Drug Abuse

Nine: Religious and Mystical Experience

One of the most important questions raised by the psychedelic drugs is whether authentic religious and mystical experiences occur among the drug subjects. To this question the answer must be Yes—but we feel an extended discussion is warranted and that many qualifications are in order.

In our experience, the most profound and transforming psychedelic experiences have been those regarded by the subjects as religious. And in depth of feeling, sense of revelation, semantically, and in terms of reorientation of the person the psychedelic religious and religious-type experiences certainly seem to show significant parallels with the more orthodox religious experiences. These parallels alone would be sufficient to demand extensive and careful study.

Undoubtedly it would be the supreme irony of the history of religion should it be proved that the ordinary person could by the swallowing of a pill attain to those states of exhalted consciousness a lifetime of spiritual exercises rarely brings to the most ardent and adept seeker of mystical enlightenment. Considering the present rapid assimilation on a mass cultural level of new discoveries, therapies, and ideologies, it then might not be long before the vested religious interests would finally have to close up shop. And no less renowned a prophet than the late Aldous Huxley has suggested that humanity at large may in fact come to avail itself of psychedelic drugs as a surrogate for religion.

Since his statement appeared in 1954, the controversy has raged between those like Huxley, Gerald Heard, and Alan Watts who believe that in these chemicals the evolutionary acceleration of man's spiritual nature is now at hand, and other writers such as R.C. Zaehner who contend that these drugs at the most produce a very minor sort of nature mysticism and moreover tend to vitiate higher forms of religious and mystic expectations.'

Before considering this debate in the light of our own findings, it should be of value to examine briefly something of the history of artifi-cially induced states of mystical and religious consciousness. We do this in order to demonstrate to the reader the unbroken line of continuity in the history of "provoked mysticism."

Since the time when man first discovered that he was a thinking organism in a manifold world, he has sought to marshal his analytic capacity to control the manifold and discover its natural laws. As a parallel movement to this analytic process there developed as an under-current another way of knowing—one that sought to discover man's essential nature and his true relationship to the creative forces behind the universe, and to discern where his fulfillment lay. For the sake of achieving this integral knowledge men have willingly submitted them-selves to elaborate ascetic procedures and have trained for years to laboriously master Yoga and meditation techniques. They have prac-ticed fasting, flagellation, and sensory deprivation, and, in so doing, may have attained to states of heightened mystical consciousness, but also have succeeded in altering their body chemistry. Recent physiologi-cal investigations of these practices in a laboratory setting tend to con-firm the notion that provoked alterations in body chemistry and body rhythm are in no small way responsible for the dramatic changes in consciousness attendant upon these practices. The askesis or ascetic discipline of fasting,2 for example, makes for vitamin and sugar defi-ciencies which acts to lower the efficiency of what Huxley calls the cerebral reducing valve.3

Similarly, the practice of flagellation will tend to release quantities of histamine, adrenalin, and the toxic decomposition products of protein—all of which work to induce shock and hallucination. With regard to sensory deprivation, the work of D.O. Hebb at McGill Uni-versity in Canada and that of John Lilly at the National Institutes of Health in Washington demonstrates on the laboratory level how the elimination of external sensory stimuli can result in the subjective pro-duction of fantastic visionary experiences similar to those reported by St. Anthony during his vigil in the desert or the cave-dwelling Tibetan and Indian hermits who live out great segments of their lives in com-plete isolation. Other techniques of "provoked mysticism" include breathing exercises rhythmically performed to alter the composition of the blood and provide a point of concentration, extended chanting (which increases the carbon dioxide content of the blood), hypnosis, prayer dancing (employing body oscillations which induce trance and presumed physical changes), the spinning frenzy of the whirling der-vishes, and so on.

'The most comprehensive and consciously controlled system of dis-ciplines is, of course, the Hatha Yoga which incorporates the practices of posture regulation, breathing exercises, and meditation. Its immedi-ate aim is to bring under conscious control all physiological processes, so that the body can function with maximum efficiency. Its ultimate aim is to arouse what is called kundalini, a universal vital energy which is supposed to gain its access to the body at the base of the spine. When aroused and controlled, it is said to activate the psychic centers and thus make available to the yogi unusual powers. It is claimed that if this energy can be directed to the head center (the thousand-petalled lotus), a mystical state is attained and the yogi becomes aware of a mystical unitive consciousness. To this end the early Sanskrit psychophysical researchers developed a remarkable knowledge of physiological pro-cesses and their relation to body control.

Thirty years ago, in a volume entitled Poisons Sacrés, Ivresses Di-vines, Philippe de Felice provided considerable documentation to sup-port the ages-old connection between the occurrence of religious-type experiences and the eating of certain vegetable substances. He wrote that the employment of these substances for religious purposes is so extraordinarily widespread as to be "observed in every region of the earth among primitives no less than among those who have reached a high pitch of civilization. We are therefore dealing not with exceptional facts, which might justifiably be overlooked, but with a general and, in the widest sense of the word, a human phenomenon, the kind of phe-nomenon which cannot be disregarded by anyone who is trying to dis-cover what religion is and what are the deep needs which it must satisfy.4

De Felice advanced the thesis that one of the earliest known of the substances, the soma of the Vedic hymns, may have been indirectly responsible for the development of Hatha Yoga. 'The soma appears to have been some kind of creeping plant which the Aryan invaders brought down with them from Central Asia about 1500 s.c. 'The plant occupied an integral position in the myth and ritual structure of Vedic religion, was regarded as divinity, and was itself ritually consumed to bring the worshiper to a state of divine exhilaration and incarnation. "We have drunk soma and become immortal," hymns the early Vedic author. "We have attained the light, the gods discovered." According to de Felice, as the Aryans moved deeper into India the gods proved more difficult to find as the soma plant, like fine wine, would not travel. The exercises of the Hatha Yoga school, he suggests, may have been created as an attempt to fill the "somatic" gap and achieve that physiological state of being conducive to religious states of consciousness similar to those brought on by the ingestion of the sacred food. 'The larger impli-cation of this thesis is that vegetable-provoked mysticism exists as a state prior to askesis-provoked mysticism—that early man may have come upon his first instances of consciousness change through his ran-dom eating of herbs and vegetables. Certainly this thesis can never move beyond the realm of conjecture, although the fact remains that naturally occurring mind-changing substances are found the world over and are much more likely to have been experimented with before the creation of any system of mind-changing exercises.5

For millennia man has been involved in the ritual ingestion of sub-stances reputed to produce an awareness of a sacramental reality and has come to incorporate these substances into the myth and ritual pat-tern of the culture in which they occur. The words haoma, soma, peyote, and teontmacatl, all of which refer to God's flesh, are significant semantic referrents to the religious experiences believed to be inherent in the sacred foods.

One of the major archaeological discoveries of recent years has been the digging up on the Guatemalan highlands of a great many stone figures representing mushrooms out of whose stem emerges the head of a god. Thus the mushroom appears to have been hypostatized as deity as early as 1500 s.c. These figures occur as Aztec artifacts as late as the ninth century A.D. However, the earlier figures are technically and stylistically of finer craftmanship, indicating a flourishing cult in the early pre-classical period. By the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries of our era reports of such a mushroom cult occur in the writings of Span-ish explorers and priests. They naturally regarded these rites as demonically derived celebrations and soon made certain that they were driven underground. 'The rites, as noted, continue to survive today among the Mazatec Indians of southem Mexico where the ancient liturgy and ritual ingestion is still performed in remote huts before tiny con-gregations.

In recent years the cult has been subject to a great deal of publicity owing chiefly to the efforts of that well-known mycophile R. Gordon Wasson. In thirty years of search for the secret of the mushroom throughout the world, he and his wife believed that they uncovered the mystery among the Mazatec communicants. 'They persuaded a curan-dera or cult shaman to allow them to participate in the ceremony and swallow the sacred food. Recalling his experience, Wasson wrote that "as your body lies in the darkness, heavy as lead, your spirit seems to soar and leave the hut, and with the speed of thought to travel where it listeth, in time and space, accompanied by the shaman's singing and by the ejaculations of her percussive chant. What you are seeing and what you are he,aring takes on the modalities of music, the music of the spheres . . . as your body lies there . . . your soul is free, loses all sense of time, alert as it never was before, living eternity in a night, seeing infinity in a grain of sand. What you have seen and heard is cut as with a burin in your memory, never to be effaced. At last you know what the ineffable is, and what ecstacy means."

In a monumental study of the mushroom, Mushrooms, Russia, and History, the Wassons claimed to discover its sacramental usages in cultures widely distributed from the Levant to China; and they state that it even was known to the Norsemen of the Icelandic culture? In addition to the Mexican cult, the rite continues today among certain shamanistic tribes in Siberia, the ritual object of the cult being the hallucinogenic mushroom Amanita muscaria. Because this variety of mushroom occurs widely throughout Europe, Wasson has advanced the hypothesis that it might provide an answer to the secret of the Elusinian mysteries. From certain Greek writings and from a Pompeian fresco there are indications that the initiate drank a potion and then, in the depths of the night, beheld a great vision. Aristides, in the second century A.D., speaks of the ineffable visions and the awesome and luminous experience of the initiates.8 Wasson finds significance in the fact that the Greeks frequently referred to mushrooms as the "food of the gods," broma theon, and that Porphyrius is quoted as having called them "nurslings of the gods," theotrophos.8

However interesting is the notion of a mushroom-inspired Hellenic mystery, we suspect that Wasson's mycophiliac zeal exceeds his academic rigor when he suggests that Plato came upon his theory of an ideal world of archetypes after having spent a night at the temple of Eleusis drinking a mushroom potion.

The history of transcendental experience bears testimony to the thin line that often separates the sublime from the demonic, and to the frequency with which the one may cross over into the other. In demonic terms the visionary foods were extensively used, for example, by vvitches, especially during the period 1450 to 1750. As remarked, the witches drank and rubbed on their bodies concoctions the principal ingredients of which were the Solanaceae drugs contained in such plants as the thorn apple, mandragora, deadly nightshade, the henbanes, and others. The drug concoctions were employed at the Sabbats to produce hallucinations and disorientation, and also were taken at home for the purpose of inducing dreams and imagery of flying, orgiastic revels, and intercourse with incubi. So vivid were the nightmares and hallucinations produced by these drugs that witches frequently confessed to crimes they had only dreamed about but thought they had committed in the flesh.

The peyote ceremonies of the Native Arnerican Church have re-ceived sufficient treatment elsewhere in this book.

The historic sacrality of the visionary vegetables has since given way to the modern notoriety of the synthetic derivatives—especially, LSD, psilocybin, and mescaline. With regard to religious experiences as othervvise, one confronts these contemporary compounds with a host of puzzling questions. How, for example, may one reconcile the extremes of enthusiasm on the part of those who claim to find in these drugs a near-panacea for all ills and the key to mystical illumination with the vehement antagonism of those who are convinced that at best the drug-state mimics schizophrenia while at worst the drugs may wreak irre-parable havoc with the psyche and possibly also irreparably damage the brain? Again the whole question arises as to whether these substances are consciousness-expanders or merely mind-distorters? In Savage's well-known phrase, do they provide "Instant Grace, Instant Insanity, or Instant Analysis?"" Finally, there is the tragic-comic denouement that these altercations have won for the drugs a pariah mystique. The prob-lem with such a mystique is, of course, that it dictates that the pariah must go underground and there fester in cultic movements.

The contemporary quest for the artificial induction of religious ex-periences through the use of psycho-chemicals became a controversial issue with the publication of Huxley's Doors of Perception in 1954. In that book Huxley with his usual genius for the quixotic offered the suggestion that visionary vegetables in their modem synthetic forms could provide a new spiritual stimulation for the masses: one that was surer than church-going and safer than alcohol» The actual experi-mental testing of the claims for the psycho-chemical-as-religious-surrogate occurred in 1962 on an occasion now known as "The Miracle of Marsh Chapel." As a part of his work on a Harvard University doctoral dissertation in the Philosophy of Religion, Dr. Walter Pahnke, an M.D., set out to test a typology of mysticism based on the categories of mystical experience summarized by W.T. Stace in his classic study of the subject.12 Pahnke designed his experiment to test this typology on subjects who were given psilocybin in a religious setting. The subjects in question were twenty theology students who had never had the drug before and ten guides with considerable psychedelic experience. 'The theology students were divided into five groups of four persons, with two guides assigned to each group. After a preparatory gathering the groups moved upstairs to the chapel and the three-hour Good Friday service that awaited them. It was on this occasion that two of the subjects in each group and one of the two guides were given 30 micro-grams of psilocybin, a fairly strong dose of that drug. The effects of psilocybin are very similar to those of LSD. The second guide and the two remaining subjects received a placebo containing nicotinic ingredi-ents which provided the subject with a tingling sensation but produced no psychedelic effects. The drug was given in a triple-blind frameworlc, meaning that neither subjects, guides, nor the experimenter knew which ten were getting the psilocybin and which ten were members of the control group and received placebos. The Good Friday sermon was preached and the subjects were left in the chapel to listen to organ music and to await whatever experiences they were to have.

What subsequently occurred has been described as "bizarre," "out-rageous," and "deeply inspiring." As Pahnke's dissertation has not yet been published, we will not to be able to describe at this time the events that transpired in the chapel. However, it is permissible to say that nine subjects from the psilocybin group reported having religious experiences which they considered to be genuine while one of the subjects who had been given a placebo also claimed to have experienced phenomena of a religious nature. Typical of the responses was this excerpt from a report written shortly after the experiment by one of the subjects: "I felt a deep union with God. . . . I carried my Bible to the altar and tried to preach. The only words I mumbled were peace, peace, peace. I felt I was communicating beyond words."

In order to provide some material for a meaningful critique of this experiment the subjects' reports were read by three college-graduate housewives who were not informed as to the nature and background of the reports, but were asked to assign to each a rating of strong, moder-ate, slight, or none, according to which of these terms best applied to a subject's statement in the light of each of the nine elements of mystical experience listed in the mystical typology provided by Pahnke. Accord-ing to Pahnke, the statistical results of these ratings indicated that "those subjects who received psilocybin experienced phenomena which were indistinguishable from if not identical with . . . the categories defined by our typology of mysticism."

Various other studies would seem to attest to the mystico-religious efficacy of the psychedelic drugs. For example, in an attempt to explore the "revelatory potentialities of the human nervous system," Dr. Timothy Leary and his associates arranged for 69 full-time religious professionals to take psilocybin in a supportive setting. Leary has sub-sequently reported that over seventy-five percent of these subjects stated after their sessions that they had experienced "intense mystico-religious reactions, and considerably more than half claim that they have had the deepest spiritual experience of their life.""

In another study by two Californians, a psychiatrist and a psycholo-gist respectively, Oscar Janiger and William McGlothlin reported on a study involving 194 LSD subjects (121 volunteers and 73 as part of a program in psychotherapy). 'The drug was given in a nonreligious set-ting so that presumably religious expectations did not influence the subjects as was the case with the Leary experiment. Below is a statisti-cal abstract of their findings, based on a questionnaire answered by the subjects ten months after their sessions:

It also should be added that ten months after having taken the drug twenty-four percent of the 194 subjects still spoke of their experiences as having been "religious."15

Two other similar studies should be mentioned because of the re-markable percentages reported with regard to the subjects' feeling that they had had a religious-type experience. Both experiments were con-ducted by psychiatrists but whereas one provided a supportive environ-ment for the session, the other not only was supportive but also was structured in part to provide the subject with religious stimuli. This second precedure resulted in significantly higher percentages of subjects reporting religious experiences."

Taken altogether these findings must be regarded as remarkable. In the five studies just cited between thirty-two and seventy-five percent of psychedelic subjects will report religious-type experiences if the setting is supportive; and in a setting providing religious stimuli, from seventy-five to ninety percent report experiences of a religious or even mystical nature.

'The reader is surely by this time wondering what to make of the claims of these researchers. Are they psychedelic Svengalis employing suggestion to play upon the sensitized psyches of their hypersuggestible subjects, imposing whatever delusions they might need or wish to im-pose? Or may it be that they themselves are deluded and fail to under-stand that in present-day America a man or woman will put a check next to "had a religious experience" if a drug has helped him or her to feel in some impressive way "different" than usual? There can be no doubt that the psychedelic drugs give the subject experiences very "dif-ferent" from any the average person is likely to have had. For the most part the drug-state resembles neither the effects to be gotten from alco-hol nor those resulting from amphetamines and tranquilizers. Does the present-day subject, then, having little or no familiarity with what is meant by the terms "religious" and "mystical" (other than something undefinedly exciting), adopt these words by default to describe the novel phenomena he has encountered during his session (and finds conveniently present on the questionnaire)? 'The Eastern scholar R.C. Zaehner offers a sophisticated version of this argument in his book attacking Huldey's position, Mysticism, Sacred and Profane. In this work Zaehner presents a closely reasoned and scholarly look at the classical records of religious and mystical experience and concludes that drug-induced mysticism falls so far short of the experiences of saints and holy men that a subject is badly misleading himself if he feels that he has undergone an authentic religious experience. "Preternatural" experience, the experience of transcendence and union with that which is apprehended as lying beyond the multiplicity of the world, is very common experience indeed, Zaehner argues. Not only is it common to nature mystics, but it recurs regularly with poets, monists, manic-depressives, and schizophrenics. Whether one is dealing with the "cos-mic emotion" of the nature mystic, the "almost hysterical expression of superhuman ecstasy" found in a poet like Rimbaud, the bliss of subject-object dissolution, or the rapture of psychologically dissociated states, one is dealing exclusively with "preternatural" phenomena and not with authentic religious or mystical experience. Zaehner deems all psy-chedelic drug experience, be it madness, monism, or nature mysticism, to lie entirely within the province of such preternatural experience.

The further implication of Zaehner's thesis is that these drugs can never induce theistic states of religious and mystical experience which he regards as the supreme and authentic religious experience. The other tvvo forms of mystic,a1 experience which Zaehner recognizes, nature mysticism in which the soul is united with the natural world and monis-tic mysticism in which the soul dissolves into an impersonal Absolute, are infinitely inferior states of religious awareness as compared to theistic mysticism in which the soul confronts the living, personal God.

Here Zaehner's position is clearly open to criticism. Apart from questioning the value hierarchy which Zaehner ascribes to the three kinds of mysticism, one might take him to task for suppressing the evidence for drug-induced theistic mysticism. As is well known, the peyote rituals of the Native American Church are frequently productive of theistic religious experiences. James Slotkin, an anthropologist, has noted that the Indians during these ceremonials "see visions, which may be of Christ Himself. Sometimes they hear the voice of the Great Spirit. Sometimes they become aware of the presence of God and of those personal shortcomings which must be corrected if they are to do His
(Slotkin, it should be added, had observed the Indians' rites and been a participant in them.) And, in any case, the phenomenon of specifically theistic versions of psychedelic mysticism is an ancient and widespread tradition.

Needless to say, Zaehner's arguments have provided ammunition for many theologians and churchmen who refer to religious experiences induced with the help of psychedelic drugs as "chemical religion," "cheap and lazy religion," "instant mysticism," etc., and who charge that the use of the drugs for such a purpose amounts to "irreverently storming the gates of heaven." However, there is no avoiding the fact that Zaehner's critique has the ring of an eleventh hour tour de force. One philosopher sympathetic to the use of the drugs for religious purposes says that "Zaehner's refusal to admit that drugs can induce expe-riences descriptively indistinguishable from those which are spontane-ously religious is the current counterpart of the seventeenth-century theologians' refusal to look through Galileo's telescope or, when they did, their persistence in dismissing what they saw as machinations of the devil. . . . When the fact that drugs can trigger religious experiences becomes incontrovertible, discussion will move to the more difficult question of how this new fact is to be interpreted.'"

In our own experience, the evidence would seem to support the contentions of those who assert that an authentic religious ex-perience may occur within the context of the psychedelic drug-state. However, we are certainly less exuberant than some other researchers when it comes to the question of the frequency of such experiences. It is not here a question of our having had fewer subjects who claim to have had a religious experience—over forty-five percent have made this claim; rather, because of the criteria employed, a large number of these claims have been rejected by us. The difference therefore is one of criteria rather than of testimonial opulence.

In our attempt to develop unbiased criteria for the authentic reli-gious experience we have employed the usual measuring devices; how-ever, we have also found it important to place some emphasis on what we have termed the "depth level" of the experience. The literature of nondrug religious and mystical experience appears to lend considerable support to this criterion. It is significant to note, for example, that in this traditional literature the writers repeatedly deal with and emphasize the stages on the way to mystical enlightenment and describe these with metaphors suggesting striking analogies to the psychodynamic levels hypothesized in our psychedelic research. Again and again, the literature reveals comparable gradations or levels of experience as the mystic moves from acute bodily sensations and sensory enhancement to a heightened understanding of his own psychodynamic processes, through a stage inhabited by visionary and symbolic structures, until at last he achieves the very depths of his being and the luminous vision of the One. This level is described as the source and the ground of the self's unfolding and represents the level of confrontation with Ultimate Reality. The most important of the experiences reported by William James in The Varieties of Religious Experience are of this type in which the person seems to be encountered on the most profound level of his being by the Ground of Being. Religious experience can be defined, then, as that experience which occurs when the "depths of one's being" are touched or confronted by the "Depth of Being." Mystical experience differs from this in degree, not in kind. This latter occurs when one's personal depths dissolve into the "transpersonal" depths—when one is unified at one's deepest level with the source level of reality.

Mystics and religious personalities have repeatedly warned against accepting states of sensory and psychological alteration or visionary phenomena as identical with the depths of the spiritual consciousness. These warnings go unheeded today by many investigators of the psy-chedelic experience who seem to accept the subject's experiences of heightened empathy and increased sensory awareness as proofs of reli-gious enlightenment. Doubtless some of these experiences are analogous in some way to religious and mystical experiences. But religious ana-logues are still not religious experiences. At best they are but stages on the way to religious experiences. And a major problem in this research to date is that it has been conducted by persons unfamiliar with the nature and content of the religious experience. Thus claims are made that can be misleading.

For example, a subject may have a euphoria-inducing experience of empathy with a chair, a painting, a person, or a shoe. This may result in protestations of transcendental delight as chair, painting, person, and shoe are raised to platonic forms and the subject assumes himself to be mystically enlightened. Too often in these and similar situations the guide will offer reassurance to the subject and so reinforce his belief that he is having a religious experience. But by doing this, the guide may prevent the subject from descending to a deeper level of his being where a genuinely religious and transformative experience then might be had.

Given this type of misunderstanding, it is no wonder that the psy-chedelic drugs have resulted in a proliferation of "fun" mystics and armchair pilgrims who loudly claim mystical mandates for experiences that are basically nothing more than routine instances of consciousness alteration. The mandate being falsely and shallowly derived, the sub-sequent spiritual hubris can be horrendous, the subject announcing to whoever will listen that all mystic themes, all religious concepts, all meanings, and all mysteries now are accessible and explainable by vir-tue of his "cosmic revelation." It is frequent and funny, if also unfor-tunate, to encounter young members of the Drug Movement who claim to have achieved a personal apotheosis when, in fact, their expe-rience appears to have consisted mainly of depersonalization, dissocia-tion, and similar phenomena. Such individuals seek their beatitude in regular drug-taking, continuing to avoid the fact that their psychedelic "illumination" is not the sign of divine or cosmic approval they suppose it to be, but rather a flight from reality. Euphoria then may ensue as a result of the loss of all sense of responsibility; and this can and often does lead to orgies of spiritual pride and self-indulgence by those who now see themselves as the inheritors of It! In fact, they come to spend several days a week with It! And all mundane concerns, all earthly "games" seem superfluous and are abandoned insofar as circumstances will allow.

'The situation is complicated by the fact that many such persons are caught up in a quasi-Eastern mystique through which they express their disenchantment with the declining Western values and with the prolifer-ating technology, the fear of becoming a machine-man, and the yearn-ing for some vision of wholeness to turn the tide of rampant fragmenta-tion. This vision they pursue by means of a wholesale leap to the East without, however, having gained the stability, maturity, and elasticity needed to assimilate the Eastern values. Few have the spiritual sophisti-cation of a Huxley or have spent as many years of study and training in quest of methods of achieving the spontaneity and integration elabo-rated in the teachings of some schools of Vedanta and Mahayana Bud-dhism. Thus the leap out of the "games" and everyday "roles" of West-ern reality is usually into a nebulous chaos seen as Eastern "truth." It is an added misfortune that the psychedelic drugs may genuinely give some inkling of the complexity of Eastern consciousness, although the vista usually uncovered is no revelation but merely a glimpse—one that would require years of dedicated study before it could be implemented and made effective in day-to-day existence.

To at least some extent the responsibility for this seduction of the innocent must lie with such authors as Huxley, Alan Watts, and others who in their various writings imposed upon the psychedelic experience essentially Eastern ideas and terminology which a great many persons then assumed to be the sole and accurate way of approaching and interpreting such experience. Armed with such terminology and ide-ation, depersonalization is mistranslated into the Body of Bliss, empa-thy or pseudo-empathy becomes a Mystic Union, and spectacular visual effects are hailed as the Clear Light of the Void."

It should by now be evident why the authors discount as belonging to the class of authentic religious and mystical experience a good many cases in which the data of altered sensory perception and other ordinary drug-state phenomena are hypostatised by the subject as having sacra-mental or religious significance. Among our own cases, that of the young woman in the opening chapter who perceived the objects around her in terms of "holy pots" and a "numinous peach" is clearly not an example of religious experience as the rest of her account goes on to make clear. This subject is indulging in a commonplace practice of psychedelic subjects—the describing of various uncommon experiences in terms of sacramental metaphors.

This is not to suggest that religious insight and religious-type expe-rience never occur in combination with an experience of sensory en-hancement. The interpretation accompanying the perception may result in revelatory insights. A famous case in point is the divinity school professor contemplating a rose: "As I looked at the rose it began to glow," he said, "and suddenly I felt I understood the rose. A few days later when I read the Biblical account of Moses and the burning bush it suddenly made sense to me." Thus within the framework of the psychedelic experience one man's glowing rose can be another man's epiphany.

Analogues of the Religious Experience. The sensory, ideational and symbolic analogues of religious experience are not religious experience; but, at the same time, these may be productive of insights enabling the subject to live more easily and fruitfully than he was able to do before. In order to illustrate this point, we will reproduce here a description by a subject of an experience of extended sensory awareness bordering on nature mysticism and verbalized by the subject mainly in religious terrils. Although the subject was at the time indifferent to religion, she found it necessary to make use of metaphors drawn from the religious vocabulary in order to formulate and communicate her responses.

The subject, S-1 (LSD), a housewife in her early thirties, was taken by the guide for a walk in the little forest that lay just beyond her house. The follovving is her account of this occasion:

"I felt I was there with God on the day of the Creation. Everything was so fresh and new. Every plant and tree and fern and bush had its own particular holiness. As I walked along the ground the smells of nature rose to greet me—sweeter and more sacred than any incense. Around me bees hummed and birds sang and crickets chirped a ravish-ing hymn to Creation. Between the trees I could see the sun sending down rays of warming benediction upon this Eden, this forest paradise. I continued to wander through this wood in a state of puzzled rapture, wondering how it could have been that I lived only a few steps from this place, walked in it several times a week, and yet had never really seen it before. I remembered having read in college Frazer's Golden Bough in which one read of the sacred forests of the ancients. Here, just outside my door was such a forest and I swore I would never be blind to its enchantment again."

The subject remained true to her vow and as of two years after the session continued to experience not only heightened sensory apprecia-tion but also a kind of awe and reverence whenever she walked through her "Holy Wood." 'Thus, although the subject cannot be said to have had a religious experience in the forest, she unquestionably had an experience of the sensory transfiguration of a part of her everyday world so profound that she found it necessary to use the vocabulary of the religious life to describe her experience. Further, although S considered herself to be basically agnostic, her experience in the forest caused her to feel in herself an awakening to dimensions of reality to which she previously had been indifferent. Subsequent to the session she continued to remark in herself a growing interest in "spiritual matters," as she describes:

"Since that day I have had brewing in me a sense of the relevance of that forest for the other areas of my life and the life of my family. For I have come to realize that my way of seeing and hearing and smelling the forest in a way that was greater than any way I had ever seen and heard and smelled before was not because the forest was in any special way 'different' or even more 'sacred' than the rest of the world but because the rest of the world (and this includes myself and my children) was perceived by me with the eye of ordinary expectation. With this expec-tation life becomes just something that somehow you muddle through with no thought or hope of it ever being anything else. But that forest proved me wrong. I saw there and I knew then that there were dimen-sions to life and harmonies and deeps which had been for me unseen, unheard, and untapped. Now that I know that they are there, now that I have awakened to the glorious complexity of it all I shall seek, and perhaps some day, I shall find."

It is interesting to compare this subject's account of discovering unsuspected dimensions of life with the classic account of William James in which the great psychologist similarly evaluates his nitrous oxide experience in terms of a revelation of the levels of existence:
"One conclusion was forced upon my mind at that time, and my impression of its truth has ever since remained unshaken. It is that our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, 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 exist-ence; but apply the requisite stimulus, and at a touch they are there in all their completeness, definite types of mentality which probably somewhere have their field of application and adaptation. 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 discontinuous with ordinary consciousness. Yet they may determine attitudes though they cannot furnish formulas, and open a region though they fail to give a map. At any rate, they forbid a prema-ture closing of our accounts with reality. Looking back on my own experiences, they all converge toward a kind of insight to which I cannot help ascribing some metaphysical significance.""

As noted, there are various odd and pathologicomimetic states of mind which seem to be especially productive of unfounded claims of religious and mystical experience. Depersonalization and empathy, for instance, can cause an ordinarily secular-minded subject to sound like a garrulous Hindu sage who has been transplanted into Southern Cali-fornia. It is not infrequent to hear these psychedelic Swamis intoning such "wisdom" as:

"The not-self of me yields to the Void of Becoming."

"You and I are One. One and God is All."

"We are Mind-ed by God and Self-ed by each other."

"My Isness is of God. My Supposed-to-be-ness is of Man."

Of course not all experience which falls short of being authentic religious experience is on so sophomoric a level. And some actually superficial experiences may sound quite authentic when taken out of their context in the session. Such is the following example which in-volves the not-too-rare psychedelic experience of feeling that one has been raised to a transcendental plateau from which it is possible to look down upon one's own mental processes in Olympian fashion and as if with the "eye of God." This Olympian perspective then leads not infre-quently to religious or pseudo-religious phenomena.

S-2, a thirty-four-year-old sociologist (LSD), writes (with initial reference to his eidetic imagery) :

"The surface of my mind, upon which I—evolved to a supercon-sciousness—looked downward, was revealed as a vast illuminated screen of dimensions impossible to calculate. I observed the myriad multiform ideas and images passing across it; and sensations and emo-tions, flowing inward and outward—whatever occurred within the psyche; perhaps, within the still larger, more complex totality of the self.

"From above, with absolute concentration, observing and sustaining all of this, I was—directing everything, controlling the internal events as one might control the carefully preconceived flights of innumerable air-craft, keeping each on course, preventing all miscalculations and wan-derings that might lead to missed objectives and collisions and needless expenditures of energy.

"The light that illumined these images grew brighter and brighter until I was almost frightened by the intensity of the brilliance. I saw that perfect genius would require the perpetuation of the capacity so, from above, to visualize and direct and regulate. Perfect genius would be an unwavering perfect control of the positions and velocities of ideas and images, instantaneous pre-arranged channeling of impressions—all the internal events, from conception, held in view and directed.

"But then, in a flash of illumination, I understood that this perfect genius of which I conceived was nothing more than a minute and miser-able microcosm, containing but the barest hint of the infinitely more complex and enormously vast macrocosmic Mind of God. I knew that for all its wondrous precision this man-mind even in ultimate fulfillment of all its potentials could never be more than the feeblest reflection of the God-Mind in the image of which the man-mind had been so miracu-lously created.

"I was filled with awe of God as my Creator, and then with love for God as the One Who sustained me even, as in my images, I seemed to sustain the contents of my own mind. It seemed to me that I stood in relation to the whole of the universe in somewhat the same relation as the universe, itself no more than a greater microcosm, stood to the Macrocosm that is God.

"Thus recognizing my own total insignificance, I marveled all the more at the feeling I now had that somehow the attention of God was focused upon me and that I was now receiving enlightenment from Him. Tears came into my eyes and I opened them upon a room in which it seemed to me that each object had somehow been touched by God's sublime Presence."

Read as here presented in the foregoing quotation this description might appear to be the report of a major revelation—an authentic religious experience. However, in the context of S's entire session, it loses most of its impact and importance and must be seen as no more significant than some other and not at all religious experiences of this subject. S was not changed in any important way by the "enlighten-ment" he said he had received, and a few days after the session S himself had relegated it to his personal stockpile of "interesting episodes."

Symbolic Analogues. Since religious and other phenomena of the sym, bolic level have been discussed in the preceding chapter, we will con-sider here only a single aspect of symbolic analogues to religious experi-ence—the eidetic images of an apparently religious nature experienced by almost all subjects. If taken uncritically, these images would seem to provide prima facie evidence of religious experiential content. However, the larger part of this imagery occurs without accompanying religious emotion, and we must conclude that it is a phenomenal curiosity of the drug-state and does not establish or portend any activation of religious or mystical states of consciousness. The following is a statistical break-down of the kind and frequency of "religious" images as they have occurred among our drug subjects:

* To the nearest percentage.

Certain comments should be made with regard to these statistics. Of the four percent of the subjects who did not report any religious imagery at all, these persons were, with two exceptions, completely imageless or imaged only geometric forms. This would seem to indicate that if a subject is able to image at all, then some kind of "religious" imagery is almost certain to occur as a part of the total eidetic image content.

The preponderance of imagery relating to religious architecture reflects not so much a religious interest as an aesthetic appreciation of this generally most imposing and interesting of all architecture.

We will also note that some aspects of these statistics are more than slightly enigmatic. Why, for example, do ancient and primitive rites occur in the images so much more often than do the contemporary ones? Is it because the old rites reflect and minister to deep-rooted human needs that the modern rites do not, or is there some other explanation? Why do angels run such a poor second to devils? Here, it would seem that the devils and demons may be personifications of nega-tive components within the psyche. Sigmund Freud, for one, undoubtedly would have remarked with great interest this apparent preponder-ance of negative over positive personifications of unconscious elements.

Another phenomenon of considerable interest is the fact that mandala (symbolic geometric diagram) imagery scores only eight per-centage points less than imagery pertaining to traditional religious sym-bols. In this statistic one may be encountering evidence of the radical individuating tendency of the psychedelic process. The mandala is, after all, a highly personal symbolic form; in fact, the symbolic condensation of the thematics and dynamics of the person's own nature. It is the coded formula of the subject's personal mythos. The significant per-centage of mandala imagery then may be testimony to one of the key phenomena of the psychedelic experience: the discovery and creative utilization of personal patterns of being against the backdrop of univer-sal structures and sanctions.

The Integral Level. When we examine those psychedelic experiences which seem to be authentically religious, we find that during the session the subject has been able to reach the deep integral level wherein lies the possibility of confrontation with a Presence variously described as God, Spirit, Ground of Being, Mysterium, Noumenon, Essence, and Ultimate or Fundamental Reality. In this confrontation there no longer is any question of surrogate sacrality. 'The experience is one of direct and unmediated encounter with the source level of reality, felt as Holy, Awful, Ultimate, and Ineffable. Whether this Presence resides forever immanent in the integral realm of man's being or whether this realm provides the Place of Encounter between man and Presence remains a meta-question requiring no answer. The important thing is that the encounter does take place—in an atmosphere charged with the most intense affect. This affect rises to a kind of emotional crescendo climaxed by the death and purgation of some part of the subject's being and his rebirth into a new and higher order of existence. Specifically, the subject tends to feel that his encounter with Being has in some way led to the erasure of behavioral patterns blocking his development, and at the same time provides him with a new orientation complete with in-sight and energy sufficient to effect a dramatic and positive self-trans-formation.

Our major criteria for establishing the validity of these most pro-found religious and mystical experiences are three: Encounter with the Other on the integral level; transformation of the self; and, in most cases, a process of phenomenological progression through the sensory, recollective-analytic and symbolic levels before passing into the integral. In the case of these authentic experiences this progression has been at the same time a rich and varied exploration of the contents of these levels providing a cumulative expansion of insight and association until, at the threshold of the integral, the subject has experienced a compre-hensive familiarity with the complex network of his being such as he had never known before. This process is greatly intensified and ap-proaches culmination during the subject's passage through the symbolic level.

Comparative studies in the history of religion demonstrate the tendency in the life of a given religion or culture for the myth and ritual complex to exist as a stage prior to the development of the individuated religious or mystical quest. Indeed, it is a matter of cultural and psycho-logical necessity that the myth and ritual pattern should dominate and precede the emergence of the mystic way for the one serves a more comprehensive role in the organic ordering and revitalizing of society and psyche, while the other involves a movement away from the social complex to a region of radical individuation.

It is significant then that in the levels of phenomenological progression revealed in the psychedelic experience, the symbolic realm with its abundance of myth and ritual material is, in most cases, experienced as preceding the level of integral and mystical reality. This relation of the symbolic to the integral will be illustrated in the following case.

The Authentic Religious Experience. In the highly unusual case to follow we present a detailed account of what we consider to be an authentic religious experience. It is also a transforming experience, one that profoundly and beneficially changes the person. The movement is continuous, beginning in the first 'of three psychedelic sessions, and reaching culmination in the third as the subject attains to the integral level. This case should be read as exemplifying better than any other we present the guided progression through the various hypothesized levels toward the climactic, transforming confrontation—here, a confronta-tion with God.

The (LSD) subject, S-3, in his late thirties, is a successful psychol-ogist who has achieved much recognition in his field. Before offering any account of the sessions it will be necessary to discuss the back-ground of the subject at some length. We should add that we have received from thoroughly reliable sources confirmation of many of the strange autobiographical materials first supplied us by the subject.

As we have found to be very often true, in its broad outlines the life of this subject may be seen as the re-enactment of a myth—in this case, the myth of the rebellious angel Lucifer who challenged the power and authority of God Himself and was cast down into Hell as a punish-ment for his pride. One of the most extraordinary elements in this case is the very early "choice" of the particular myth and the thoroughness with which the myth has been acted out in the subject's life.

In considering this case it may prove helpful to keep in mind several key points. S, since earliest childhood, has displayed a high degree of intelligence accompanied by a rich imagination continuously expressed in both his overt behavior and his abundant fantasy life. He has shown a constant tendency to represent his life to himself in terms of symbolic analogues. And he has long regarded the progression and details of his life as "a kind of 'art work,' initiated by a fertile childish imagination and subsequently 'improved upon' by an older imagination armed with immense amounts of esoteric data."

S is the only child of well-to-do Protestant Anglo-Saxon parents with whom his relations are good. As it has been described to him, he came into the world with long silky black hair growing over much of his body. His face at the time of his birth was wizened, he had teeth and resembled a tiny, ancient man. Shortly after his birth he developed pneumonia and "was born with or soon got a bad case of jaundice." His skin was wrinkled and yellow and his relatives thought him an ex-tremely odd-looking baby, "a little old Chinaman," although his mother insisted she thought he was "quite beautiful." S was not expected to survive, but "surprised" his family and the physician "by somehow pulling through."

As a child, S was precociously intelligent, imaginative, and self-reliant. By the time he was four he could read and, at the age five, was reading pulp fantasy and science-fiction magazines as well as the usual children's books. Myths and legends of many lands, along with the works of Poe were read to him or by him. As far back as he is able to remember, S always felt himself to be "alien, not really a member of the human race at all, but someone who belonged someplace else and got into this world by accident or under strange circumstances." However, he soon found it expedient to keep "the secret" of his "difference" to himself and to "make believe" he was "like other children." Or, when unable to deceive himself, he would "consciously pretend" to be "a human child." Whether this began as a game he played with himself, S cannot be certain; but this seems to him a likely explanation.

Also as far back as he can recall, S felt an irresistible attraction toward "what others regarded as evil," although S himself "at no time accepted this value judgment." All through his childhood his "sympa-thies were always with the bad guys" in films, on the radio, etc. In playing with other children he selected games in which he could take the role of the robber or some other villain. His precocity was such that he was easily able to "manipulate most other children" and also, much of the time, the adults around him. Until rather recently he has continued to see his relations with others in terms of their manipulation by him—a manipulation that was usually not a means to some end, but rather was an end-in-itself.

At around age six, S greatly distressed his mother by declaring his disbelief in God. He attended Sunday School under duress and excelled at memorizing passages of Scripture; but, in reading the Bible, he "was always turning to the erotic incidents and to anything that concerned the Devil." His fascination with the Devil was constant throughout his childhood and much of his adult life. At the age of twelve, he made the first of his many "unsuccessful attempts" to sell his soul to the Devil. He found books on demonology and sorcery, studied them, and identi-fied with the demon Ashtaroth. He practiced black magic, "sometimes with apparent success."

At age thirteen, S had his first sexual experience. Thereafter, he was "constantly out after sex." He became exceedingly promiscuous and had remained so up until about one year before his session. He also "read omnivorously about sex," especially prohibited sex practices and aberrations. All of this he did "because society, and especially the church, regarded sex outside of wedlock as evil." Whatever was thought to be "evil," S would do—although he stopped short of activities likely to result in serious trouble with the police. At the same time, S "never did believe that sex was evil." He never experienced any feelings of guilt in connection with his "evil" practices and "probably" never has known what it is to feel consciously guilty. Yet, no one has ever suggested that S is a psychopath. For all his "manipulation" of others, he has fre-quently been of great help to his friends and associates and is regarded by many as a kind, compassionate person.

As he grew older, S became "a real scholar of evil." He searched assiduously for "all the banned books" and read them. In school, his intelligence (I.Q. about 165) permitted him to earn good grades with-out effort and left him time to "stir up lots of mischief." At the univer-sity, he was considered to be an outstanding student. He was drawn to the study of psychology, and especially to psychoanalysis, because his own mental processes seemed to him "mysterious and unlike those of other persons."

Although an atheist with scientific interests, S continued his studies in satanism, witchcraft, "black" occultism, etc. His atheism was militant and for a time he also was a nihilist. His militancy "attracted disciples" and others often remarked that he had "some strange kind of power." He had much sexual success with coeds and "preached a doctrine of total debauchery." However, he preferred his contacts with socially low-level girls and spent much time in "almost skid-row surroundings" that seemed to have a very great fascination for him.

"As a nihilist," S "believed in nothing at all," and "the effect of this" was to cause him to lose the "power" that others always had recognized in him. The "next effect" was a "crippling anxiety neurosis" that came on when S still was in graduate school. He was "just barely able to control" his anxiety to the extent required to let him finish school. Whenever confronted by "a person in any position of authority" over him, S would "inwardly tremble" and felt that at any moment the trembling "would be exteriorized and then degenerate into total panic." Yet, when confronted by such situations, he "somehow always got through." And even when the neurosis was at its worst S remained a forceful personality who "always managed to have a few disciples on the string."

In his practice as a psychotherapist, S was unusually effective. Here, he felt, the "upper hand" was his and consequently the "anxiety prob-lem did not come up." Outside the therapeutic situation, however, S's ‘`neurotic symptoms intensified" until, for a few brief periods of his life, he found himself almost unable to enter a store to make a purchase. If he found himself in a position where he "had to ask anybody for anything," he became extremely agitated and feared he would be unable to speak. This condition, which was intermittent, was at its worst during a period of three to four years. The neurosis "seriously handicapped" S and caused him a great deal of misery for almost a decade.

At age twenty-eight, S embarked upon a lengthy self-analysis that continued for some seven years. His method was eclectic, but mostly psychoanalytic and Freudian. He worked with auto-hypnosis and relax-ation techniques in an effort to suppress his physical symptoms (trem-bling, tachycardia, etc.) while he "attacked the neurosis itself" with his self-analytic method. During the whole duration of the neurosis S con-tinued to be promiscuous, but could only overcome his anxiety with the woman he approached as "suppliant" by drinking very heavily. He felt that this necessity presented the added threat that he would become alcoholic.

About four years previous to his LSD sessions, S "achieved impor-tant breakthroughs" in his self-analysis. He did not "cure" the neurosis but developed techniques "for detecting a symptom at its inception and immediately suppressing it." He felt that the cause of the neurosis no longer was operative, so that the task was really one of breaking down habits and conditioned response patterns. His anxiety, he felt he had learned, was in fact a "rage unable to express itself because known to be an irrational, inappropriate response." This rage occurred whenever S was "in any sense in a subordinate position." Then the rage, which he could not express, "would come to the surface as symptoms" which S initially had "mistaken" for amdety. Later, what he feared was the symptomatic behavior itself, and "then the anxiety became real." After his "breakthroughs" he continued to work at the self-analysis for an-other year, then abandoned it as no longer needed. He continued to be "very promiscuous," but "more out of habit than need."
About one year before his sessions, S had several experiences he felt to be of great importance. He long had recognized religious tendencies in himself but had always suppressed "this need" or "deflected the need towards the Devil." Now, however, he felt that his lifelong preoccupa-tion with the Devil was "juvenile" and made some strenuous efforts to tap "that genuine source of strength and inner peace men call God." S felt that on several occasions he had "broken through to this Source." Each time, after such a breakthrough, he noted "definite gains towards improved adjustment and self-mastery." But he never could manage to subdue his "inner devils, who whispered that all of this was merely hypocrisy and self-delusion."

S then had a curious kind of "mystical experience." His "totem animal" for many years had been the wolf. This wolf, with which S identified, represented "a wild, untameable freedom." The wolf was, like himself, "a solitary beast, self-reliant (and as S wanted to be), strong and snarling his defiance at the world." This personal totem was abandoned when S, reflecting upon his "wolf-identification," suddenly knew beyond all possibility of doubt that the wolf in himself now was dead. In almost the same instant, dosing his eyes, he saw before him a vivid eidetic image of a huge, beautiful tiger and knew with equal conviction that the tiger now was his totem. Following this incident the tiger appeared to S in a succession of dreams. During the dreams S was "somehow made to understand" that the transition from wolf to tiger represented a distinct advance for him and that the neurosis was coming to an end.2' From the moment of this change of totems onward, S continued to make "steady gains" in the form of "a healthier outlook than ever before and better relations with other persons." He continued to "seek God" and the feeling that this was "something to be ashamed of" troubled him much less than before. He felt that for the first time in his life his mental health was "very good, though not perfect," and that the more severe of his problems had been left behind him "once and for all."

Such, very briefly, are the general outlines and some relevant details of this subject's strange background. The infonnation was not available to us previous to his session and, in this subject's case, no amount of interviewing could elicit what he did not want to tell. He was far too practiced and knowledgeable a veteran of dissimulation to reveal either in conversation or testing any information he preferred to withhold. Nor was there, at the time of his first session, any longer any serious dis-turbance to be diagnosed.

The First and Second Sessions. Because S's last two sessions are more important and require rather lengthy summation, we will pass very briefly over the first.

During that first session, S spent several hours experiencing the various phenomena of the sensory level. He adjusted to the drug-state22 quickly and kept up a witty and intelligent running commentary on his images, visual distortions, ideas about "psychodynamic mechanisms" involved in the sensory phenomena, etc. He expressed some desire to examine his own psychology, but produced nothing of much impor-tance. We agreed with S that, at this point, his psyche already was so well explored that he might as well go on to something else.

Some three and one-half hours into the session, S abruptly ceased his brief venture into the recollective-analytic realm and experienced many phenomena characteristic of the symbolic level. He felt the evolu-tionary process in his body and also imaged rudimentary life forms, then observed with much interest the development over the aeons of new and more complicated varieties of plant and animal life. He ob-served dinosaurs in ferocious combat and a series of "abortive hu-manoid forms, failing to develop so as to enable them to survive." He repeatedly observed "very decadent half-human beings" and great twist-ing masses of serpents, writhing in a brilliantly colored mass, "inextric-ably intertwined." He remarked that this latter image often had been seen (eidetically imaged) by him outside of the drug-state, but never so vividly.

The most dramatic moments of this session occurred after some five hours, when S imaged a great ball of fire that exploded in outer space and molten-looking but "immaterial" sheets of flame rained down upon the earth—"a kind of fiery deluge." 'These sheets of flame became a blazing, glowing cylinder that surrounded "the edges of the earth." The cylinder "cooled," became a silvery mist, and then appeared to evapo-rate. "After this," S declared, "the Presence of God was upon the earth" and the attempts of evolution to bring forth man were crowned with success. Henceforth, the "pull of Nature upon man was down-ward." It was as if whatever force had itself failed at creating man, now set itself the task of undoing God's successful creation. Concerning this conflict, S described himself as being "very ambivalent . . . wanting to side with God, but somehow allied with the other force that incessantly strives to tum order into chaos." S felt that this conflict he now de-scribed was basically his own, but "infinitely more complex" than his statement of it would suggest. With great emotion he announced that "this is of vital importance to me" and that he "absolutely must get to the bottom" of what he felt was being disclosed to him about his own nature.

From this point on, the drug effects rapidly diminished and no material of any importance was produced. After the session, S contin-ued to insist very strongly that "something has been started, some process that it is very important I see through." He felt that this could only be accomplished if he had another LSD session.

While only rarely in our work have we found it desirable to give a subject more than one session, in this case we shared the subject's conviction that "something big is in the wind." Since all were agreed that another session was in order, we scheduled the second for the following Saturday, just seven days from the date of the first session. On the occasion of this second session, S declared he would "waste no time with the exotica"—the sensory level phenomena—and almost at once resumed his first-session preoccupation with symbolic level materials. His session from that point on was largely on this symbolic level with, however, frequent and important movements "back up" to the recol-lective-analytic.

Early in the session, S reported feeling his body to be that of a huge, happy dragon lying upon the surface of Mother Earth. He also reported the recurrence of a surface numbness or anesthesia which he now re-lated to the tough hide of the dragon. This anesthesia, as before, could be penetrated by music, which provided intense pleasure sensations "as if each nerve end were being simultaneously stimulated"; but whatever he touched was felt "as by one whose whole body is encased in a thin rubber glove." Bach's Brandenburg Concerto No. 4 was played and S was urged to permit his body to "dissolve." At first he was "over-whelmed by a bombardment of physical sensations, by tangible sound waves both felt and seen." The sensations were "erotic" and his intellect too now seemed to be "almost wholly genital." He closed his eyes and described great sinuous, jeweled shapes undulating through space. "Everything" was "coming in waves and from all sides." "Great waves of stimuli" were "crashing against the perrneable rock" S now felt him-self to be. He reported that "everything is happening now on a great universal scale. I can dissolve. Now I understand what is meant by being a part of everything, what is meant by sensing the body as dissolv-ing. I have a knowledge of all my particles dissolving and becoming incorporated into a sea of particles where nothing has form or even substance. In this sea there is no individuality."

It was not clear at this point whether S was moving toward an authentic or a pseudo-mystical experience. He was urged to continue the dissolution process and almost at once announced that he was resist-ing the process. "At the same time as I dissolve," he said, "I feel myself to be some kind of huge monument, some great stone edifice." Again, he was urged to "let go," to dissolve not only the body but also the self. To this he responded that "There are two ways of doing it. I can take everything into myself, or I can let myself go totally into what is not myself. 'This decision is the most difficult problem of all. I must see what I can do."

S then was momentarily diverted by images of "a huge beautiful ballet in which all of my physical and mental states are personified.

There are thousands of dance figures, each one of whom is myself. I am able to feel myself into each one of them, but am also able to combine them all and feel them as a totality." He then quickly returned to the "dissolution theme" and described an image of "horizons that go out and out and out. These expanding horizons are what I see and feel and am. This became possible when something was pulled away from over my head. A kind of net was lifted from the top of my head, and caught in the net and pulled away with it were many ugly things. Once the net and all that garbage had been pulled away the horizon could begin to go out. I now have no horizon at all. I have a feeling and knowledge of being physically boundless. There is an oceanic quality, yet sometimes I get washed up by some irritating passage in the music. I get washed up into dirty little bistros on tropical islands in the ocean."

Again S was urged to stop resisting, to allow himself the experience of boundless being. But now he found himself surrounded by "darting, oriental, snake-like things, moving in circles around me so that I cannot go beyond them." He began to breathe heavily and gave the impres-sion of being involved in some great internal struggle. His face red-dened, he started to perspire, and the facial expression resembled that of some mythological hero locked in mortal combat. After some min-utes he reported experiencing a "titanic struggle." His senses were un-willing to relinquish their "hold upon the earth." He complained of being "in bondage to serpentine, oriental forms that press down upon consciousness strangling its horizon." S struggles against these forces and, in so doing, experiences sensations more intense than any he has known. His effort, he now says, is directed towards "containing God." But the "Idea of God is too big to contain. One tries to know God by extending oneself outward in all directions as a circle radiates outward from its center along an infinite number of lines." S is told that he should not struggle any longer but simply "Be the circle extending outward, let yourself extend outvvard to meet God if that is what you want." S then wondered about the advisibility of this, saying that "If God is real, one would not dare to meet Him unless properly prepared." He laughed loudly and said that "My ego is still in pretty good shape. I find myself sitting down before the Majesty of God, but as a member of the House of Lords. The meeting place is long and narrow and contains a few minds who have elected God to His high office. We acknowledge our submission to His power, but only reluctantly."23 He adds that "Should I allow God to enter me, then I would expand as if filled with a wind, and finally I would burst."

After a silence of some minutes, S remarked: "I am locked in a titanic struggle. The creatures are enormous and symbolic. Whether I am losing or winning I don't know, because I don't understand the symbolism or what the outcome should be. Great colossi are fighting. Tigers and other beasts, hundreds of feet high, tear at one another's throats. These are the forces of myself, forces threatened with dissolu-tion should I abandon myself to God. The forces also have cosmic meaning—meaning beyond the meaning they have in my own psychology."

At this point, S reviewed a good deal of the material summarized at the beginning of this case. He tried to put his conflicts into conventional psychological terms, but declared himself unable to make a convincing formulation. Only religious terms were "relevant and valid" and "The big, essential conflicts are with God. Any others I am able to take care of by myself." Concerning his "conflict with God," S said that he found himself "impelled by a basic instinct of survival to fight against God. Should I be overthrown in this, then my I would be gone. To preserve itself my I must wage war against God. Once I give in, I am subject to God. My I is only able to preserve its singularity by blowing itself up very large and fighting against everything. . . . Either I meet God on equal terms, or I cannot meet him at all. I feel like a terribly battered boxer who gets knocked down again and again but keeps on getting up and coming in for more punishment. I am a battleground of the most titanic forces. All this time colossal tigers and enormous dragons are snarling at one another's throats. These forces I know to be symbolic and involved in my conflict with God, yet I still cannot say exactly what they are."

S reported that he was continuing to experience very intense sexual sensations and said that he feared abandoning himself to God because God might "take away" his "sexuality." The subject was now at the start of what proved to be a three-hours-long "battle with God." 'The psychical climate of this "battle"' was intensely emotional as at times S would "rage against God" and against his own "impotence in this terrible struggle." During much of this time he continued to describe what he was experiencing and we must condense the monologue:

"What Infinity takes away has to be infinite also. I would be sucked at both ends by God should I give myself up to Him. I am both giving all that I can and all that I have is being taken away. I have done all I can. God must sustain me if this effort is to continue ... Yes, yes I need God. I need Him out of the need that everyone has who knows he cannot stand alone against all of the forces of the universe. God has raised all these forces up and God alone can sustain them. But I don't see why I should have to fight all these terrible battles. Rather I'd pass unnoticed like some grain of sand on the beach. I see the promise of giving in to God, and also the threat if I do not. But I have started out with nothing but my bare hands and through the years have piled up plenty of weapons. If God tries to fight me in my own world, He will find me plenty tough to handle. And God, to fight me, has to be willing to assume certain human proportions. He has to dwindle down and make Himself almost human, come into the human sphere, to contend with those who can't fight Him on more potent levels.

"It is unfair! Unfair! I have no chance at all in this fight! [Here, S became extremely angry.] How do I keep my self-respect if give in to God? God stands with His foot on one's neck and will only take it away if one makes an abject surrender to Him. This I cannot do! All around me these damned tigers and dragons and herculean figures are fighting, trying to tear each other to bits .. . If we can neither give in to God nor successfully resist Him, then we have to settle for some smaller, less satisfying place in the scheme of things. But one doesn't accept it plac-idly. One always resents the fact that God is so much greater—and, even more, that God should make us aware of His greatness. One is ultimately defeated by God because one is defeated by an Idea that is greater than oneself.

"My mind goes out as far as it can go, and beyond that is God. I am beaten down again and again by it. My mind reaches out to encompass all and when it fails I get mad and start complaining that someone is greater than I. If I can't encompass all, at least I can defend myself. I can put on a suit of armor. When some small nation is threatened by a bigger neighbor and can't develop good enough offensive weapons, then it puts up good defenses. Still, there should be the possibility of some kind of agreement. To accept God seems to me to mean only surrender and this I haven't been forced to do. Every minute I fight very hard and am very, very tough. I am like an old general who has been through many wars, knows all the tactics and has developed his arsenal. . . . 'The more one acquires, the more one has to protect. What ultimately threat-ens can only be God, for ultimately God is whatever is other than oneself."

At this point the subject launched into a lengthy and scathing attack upon Christ. Christ was seen as "the archetypal demagogue, the personi-fication of the socialist concept in religious terms. . . Given all that man has learned in the last two thousand years, I consider that my mind is greater than God's mind personified in Jesus. God had to reduce Himself too much in order to make Himself comprehensible to the human masses. In Christ, God reduced himself to such miserable proportions no man of intelligence can accept Him."

Asked if God might incarnate in man again, S responded: "Only if man evolves to a scope sufficiently great that God needn't degrade Himself too much by personifying. What the hell is the matter with me? Why do I keep fighting this thing? For as long as I can remember if a fight was clearly futile, then I wouldn't get into it. I would only fight if there seemed to be some real chance of winning. But now I fight and I know I can't win. I've fought battles today like no man ever fought before. I have this possibility of seeing God as Chairman of the Board. At best, then, one can be no more than a member of the Board. It is important to know that one would then be inferior only to God, not to other people. I have fought God all my life. Other members of the Board are satisfied with money, power, that kind of thing. I have always wanted much more. I want the whole Idea of God. If one has that, the rest will follow. But the Idea of God is always just what one can't have. I can only know what is in my mind and the Idea of God is much too big to be contained by my mind." S again, at this point, launched into a furious attack on Christ and Christianity, returning from this to discuss his futile struggle against God. Time and time again, he notes, he has hurled himself "against the God-Idea in an effort to assimilate or en-compass it." Time and again he is "battered to the ground," then gets up and fights some more. It is a "futile fight" he "cannot win," but his "pride" compels him to "get up and keep trying." Also, now, he recog-nizes a certain value in this struggle. Even as he continuously flings himself against the Idea and is "knocked down" by It, his "conscious-ness is enlarged" and his "head is flattened out and gets bigger just from ramming it against the stone wall of the effort to comprehend God." Should he abandon this effort, then he would have "no more motivation to keep enlarging [his] horizons. One can vegetate in self-renunciation and assimilation into God, but by so doing one admits that one has no absolute value. If a man stands alone, apart from God, he exists as something separate and so has a certain value, however petty in relation to God's value."

Having continued in this vein for several hours, and still only four hours into the session, S suddenly appeared to have very largely shaken off the drug effects. He announced: "I seem to be coming out of it," and said that he was feeling very tired but wanted to move around a bit. He sat up on the edge of the couch where he had been lying and then got and walked around the room. He felt that his brain had been "greatly stretched" and likened the top of his head to a flowerpot with a plant growing in it. This plant ("ideas") had grown too large for the present dimensions of the pot ("mind"), was top-heavy, and felt as if "it might be pulled out by its roots." The pot now would have to grow still more in order to be able to support the plant; also, the plant now needed "better roots to support this new superstructure."

After pacing the room for several minutes, S said that the drug effects again were being felt but not so intensely as before. He sat down and began to try to analyze what had happened. As a part of this effort, he dredged up a wealth of memories from his childhood, including some left untouched even by his long self-analysis. He wondered if the "battle with God" could have been "a smokescreen thrown up to prevent any coming to terms with the real problem?" But he doubted that this was so and felt that he had been dealing with what for him was the "fundamental issue."

S felt that the answer to the "riddle" of himself must lie in finding the reason for his "early and almost instinctive tendency" to align him-self with whatever forces society regarded as evil. 'This tendency, he felt, "shou/d point to deep-rooted feelings of guilt acquired at a very early age." But he had never experienced conscious guilt and had never tried to "provoke punishment." On the contrary, he had "always exhibited extraordinary talent at not getting caught in any wrong-doing." And, when caught, he had been "extremely skillful and effective at evading punishment."

S now saw for the first time his "whole life as a recapitulation of Lucifer's struggle with God." S, like Lucifer, has wanted to be God and has been punished for his pride. Pride has been his main fault and no matter how much he has suffered for it, he has been unwilling or unable to give it up. His hunger for God, which has "been conscious only from time to time," has been a hunger "to devour God"—"to become God." His "main and driving passion" has been "the full richness of the Idea of God." This goal has at times been variously defined, but in one form or another it has been what has driven him to constantly try to expand his consciousness, to try to acquire all knowledge, to try to "bring everything" into himself.

Since childhood, S said, he had "created phantasies, worn masks, dealt in illusions." He was "like Genet, but where Genet's hangup is sexual," S's problem has been his "preoccupation with evil." He was, as a child, "a little philosopher of evil, a little Marquis de Sade, a kind of born criminal." To be this was to be unacceptable to others and so he was forced to wear masks, deal in more and more illusions. His anxiety, he thought, might derive in part from this: his fear that his mask was not good enough, his hiding place not hidden enough, so that others might find him out, see through him, and then reject him. Yet, he wanted to be accepted by others as he "really" was, and so would reveal to others just as much of himself as he could, while always stopping short of "that degree of revelation" that would cause the others to reject him. He always had the sense of not being human, of "coming from someplace else and not belonging in this world at all." He manipulated others and, for a long time, wished to make others evil just as he was evil—"so that then they could accept me?" To do this, he was obliged to try to "make evil appear very attractive to others, to show others that if they would do something evil they would get pleasure from it, so that it was good after all—so that I was good after all?" Yet, when others succumbed to his persuasion, his sense of having manipulated them tended to make him scornful of them. They were weak and he was strong, and "what is it worth to be accepted by weaklings?" He appar-ently wanted others to remain "good" in spite of all his tempting of them, but he also wanted these "good" others to accept him in all of his "evilness." Again and again, S noted, he reviewed the facts of his life to find himself in the position of Lucifer—trying to be God, tempting man and then despising (punishing?) man for succumbing to this tempta-tion. His own great sin was pride and his evil-doing may have been a revolt against his realization that he could not be God. If he could not be God, then he would be the very antithesis of God, the master of all that God "has rejected." He would carve out his own domain, even if that domain were a wasteland, and be God there. And he must try to enlarge his kingdom by taking away a part of God's kingdom—i.e., by "seducing others away from God's Good and persuading them to accept (his) evil, come into (his) domain, which can exist apart from God's because consisting of what has been rejected by God." He would "lead the whole world away from God, into evil, and thus win a kind of victory over God," demonstrating his "own power as against God's power." (S, in addition to his other proselytizing, has attempted to do this by writing novels and philosophical works which, however, he has not published.)

Yet, S remarks, at various times in his life "things have happened" to change the course of his life. He has come to see that the struggle with God is one he cannot possibly win. He has recognized the painful-ness and the self-destructive results of the struggle. He has had a painful anxiety neurosis "inflicted upon" him. 'This he conquered by acquiring "enormous amounts of knowledge" in the fields of psychology and psychiatry, among others. This knowledge he then used as '"a weapon against God," just as his extensive studies in sorcery could be seen as an effort on his part to provide himself with weapons by means of which he might "prevail against God by magical means." But even when he rejected God altogether—when he considered himself an atheist—he sometimes "felt a conscious need for God." Increasingly, in his later years, he has come to feel that he "cannot stand alone against God." He has "lost the dynamism" of his evil, but this "has only opened up an inner void since having let go of much of the will-to-devildom" he has not "filled the void by accepting God." 'This void, he recognized before his session and has "tried in many ingenious ways to come to terms with God, to be accepted by God while still not surrendering to God," and while preserving himself as "a separate entity not entirely controlled by God."

S feels that his life has been changing for the better precisely as he has become more willing to "accept the God-values and give up the Devil-values." For example, the residue of his anxiety has continued to diminish. His activities have prospered. Yet "problems remain," and he wonders whether freedom from problems at the expense of giving himself over to the "other side" could be worth the price? This would perhaps be a self-denial and a self-humiliation. God has "no right to force such a choice upon man." One is either crushed by God or one surrenders to God. S has considered it better to be crushed, no matter how painful the crushing. However, he now repeatedly emphasizes his awareness that it is stupid to fight battles one cannot win. His "stub-bornness and pride" are "surely the main source" of his difficulties. But "is giving up the stubbornness and pride and behaving not stupidly" better than the "abject surrender that seems to be the only other alter-native?" He is "unable to conceive of the problem in other terms," although he recognizes that this may be his "own deficiency and per-haps there are other alternatives" he is "not able to see."

Considering the tiger and dragon that clashed repeatedly in his images, S "would hazard a guess" that the dragon represents, on one level, his masculinity; the tiger, the feminine aspect of his character. The dragon also stands for S's sexuality, "a very complicated and knowledgeable sexuality," and the tiger for a "rather corrupt heroic-ascetic aspect of the self." The tiger also represents "occult weapons." Yet, "it is still more complicated than this, much of the symbolism is beyond my present understanding."

His unusual amount of sexual activity S now "very clearly" sees as being "something that I did to be doing something that in the world's terms was wrong although it wasn't wrong on my own terms. It was also an effort to break through a kind of barrier against really touching. This I always have had and the anesthesia I have felt during the sessions reflects this. The anesthesia is ineffective against music, because the music is not something I reach out and try to touch. Also, I have had so many sexual relationships for the ordinary reasons: physical pleasure, warmth of human contact, and so on. But to go to such an enormous amount of trouble as I have always gone to! To read so many hundreds of voluntes, to sleep with all of those hundreds of girls1 And all of it was only secondary, having no profound meaning for me. It was mainly a superimposition on Some Other Thing, an outgrowth of my need to do evil. I didn't want to do really bad things, for example I didn't want to kill anybody, but I wanted to do things as bad as I could within the limits of those laws likely to be enforced. That was why I became an atheist, a nihilist, slept all around the time and became a student of sexual perversions and all sorts of crime. I felt this constant compulsion to build up a great store of knowledge of everything that man, and especially the Christian religion, said was evil. I was as driven to do this as if it were the most basic and powerful impulsion within me."

During this period of problem-formulation on the recollective-analytic level, S frequently emphasized how important it seemed to him to be able to see his life in terms of the Lucifer myth. "On these terms," he is "able to make sense" of much of his life. However, his "initial choice" of the myth still remains "an inscrutable mystery." Why, even as a tiny child, had he always cast his lot with "the forces of evil?" Why the tremendous fascination with the Devil, demons, black magic? As the session was coming to a close S remarked that he felt that he now for the first time really understood the futility of struggling any longer against God. He could not hope to "be God" but this "need not under-mine" his "position as something other than God." Between him and God, during the session, had been "the wall of the Idea of God." This Idea of God was "by definition" beyond his comprehension. However, should he "stop trying to comprehend the God-Idea," then he might be able "to confront God directly."

S felt that his session had been extremely productive, but had "raised more questions than were answered." He felt, as did we, that he was "getting very close" to understanding himself in terms that would be more helpful and more transformative than any he had achieved by approaching "the problem" through "more conventional"—mainly psychoanalytic—means. A third session was scheduled for the following week.

The Third Session. While waiting for the LSD to take effect, S read an account of his previous session. He asked that a recording of "innocu-ous" eighteenth-century lute music be played for him and said he wanted "nothing profound or emotional." He dosed his eyes and saw himself and the guides in an ornately furnished drawing room, all suit-ably attired for the occasion. At this point the telephone (not cut off as it should have been) jangled and S leaped to his feet. He felt that the call had "ruined everything," and that now he was "going to come out of it." He thought at this time that the session had been going on for about two hours, although he had reported his "first feeling of the drug effects" about ten minutes previously.

For almost an hour S reacted to the phone call, claiming that it had irrevocably wrecked his experience. We doubted this, and suggested to the subject that he "descend" to the point he had reached in the last session. S then, in a bored and rather patronizing manner, described an image of a circular staircase with jeweled walls. But this feeble symboli-zation of his psychic de,scent could not hold his attention. He an-nounced he was resisting and again repeated that "I think I am in some danger of altogether throwing off the drug effects." S then was urged to try to discover why he was resisting the experience. It was proposed that he try to find some image for this resistance. He was silent for a moment, then said "SinIcing ship . . . I see a sinking ship and I am afraid of sinking the ship." He interpreted this image as being "partially related" to his previous session when he had fought against God in an effort to preserve his own identity. Shortly thereafter he admitted fear-ing at the start of the session that the confrontation with God was "imminent." He was now "so well prepared" for this confrontation that it would "have to happen right at the beginning or not at all." His resistance was "partly an attempt to block" his "greatest expectation just when the confrontation" seemed "most imminent." But he also was "very fearful about meeting God." "Little did I know," he said later, "that God was biding His time."

S now reported "a strange alteration of the emotional tone of the experience." The lute music now seemed "much too innocuous" and the Brandenburg No. 4 was played—this being the same concerto to which S had responded so powerfully the previous week. Now, however, S reported that the concerto "sounds very simple this time. Almost a simple little 'pop' tune. Yet always before Bach's music has seemed to me almost as complicated as the God-Idea. This is amazingl"

Asked what images he was seeing, S responded: "I envision wave after wave of comic-strip monsters bearing down upon me. I am not at all impressed." This was strilcing when compared to the intricately de-tailed and formidable monsters seen by S in the earlier sessions. The monsters had dwindled to "comic book status," somewhat as the Bach concerto had become "simple, almost 'pop' music." One wondered if the subject now might be apprehending the things of this world and of his image-world as from the perspective of deity? S now remarked that:

"Instead of myself going out and away from myself as in the last session, everything is coming in upon me." It was suggested that he try to reverse this process, but S responded by saying that he was "caught up in very sensual feelings." Returning to his discussion of the Bach, he said that "This is the first time that I've ever felt that this music is brought down to proportions that I can contain. I see how the music loses by this. I see that to try to contain the Idea of God would be to infinitely shrink and cheapen its proportions, or else one would have to stretch one's own comprehension to the bursting point. A greater rich-ness is to be had when there is something beyond comprehension, some-thing that continues to challenge." S then listened to a concerto of Beethoven. He was more impressed and found Beethoven "for the present more complicated than Bach, or perhaps it is only that the scope is greater." He described an image of "someone outdoing both Bach and Beethoven by sitting and pushing buttons on an electronic graph computer." Asked why he was insisting on reducing everything to simple or conquerable proportions, S replied that he was aware of "a great sense of a peisonal will-to-power" that was "blocicing" him off from both the experience of God and his own deeper levels. "In terms of the music I seem to have to reduce everything in this world to manageable proportions before I can hope to go beyond the things of this world and meet God."

At this point a change of environment seemed advisable and S was led into the adjoining room—the scene of most of his "titanic struggles" of the last session. The enormously complex Bach Toccata in C was played and the subject was given a little figurine of a sweet-faced child merrnaid who is holding a fish. S contemplated both music and figurine for a while and then remarked: "My mind is getting another lesson. I can see with regard to this music how easy it would be for God to contain it and also, given my present physical feelings, how easy it would be for God to dominate the world by just stimulating certain sensations. One man might control the whole world by giving people sensations they've never had before and can't get elsewhere. God has declined to do this and has left man free to go beyond his sensations and control them by means of his thinking and creating."

S then became intensely interested in the little porcelain mermaid and stared at her for several minutes. He looked up and remarked that "Maybe I can open myself up to God by understanding who I am and perhaps I can do that through this very ancient and wicked little child." (As noted, this figure is a kind of personification of childish innocence; and it quickly was evident that S was projecting himself as a child into the mermaid figure.) He continued:

"I see that her wickedness is the result of inheritance. Hair is grow-ing over her whole body and this hair is like a wolfs hair. (In fact, the merchild's hair is mostly obscured by the fish and her body has no hair on it at all. S is here referring to what he has heard about himself as an infant, as noted in our earlier summation of the background to this case.) It should not be that a mermaid has such hair. I see under the face of this child the face of Pan, the faces of corrupt priests. Her face turns into a death's head, into a succession of grimacing devils."

S then was told: "Look past all that to what is still farther under-neath. Look past your distortions to see what really is there in her face."

S responded: "I see still greater, more complex, more beautiful but less describable evils. I perceive them in terms of the child's face which reflects a whole series of works of art, and I see the mermaid also in terms of the material the artist has used to impose upon it her form. I see the infinite number of forms that might have been imposed upon this material. I see how the basically beautiful material can be beautiful or ugly in its form, good or evil, vulgar or shaped with great refinement."

One of the guides (G) asked him: "How do you relate this under-standing of forrn and matter to yourself?"

S: "I made the terrible mistake of thinking that the fault lay in the matter rather than in the forms imposed upon matter. I thought (S now speaks with very great emotion) that matter was evil. Now matter stands revealed to me as basically beautiful, but subject to whatever one chooses to do with it."

G: "Keep going deeper, and back in time, and see if you can find out when and how it was you first got this idea that matter is evil. VVhere did this idea begin with you? Go back to the source."

S: "I am in a silent subterranean place. I have the sense of some kind of machine and of operating the machine. But yet this machine is inside of me. I think that only from within this protective bathysphere-like thing do I feel safe to look around. Down here all of the things that have been so much a part of my drug images on the more conscious level are present. Dragons and snakes, especially, are at home here and are not fighting. This is where I come from. It is as if always inside of my head I somehow knew that this is my own world—the place I came out of and up from when I was born. A world so different from the face of the earth."

G: "Go ahead and describe this world."

S: "I feel that I am speaking from a deep, quiet place. There are, in this world, no straight lines ever. Everything is sinuous and serpentine, often undulating, very graceful and rhythmic. Things appear to be very hard and brilliant on the surface, yet I know they are soft and that I could crush them if I squeezed them in my hand. Everything looks hard but could be crushed if it were felt. I've alvvays seen this world before, in my images when I am lying in bed, in my dreams, and again with this drug. I find this world to be beautiful and if I can retain the insights I am getting, there will be some fundamental change in my whole being."

G: "Why will this change occur?"

S: "Because it is a perception of everything as not only potentially beautiful, but as basically beautiful in its own right and as formless matter. The forms one imposes on matter are one's own fault and not the fault of the Creator of matter. One is given this beautiful substratum of reality and what one does to it after that is one's own decision. This world which I now perceive as 'down there' is a particular world im-posed upon the plastic reality."

G: "Keep trying to find out more about this world. Find out just where it is and what it means."

S: "One seems to rise up out of it into birth in this world in which my body now is."

G: "Try again to find the source of your original idea that matter is evil."

S: "I was told that matter was evil. This teaching I have associated with Christianity. Perhaps I learned it when I was very young. It seems to me that when I was born I already was very old. I was cold and shivering—not from lack of human warmth, but because of what I already had seen in other places. It seems to me that when I was born I already was old and that I remembered things. Almost at once I forgot a great deal, but not the forms that have kept coming back to me in my images."

G: "Try to recapture those memories you think you lost just after you were born."

S: "Down here the colors, the forms, the emotional tone, every-thing is familiar. It is a very sensual and corrupt beauty. If only I can hang on to my awareness that matter basically is beautiful! . . . that beauty is inherent in the material that is plastic, malleable, so that the material can be shaped into any kind of form at all."

G: "But your feeling that matter was evil, where did it begin?"

S: "I think it may have been my initial reaction to the world. It wasn't just the environment where I found myself. It was something I knew . . . I already knew it . . . I felt . . ."
Here, the subject stopped talking and put his thumb into his mouth. For all of the rest of the period during which he discussed his infancy, he kept his thurrxb in his mouth and occasionally sucked on it. Asked to continue, he went on speaking with much emotion.

S: "I had the sense then (at birth) of cheating somebody by living . .. as if somebody wanted me to die, but I was aware of this and made up my mind that I would live in spite of it. I feel also that my father, I'm not quite sure if I mean my human father, flung me snarling and gnashing my teeth like some kind of dragon or mad dog against the whole material world . . . so that I would subdue it all and doubtless so that I could give it to him. I felt that this was what was expected of me. I had to batter down everything, bring back everything. It seems to me that I was bom shivering, snarling, and gnashing my teeth at the world like some kind of mythical animal . . . like some kind of oriental dragon . . . a yellow, miserable infant covered with long hair . . . some kind of little Mongol tyrant sitting on a throne of diapers. Yet, as this baby, I was stuck with all of the adhesions of the past, all of this corruption and anger that I had dragged up with me from below. As soon as I saw the world I snarled at it like a wild beast.
"Later I forgot some of the sense of identification I had with this world down below, I had roots that ran through all of my body, roots reaching down toward this world underneath. I have felt that one could dive into a swamp and go down and down and finally get to a place that would be home. Whenever, during my life, my mind would lose its direction downwards, then all kinds of impulses would come up from below to pull me 'back and remind me who I was. Thus I wasn't like any of the others. I didn't belong to the human race. I think I must have come up from down there because the images are so deeply rooted in my mind."

G: "Itemize these recurrent, deep-rooted images. Describe for us again this world you keep mentioning."

S: "'There are snakes, alligators, dragons, beautiful reptiles. 'They are lying on the bottom of a kind of sea, but I don't think it is water. At the edges of this place where they are there are tigers walking along the shore. Up on the beach all kinds of wild orgies are going on. Lots of sex, people getting drunk, and tigers eating the people. Tigers getting drunk on blood and then slaughtering one another."

S is now urged to try to descend to a level even more basic than this one. He says he "can do that" and reports: "I don't know how far down I am, but it is very, very far. I see myself down at the bottom of a pit and each one of its four walls slants inward towards the bottom and each wall is a single great stone slab. There are gray boulders on the floor. I have been hurled down to the bottom of this place, where I also feel myself to be. Everything I would ever want to have is looking down at me. God is up at the top and I am at the very bottom. God is the light at the top, the light over one's head. I have a feeling of having been punished and shoved down into this hole for having done something. It was something that happened before I was born as the person I now am.
"Even when I was successful and seemed to be a good child, really I was being bad because my actions were never motivated as others thought that they were. Whatever decision was made about me was made very early. I know that I am the product of hereditary factors, not environmental ones. I was born already in many ways determined. All of my life I have felt stretched apart by something trying to go up and something pulling down. I would make a little progress up, then snap back down like a pair of suspenders somebody has let go of. Always I sensed something pulling me down. I seem to see this pull downward in terms of the dragons and other beings of the 'down there world,' and in human terms of derelicts and skid row bums. I associated with the dregs of humanity so much because of what they satisfied in me—that is, this need to associate myself with something resembling or representing what I had come up from, the dragons and snakes. But always there was something in me too that wanted to get beyond this—to go in the direction of gobbling up the whole world."

G: "How would you describe this direction?"

S: "The movement was up, but it was my father who decided that the movement was 'up.' My father . . . again I'm not quite sure who I mean by my father, whether my human father or someone else . . . saw this up-movement as one towards power and possession and knowledge and a kind of expansion of consciousness generally, but to satisfy selfish-wants. I was pushed by my father in this direction. But I became aware that I saw some goals as worth pursuing in their own right, not neces-sarily because of the benefits I was going to get. At one time I saw these goals very clearly, but then I mostly lost sight of them. I was constantly being torn in three directions: Heaven, Hell and my own self all pulling me in opposite directions."

G: "What was your position in this world you feel that you came from?"

S: "I see myself down there and I may have some special kind of status. Nobody interferes with me down there." (S's image here changed and again he was down at the bottom of the pit, which he described in more detail.) "I am down at the bottom of this great stone dungeon with big goatskins hanging from walls that reach hundreds of miles up into the sky. I came into the world with a rage against it. The self I have been in this world had to pay for what someone did in some other time and place. I see myself as acting out all kinds of universal dramas and can't separate my ordinary self from these legendary selves."

G: "What are these legends you participate in?"

S: "Faust, and the Grail, and Lucifer being cast down out of Heaven." Asked about any connection between the Devil and the Grail, S declared that "The Grail is one of the things that the Devil always wants."

G: "Why don't you now go down still deeper, down to a level where you might meet God if you still want to do that."

S: "I don't know if I should. I'm afraid. If one goes down far enough one is likely to run into all the fires of Hell. If I am unable to contain God, no more am I able to contain the Devil."

G: "Why don't you try? Maybe you will find that the Devil has no more power over you?"

S: "I have the feeling of going down to see someone I always have known and whom I know very well. I see him with all his historical faces. His power was over me from the very beginning. From the day I first came in to the world I was full of the sense of his power. I could always feel his power running through me, going down like licking flames or the roots of trees, going down into the ground. There were all these impulses running down my body to there, and other impulses coming up into me from down there. I seem to have known the Devil from a very long time ago. The Devil is a literal Devil. I feel that the Devil created the earth and this seems at odds with my understanding that the substratum of reality is beautiful."

S then got up to go to the bathroom and came back reporting: "Whenever I looked at myself in the mirror during the other sessions I was always surrounded by darkness. But now I am surrounded by light. I saw myself in the mirror before as looking like the Devil. My image in the mirror was each time that of the Devil. And I have seen it often before in my life, without any drugs. As of several years ago I started seeing this Devil image in the mirror less often. But now I see my own face surrounded by light and somehow the face is changed in other ways I can't yet describe. 'This seems to me to be some kind of defeat for the Devil and at the same time I feel a hope with regard to myself that I never felt before. The hope seems to be a kind of awareness of the possibility of my being delivered from all the punishments I feel I've had to bear for what I never did . . . as if I were the one who had to bear the burden of the Devil into the world as a little child and then had to live with it."

All of this time S had given the impression of speaking from within some deep recess of himself. He began now to analyze some of the material but continued to speak as if from this deep level. He speculated as to whether "all this is a strange kind of fairy tale or has a deeper reality?" Even though he has "always borne the burden of the Devil," he has had a sense of "being bound by what seemed to be and yet not to be ethical restrictions." S "could only go so far and no more. I see I am not referring to morals, but to something more tangible. Something always prevented me from doing anything too bad. This was never a fear of getting caught, since I felt I was clever enough to get away vvith most anything. But there were literal boundaries of my own being that I couldn't reach beyond. I could only move within my own natural limits that seemed to have been given."

G: "Do you understand now anything more about the anxiety neurosis?"

S: "Why should I always have felt it with people I had to come to and ask them for something? I thought that it was probably my rage that I had to control and this rage then was turned to anxiety. Because there was never anything for me to fear. These would be people to whom I would feel infinitely superior. And I had good, objective rea-sons to feel superior to them. But finally what I began to be anxious about was the anxiety itself. I thought this helpless rage of mine, that should never have been and could not be expressed, was going to push me into a psychosis. If there was any other ground for anxiety, .I haven't been able to find it. Maybe it partly was an unconscious fear I had that others would manage to find out who I was, discover these connections I had with something down below. Situations would come up where I was certain I was going to panic. But some strength would come into me or something would happen to spare me and then I felt as if God had reached down and given me a reprieve. Many times I have felt protected by God when I did the most incredible things. I have been in places where I certainly should have had my throat cut. But some little miracle always would happen. I felt I was being saved for some pur-pose. I felt I must be a special case or else I wouldn't be tormented to the limits of my endurance, but always just to the limits of my endur-ance."

S then remarked that he had a sense of being out in the middle of a lake by himself. 'The guides were on the shore and could not swim in these particular waters. The drug subject, he observed, is always out in the middle of the water and the guides can at most be on the shore. It seemed apparent that S now was preparing to "descend" to the integral level where the subject has a strong sense of experiencing what can never really be shared with others, so that although the subject may speak about what is being experienced, he still feels himself to be fun-damentally alone. As he approached the threshold of this integral level, S remarked upon a gathering emotional intensity, expressing his sur-prise that such an emotionally charged psychical environment also could be experienced as "a state where all that is happening is good and supremely in one's best interest."

At this point, as is likely to happen when the subject reaches the threshold of the integral level, S made a kind of final summation of the data collected on the several levels and formulated mainly in symbolic-analogic terms. Speaking in a clear and almost matter-of-fact voice, he remarked that "The whole broad outline of my life, and also many of my life's particulars, now are seen by me much more clearly than ever before. I arn able to see it all as being essentially an acting out of these dramas I was caught up in. I know that there are other ways of looking at my life, but I have a very strong feeling that this is the way I can deal with the facts most effectively.

"Once certain premises are accepted as in some way true, then everything makes perfect sense. I thought that I was some kind of devil and now, whatever the cause of that belief, I have managed to emanci-pate myself from the belief and from most of its effects. All of my life I have been trying to cut loose from something at the bottom of myself that prevented me from going where I wanted to go and also from knowing what I wanted to know. What I wanted to know was, essen, tially, God. But before I could get to know God I had to cut loose from most of what bound me to the Devil. I am sorry that what I have learned cannot be put into terms that would seem to me more scientific. I continue to have some resistance to understanding myself in these ternis of God and Devil, Heaven and Hell, although I believe that these terms are the only ones really acceptable to me and effective as instru-ments of change. I would prefer not to have these naked truths stated so bluntly, but rather frosted over with lots of high-sounding medical ter-minology. But some part of my mind is especially well equipped to communicate with God and Devil. As the cords that have connected me to the Devil are being cut away, so does my anxiety diminish. I have experienced some of this during the last several years. I felt sometimes during this period that God was tossing me bones to lead me along as if I were a dog. I was afraid it might be a seduction, but allowed the possibility that it might be something else. VVhenever I have seemed to be successful in dealing with God in personal ternis, I have noticed I experience effects in my favor. As I cut through the cords or roots my anxiety diminishes. As my anxiety diminishes, I have the strength to cut through more of the cords. What was once a vicious circle thus has become a process working for me. I see that what I want most at this stage of my life is strength. Not strength to be used to subdue other persons, but strength enough to let me be master of myself. With the knowledge I have I can then use my strength to help others."

'The time now seemed to have come for this subject to experience whatever was to be the culmination of a process that had developed continuously and with minimal meandering throughout the three ses-sions. S was told that there was now no more reason to resist and no justification for resisting—that he must now have his confrontation with God if he was going to have it. S agreed with this at once and lay back with his eyes closed, somehow conveying the impression of one in a state of extraordinary calm who, at the same time, was being infused with a vitality and a spiritual force not possessed by him before.

As might be expected, the psychedelic subject is not, at such a time, very communicative. In this case, S spoke very calmly but also in terse and rather cryptic phrases, a high degree of emotion becoming apparent only toward the end of his experience. 'The guide must not interrupt at such a time to ask for amplifications, and so it is necessary to recon-struct later what has occurred. Much is undoubtedly lost in so doing, but much more would be lost were one to keep interrupting and asking for details.

As since reconstructed, S now imaged and physically felt himself to be standing in an immense and brilliantly illumined hall where shone a preternatural light predominantly an "indescribable blending of white and gold." The Presence of God was tangible and overpowering within this hall and S understood that he was about to be initiated into some kind of order as yet not defined. Before him he saw a very large "oc-cult" circle, etched into the highly polished substance of the floor. Many complicated symbols encrusted with precious stones were seen around the inner edges of the circle. And beyond the circle, through which he must pass, S perceived two tall, rectangular and gleaming white boxlike thrones. In one of these was standing, facing towards him, an enormous and exceedingly beautiful tiger; and, in the other, stood a lion of equally awesome stature and beauty. Emblazoned on the front of the boxes or on their pedestals were metallic jewel-studded bas reliefs of the tiger and lion, respectively. The initiation, S now understood, was for the purpose of investing him with "The Order of The Lion."

As his attention was drawn to the lion, S perceived from the corner of his eye that the tiger, now dead and apparently having been sacri-ficed, was being hauled up out of its box by braided ropes slipped under its forelegs; and, once clear of the throne, the tiger was lowered until it disappeared from his view.

S's attention continued to focus upon the great-maned archetypal lion standing majestically in its throne-box and facing towards him. Then, it seemed to S, he was transported to the rear of the box, stepped into it, and found himself to be identical with the lion although preserv-ing the sense of his own identity as human. His body was the body of the lion and yet it remained his own body. His face was the face of the lion and yet it remained his own face. And during this "brief" identifica-tion, which seemed to him to last no more than a second, S suddenly knew that,he had stopped being what was represented by the tiger and had become, instead, what was represented by the lion. He had left behind him the "blood-lust, anger, and unrestrained sensuality" of the tiger. The lion was "a more mature form, along the same lines of development as the tiger, but older, wiser and stronger—a creature destined to become wiser still, and who would not be controlled by his passions as the tiger had been."

S now once again assumed his own form, the lion was gone, and S stood in the place where previously the lion had been standing. He felt that now he was permitted to speak, and he suddenly found himself "asking all sorts of stupid questions of God"—i.e., was all of this "real" or was it "only a fantasy?" When he did this the lights in the hall were dimmed, and S felt that God had withdrawn in disgust at these ques-tions. However, he was somehow reassured that what had been given to him would not now be taken away.

S at this point began to speak to us and seemed to be both awed and very upset. He said that the initiation images had been "much different from all of the other images" he had seen. He said of these images that "everything had a strange, dreamlike quality and I know that the con-tent will pass away like a dream and be forgotten if I fail to tell you enough so that you can remind me of the major details afterward." He then related to us in much-condensed form the events just described.

We now urged S, since he felt that he had behaved so badly, to "Go back and tell God you are sorry. Remedy right now any mistakes you feel that you made." S then experienced the Presence of God for a second time, and on this occasion with much greater emotion than before.

'The image was of "a great hand (God's hand) that the lion (S) rubs against with his cheek and nuzzles." S began to weep and later said that this image meant to him that the relationship between God and man was revealed to him in terms he was able to accept by means of this image. "The lion," he now knew, "can take full pride in being a lion and has no reason to be disturbed that he is not a man. The man is totally other than the lion and the lion is only able to exist as what he is. Any comparisons the lion may make can only be comparisons between himself and other beings like himself. There can be no degradation or humiliation in not being something that is entirely different from one-self. I see in this image that I can love God without being diminished as a man any more than a lion need be diminished as a lion by loving a human person. To weep is something I have never permitted myself to do. But now I am weeping and it is good. These tears are tears of joy—the very first tears of gladness I have ever wept in my whole life."
While S remained in this affect-charged state, it seemed advisable in what time remained in the wake of his God confrontation to deal with some of the "symbolic symptoms" described by him. 'The most out-wardly dramatic moments of the session then occurred when S was asked to deal with his "roots."

G: "You have mentioned many times your 'evil roots,' those roots going down to the place you feel that you came from. Do you still feel those roots now?"

S: "My roots extended down to that other place. I have had to cut myself away from my roots one by one. I have a sense now of having cut through so many of these roots that there may not be too many of them left."

G: "Good, then maybe now you can pull free. Try pulling free. Pull free now!"

S: (Waves his feet in the air, makes jerking motions with his feet and legs, etc.) "I feel like I really am free! But it was so easy! I broke them off where they came into the soles of my feet. They were dry as dust and just crumbled when I started to pull away from them. Like dried old umbilicals, attached to the bottoms of my feet, and I've broken them all off. Why didn't I know before that they were ready to crumble? How long could they have been like that? Why, now I am freel" S was smiling, very excited, and looked extremely pleased and happy.

G: "And this hold that you say the Devil has had on you? What about that?"

S: "Satan has no more power to control mel I still have habit to fear, but the organic link is gone! What I just kicked loose was the whole serpent identification and the dead crumbling umbilical cord that still was tying me down to Hell. I seem to have shattered every physical connection with the place below. Lookl (S gets up and stamps his feet against the ground.) I am crumbling the last remnants of the connection under my feet. I shake off the last of the dust and I step free of it all. My perception with regard to matter was what triggered everything off—seeing in the face of the little mermaid that it could be shaped in so many ways according to the way I looked at it. Intellectually, of course, I was aware of this before. But now I really knew it to be so and it seemed that from there I could go on to other real knowledge."

S now walked around the room, picking up his feet, shaking them, and declaring he was freeing himself from the last remnants of the "dust" that linked him to the "down below" aspects of his past. He looked at us, smiled very happily, and said: "It is over." 'The session had lasted less than five hours and the drug effects were cut off about as abruptly as lights go off when someone flips the switch.

The After-Effects. However awe-inspiring the strictly religious ele-ments of the transforming experience, the subject's most immediate interest is almost always in himself and the ways he feels that he has been changed. Later, when some of his euphoria has passed, he returns to a more sober consideration of those moments of the session that were truly profound and climactic. For the present, however, the subject is intensely happy, even blissful as he continues to discover and itemize the various signs by which he knows he has been transformed.

S, for instance, discovered that with the "sloughing off" of his "roots" he experienced a sensation of lightness and also felt that the bottoms of his feet were "all new, like the feet of a new-born babe." He went to the bathroom again and found that his mirror image was sub-stantially changed. His face appeared to be simultaneously younger and more mature. He had lost his "characteristically tormented look" and his upper body appeared to him to be more trim, more muscular, and better shaped. "Above all," he felt that his "whole general outlook" had been "changed for the better." He felt "an extreme contentment" and the sense that he had been "reborn and moved far beyond the limits imposed on the old self by restrictions that now have been dissolved."

Changes noted by S the next day included the following:

The previously noted mirror image changes were retained and the face seemed also "stronger" than before. The body seemed to have been energized and to be more compact, better co-ordinated, and also lighter than in the past. The bottoms of the feet continued to feel "like those of a child, tender and sensitive, a very, very good feeling."

All of the senses seemed to be more acute, and objects were appre-hended as "presenting themselves more forcefully" and as "being less opaque, more easily yielding up meanings."

Looking down from a terrace high over the city, S found that a street scene he had always thought drab now was seen by him as "color-ful and happy." A "mild anxiety" about "falling or jumping from high places" no longer was experienced except for his noting that it did not occur.

Sitting in a chair, S felt that he was sitting "less on the chair than with the chair." In all of his "relations to externals" he experienced a heightened sense of "unity and harmony."

His emotional state was one of "tranquility, a quiet kind of happi-ness and a security coming from the knowledge of having accomplished something enormously worthwhile, of having made some very great advances." "The mind" was "active, stimulated, but without any sense of the 'manic' involved in the stimulation."

S felt that he had "gone beyond" the Lucifer myth and so had gained a much greater measure of freedom to be himself.

He noted that "There is some occasional skepticism as regards the permanency of these benefits, but it is easily shrugged off. One feels that there is no need to analyze what has happened—It is what it is, and should simply be accepted. One should wait and see what develops, expect the best, and not pick at and try to tear apart the whole experience—as perhaps can be done with any experience, na matter how valid, thus reducing or entirely forfeiting the gains. However, there is much less a fear of losing the gains than there is a feeling of 'right-ness' about letting the experience progress on its own terms. These terms were never primarily analytical, and possibly just the opposite of analyzing, breaking down. By opposite I mean that everything was directed toward fitting the pieces together into a harmonious whole, toward integrating and synthesizing."

Only two "negative side-effects" were reported by the subject. On the evening following his session, S was wallcing by the river and be-came aware of "a strange feeling of rootlessness, of having no real sense of direction." 'This was "only very mildly disturbing" and was under-stood by S as being the result of "cutting away the old roots." This feeling of rootlessness was accompanied by "a very positive feeling of greatly expanded freedom." He "rejoiced in the feeling of being free to go anywhere, of not being controlled," and felt "secure enough in the knowledge that the rootlessness was temporary and awaited my devel-oping new and positive directions."

The second "side-effect" occurred four days later and was "in-tensely distressing, but also very brief." S had awakened during the night and "felt exceedingly uneasy." He walked into the next room and "for about thirty seconds experienced what can only be described as a sort of 'metaphysical panic.' During these few seconds it seemed to me that nothing any longer held me to the earth and that because of this I might simply blow away into what I thought of as a 'void.' This feeling passed when I told myself that it was the natural result of not being tied down any longer by the old roots, while I had not yet had time to attach myself to the world in a positive way." The "metaphysical panic" had not, a year later, recurred and S felt at that time that any danger of recurrence had passed. He was now "too strong, too happy, too much at home in the world to feel cast adrift and susceptible to being blown away."

Separated from his last session by the temporal distance of one year, S felt that he could offer "more objective" evidence in support of his conviction that important changes in himself had occurred.

He noted, for example, that his work capacity was greater than before and that this could be measured both by the volume of patients he was able to handle and by an increased literary output. "Subjec-tively," he felt that the quality of the literary output was higher and that he was being more effective in his therapeutic work.

S felt no wish to be promiscuous and had "fallen in love." He was planning to be married to a woman he felt to be his equal in every respect and no longer sought out the society of persons he regarded as inferior to him. He felt more "gregarious" and had translated this into action by participating in social activities for which he previously had "never had any time."

Where before he had felt it necessary to "stay on the wagon," S now was able to drink moderately and even "get a little high on occasion" without feeling the need to drink more and without engaging in any behavior offensive to others or damaging to himself.

"Subjectively" again, S felt that he had retained almost all of the gains reported just subsequent to his session. The mirror image and the felt body image remained improved. He seemed to have more energy and this had led to greater physical activity which, in turn, had im-proved his level of fitness and the general state of his health. He felt "fully human, a bona fide member of the species." "Devils" no longer whispered in his ear—i.e., each positive thought or perception no longer was swiftly followed by a kind of "negative reflex" with the positive idea such as "How good everything seems!" at once "provoking" such a thought as "You are kidding yourself. The world is an ugly and wicked placet"

In general, he felt, "a destructive response to the world has been replaced by a response that is essentially creative."

Comments. No more than the subject will we attempt to analyze this case in any orthodox way. Conventional psyche-analysis is not a part of the psychedelic experience as we have worked with it. 'There is no purpose that requires such analysis and neither would conventional analysis very often be successful in one or even several psychedelic sessions.

S, at one year after his session, continued to regard himself as "transformed" and to behave as he feels he could only behave a consequence of an authentic transformation. These two criteria: subjec-tive certainty that a transformation has occurred, and behavioral changes of a positive character supporting the certainty of transforma-tion, seem to us to be sufficient evidence that the person has in fact been transformed. This does not mean that all questions are thereby an-swered.

We have said that this is an authentic religious experience. By that we can only mean that it is authentic in terms of such criteria as we are able to devise for measuring whether such an experience is or is not authentic. Someone else may say that "God can't be found in a bottle" and go on from there to say that one cannot have a religious experience without God. Ergo, whatever else may be involved in this case, it is not a religious experience. Definition then excludes the possibility that we are correct and the discussion ends there. However, anyone arguing in this way must also, we think, rule out most of the "religious experi-ences" of many famous mystics and saints, since these persons, too, induced in themselves physiological changes instrumental in bringing about confrontation with God and mystical union. Drugs are quicker and perhaps more effective than fasting and other ascetic practices, but the principle would seem to be the same.

Unfortunately, the high emotional content, sense of awe and rever-ence, and other elements of a psychedelic subject's religious experience cannot really be conveyed in such a way as to validate the content of the experience so far as a reader is concerned. Thus, we can only provide certain facts we consider to be relevant and then offer our evaluation of those facts and the evaluative criteria employed. Some of these criteria are also subjective and not susceptible to objective meas-urement. For example, we cannot hope to convince anyone by speak-ing of the "emotional feel" of a subject's authentic religious experience as compared to those experiences we, as observers, dismiss as inauthen-tic. The "contagion" of the authentic experience moves from the subject to those physically present and cannot be further communicated by means of the written word. The skeptic who easily dismisses the first-person accounts to be found in, say, Bucke and James, will not be impressed with regard to religious content by our data either.

It will be clear from this case as from others that our schema of psychical drug-state levels does not describe a phenomenological pat-tern of progression invariably followed by the subject. In the case just given, S certainly does not move in orderly fashion from one level to the next. Rather, he "plunges" into various "depths," "comes up" to "sur-face" at a "higher level," then "descends" again, and so on. The value of our schema is methodological, permitting us to recognize within limits "where" the subject "is" so that we are able to have some idea of what is possible at that "place"; and permitting us, too, to direct the subject toward "deeper levels" where we know from experience that certain phenomena and effects are likely to be possible. Whatever the present defects of this method, whether in lack of precision or other-wise, it nonetheless is effective to a degree we have not found any other method to be.

In the foregoing case the subject's active, intelligent, and highly developed imagination has enabled him to erect upon a rather common-place foundation an exceedingly complex and certainly fascinating superstructure. But if we do not miss the forest on account of the lushness of the foliage, we are able to see clearly enough those typical elements with which the guide may work to lead the subject toward self-understanding and, hopefully, profound and beneficial self-reorienta-tion.

In moving toward these goals it assuredly is helpful if the subject has gained by more conventional means some real understanding of his mental processes and problems. Individuals (including psychoanalysts) who have been analyzed often do particularly well as psychedelic sub-jects. However, as subject, the person must be prepared to go far be-yond the search for traumas, dissection of motives, and so forth, and operate in ways enabling him to profit to the full from all of the tools he now has at his disposal.

Particularly the subject now must work with symbolic representa-tions, not with the stark and unadorned facts of his existence. He must be enabled to formulate his problem in symbolic terms in order that the problem may be resolved on a symbolic level where it no longer is -necessary to deal with the literal factual materials so often productive of resistances not met with when the materials are symbolically repre-sented.

Once the person is able to perceive his life in these symbolic terms—in terms of a myth, as S saw his life, or perhaps in terms of the need to participate in some rite of passage—then the ground has been laid for participation in the symbolic actions. One may "go down," as S did, to the "place" where one has one's "roots" and there, in symbolic forrn, encounter materials which set in quickening motion a mobiliza-tion and orchestration of powerful, beneficent forces. The symbolization of the life, that is, initiates a process wherein image, ideation, sensation, and finally, affect, work for the person and, when final orchestration is achieved, bring about some degree of positive transformation. Observ-ing the development of this process, it becomes difficult to avoid the speculation that there exists within the person some entelechical im-petus tending towards positive integration.

That the "entelechical" process so often moves toward confronta-tion with the most potent and beneficent of all man's symbols—God—scarcely should surprise us. Neither should we be surprised when we know how often the movement is just toward this "Symbol," that the God is potent and that the confrontation with God, the authentic reli-gious experience, does have the power to transform.

Psychedelic Drugs and Mystical Experience. Of mysticism it often has been said that it begins in mist and ends in schism; and to this state-ment, -the psychedelic variety is no exception. A part of the blame for the historical abundance of misty schisms may lie with the ambiguities inherent in the mystical experience itself. As writers and mystics alike have noted, there are two distinct and differing types of mystical experi-ence available—the inward and the outward way. Variously termed introvertive and extrovertive, introspective and extrospective, both in-volve the apprehension of an Ultimate Unity with which the seeker unites or identifies. The outward way differs from the inward in that whereas the one attempts to discover the Ultimate Unity in the external world, the other introspects into the depths of the self therein to meet and yield to the Ground of Being. Mystics and writers are unanimous in declaring the inward way the superior mysticism. 'The outward variety is considered at most a preparation for the true mystic pilgrimage in-ward.

In his classic study of mysticism, the noted philosopher W. T. Stace distinguishes between the two types of mysticism and terms them extro-vertive and introvertive. He suggests seven common characteristics of introvertive mystical states of mind as evidenced from a wide sampling of the literature of mystical experience. According to Stace, these seven characteristics are:

1. The Unitary Consciousness, from which all the multiplicity of sensuous or conceptual or other empirical content has been excluded, so that there remains only a void and empty unity. This is the one basic, essential, nuclear characteristic, from which most of the others inevitably follow.
2. Being nonspatial and nontemporal. This of course follows from the nuclear characteristic listed above.
3. Sense of objectivity or reality.
4. Feelings of blessedness, joy, peace, happiness, etc.
5. Feeling that what is apprehended is holy, sacred, or divine.
6. Paradoxicality.
7. Alleged by mystics to be ineffable."

Extrovertive mysticism differs from the introvertive variety in only the first two characteristics. In extrovertive mysticism, according to Stace's typology, there is no Unitary Consciousness but only a unifying vision "expressed abstractly by the formula 'All is One.' The One is, in extrovertive mysticism, perceived through the physical senses, in or through the multiplicity of objects." The nonspatial and nontemporal character of introvertive mysticism has no place in the extrovertive variety in which there is a "concrete apprehension of the One as being an inner subjectivity in all things, described variously as life, or con-sciousness, or a living Presence. The discovery that nothing is really dead,"25 is also a crucial revelation for the extrovertive mystic.

In the psychedelic drug-state there also may occur major and minor forms of mysticism, these being roughly equivalent to Stace's descrip-tions of the extrovertive and introvertive varieties. 'The drug subject is also prone, however, to another experiential possibility of mystical awareness, one which is nothing more than an analogue of mystical experience differing from the religious analogues already described mainly in the degree of identification and the intensity with which the subject responds to persons, objects, and various drug-state phenomena. These mystical analogues we do not regard as authentic mystical or religious experiences. At best they are experiences of intense empathic communion often rendered more impressive still by such accompanying drug-state phenomena as ego loss and body dissolution. 'That these are profoundly moving and impressive experiences explains in part why it is that they are so often confused with authentic states of mystical aware-ness.

In our investigations we have discovered that religious professionals are especially given to this kind of confusion, perhaps because of their strong desire to have first-hand experience of a phenomenon with which they may have had only theoretical familiarity. As often has been true in the past, at the opportunity of moving from theory into practice the scholar and theologian will all too often mistake the sow's ear for the silk purse.

In discussing the extrovertive mystical experience as it occurs in the psychedelic state, we will limit ourselves to an examination of one of its most frequently recurring types—a type experienced by almost one half of all our LSD subjects and which we will term cosmological mysticism. Cosmological mysticism is essentially an ecstatic experience of Nature and Process which leaves the subject with a sense of having acquired important insight into, as well as identity with, the fundamental nature and structure of the universe. Rarely transformative of the person as integral level experience may be transformative, it is not a religious experience either, since it rarely involves an individual encounter with That which is perceived as God or Being. Pantheistic terms are fre-quently employed, but what the subject expresses is likely to be the pervasiveness of energy states rather than the plenitude of deity.

Cosmological Mysticism. In its best sense cosmological mysticism is an experience of Reality illumined from within; an experience in which, to quote Blake's words, "the doors of perception are cleansed" so that "everything appears to man as it is, infinite."26 It is an experience that has inspired poets and nature mystics to revel in the Immanence in things and to speak of:

. . . a sense sublime

of something far more deeply interfused,

Whose swelling is the light of setting suns,

And the round ocean and the living air,

And the blue sky, and in the mind of man.

A motion and a spirit, that impels

All thinking things, all objects of all thought,

And rolls through all things."

With the great mystics of the past this is familiar terrain and is regarded as a way station along the Mystic Path. The Protestant mystic, Jacob Boehme, was especially prone to the raptures of cosmological mysticism, for as Evelyn Underhill remarks:

"In Boehme's life . . . there were three distinct onsets of illumina-tion; all of the pantheistic and external type . . . About the year 1600 occurred the second illumination, initiated by a trancelike state of con-sciousness, the result of gazing at a polished disk . . . This experience brought with it that particular and lucid vision of the inner reality of the phenomenal world in which, as he says, he looked into the deepest foundations of things . . . He believed that it was only a fancy, and in order to banish it from his mind he went out upon the green. But here he remarked that he gazed into the very heart of things .. . viewing the herbs and grass of the field in his inward light, he saw into their es-sences, use, and properties, which were discovered to him by their lineaments, figures, and signatures ..."28

It is not uncommon for the psychedelic subject to feel that he, too, gazes into the very heart of things to discover therein the "essences, use, and properties," the "lineaments, figures, and signatures." He, too, may be certain that he perceives the "hidden unity in the Eternal Being" and knows directly the mysterious workings of Nature which science is only beginning to guess at. This sense of acquiring real knowledge of the processes of life while in the drug-state, is at first glance one of the more baffling phenomena of the state we have termed cosmological mysti-cism.

In a curious article entitled "The Religious Experience: Its Produc-tion and Interpretation," Timothy Leary asserts that "those aspects of the psychedelic experience which subjects report to be ineffable and ecstatically religious involve a direct awareness of the processes which physicists and biochemists and neurologists measure." Leary believes" that the data of the drug session provide psychedelic correlates remark-ably similar to the most advanced scientific thinking with regard to 1) the ultimate power question, 2) the life question, 3) the human-destiny question, and 4) the ego question. Leary had defined religious experi-ence as the "ecstatic, incontrovertibly certain, subjective discovery of answers to these four basic questions." He argues that since psychedelic correlates correspond so favorably to current scientific findings, the subject who achieves such information in the course of his session is undoubtedly undergoing an authentic religious or mystical experience according to the Leary definition.

Our own position is that while we have witnessed the same kind of phenomena Leary desc'ribes, we would be very hesitant to suggest as he does that in the ecstatic-psychedelic state genetic codes are unlocked, nuclear enigmas revealed, and the virtual infinity of intracellular communication lines perceived and in some sense understood. Further, we must argue that his criteria for what constitutes religious and mystical experience are not adequate as criteria for the authentic experience. As mystics through the ages have known and shown, much that is accepted as evidence by Leary is but a part of the exotica accompanying certain minor forms of mysticism.

To take a brief look at some of this exotica, we find drug subjects with little or no scientific training describing evolutionary processes in some detail, spelling out the scenery of microcosm and macrocosm in terms roughly equivalent to those used by the modem physicist, em-pathizing with primal states of matter and energy and then recounting this experience in terms more reminiscent of Heisenberg than of an hallucinatory state. Since this book already is replete with subjects' descriptions of just such experiences, there is no need to burden the reader with further "documentation" of this kind.

Still the question remains: Where is this information coming from? Is it a gift of God? of Grace? of hyper-neuronal ecstasy? Is it a result of our twelve billion brain cells astronomically interconnecting at the speed of light and now galvanized by a psychedelic drug to ever more prodigious computations—to tune in finally on the Process Itself? Or perhaps may it be, as some theorists propose, that the cell has its knowledge that Knowledge does not know? In regard to this last sug-gested explanation, it might be argued that it is a well-known fact of biophysics that there is a kind of purposiveness to all bodily processes, be they ever so microscopic. It might be, then, that in the sensitized psychedelic state the subject picks up some sense of this purposiveness from his physical processes which he then dramatizes in terrns of the drama of birth, growth, decay, and death. Or could it even be that the subject becomes aware of the purposiveness and then transforms this insight into a scientific spectacular from information dimly remembered or subliminally recorded?

Whatever the explanation may be, we believe that it is fair to say that we are here facing the same problem that was met with in the preceding chapter. There, it will be recalled, we described several in-stances of remarkably accurate and sometimes esoteric historical de-scriptions provided by persons who seemed largely ignorant of that kind of information. Just as one might have recourse to a "collective unconscious" in explaining the historical evocations, so with regard to the present phenomena one can easily fall into a kind of Jungian physical-ism, proposing a priori knowledge of energy and nuclear and cellular processes. Claiming unconscious a priori knowledge is a very seductive stance, but it does not exhaust the possibilities. A more probable specu-ation would propose the drug-induced activation of memory patterns dealing with scientific data. As we observed in the previous chapter, the average American is exposed through his reading of newspapers, magazines, TV-watching, to enormous amounts of exoteric and eso-teric inforrnation conceming a vast range of subject matter. This in-formation is haphazardly absorbed, consciously forgotten, but cumula-tively stored in regions of the mind accessible under certain conditions. As the surprising emergence of historical data into a subject's con-sciousness may constitute subliminal triumphs of Time, Life, News-week, so the scientific arcana of cosmological mysticism may be simi-larly attributed.

Having offered some suggestions as to the "where" of this material, it still remains to inquire after the "why." Why should a religious or mystic-type experience have as an important part of its content the metaphors and meanings of science? 'The reason, we will speculate, is this: Since man has been man he has limned his understanding of life through mythological motifs, finding in the myth both dimensional perspective and the emotional force necessary to interpret his world. As the mythopoeics of one age become inadequate for a succeeding age, the myth assumes a broader and sometimes more factual base from which it either develops or decays. Today the mythic mantle has passed in many cases from gods and heroes and has fallen upon the extraor-dinary hypotheses of inner and outer space. The new scientific knowl-edge concerning molecule and galaxy, DNA and RNA, force field and wave length, creation and evolution, provides the stuff of myth-malcing and constitutes part of the present domain of "sacred knowledge." It is for this reason then that we believe that after the psychedelic subject has paid eidetic and ideational lip service to traditional (but de-mythologized) myths and deities, he often will center his emotion and conviction upon the re-mythologized vistas of sacramentalized science. As we have shown throughout this book, it is a commonplace for the subject to apprehend the world both mythically and empathically. Cos-mological mysticism would appear to be the mythic and empathic ap-prehension of the world, often scientifically conceptualized by virtue of the subject's normal or subliminal familiarity with the terms and "sacred" hypotheses of the new science. Cosmological mysticism is also the mythopoeic eye ecstatically encountering these hypotheses (the dogmatics of the myth) in the data of the world and so experiencing these data as revelatory though coherent, mystical though precise.

Introvertive Mystical Experience. Among our psychedelic drug sub. jects the authentic and introvertive mystical state as described by Stace has appeared to occur at the deepest phenomenological stratum of the subject's experience. This deep stratum, of the integral level, may be reached rather quickly when the movement is towards introvertive mys-tical experience. Sensory level phenomena are especially rich and typi-cally include some variety of cosmological mysticism which may be an important first step towards the more profound mystical state yet to come. After that, the subject moves quickly through comparatively unimportant recollective-analytic materials to the symbolic experiences carrying him to the threshold of what for want of a better term we will call the Mysterium of the integral level. 'This Mysterium almost always is experienced as the source level of reality. Here, the semantics of theological discourse become the visceral realities of the subject; and such well-known concepts as the "primordial essence" and the "ulti-mate Ground of Being" take on an immediacy and clarity hitherto unknown.

Out of our total of 206 subjects we believe that six have had this (introvertive mystical) experience. It is of interest to observe that those few subjects who attain to this level of mystical apprehension have in the course of their lives either actively sought the mystical experience in meditation and other spiritual disciplines or have for many years dem-onstrated a considerable interest in integral levels of consciousness. It also should be noted that all of these subjects were over forty years of age, were of superior intelligence, and were well-adjusted and preative personalities. It would appear, therefore, that where there is an intellec-tual and other predisposition, a belief in the validity of religious and mystical experience,' and the necessary maturity and capacity to un-dergo such experience, then we have the conditions favorable to the psychedelic-mystical state.

Reports from the subjects concerning the structure and development of their mystical experience show a remarkable similarity. Along with generally confirming the characteristics of the introvertive mystical ex-perience as Stace describes it, they also agree as to many particulars met with, too, in the classical literature of mysticism. In almost every case the experience is initiated with a sense of the ego dissolving into boundless being. This process is almost always attended by an experi-ence of the subject being caught up in a torrent of preternatural light. S-4, a forty-nine-year-old woman (LSD), gives a typical description of this light:

"My body became the body of bliss, diaphanous to the rhythms of the universe. All around and passing through me was the Light, a trillion atomized crystals shimmering in blinding incandescence. I was carried by this Light to an Ecstasy beyond ecstasy and suddenly I was no longer I but a part of the Divine Worlcings. There was no time, no space, no 'I,' no 'You,' only—the Becoming of Being."

Another common aspect of the experience is the subject's becoming aware of himself as continuous with the energy of the universe. This is frequently described with words to the effect that the person was part of a dynamic continuum. It is also experienced as a state in which the subject feels himself to be filled by divinity. We find this illustrated in the experience of another LSD subject, S-5, a fifty-two-year-old engi-neer, who writes:

"Although consciousness of self seemed extinguished, I knew that the boundaries of my being now had been dissolved and that all other boundaries also were dissolved. All, including what had been myself, was an ever more rapid molecular whirling that then became something else, a pure and seething energy that was the whole of Being. 'This energy, neither hot nor cold, was experienced as a white and radiant fire. There seemed no direction to this whirling, only an acceleration of speed, yet one knew that along this dynamic continuum the flux of Being streamed inexorably, unswervingly toward the One.

"At what I can only call the 'core' of this flux was God, and I cannot explain how it was that I, who seemed to have no identity at all, yet experienced myself as filled with God, and then as (whatever this may mean) passing through God and into a Oneness wherein it seemed God, Being, and a mysterious unnameable One constituted together what I can only designate the ALL. What T experienced in this ALL so far transcends my powers of description that to speak, as I must, of an inefFably rapturous Sweetness is an approximation not less feeble than if I were to describe a candle and so hope to capture with my words all of the blazing glory of the sun."

It is characteristic of the subject during the mystical state to feel that the categories of time are strained by the tensions of eternity. "Everything was touched with eternity," said one subject. "Time was no longer. Eternity had burst in," said another. "Eternity had flooded the gates of time," said still another.

The subject experiences the world as transfigured and unified. He describes himself as haying been caught up in an undifferentiated unity wherein the knower, the knowledge, and the known are experienced as a single reality. In the following case we have an account by a subject whose whole experience largely typifies the range of phenomena en-countered in the psychedelic mystical experience. 'The subject, S-6, is a highly sensitive and intelligent woman in her late fifties. She wrote the following "Subjective Report" about twenty-nine hours after taking 75 micrograms of LSD:

"For those interested in the type of experience that was mine I should like to record, in the interest of 'preparation,"motivation,' that I have, for over twenty-five years, been drawn to the philosophy and literature of ancient China, India, and Tibet, and have practiced the science of meditation. After reading the published account of Aldous Huxley's experiences under mescaline, I hoped some day to have a similar opportunity to know the true meaning of an expanded con-sciousness. After waiting some years, this was given. Under guidance and in the company of beloved friends, I was given 75 gamma of LSD.

"Lying on a comfortable couch, in a room of great serenity, filled with roses, pansies, and hydrangea, I felt almost immediately a sense of profound relaxation and a great inner peace. I watched the sunlight on the ceiling as it played through the shadow of the windowpanes reflected there.

"Soon a shell-pink rose was given to me to observe. I sat up to do this and though quite prepared for the phenomenon given to most everyone under this influence, I was overwhelmed by the life that pul-sated through this fragile, delicate flower. Its petals rhythmically ex-panding and contracting and hues of pink rushing into its heart and out again. It was spellbinding, and as I re-emerged into a three-dimensional world I looked with awe upon what I considered a live, fresh flower and realized that it was only a 'still life' in comparison to that which had been given. I asked whether my hand was trembling, so alive was this quivering rose. Later, I observed the rich, deep velvet tones of a large-faced pansy with the same 'inner seeing' only its heart became a fathom-less tunnel of light.

"Now I no longer wanted the abstractions of this kind of glory, for deep within was the thirst for a greater knowing into the ancient Wis-dom teaching I had long wrestled with. Closing my eyes, my position was suddenly shifted to some Oriental posture—legs folded across—palms facing up—wrists meeting under chin—it was pleasant—as if it were a pranldsh, almost impish moment into some former incarnation. Then followed this verbatim description (from notes made at the time) of what came out as 'The First Absorption'—The longing of my soul to experience the Reality of Oneness with the Absolute was my paramount hope and motivation in taking LSD—that some breakthrough might be given. Also, long had I contemplated whether Identity is sustained in the final Absorption. With these thoughts, I became a diffused light that broke into a brilliant glittering, quivering thing—then it burst—bringing a shower of dazzling rays—each ray filled with a myriad of colors—gold, purple, emerald, ruby—and each ray charged with a current—throwing off sparkling lights—there was the Ecstasy—all identification with self dissolved. 'There was no sense of time-space. Only an aware-ness of Being. At last I cried: cannot endure this any longer. It is enough.' Someone whispered: 'You are given that which you can en-dure.' Then I wept. I recall there were 'instances' of a returning aware-ness. At no time was there a sense of the individualized self. I never knew when T entered the stream. Only the emergence out of it.

"I joined the group who were having a late (?) lunch (there is no time) on the terrace. A friend asked whether I would like to have something and I said no and made a remark about those 'historic fig-ures' reputed to have lived a life without partaking of food and won-dered how this could be. Instantly, I became a vessel—a mighty force of energy, sparkling, crystal-like, and pure, came pouring into me. I remember thinking or saying—This is the pure source of energy—right from the very mouth of Godhead.' The current entered into me—through the fingers first, then coursed through my entire body and all of me seemed electrified. I felt energized, knew to an overwhelming degree the meaning of regeneration and thought 'this is how it's done.' Why should this have to go into the earth, to be converted into food—to be digested and again converted into energy, when one may have it pure and glorified. I saw it dissipate itself into the earth and rise with incredi-ble speed into a spiral going up, up, up, and then I spoke of the Whirl-ing Dervishes and understood the Cosmic meaning of all nature dances and how man and nature merge into one.

"I was reminded that I had not yet known the joy of being outdoors, in the grass and under the trees. We went out beyond the house where I lay in the grass, felt its wondrous texture with my fingers and toes, then rose to stand under a cedar tree. Embracing its branches and burying my head, I was overcome by the crisp, pungent fragrance of the cedar. At that moment an icy wind began to blow over and through me and I was shifted to some solitary height, measureless, boundless, and inde-scribable. There I shivered and in that instant there came a repeat of the former, shatteringly ecstatic experience of an exploding shower of sparkling light, pouring into me illuminating rays of glittering jeweled tones—ememlds, amethyst, ruby, and gold.

"We returned indoors. I again stretched out on the couch, ex-hausted, spent. In conversation I mentioned everything that I had ever sought to experience in the realm of the 'other world' had been given—although the 'between worlds' had not. Instantly I became aware of a formless mass hovering above the gross body. At first it appeared with a cloud-like dimness—the texture gradually becoming more and more delicate and finally translucent. There was a sense of buoyancy—an inexpressible joy. I thought 'this may be suspended animation.' Unlike the two earlier experiences, this awareness had form. It was lovely and one knew why meditation at this level could be indefinitely sustained. I do not recall that 'it' had identity. I believe not.

"After the guides felt the peak had been reached, it was explained that I would descend quietly and cold cloths were applied to my head which now was throbbing. 'The ache became concentrated at the center of my forehead—between the eyes. 'This became so penetrating that I placed the third finger of my left hand on the spot and pressed down with all my strength. In so doing the finger became an iron shaft that kept pushing down, down, down. It was excruciatingly painful and remained so. All the while I felt something was 'being done.' The sense of several faceless, formless, and nameless presences were around the area making a concerted effort to keep the shaft going deeper and deeper. The pain increased and I cried out: `Nlo more today, please. Don't give it all in one day.' And suddenly the pain reached such intensity that it was no longer a pain. Questions were asked by voices in the room and someone mentioned the third eye episode and asked was it similar and what did it mean to me. I felt the shaft and said simply, 'an initiation.' It diffused itself by streaming to the base of the skull and dividing. The ache back of each ear was awful until it flowed into many little veins and entered some subterranean passage. The area between the eyes felt as if some surgery had been performed, the wound stitched and with the anesthetic waning, was left tender and sore."3°

Although the experiences of introvertive drug-state mysticism are integral level experiences, they rarely yield any such radical transforma-tion of the subject's inner and outer life as ordinarily results from the integral level religious experiences. The reason for this may be that those few subjects who are sufficiently prepared for and able to attain to introvertive mystical states are already persons of exceptional mental and emotional maturity and stability. 'The present potential of the per-son already has been in large measure realized. It is also possible, however, that the aforementioned tendency of these subjects to avoid or minimize work with psychodynamic materials may preclude the possi-bility of a transforming experience.

Apparently, introvertive mystical experience, at least in the case of the psychedelic subject, does not occur except in those instances where preparation has been considerable and a state or readiness for the mys-tical experience has been established. It may be significant that in each of our six cases of introvertive mysticism, the subject probably was, at the time of the session, near the peak of his or her preparation and readiness to undergo a profound mystical experience. Thus the function of the drug-state seems to have been that of giving the subject the final push off the mystical brink on which he or she already was standing.

We have said that the psychedelic mystical experience closely re-sembles the seven-point typology of mystical experience set forth by Stace. In fact, when Stace recently was asked if he thought the psyche-delic mystical experience to be similar to traditional mystical experi-ence, he responded that "It's not a matter of it being similar to mystical experience; it is mystical experience."81 To this judgment we would like to introduce a qualification we feel to be significant to the future devel-opment and understanding of states of religious and mystical consciousness.

Our qualification has to do not with the culmination of the mystical experience—since we feel that the psychedelic and traditional varieties afford a virtually identical experience of non-sensuous, atemporal Uni-tary Consciousness—but with the developmental process of the experi-ence, since here we have observed the psychedelic type to differ dia-metrically from the traditional. These differences of process are evi-denced in the following important manner:

In nondrug introvertive mysticism, whether of the Eastem or West-ern variety, the seeker attempts a long, arduous process of gradually emptying his mind of all its empirical content; that is, of all events, associations, sensations, images, sytnbols—until the mind becomes a virtual vacuum which then can be "filled" with the Mystic Void. By thus systematically ridding the mind of its multiplicity the traditional adept attains to the pure essence of the Undifferentiated Unity, the One without a second. But in the psychedelic experience, it would appear that just the opposite happens. Consciousness expands and reaches outward to encompass a wealth of phenomena unprecedented in the subject's experience. The empirical content of the subject's mind is vitalized, the multiplicity compounded, and the fullness of awareness increases to an intensity that may seem almost too great to be borne. Then, with the crossing-over into the integral, consciousness abruptly and spontaneously contracts, narrowing to a focal point of awareness, which being so compacted then explodes into the mystic state of One Single Reality. 'The process is such that the phenomena condense into the Noumenon, the many into the One, the particulars into Essence.

While it is impossible at this time to make comparative qualitative judgments concerning psychedelic and traditional mysticism, it appears to us evident that the process leading toward Mystical Culmination is far richer in the case of the psychedelic subject than is the via negativa or path of obliteration of the traditional mystic. This is an area in which our conclusions have not yet crystallized and to the consideration of which we plan to give much further attention. However, we do feel it possible to suggest that the disparate processes involved in these two mysticisms may do much to explain the withdrawal from life of many of the traditional mystics as compared to the psychedelic mystic's oft-observed tendency to move towards a fullness of experience.

In the case of our six subjects who experienced the introvertive mystical state, the only significant change in post-session behavior ob-served by either us or the subject was a change toward increasing con-cern with and appreciation of the particulars of existence. For if one were to note any single deficiency characteristic of all of these subjects, it would be the somewhat abstracted attitude they had acquired as a result of their years of preparational devotions. The beneficial effect of the psychedelic mystical experience, then, was to take the subject through a process of experiencing Essence in such a way that it illumi-nated all of existence, making him more interested in and responsive to the phenomena of existence than he had been before. Thus, instead of retreating from the phenomenal world, as often occurs with the tradi-tional mystic, the psychedelic subject was inspired by the process of his experience to a kind of flight towards reality.82

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