging of self and not-self. Bertrand Russell wrote of -the true union of the mystic and the man of science—the highest eminence, as I think, that it is possible to achieve in the world of thought- (Russell 1929, p. 4). These are the kinds of consciousness expansion, in self-knowledge and knowledge of the world, that constitute a genuine advance for humanity, and we should not neglect any modest way in which psychedelic drugs might contribute to them.

If the boundaries of science seem more porous than they used to be, and formerly excluded material is drifting across them, psychedelic drugs deserve some of the credit or blame. Experiences and problems that had been associated with a dimly conceived India, or the ancient past, or primitive cultures, or the ravings of madmen and mystical obscurantists, came into the mainstream of Western research by entering the awareness of researchers in such a way that they could no longer be ignored or dismissed. It is therefore ironical that we have taken the self-defeating course of abandoning this research instrument to directionless illicit experimentation out of which little systematic knowledge can come. To conclude the discussion of psychedelic drugs, we must consider the reasons for this abandonment and also what can be done about it.

1 See Brawley and Duffield 1972; von Hungen et al. 1974; Logan 1975; Bennett and Snyder 1976.

2 The subject is discussed in Snyder and Richelson 1968; Shulgin 1969; Keup 1970; Snyder et al. 1970; Aldous et al. 1974; Brimblecombe and Pinder 1975, pp. 81, 234.

3 Ludwig (1966) provides a useful short discussion and analysis of altered states of awareness, with references. See also Siegel 1977.

4 On the centrality of the theme of return to a blissful original state in myth, see Eliade (1963) Eliade also discusses the symbolic uterine regression and mystical rebirth that are a part of many primitive rituals and have been employed as religious-therapeutic techniques in India and China

5 For these Darwinian thoughts we are indebted to Carl Sagan.

6 For further discussion and clinical observations, see Rank 1952 (1923) and Fodor 1949.

7 The pictures in Masters and Houston's Psychedelic Art (1968) convey much better than any words the influence of psychedelic drugs on artists.

8 Another example is Bharati (1976), a European Hindu monk who has practiced yoga and Tantra and now teaches anthropology at an American university. He claims to have had mystical or -zero experiences- both with and without drugs, and he credits the authenticity of the drug-induced variety. See especially pp. 42, 48, 57, 71-72, 193, 202-208.

9 Bharati (1976) strongly insists that mystical union is no more authentic or valuable when it is attained the hard way than when it comes easily. His book is interesting for its polemic against various contemporary mystical gurus, schools, and doctrines.

10 Bharati (1976), although he emphasizes the enormous significance of the experience for one who undergoes it, insists that afterward the mystic "remains the person he was before" (p. 53).

11 The parallels—and some of the differences—between modern physics and Eastern religion are explored in detail in Capra (1975).