That we wish to consider in this chapter is a contrast which may throw light on some of the features of the campus social environment conducive to marijuana use or to nonuse. Think, if you will, of a random sampling of students in a metropolitan Catholic university which reveals that only 11 per cent have had any experience at all with marijuana and that, of these, less than a half could be described as having been, at any time, regular users of "pot"—that is, even once or twice a month! Imagine musing about this finding while standing in front of a window in a research lab which overlooks the Haight-Ashbury District in a valley less than a mile from the hill on which this university stands.

Before "Haight-Ashbury hippies" became a cliché, the Urban Life Institute had openly courted the then-new "community" with daylong conferences, cooperation with the Diggers, police-harassment studies, Haight-Ashbury Town Hall meetings, and other neighborhood activities. Several commune dwellers had developed into cooperative and sympathetic interpreters of the hip culture to the "straight" researchers of the Urban Life Institute. Two of the facts which they communicated to us, long before they became public knowledge, were (1) that the hippie culture was a drug culture—the use of marijuana was a sine qua non of being hip and (2) that most of the new community came from middle-class families. Although we were never able, because of the high mobility of the hippies, to get any exact proportions of Catholic-family backgrounds during the time period we are considering, I can recall that I made a habit of asking this question and being surprised, in answer, at the number of Catholics reported. Ex-seminarians, especially, were greatly overrepresented among the hippies in comparison with the composition of other neighborhoods in San Francisco. At any rate—and regardless of the per cent of the total number of hippies that had Catholic backgrounds—it suffices to note that there were large numbers of them in the Haight-Ashbury using pot, while up here on the hill the predominantly Catholic student body of the university did not. There are many "obvious" answers to the question "Why the difference?" Those in the Haight-Ashbury had left the Church while those at the university had not, for example'. Yet the fact is that the Church has no position on the smoking of marijuana. Catholics can smoke marijuana and remain in the Church.

There was one question-answering procedure that was easiest for a middle-class researcher in his late forties to follow—this was certainly not participant observation in the youthful hippie movement but, rather, keeping one eye on that movement through student and hippie reports, and doing an intensive analysis of the student population at the university. There were two questions that ordered our analysis of student use of marijuana—"Why?" and "Why not?" The "why" question was, of course, why did the small percentage of marijuana users engage in the practice in a milieu which they shared with the vast majority of students who did not engage in the act even once? "Why not?" is the obvious question with regard to this majority.

The Catholic university studied was in the process of responding to the general pressure for an updating of the Church. Administrators, resident assistants, faculty members, and students were anxious that an objective look at the university be taken—one with no punitive action against the real or suspected illicit-drug users who might be identified. In a pilot, naturalistic inquiry, fifteen LSD users who had also smoked pot and more than thirty-five students who had had experience with marijuana only were found to be extremely vocal about their experiences and viewpoints. Some of these same students were also drawn in the random survey sample where they became doubly voluble, since, on the one hand, they could serve as critics—providing information on what the survey questionnaire schedule did and did not uncover about the university scene—and since, on the other hand, they could serve as contributors and provide valuable data about drug use itself.

It was our naturalistic or intensive-observation sample that told us about off-campus students. "Dormies" vs. "day-hops" have differing exposure to marijuana use. The "day-hops" have a higher incidence and prevalence of the practice. "Day-hops" living at home are not as prone to marijuana smoking as those who share quarters with other students off campus. These latter are not as prone to illicit-exotic drug use as those who share quarters with nonstudents or students at other universities. Very few students live alone. Our interview data supported these crucial distinctions made by our intensive sample of fifty.

Even more importantly, our fifty informants—the anthropological term seems to fit them best—were able to provide information which made it possible to characterize the nature of the milieu of this Catholic university, to give us leads to the subterranean social networks of pot users, and to tell us the reasons why marijuana use there was not a widespread practice. They showed us how the family backgrounds of the students, the selection factors which brought them to this university, the school's social system and its control mechanisms, and the nature of parent-youth relations were all crucial social variables to consider. Peer-group relationships shed light on the question only in the context of these other factors.

The students voiced much of the same self-criticism that Catholic educators had advanced in the past decade regarding the American Catholic "mentality." Monsignor Ellis (1966) ascribes these Catholic attitudes to lower-class backgrounds, the nonintellectual traditions of immigrant American Catholics, and the moral and pragmatic orientations of their ecclesiastical leaders. O'Dea (1958) asserts that the Catholic mentality suffers from "the basic characteristics of the American Catholic milieu" which inhibits the development of mature intellectual activity: formalism, clericalism, moralism, authoritarianism, and defensiveness. Hassenger (1966) posits that Catholic universities "founded to serve a self-conscious minority" reflect an isolationist stance which emphasizes external devotion, strict sexual morality, and other protections from the lax new-world morality.

Our Catholic university here serves that clientele so vigorously criticized. The ethnic backgrounds of the students who dominate the university are Irish-American and Italian-American. The lower-middle and middle-class standing of so many of the students' families is a testimony to their persistence in striving for upward social mobility, for many can ill-afford the tuition. Bureaucratic more than entrepreneurial in orientation, students' families are well integrated in society in positions of responsibility and economic security considerably above those of their families of a generation or two ago. Respectability is prized and it is extremely threatening when a member of the family appears to be "throwing it all away."

Most of the students here are raised in Catholic homes which do not reflect so much a Catholic isolation as a solidarity with and a conformity to those values which, ironically, have been associated with the Protestant ethic. For instance, no student interviewed desctibed his marijuana trip as a mystical experience. It seems paradoxical that illicit-exotic drug users and students at a religiously oriented university are almost unanimous in rejecting any notion of mysticism attached to their drug practices, whereas other students (see Section I) do seek religious meanings through drugs. The answer to the paradox lies in their socialization into a modified "Protestant ethic" by their Catholic parents and supportive Catholic institutions. Weber (1963) describes the predominant "givens" in the Western world as

. . inner worldly asceticism; rationalism; a sober and dominant bureaucracy; the ideal of alertness and self-control; the exaltation of commerce and vocations with a power distribution to maintain them and military force to protect and facilitate them; the proliferation of the apparatus of the state; indifference to religious feeling (in the present context this would have to be interpreted as indifference to emotional or expressive religious behavior in contrast to rational and formalistic religious participation) and the emphasis on institutional religious forms accompanied by suspicion of the independent religious seeker; the rejection of personal ethics and personal loyalties as dictating modes of economic and bureaucratic intercourse; and success in business as the proof of salvation and as the finest fruit of a rational way of living (p. 220) .

The Protestant ethic of the parents as reported by their children and the usual characterization of American Catholics as "bureaucratic" are not inconsistent. These Catholic families, as stated earlier, are highly selective and not representative of all Catholic families in America. They have managed an amalgam of both the entrepreneurial and the bureaucratic mentalities. Helmut Wagner (1954) seems to describe it well:

The main economic ambitions of the American middle classes, in contrast to the Protestant ethic and spirit of capitalism, is to gain and spend what one can, and to spend part of future earnings as well. Hard work to increase income, by way of advancing one's occupational career in the corporate setting, becomes the key to an increase in possessions which increases the material comfort of one's family.

This ambition is not "materialistic." It represents an intangible value: that of demonstrating, asserting, or improving one's social status in a community which has changed the cherished price of competitive effort from economic independence combined with the "inner-directed" self-satisfaction of "rugged individualism" to status dependence combined with the "other-directed" satisfactions of a mobile conformism (p. 38) .

While it would be an oversimplification to equate this "Protestant-ethic-in-a-bureaucratic-social-context" with the world view of these students' families, nevertheless, students fell back on reasons such as these when asked how their parents view people who use drugs. Their parents characterize marijuana as deadly and dangerous and lump it together with addictive drugs such as morphine and heroin. This is not so important for the questions we are pursuing here as the reasons which parents give these students for not using exotic drugs. In the main, they view people who use drugs as threats to the social order. When there is a good society to live in and a God to pray to, when one's needs are met by family protection and solidarity, when there is approval and prestige to strive for, and when, if one needs it, there is an acceptable drug—alcohol—available, experimentation with the social forms and psychological adaptations which characterize the image of marijuana users is viewed with suspicion and hostility. Marijuana use is a threat to the good, the given, and the hoped-for.

The successful family makes of its young both good Catholics and successful men and women. The symmetry of male-female socialization is disrupted in the middle-class Catholic family. It is not uncommon for more affluent Catholics to follow the Kennedy pattern of providing a first-class secular education for their sons and routing their daughters to Catholic colleges for protection. Despite its proximity to the university, few students frequent the Haight-Ashbury. Many coeds at the university have not been over to this area of the city because "their families would be upset." The curiosity that young people from a different background might have is not expressed. Family authoritarianism—which dictates "proper" conduct—is reinforced religiously (in both senses of the word) in Catholic elementary and high schools. Data from the Office of Admissions reveal that approximately 75 per cent of the students have twelve years in such institutions. Students from such a background have a strong influence on the general atmosphere of the university. Although a few parents have criticized this university as wicked because of stories they have heard or because of some of the public utterances of the faculty, the social milieu of the university comes close to being precisely what the family would like it to be.

Whether or not the views imputed to their parents by the students are accurate and, if so, how characteristic these parents are of the American Catholic family are not as relevant as the point that these are the views upon which the students act both in relation to the university and to their parents. Secondly, of course, the students at this university are highly selected and the selective processes are intricately interwoven to bring a type of person from a type of family to a type of university, and finally, to keep him there.

The Catholic women's "choice" of a college is simply an extension of their prior attendance at parochial elementary and high schools. It seems likely, in view of the high percentage of men at this university who have attended parochial high schools, that the same holds true for them. The cost of tuition fees and books and room and board and allowances are such at this university that only parents of higher socioeconomic status would seem to be able to afford them, but from data on parental income it can be inferred that many families make extraordinary sacrifices to send their children here. They want to give their children opportunities; for many it is a further upward social step beyond what they as parents had. When their children come here, it symbolizes the parental aspiration for their offspring's socioeconomic success. It also demonstrates that the parents themselves are "arriving." No wonder students report that they are under great family and self-imposed pressure to make good.

Another selective factor is the admission standard. Both a high grade average in secondary school and high scholastic aptitude-test score are required. This seems to work in two directions. It is probably the successful middle-class which can produce the acceptable student for this university. Middle-class parents value the child's development of internalized standards of conduct, and he tends to be trained primarily for attitudinal conformity. Expectations of attitudinal conformity in this socioeconomic class are directed at the very identity of the child, at his whole personality. All of his being must conform. Arnold Green (1946) has called this "personality absorption." The admission requirement selectively brings a more "motivated" student to the university and this has great consequences for his behavior while here and his readiness to accept the parental authority of priests and other faculty members. Obviously, other schools with high standards do have higher rates of marijuana use. Presumably, their selection is of less convention-abiding youth. The Catholic orientation here suggests that the conformity of our students is to a specifically Catholic as well as middle-class convention. About 90 per cent of the students accepted to the university are Catholic and approximately 70 per cent are from Catholic high schools. It seems likely that only families bent on preservfng their Catholic heritage through exposure to Catholic philosophy and theology (and to potential Catholic mates) are willing to make the financial sacrifices involved and to dedicate their children to these same ideals.

There are selective factors of a more subtle nature which affect the student body. There is a high attrition rate at the university. Those who have been sifted out are, of course, no longer available for study. The juniors and seniors remaining, despite frequent complaining, are the ones who have survived the classroom competition for grades and the continued demands for behavioral control imposed by the college social system. Those who don't like it, who want a more casual scene, drop out, fall out, or transfer. One pot-LSD user who was both in the random sample and who served as an informant in the intensive-study group, illustrates this point: coming from a rural state, he has a great desire to be "where the action is."

I have always thought the bohemian life was what I wanted. I had visions of a mattress on the floor with a hot-plate and books surrounding it. Marijuana didn't enter the fantasy at all, though I vaguely knew it was there. Until reading about the drug, I was convinced I would never use it, for I thought it was addictive. LSD had interested me since I had first heard about it. At first, I was sure I wouldn't use it either, but as I read more about it I decided it would be safe under a doctor's care.

He was easily able to get marijuana, and for two-and-a-half months he smoked pot. "I spent thirty-five dollars on grass during this time, and I'm convinced it led to my downfall in school. It seemed to make me indifferent toward my studies so I simply quit attending classes. By the time I caught myself and tried to salvage the semester it was too late." Despite a bad LSD trip, which took him to a psychiatric ward, and swearing off drugs to placate his parents, and to remain in school, his poor grade average finally got him disqualified. He now lives in the Haight-Ashbury.

Since a goodly number of the hippies using exotic drugs and residing in the nearby hippie area report that they have a Catholic family background, it is interesting to find that they describe it in much the same way that university students do. Although there is little interaction between the university students and the hippies, many hippies are drop-outs from Catholic families of the same socioeconomic stratum as the university students. What the students want to conform to, the hippies want to get away from.

Why most students at a Catholic university do conform and do not use marijuana and why a handful of students plus the Catholic hippies do not conform to middle-class conventions and do use marijuana requires further consideration. Our data show some tendency for broken homes to be related to marijuana use and some tendency for parochial-school background to be related to non-use, but a much more revealing comparison is made possible by taking an approach bolder than the use of statistics.

The Catholic students (who have smoked pot) unanimously reject the idea that marijuana or any psychedelic drug can have any effect upon a life philosophy or a mystical approach to life or the supernatural. Anyone familiar with the original hippie movement knows that this is a direct violation of the hippie dogma that "turning on" is an absolute requisite to discovering one's self, one's relations to others, and one's relations to God or the All. These contradictory beliefs, I feel, bring us closer to the "why?" and to the "why not?" answers that we seek. As a sociologist, I have no quarrel with the notions of Protestant and Catholic ethic, of the importance of socioeconomic class positions and family background as they relate to behavior. These social factors, however, are the external, observable phenomena which we can measure. In our preoccupation with the positivistic approach, we suffer the disadvantage of diverting our gaze from an area that tells us more than all of the questionnaire responses and statistical data that we have gathered. In this instance I suggest that we need to look at the inner-life of the Catholic student and the ex-Catholic hippie. We are looking for values, cathected and made a part of the individual's most impottant motivations—those which move him to the "good life" and which govern his conception of the "good man."

We were extremely fortunate to have such a tantalizing difference in conceptions of the inner life emerge right under our noses. The situation had all the makings of a crucial experiment. Yet problems of methodology made it difficult for us to be as precise as we should have liked. We were forced, as is all too common in social epidemiology, to take the retrospective approach to an experimental design. We have two groups of students which are—or were—in many ways alike and yet sufficiently different as to invite our curiosity. When we imitate the form called experimental design, we imagine a point in history when the difference did not exist. Finally we attempt, by infereace, to reconstruct what happened developmentally and/or situationally to the Catholic hippie vs. the Catholic university student to explain the difference. Do you not share with me the sense that such hindsights are contrived and artificial even if sophisticated by the dodge of correlation chasing? I prefer to rely on conceptions of the inner man instead. There are three paths to these.

One conception is that the exotic drugs, including marijuana, do have genuine religious functions. This is the "psychedelic" assumption. It is held that the drug experience can be either directly one of revelation or a series of gradual expansions of the inner awareness until a full-fledged mystical union of man with God occurs. A corollary conception is that the drug may not have within it any compelling force which leads man to the mysteries, but that the drug—whether LSD, amanitas, marijuana, and so on—does work to reveal to a man his inner self and that it does this by peeling away the successive layers of preconscious material, of restraint and defense and so forth ( Masters and Houston, 1966). When a person sees within himself, understands his structure and feeling, he is then free to accept himself, free to experience, and free to see the world as it is. Necessarily, such a process would lead a religious man directly to God. In either case the conception is of the exotic drug as a tool to open the inner self and to set up conditions whereby a man may have a mystical experience therein to sense the nature and the glory of the Lord.

In our samples we had only one student who found a psychedelic (mind-expanding) drug an aid to what could be called a mystic experience. The fact was that he originally had used marijuana as part of a gesture of independence from the "paternalistic atmosphere" of the university. He found it relaxed him. He made elaborate preparations for an LSD trip and taped his comments during the trip. He volunteered us the tape for transcription. During his trip he kept repeating that now he knew what it was to be in the darkness and to walk into the light of Christ. He mentioned frequently that it was all as Father X had said it would be when he could see the light of Christ for himself. When he was reinterviewed, he said that he thought he could have come close to the same realization without LSD. He said that he was very much under the influence of Father X and that it would only have been a matter of time before he had such a revelation. He continued the sporadic use of marijuana, for relaxation, and discontinued using LSD. Months after he left the university for civil-rights work in the South, he made special reference in a letter to his LSD experiences and commented that he was now receiving the sacraments regularly, whereas before, he had been quite lax in his religious practices. He was the only student among twenty whom we knew as LSD user who even remotely related his psychedelic experiences to mysticiF.n.

Another conception, a sociological one, has two aspects. On the one side is social control which has already been discussed. There are external prohibitions on illicit-drug use. The family, the faculty, and the university administration are against it. Local religious and political authority is also against it—and that authority is also very much part of the local Catholic world since the mayor and police chief are also Catholics who represent official positions that back up the negative sanctions of family and school. Thus, there are no institutions in the sociological sense which allow—let alone induce—the student to try marijuana. On the other hand, students as adolescents have been living in a cosmopolitan center where marijuana use is widespread and where most youth share the folklore or informal pharmacology pertaining to its effects. The effects most discussed in the teen-age groups in which students earlier participated were of pleasure. Before they ever had access to a supply or perhaps even to a real pothead, students had learned what marijuana was supposed to do. The success or failure of pot smoking rested, then, simply on whether it produced—when finally the individual did try it—a "high." Almost all of our informants agreed that such was the case. Those who did try it, in spite of negative social sanctions, in spite of their own interests in being good students doing the conforming things that they themselves had come to value, were doing it simply for fun. There was no underground community among them which provided justifications on more far-reaching grounds of personal or social value, no set of justifications which created them as a group opposed to or superior to the square and terrible world against which the hippies inveigh. Adolescent fun-seekers did not become a separate community, did not develop an ideology of their own. When they did use marijuana, they knew it was for fun and they knew it was wrong and they disagreed with neither tenet. If marijuana then failed to give pleasure, which is very often the case with early use (Becker, 1963 ) , there was no reason at all to continue.

A third consideration is philosophical. Bergson's (1935)  two sources of morality and religion, pressure and aspiration, are involved. The advantages of extending the analysis beyond the psychedelic and sociological models are several. The way remains open for our regarding mystical experience as genuine without positing successive layers of the unconscious to be probed by drugs or reduced to the determinism of individual conduct by social forces which are abstractions. Secondly, by widening the concept of biology, we say that all morality is in essence biological, another Bergson concept. By this we mean that life is a vital impulse which struggles through matter and is not reducible to it. Briefly, it is a rejection of mechanism as anything more than a heuristic model and one that has little heuristic value in analyzing mysticism. One's confidence in that approach is strengthened by the fact that William James passed this way before us. He successfully avoided reductionism in his Varieties of Religious Experience. Though he intended to translate Bergson into English, death prevented him from it.

In the foregoing we have the ingredients of our conclusion. The students on our hill who have used pot deny its utility for mystical experience. The hippies in the valley have an ideology which affirms its variety of uses, among which are journeys into the mystical realm.

The students, on the other hand, are living in a community characterized by a social system depending on more or less deeply rooted habits, habits of obedience to parents, parent-surrogates at parochial schools, and now to professors, priests, and residence assistants. From the student body itself there emanates a vaguely perceived impersonal imperative. There is a pressure to be accepted socially, to succeed in classes. There is an order which is experienced by the student as a social imperative. He is conscious of this pressure. He complains about it, too, and may imagine how fine it would be to transfer to a more glamorous campus, an exotic one with more excitement. Sometimes the student complains that the campus social order is a police state; yet it is quite evident that the student wants this social solidarity of shared obligation and goals. The greater part of his strength, his social self, is invested in his campus life and to responding to its demands which his presence here legitimizes. Through the university he gets the greatest returns for his activity. Most students, even those who forecast darkly that theirs is "the last generation of Catholics," are attached by their own engagements to the obligation of the community. External constraints are secondary. Religion sustains and reinforces the claims of the social order at the university.

There is moral distress when there is too great a gap between the social self and the individual self. Catholic mysticism has had many rapturous and ecstatic practitioners in the past, but the variety of mysticism generally advocated at the university aims at restoring the personal self to tranquility and peace. True, sermons in the university church are often designed to motivate the student to share Christ with others. From time to time, there are movements to do something for the poor, the handicapped, or the oppressed. Almost every student participates at some time or another in a social-action program. There is a strong theological motivation in such work.

Yet, most significantly for our analysis, the appeals to fulfill one's obligations in the university community and to extend one's activities into the larger society outside the university are based on reason. Morality and religion are based on rational norms. Proofs for the existence of God, for necessity of moral order and for personal sanctity are offered as morally imperative. "You should . . . . . . . . ." is applied as a pressure or a propulsive force. Faith means "the Faith" which is defended by rational arguments.

This is the context in which Christ is presented to the university students. The Ten Commandments are considered valid, but negatively stated.

Which Commandment is the first of all? Jesus answered, "The first is: Hear, 0 Israel, the Lord Our God, the Lord is one; and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength. The second is this, 'You shall love your neighbor as yourself.' There is no other commandment greater than these." (Mark 11:29-31)

Thus, the emotion introduced by Christianity in the virtue of charity and in identification with Christ—the charisma—leads to behavior and a doctrine is developed to regulate the behavior. "But [says Bergson] neither has its metaphysics enforced the moral practice, nor the moral practice induced a disposition to its metaphysics." The two forces of pressure and aspiration blend into a system of obligation, become rationalized into norms which can be appealed to by reason. But the role of emotion—in this case, the charisma of Christ—is primary in the motivation to behavior.

Thus, students who face a crisis of faith are often led back into an even greater faith than before by a priest (ordinarily) who, charismatic himself, is able to guide the student from the dark into the light of Christ. Other waverers may decide that they are "in too deep" with their parents and the university—graduation is not too far off—and they effect some accommodation between their personal selves and their social selves and make-do until they graduate. Ventilating one's emotions to intimate friends provides some relief for the person whose faith is, at best, formant. For the accepting student and for many of those with a crisis of faith, marijuana smoking is a pleasant relief-giving lark, much on the order of other less forbidden fruit, such as liquor and girls. But this is not so with the student whose crisis of conscience leads him to leave the university.

It is extremely significant that the main source of marijuana and LSD for campus students—at the time I speak—was the drop-out who came back to turn on his former classmates and friends. Regrettably, most of the information I have on this point is second-hand, but of the six drop-outs I was able to reach personally and from the second-hand information I received from the students ( eleven others), it can be said that these former students were all impressed with the idea of love as personal union with fellow man and with God. Some of them were described as being fanatical in their zeal to turn on to this mystic trip. Students remaining at the university failed to comprehend them although they spoke of them favorably.

Enough of the students at the university who set the tone of the campus consider marijuana smoking as unacceptably deviant—alien to the obligation system of the student body. Those who have smoked marijuana did so as a lark—perhaps as a sophisticated one. They were seeking pleasure; they did so surreptitiously and precisely for the reason which they gave. Most users really could not explain their behavior except to say that they were "looking for something."

Q. "Something religious?"

A. "No. Catholics have their trip. I admire Him more than anyone else who ever lived. He was on a trip all of his life."

The Catholic mystic ( and there are some on campus) imitates Christ and achieves a spiritual union, a more or less complete identification. He is absorbed into the system of obligation with the emotional warmth of his love of God and his fellow men. In his external appearance, at least, he is Apollonian. Marijuana is not his "bag," for his is a philosophical rather than pharmacological orientation.

Just as there are some Catholic students who—apparently less interested in religion and more interested in the secular world—drop out or fall out of the university, there are also religious men who do so. It is sometimes difficult to assess the grounds for departure, whether it is a crisis of faith which is so resolved or whether it is simply lack of interest. For those who leave because of faith and conflict, the abandonment can only be false since, in Bergson's terms, what are abandoned are obligations, metaphysics, and a set of ethical conceptions but what cannot be left behind are the essence and the cause. These are the emotional aspirations and the spiritual inspirations of Christianity. Those who do leave, shedding the pressures of obligation but remaining mystically oriented, are the ones most likely, it seems to me, who will not only open themselves to a variety of worldly experiences —and disappointments—but to the psychedelic drugs. Having failed their mission, failed to satisfy their hunger within the traditional environment, would they not be the seekers most ready to believe the psychedelic arguments? Whether or not in turning on they find their goal, we cannot say. We would assume that their effort involves an extension of their being into new grounds, an attempt to remythologize in terms more universal than Catholic.

In any event, both the psychedelic argument itself and the more worldly myths come from outside the Catholic environment. Thus, I propose that the Catholic student who becomes a hippie is moved initially by a crisis of faith, is attracted by the apparent opportunity to evade the community and its mysteries of obligation, and is then exposed in his wanderings to the alternative conception whereby a religious solution is offered which is pharmacological and universal—that is, he must learn the new myths outside of a strongly Catholic milieu. Upon accepting those myths, which necessarily implies that he is considerably involved with others who are non-Catholics or ex-Catholics, he embarks on a new path which, however odd its trappings, finds him bound by the same dimensions of the religious absolute that defined his seeking when it was conducted within a more conventional world.

It may be that, as Bergson suggests, there is a mystic within each of us. Perhaps, that essence can be called forth by pharmacological means. Certainly we know it can be exalted by the more traditional ones known to the saints and the prophets. If it is to be a pharmacological route to mysticism, let us be sure of its effectiveness. Let it not be that "diabolical mysticism" of the delusional and paranoid experience, the dangers of which William James saw so clearly. Annet us by all means seek the ways by which each of us can meditate on the prophets of Israel, on the visions of Christ, on the emanations of God, and on those other mysteries perceptible by those blessed with vision and understanding.