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Having fingers is just as much part of being human as having a head. So they’re not puppets. They move by themselves, see?
It’s one of the most interesting things about human fingers. And yet, they’re you—just as we move around by ourselves, and yet we’re something a lot more than that. So this comes, then—this catastrophic moment—when you realize that your ego is reduced to a joke.
Because you’re intolerably guilty and there’s nothing you can do about it. You can’t make amends without creating further trouble. You know how it is when people get into a family argument?
Somebody tries to apologize and that makes everything much worse than it was before. Well, it’s this—on a cosmic scale! But it’s all been brought out, you see, by the Lord—whether he’s God the father or whether he’s the image of Jesus Christ acting as guru.
See the many ways in which it’s done. Take the famous Sermon on the Mount in which Jesus says, “Be not anxious for your life; what you shall eat, what you shall drink, and what you shall put on. For is not living more than meat?
Is not the body more than clothes?” And then he says, “Look at the wild birds who do not sow”—or they practice no agriculture, they don’t gather things into barns—“and yet your father in heaven feeds them.” All that. Everybody always says: “Of course, nobody can practice the Sermon on the Mount. No sensible, provident person would dream of following this advice.” Then why is it offered?
It’s saying, you see: you ought to go back to the life of spontaneity, of not making plans for the future; the life of impulse. The implication is: why can’t you? Figure that one out.
Why can’t you be spontaneous? What’s stopping you? Why can’t you obey this precept?
Why can’t you obey the precept “thou shalt love?” Thou shalt be artificially natural. Thou shalt be purposively unselfconscious. Thou shalt free asso— Almost all the great religions of the world are in some way associated with a drink.
Judaism and Christianity with wine, Islam with coffee, Hinduism with the milk of sacred cows, Buddhism with tea. And, in one way or another, these sacred drinks are used for sacramental purposes, and a sacrament—defined (at least in the Anglican Church) as the outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace—is a very common feature of religion throughout the world, although one which is, I would say, highly disapproved of by many people living in the modern West under the influence of Protestantism and humanism. A sacrament, in other words, is a method of giving spiritual power or insight through corporeal means: as, for example in the sacrament of baptism, Orthodox Christians believe that through the pouring on of water (a physical substance), a person may be in some way united with the power or the grace of God.
Or that the right formula, said by the right person over bread and wine, may transform them verifiably into the body and blood of Christ, so that whoever partakes of them (on the principle that you are what you eat) becomes transformed into Christ. Behind the more obvious drinks or sacramental liquids associated with the various religions there are some religions which imply more potent substances. And so one associates Islam and the whole Arabian culture with the use of hashish.
And no one can doubt (who knows anything about the effects of the substance) that the people who painted Persian miniatures and who designed the great arabesques of Islamic civilization, no one can doubt that those people had had the sort of vision which comes through participation in hashish. Likewise, the earliest Vedic texts of India mentioned something called soma, and nobody really knows what soma was. But one may guess, in view of modern practices in India, that it was some derivative of the plant cannabis, which is today in India and has probably for centuries been used by certain types of yogi.
For example, the Shiva worshipers use it very widely in the form that is called bhāṅg (which is a drink) or ganja (which is smoked). In China there was for a long time, in the Taoist school of philosophy, a quest for the elixir of life. And this was associated with Taoist alchemy.
And when you read alchemical texts, you must realize that they are always veiled. The Taoist sages were apparently looking for an elixir of immortality that would convert a human being into an immortal. And it was supposed that, if you hit on the right elixir, when you became an old man and your skin was shriveled, it would eventually peel off and reveal a youth underneath as a snake changes its skin.
And there are statues in certain parts of China of venerable old sages with their skin falling off to reveal a young face below. Many sages, and indeed even emperors, died from drinking concoctions that purported to be the elixir of life. One of the ingredients of the elixir was always tea.
And, of course, tea as drunk in Buddhist circles is not the tea that you ordinarily drink. The real ceremonial tea of the Far East is not steeped tea leaves, but green tea ground to a very fine powder. And this has hot water poured over it, and then with a whisk it is stirred up into a thick mixture.
And drinking a few cups of this puts you in a state of extraordinary wakefulness, and therefore has long been used by Buddhist monks for purposes of meditation. It has a mild psychedelic or consciousness-expanding effect. The Tibetans likewise brew an incredibly thick tea, which they mix with yak butter.
And to us it is an appalling concoction, but to them very soothing and comforting, and also wakeful. And, as you know, throughout the Amerindian cultures, religion is very greatly centered around divine plants. The use of the peyote cactus, the use of yage, of mushrooms such as psilocybe mexicana, the convolvulus type flower ololiuqui—the use of its seeds—and a very considerable number of other plants which have been cataloged by Professor Schultes of Harvard.
Even seaweeds. All sorts of funny things are considered divine plants. And the mushroom psilocybe mexicana is known, of course, as teonanacatl among the Indians, a word which means “the flesh of God.” To an enormous degree, then, throughout the world there has been the use—going back as far as we can find any record—of some sort of plant, either chewed or distilled or boiled or whatever, which transformed consciousness and was alleged to give mankind the vision of divine things.
And therefore it was, in the precise definition of the term, a sacramental plant. Now then, the objection to this is very strong in the modern West. And there indeed have always been people who found that this kind of practice was to be deplored, and I want to (in a moment) go into the reasons why.
But it must be said, in the modern West, that the use of any material aid to spiritual insight or development is always looked upon with disfavor because it is described as a crutch. And our type of culture feels happier if it doesn’t use a crutch—in other words, if you do it yourself. Somehow or other, the use of a crutch—or as people call it with that question-begging word: a drug—seems to be something which is a sign of weakness.
If you’re a real gutsy fellow, and if you’re going to get this thing in a manner which is natural, legitimate, and the manner in which it will really stay with you, you ought to work at it by your own efforts. And you will find this extremely exemplified in, say, Christian Science, where they don’t want to use even ordinary medicine for physical health, even though every Christian scientist is dependent upon daily food, both vegetable and meats, and eats them quite gaily without any feeling of guilt, whereas actually he ought to realize that if he had sufficient faith, he would be able to live even without air. I suppose air is a crutch on which we depend, and Earth is a lamentable ball on which we have to stand in order to hold ourselves up.
But if you explore deeply into the doctrines and the history of almost all religions whatsoever, you will find that there is simply no do-it-yourself way. Invariably, whatever path and whatever method is followed, there comes a point in which the efforts of one’s own will or of one’s own ego have to be abandoned. You know, perhaps, that in Buddhism there are two schools which are respectively called jiriki and tariki in Japanese.
Jiriki means “one’s own power,” tariki means “another’s power.” And most forms of Buddhism are classified as jiriki on the principle of the Buddha’s final words to his disciples, “Be lamps unto yourselves. Be you a refuge unto yourselves. Take to yourselves no other refuge.
Work out your own deliverance with diligence.” And so in Zen, in Tendai, in the Theravada (or southern forms) of Buddhism, you will always find that meditation practice or spiritual growth is a matter of using relentless effort to control the mind, to be concentrated, and so on. But as this effort develops, its term always is that you reach an impasse in which your will and your ego comes to a state of absolute frustration; where you find that there is nothing that you can do to reform yourself, to make yourself unselfish (which is, of course, a form of lifting yourself up by your own bootstraps), that not only is there nothing that you can do, but there’s also nothing that you can not do. In other words, your energy will be as phony as your relaxation.
And at this point in the process (of yoga or meditation or whatever it is) there must transpire a state of surrender, of total giving up. And it is precisely at this moment that the transformation of consciousness (which all these various religions are after) can come about. Because in one way or another, all of the religions—without any question so far as I can see, all of the (I would say) great religions of the world (we might exclude a few weird cults)—but all of them are concerned with achieving a state of consciousness which is no longer egocentric.
Furthermore, a state of consciousness in which we see through a trick which, during the egocentric state, we always play on ourselves. And that trick is that we become unable to be aware of the relativity of opposites: black and white, light and darkness, good and evil, pleasure and pain, life and death. All these things—or, say, one’s self and the external world; the self and the other—all these things, in the egocentric state of consciousness, seem to be separated, opposed to each other.
Whereas the most elementary logic should tell us that they necessarily go together. In other words, if you are a superior person in any way—morally, intellectually, physically—you have no means of knowing that you’re a superior person except through the presence of relatively inferior people. And were they to disappear, you would be in limbo and you wouldn’t know where you were at all.
The higher always depends on the lower in the same way as the flower of the plant depends on the soil, the rows upon the manure. And so, too, the subjective (the self) goes along with the objective (what the self knows) in an inseparable union. But we have managed to screen this out of our normal consciousness and to conduct our lives as if we could make white exist without black, and light without darkness, and pleasure without pain.
But when the egocentric state is surpassed, it is seen that these things all go together. And the curious consequence of this is not that the world is felt to be a mere balance between opposed forces, not a simple compromise, but somehow it becomes obvious (when you see the unity of all opposites) that the world is transformed into a thing of glory. It’s very difficult to explain that logically, but it simply is so with reference to this different kind of consciousness.
In other words, what happens is this: that everything that you tried formally to exclude and to deny and to overcome is seen to be part of a harmonious construction, so that the whole world is seen as profoundly harmonious. That everything in it is as it should be. And this is so difficult to explain to people who don’t see it that very many people who have this kind of experience remain tongue-tied.
Not only is it difficult to explain to ordinary people, but it’s very shocking to ordinary people. Because it seems to undermine all the game rules and all the moral rules of the social order, and to be saying that evil things and bad things are perfectly alright because they are actually in a secret harmony with the good. And if you understand that superficially, and you are not a very intelligent person or a very sensitive person, you might indeed run amok and justify any kind of conduct whatsoever on the grounds that it’s all part of a universal harmony.
And this, of course, is why there has (through all the centuries) been a kind of esotericism, a kind of secrecy, attached to these deep matters—both to the state of consciousness itself and to the various means of bringing it about, whether those means be sacramental or whether they be some form of meditation, prayer, or other type of spiritual discipline. In both cases—let me remind you—in both cases there has always been a certain secrecy about it. Or rather, these things have not been taught to people, or given to people, who were inadequately prepared.
And this is a grave, grave problem in the modern world, because we are today living in a world where there are very few secrets. That is to say, scientific knowledge of any kind is, of necessity, public knowledge—or at least public among scientists. There are types of scientific knowledge, of course, which laypeople simply cannot understand, because the language in which this knowledge is expressed (say, for example, mathematical language) has to be learned and is difficult to master.
And so many popularizations of scientific ideas are at the same time partial falsifications, because these ideas cannot be said in English or French or German, even though they can be said in algebra. So, in a way, all knowledge guards itself, because to understand it you have to follow to some extent the path which was followed by the people who discovered it. But nevertheless, as a result of scientific technology in the modern world, an enormous number of things, very dangerous things, are made available to fools—not to mention the fantastic powers of destruction which technology has given us.
And so it is very difficult indeed to keep secrets in this day and age. Everything has been published. All the mysteries, practically, have been let out.
And in the thought of ancient Hindu philosophers this would be regarded as a sign of the final decadence of the world: the coming on of the Kali Yuga, or the black destructive epoch at the end of the cycle in which the whole world is destroyed. Be that as it may. So I would start out by saying, then, that even among those religious or spiritual disciplines which follow along the lines of an extreme exertion of the will, those jiriki (or self-power disciplines) eventually come to a point which is the same as the tariki (that is to say: those that rely on a power outside the individual will beyond or deeper than the personal ego), they come to the same place.
Of course, really, the difference between the two schools depends upon a definition of one’s self. If you start out by defining yourself as your ego, then what is other than you or a greater power than you will seem to be different from you. But if you start out by defining yourself as something more than your ego, then the power which transforms you will still be your own.
For example, most people define their hearts as something other than themselves. We say “I have a heart” rather than “I am a heart.” The heart is an engine (for most of us) which supports the existence of the ego. And somehow we have it; it’s an engine that goes on in us like the engine in our car—which, if you’re not a mechanic, you don’t really understand, you just use it.
And so, if you think of your heart as other than you, it is something that mysteriously happens inside you beyond your control. But, on the other hand, if you regard your heart as very much you, as the center of your physical being, then you will be accustomed to think when you beat your heart that you are doing it. So, for people who come in the Judeo-Christian tradition, they’re inclined to feel that their heart is not themselves.
The psalmist says, “Behold, I am fearfully and wonderfully made.” He looks at his own body and is astounded, and says, “Since I don’t understand it, it must be the work of a God who is other than myself.” On the other hand, when a Hindu defines himself, he doesn’t define himself merely in terms of those types of behavior which are voluntary, he defines himself also in terms of involuntary behavior. And so his heart seems as much himself as anything can be. So it’s really a matter of semantics as to what is self and what is other within you.
It depends where you draw the line. But it seems to me unquestionable that in all spiritual traditions whatsoever there comes a point at which the personal ego, the individual will, reaches a limit by one means or another, and where it is transformed by something that is not willed, but seems to happen spontaneously. The Christians call it Grace, the Hindus call it prasad, the Buddhists call it bodhi (“illumination”).
But in every case it happens of itself—or, as the Chinese would say, it is ziran: “of itself so,” “spontaneous.” So there is really no grounds for objecting to sacraments, because they are something that come to us from (as it were) outside, and do something to us which is beyond the control and understanding of the will. It always is that way. But now, this is not an experience in which the will and the ego have no part to play, no part at all.
And here comes the danger of all types of transformation of consciousness—mystical experience, sense of union with the divine, or whatever you want to call it—however obtained. It is essential that they be (what I would call) grounded, brought down to Earth, harmonized with everyday life and with human society. And this requires a discipline.
Every tradition looks with disfavor upon those who simply steal the divine secrets and enjoy them without some kind of discipline that should go along with it. And thus the destructive effects of all these things are particularly manifested in people who have no capacity for the kind of discipline that must go along with them. And that is true not only of sacraments and divine plants and yoga practices, it is true of all things whatsoever which we might enjoy.
Because enjoyment of any kind is really impossible without an accompanying discipline. Just think of a few things which are pleasurable and which can be simply snatched and swallowed. Start with candy: would there being such a thing as a palatable candy bar unless there were some expert in the making of sweetmeats?
Think of booze: you know, it isn’t just alcohol that one throws down—that is to say, if you want to have any lining left to your stomach—but skillfully prepared wines and liquors, based on a long tradition of the vintners art, which is a discipline. Consider roaring along in a fast car: you have an exceedingly short career in this thrill if you don’t know how to drive, and the car itself depends upon the skill of master mechanics. I can’t think of any pleasure at all which does not require an accompanying discipline.
Take sex: a lot of people do take it like that. And they, I guess, have a kick out of it, but it has no profound pleasure to it unless there is the discipline of an intimate relationship with another human being, which requires a great deal of intelligence. And also the merely physical aspect of sex is a considerable art which very few people ever seem to learn.
That is why our culture has sex on the brain, and is perpetually thinking about it and perpetually obsessed with it in a kind of voyeuristic way: because there is so little satisfaction and so little discipline and so little knowledge of how to use it. So every pleasure whatsoever involves a method of grounding it, a method of integrating it with everything else. And thus, if there are ways of attaining what is potentially the greatest delight of all—the sense of the divine, or whatever (I’m using that word as the vaguest possible word), the sense of transcending the gulf between the individual and the eternal universe—if you snatch that and have that experience, and you don’t do anything with it and you’re not properly prepared for it, you’re liable to get into the same sort of trouble as you would get through the insensitive use of any pleasurable thing whatsoever.
And it is for that reason, then, that it is very true to say that psychedelic substances, the chemicals derived from the divine plants, are dangerous. There is no question about it. And especially those like LSD, which produce their effects as a result of taking an extremely small quantity.
You know, if you want to get drunk on beer, you have to put down quite a bit of it. And there is a limit, you know, to how much beer one can swallow in an evening. It’s pure bulk.
But you don’t run into that kind of limit with far more potent substances which don’t involve any difficulty in eating. You see, the way the Indians take peyote cactus, it’s pretty difficult to put down. It’s nauseating, even though they get used to it—but even so, to chew all that stuff!
And so there is a limit set that way. But in these highly refined elixirs there isn’t that kind of limit. And our culture is full of plain, downright goofy people who will try anything, and don’t know anything about it.
And in the present state of affairs in the United States, the whole matter of psychedelic substances is in a state of inane confusion which beggars description. So let me say, first of all, a little bit about the nature of these things. They’re called drugs, but this is obviously a word which is unclear.
There is no definite, clear line that can be drawn between a drug and something used for food—say, like vitamins. A group of physicians and a group of lawyers got together not so long ago to see if they could arrive together at a legal definition of addiction—that is to say: dependence upon some chemical—and they kept finding that whenever they thought they were right on the definition, that they’ve really got somewhere, that their definition also applied to dependence upon a foodstuff. This is a very, very difficult thing to define.
Now, as between various types of chemicals that do produce changes in consciousness, there are wide differences. All of them could be said to be addicting in perhaps a psychological sense. That is to say: supposing you belong to an in-group where taking LSD is de rigueur, it is the thing to do, and everybody compares notes as to how often and how much, and engage in a kind of one-upmanship with each other as to how often they’ve been on a trip.
Well, this is asinine because you’re following this practice simply to be one of the boys (or girls, as the case may be), and to remain in an in-group, when you should—if you have disciplined yourself in the use of consciousness-transformation—you should come to see the folly of belonging to an in-group. So, in that sense, some of these things could be said to be addicting. Others are addicting in a much more physical sense.
The opiates, for example, have very difficult withdrawal symptoms if one doesn’t use them constantly. But this addicting factor is not characteristic of all substances used for this purpose. In other words, not everything that is used for the expansion of consciousness is a narcotic.
This, of course, is—I’m going over things that to some of you are elementary. The word “narcotic” means sleep-inducing and that which makes one soporific, which dulls or dims the senses. So, of course, alcohol is a narcotic in sufficient quantity.
Opium, likewise, is a narcotic: is used for dulling the sense of pain. Morphine is a narcotic in the strictest sense of the word. But substances such as mescaline—which is the derivative of peyote, or a chemical synthesis of the same thing that is in peyote—is not a narcotic.
LSD is not a narcotic, psilocybin is not a narcotic (from the mushroom), and cannabis is not a narcotic, because these substances tend to do something very different from producing sleep. They tend, instead, to produce a peculiar kind of wakefulness: a sharpening rather than a dimming of consciousness. And so they must not be lumped in the same category as things which are true narcotics.
And I would say it would be part of the definition of a true narcotic—that is: it is also addicting, as alcohol is addicting, as the opiates are addicting—that you become dependent on them and only with great difficulty can shake them off. The same is true, of course, of tobacco. It is very difficult for a hardened smoker to drop it, and it is therefore addicting.
Although I doubt whether it is actually a narcotic in the sense of the sleep-inducing thing, or something that makes you insensitive. Now, our absurdly paranoid government agencies have never learned in fifty years how to handle these problems, despite the lesson of prohibition. The authorities still think that the only way to deal with even dangerous narcotics is simply to suppress them, not clearly realizing that this makes them all the more attractive, and that it creates an enormous crime problem which (without suppression) would not exist.
Because the minute you suppress something and it becomes illegal, people know that there must be something extremely exciting about it. And it’s very difficult to suppress these things. You can suppress it a little bit.
In other words, you can pick out a few fall guys and make terrible examples of them by electrocuting them or putting them in prison for an incredible number of years. But this invariably only scratches the surface. Because when something wrong or illegal is really popular there is no way of suppressing it, because all the hotels in the United States would not be sufficient to jail all the criminals involved.
This has never worked. And why people don’t learn from history is beyond my comprehension. It becomes much worse as people become aware that there are an enormous number of varieties of things that will produce psychedelic effects, and that in particular such substances as LSD can be compressed into such small areas or volumes that their detection is virtually impossible.
So the moment it becomes a racket, and something, therefore, which organized crime can put a good price on, the possibilities of playing games with LSD are enormous. It’s a real good racket. And all it will do, the suppression of it, is to encourage the proliferation of crime and lead to total nonsense.
We have never really understood what control is. We don’t see the difference between controlling one’s self and strangling one’s self. In other words, a person who is a controlled automobile driver is certainly not a person who has no car or keeps his car locked in the garage.
A very controlled dancer is certainly not a person who never dances. The control of things is not the suppression of them, but their use in a sensible and proper way. And this has not penetrated the consciousness of our authorities.
You cannot suppress sex. You cannot suppress mankind’s fascination, curiosity for whatever motive, in other states of consciousness than the normal. These things are eternally fascinating to human beings and will always be pursued.
Whether you think it’s a good thing or whether you think it’s a bad thing makes no difference. It will be done. So at the present time, for example, if some people wanted to make experiments with any kind of consciousness-changing material—say, LSD or mescaline—they are in the ridiculous situation that they cannot even pay a psychiatrist to sit with them and take care of them while they do it, because that would be illegal.
What they will therefore do is not have a psychiatrist, not have any experienced or responsible person, and they will try it out all on their own without any preparation and endanger themselves, because these things will—under unfavorable circumstances and with people who haven’t got a good psychic balance—bring about prolonged bouts of psychosis and lead to a good deal of trouble. But the difficulty is that we are, as a culture, not prepared for the control of these substances. And that is why there is a panic.
That is why we are doing things that are probably worse than allowing them to circulate freely. I would not for one moment advocate the total free circulation of these things so that anybody could go into a drugstore and buy it. But I think—although I wouldn’t advocate that—I think it would be better than suppression; less destructive.
But what, you see, we don’t know is how to apply a proper control to the transformation of human consciousness by means that are relatively easy because we are not clear—one of the reasons is: we are not clear as to the role in life of these chemicals, nor are we clear as to the role of the physician. And this I want to consider. You know, of course, that in ancient times there was no clear distinction between priest and physician.
An individual might be primarily a priest and secondarily a physician. But in course of time the function of priest and the function of physician began to separate. And with the advent of scientific medicine—because the development of the sciences was always opposed by the church, therefore, priests tended not to practice scientific medicine.
And the practitioners of scientific medicine, being other than priests, the religious and the medical professions separated. And in the development of medicine in the West the deep concern of a physician was to preserve people from death: to be a healer. And the function of looking after death was abandoned to the priest and the minister.
So when the doctor (in treating a patient) gives up hope, he is out of role. He doesn’t know what to do beyond that point, and therefore the priest is summoned. So the work of a doctor is throughout curative, he is in all his activities opposed to death and regards death as the enemy.
This is, of course, not true of every individual physician. It is true of medical ethics and of the generality of physicians. So that, of course, terminal cases are people being tortured—beneficently, yes; with a good motive, but nonetheless being tortured—by being kept alive in a state of near mummification.
Because while there is life, there is hope. And in the next few days, there might be some amazing medical discovery which would cure them and it would have been a shame to let them die and not reap its benefits. Yes, there always might be.
So if this fact that the physician is in general out of role and does not know what to do in the face of death has a very important connection with another aspect of the physician’s trade: that he does not know what to do with chemicals or drugs which do not have the function of healing a physical disease. In a way, all consciousness-expanding drugs have something to do with death. Why?
Because all spiritual disciplines are, as Jung pointed out, preparations for death. And every spiritual discipline involves a form of death, that is to say, of what is called dying to one’s self; what the Christians call dying daily, or being identified with the crucifixion of Christ. In the famous words of St. Paul, “I’m crucified with Christ, yet I live.
But not I, for it is Christ that lives in me.” That is to say, he also uses the phrase “being baptized into Christ’s death.” Now, that’s all very funny language to the modern mind, but it is a commonplace of these spiritual disciplines that what you do in them is die in the midst of life: you are born again a second time. And that death refers to the death of the ego—that is to say, you leave behind the state of consciousness in which you thought you were no more than an isolated individual center of consciousness. That drops back.
And so, in that sense, you’ve died. And spiritual disciplines very often involve, as an aid to that, the contemplation of death. We think it’s rather ghoulish nowadays, but monks used to keep skulls on their desks.
Buddhists meditate in graveyards. Hindu yogis meditate beside the burning ghats on the banks of the Ganges, where they are always confronted with death, knowing: this is going to happen to me. Gurdjieff once said that if anything would possibly save mankind from its idiocy, it would be the clearest possible recognition by every individual that he and all others around him are most certainly going to die.
Because this, when it becomes something perfectly clear to you, surprisingly becomes a source of intense joy and vitality. Because when you have accepted your own death in the midst of life, it means that you’ve let go of yourself, and you are therefore free. You are not any longer plagued by worry and anxiety.
You know that you’re done for anyhow. So there’s no need constantly to fight to protect yourself—because what’s the point? And it isn’t just, you see, that people spend all their time really doing something to protect themselves—like, say, taking out an insurance policy or seeing that they eat properly—it’s what we do that doesn’t issue in any action at all: the constant inner worry, which leads to no action except more worry.
And that is what is given up, you see, by a person who really knows that he’s dead. So do you see that transcending yourself, going on beyond your ego, is the great preparation for death? Now, then, you see, we come back to the medical profession.
If this profession takes the side of the ego against death, opposes death, regards death as the supreme evil, then the doctor really is out of role at the bedside of a dying patient. And he also is out of role when it comes to the handling of drugs that are not designed to heal death-bringing sicknesses as we ordinarily understand them. But what happens?
What happens? Actually, very few people take priests seriously. I mean, even churchgoing Christians.
Because this is what happens: when somebody in the family of a good Christian shows signs of mental derangement, the priest is very seldom called in. One calls in a psychiatrist. Why?
Because in our culture he’s a scientist. And the scientist has a far greater reputation for magical power than a priest or minister. We only call in the priest when all hope is abandoned.
The scientist hasn’t been able to work and they say, “Well, maybe prayer would do some good.” And the poor priest gets it. Now, a Catholic priest or Anglican priest, by and large, they are very used to handling death. They know what to do.
They come in and open the book at the right place, and without any embarrassment proceed to administer the last rites. And really, that’s rather good. I mean, here is a man who knows what to do and isn’t flustered in the face of death.
That in itself has a calming influence. But a lot of people feel that this isn’t really the way to handle it, because they don’t really dig or understand these last rites. And if the priest is called in only in desperation, this argues that he doesn’t have very much power anyway.
He may have power to do something with the Lord in the world beyond, but very doubtful in this world. So under such circumstances, both the priest and the physician—and I’m referring, of course, to the priest as he is found in the United States or in Europe at the present day—they need to take another look at death, and to bring out the all-important fact that life without death has no value. Death—as Norman Brown pointed out in his book Life Against Death—death is what confers individuality upon us.
It is your limits in time that constitute you just as much as your limits in space. Death, therefore, always overshadows the whole of life. And life would have no meaning, no point, if it didn’t have death to balance.
In-breath and out-breath, coming and going, arising and falling are mutually interdependent. So death is a very valuable and very important thing which is being swept under the carpet. So then, in a culture where priest and physician have become widely separated, the sudden bursting upon us of sacramental substances is an embarrassment to both.
It is embarrassing, first of all, to the priest—for many reasons. Because supposing we were to say: psychedelic substances are not the province of physicians and psychiatrists, they are the province of the clergy. Everybody would throw up their hands and say: but these people have no scientific training!
They don’t think about neurology. They don’t know anything about the subtle effects of these things on the human organism. How could they be responsible?
And alas, it’s true. The clergy have not had training in neurology—and so much the worse for them. On the other hand, the psychiatrist (with very few exceptions) and the neurologists have no no training in theology.