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For example, we all have the horrors about the Spanish Inquisition, and how they took Protestants and put them on the rack with thumbscrew and finally burned them at the stake. And we say, “Oh, we don’t do things like that anymore.” Oh, we don’t? I invite you to consider mental hospitals.
The new heresy is not oddball religious opinions because, nobody takes that seriously anymore. The new heresy is oddball states of consciousness. And if you have an odd state of consciousness and you try to express it to your family, they start looking at you in a funny way and say, “Are you feeling alright?” And that’s a terrible thing to say to anyone.
You know, if you want to—I shouldn’t really tell anyone this—but if you want to really bug someone and put a hex on them, all you do is: you look at them in a funny way and say, “Are you feeling well today?” And they say, “Yes, I’m feeling fine.” “No, I just thought you were a bit pale.” And soon the person will begin feeling all kinds of squeamishness. And it’s much worse when you question a person’s state of mind. Because it’s very easy to test the bodily state.
You can take a temperature, pulse, have a urinalysis or something, and the doctor says there’s nothing the matter with you. Puts a stethoscope on your lungs. You’re alright.
But when it comes to your mind everything’s very vague. And you can get into the most weird Kafkaesque situations about whether you’re sane or not. The moment you’re challenged to prove that you’re sane, you’re on your guard.
And immediately the psychiatrist says, “Why are you so defensive?” Psychiatry is completely diabolical. Almost, the more I see of it, the less I think there’s any good to be said for it. It is a way of bugging people.
If you arrive for your appointment early, you are defined as anxious. If you arrive late, you’re defined as hostile. If you’re happy, you’re euphoric.
If you’re not happy, you’re melancholic. If you’re afraid of something, you’re paranoid. Every conceivable way is devised of putting the patient down.
And when you’re admitted to a mental hospital—you may know all this, but you ought to know the law about these things; how it stands—you can be so easily put in a mental hospital, although the only salvation is that the mental hospitals in California today are so crowded and so understaffed that they’re not wishing to admit anyone. And you really have to be in a state of the screaming meemies to get in, or somebody has to dislike you very much. But you are deprived of all civil rights.
You are no longer considered as a person. You are depersonified in a negative sense. See, there’s a higher depersonification when you attain the mystical realization and become one with the Absolute.
And that there is, on the other hand, a lower depersonification where you are simply an outcast. This has been true always. In India there were the higher outcasts called the sannyasin, the holy men, who renounced caste and lived a life of poverty and freedom.
But there were the untouchables on the other end, who were the aborigines, like the Eta in Japan. And so if you go to a mental hospital, you become a lower outcast. You are no longer human.
And you get frightened. You get scared out of your wits because you suddenly begin to realize that you cannot communicate with people, because they look at you in a funny way about everything you say. They say, “I wonder what he meant by that?” And you get real scared.
And so you start to act in a funny way. Which is, the whole thing, the diagnosis of, say, schizophrenia is a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy. Because when anybody puts you in that position and makes you the patsy, you can’t help acting in an odd way.
If you say, “Now look, everybody, you’re putting a thing over on me. I’m perfectly sane.” They say, “Why are you so insisting on it?” Methinks thou dost protest too much. It’s a very difficult situation to be in.
Never send anyone to an insane asylum. Do anything with them. Anything.
Because that’s the trap. They get in. And then, of course, because they’re understaffed, you’re ignored.
They really don’t have time to get around to. I know what the problems are. And even very conscientious psychiatrists and insane asylums just can’t get the work done.
So how do you get attention? Well, you start at being difficult, in the expectation that this will draw attention to you and you’ll get some therapy. And that doesn’t really work.
I’ll tell you how to get out of an insane asylum in a minute. But the thing is that you try to get attention, until they they construe all the things you do to get attention as being further signs of insanity, of lack of cooperation. Finally, they throw you in a cell where there’s nothing left to you but take shit and throw it at the walls in order to get some kind of attention.
And they say, “See how far gone he is?” Now, the way to get out of an insane asylum is very subtly to flatter one of the psychiatrists, and cooperate with him to the utmost—not to quickly, but in a sort of gradual way so as to give him the impression that his method of treatment is working in your case. Because he wants to write a paper, see? And publish it in the psychiatric journal showing that a certain method, a certain technique, is really good.
And you will cooperate with that idea, and you’ll do everything he tells you, but just with a certain little subtle resistance to him, see? He’ll immediately spot you as someone who is playing funny business if you cooperate completely, you see? Don’t do that, but just gently let it be understood that his therapy is working, and they’ll release you.
Unless, of course, you want to go to an insane asylum just so as to have no responsibility and just get out of the whole mess. I think there are some people who do that. But, you see, what we’ve got here in this situation is that having a different state of consciousness—or because you experience differently from other people—that’s heresy.
And that makes everybody else terribly uncomfortable. And so in you go. And then, you see—now, this isn’t all.
They say, “Well, this is pretty desperate. Golly, what are we going to do to help this person?” You know, in all the kindness of their hearts: “What are we going to do?” Well, you can see the inquisitors thinking this problem over, too. This heretic—do you realize that he is going to be tortured for ever and ever and ever because of his beliefs?
And they’re infectious: they spread, they go to other people who will be tortured in hell for ever and ever and ever because of what they believe. What are we going to do? We’ll reason with them and they don’t respond to reason.
Well, let’s apply a thumbscrew or something, you know, and see if that will just make the difference, you know? This very stubborn patient. Well… it’s a last resort, but we could burn them.
Because they might, under the torture of being burned, repent and therefore escape everlasting damnation. And they did it with the kindest motivation: burned up the heretics. So, in the same way, in a modern mental hospital they say, “Well, we’ll try shock treatment.” You know, nothing is more unbelievably clumsy.
It works occasionally because the patient realizes that he had better get out at all costs! But by and large it doesn’t, and it is a form of torture. And if that doesn’t work, well, they say the only thing is to scrape out the front part of his brain.
And, you know, they put an ice pick through alongside the eyeball and get it into the front part of the brain and they stir it up. It’s called a prefrontal lobotomy. And then the person is a happy moron for the rest of his life.
But it’s the same situation all over again. And we have, above all, to watch out in this country for this kind of psychiatric fascism. Very, very dangerous.
And the political problem today is that the right wing in this country is very mixed up. They are very opposed to official mental health; mental health programs and all that kind of thing. And they have some good reasons for it.
They’ve also some very bad reasons, because they would send them to jail pronto. The right wing also have a lot of opposition to taxation and centralized government, which is a kind of beginning of anarchism. But they don’t mean that.
They mean: let’s have centralized government against the people we don’t like. Leave us alone. Tax everybody else, but not us.
Wisdom of insecurity—for others. Here is, then, a situation in which, (A) for the reasons that I’ve outlined, Western religion definitely ignores or positively excludes the mystical experience. And (B) religion plus law persecute those who are uncool about having mystical experience.
So this double situation has created, in the course of history, an alarming practical situation—which is that Western man, in charge of his tremendous technology, is using it against life because he doesn’t feel that he belongs in the universe. By being identified as an ego, called into being out of nothing, and feeling therefore that he comes into this world instead of flowering out of it, he is basically against the world—especially since the death of God in the 19th century, where the new doctrine that follows the authoritarian God the father is that the universe is a mindless mechanism, and therefore we have to fight it. And therefore, in any war—the war against nature—there’s naturally a commander in chief, chain of command, so on, and the whole monarchical situation starts over again.
So as a result of that, then, we are using our technology in an absolutely weird way. This goes, of course, into economic problems as well. You see, since the industrial revolution it has been increasingly possible with greater and greater rapidity to feed and clothe and adequately house every single person on Earth.
There is no technical obstacle to that whatsoever. But you’ve got to do it by automation to do enough of it. But when you automate things, you put people out of work.
So if they’re out of work, they don’t have any money, and so they can’t buy what the machines produce. So you have huge surpluses begin to pile up. Well, you can’t give them away.
Well, what would happen, you say, if you said, “Well, let us pay the people for the work the machines do.” We say, “That would be going into debt! Where’s the money going to come from?” Well, the money is originally based on gold. And this is real hocus-pocus.
Because, supposing that gold is rather rare, and you can’t always find a new gold mine, but yet you’re producing millions of tons of butter, milk, wheat, iron, wood, everything you could possibly need—we’ve got to wait to find a gold mine to get all this stuff into circulation. So the only thing they can do is this: people only go into debt in an emergency. So we increase the national debt and therefore circulate more and more purchasing power to keep the economy running by having wars.
The perpetual state of emergency. The government has to go into debt because we are threatened by the Communists, by the… whatever—Chinese, Vietnamese. Anything, anybody!
Just so long as we can say there is an emergency, therefore we can go into debt. But actually, going into debt is gobbledygook, semantically. All you’re doing is: you’re issuing credit based on the actual productive wealth of the nation, or whatever community is the unit.
But people don’t understand that, just as (several hundred years ago) they couldn’t possibly understand that the Earth was round, and that if you lived in the antipodes you wouldn’t fall off. And so there’s this similar mumbo-jumbo and hocus-pocus about money. Money is a measure of wealth like inches or pounds or grams.
And when you discover a load of iron ore, you don’t have to go and borrow a thousand tons from someone before you can do anything with it. So, in this way, then, the culture is so absorbed with verbiage, with doctrines in religion, with money in economics, with status in politics, and with all kinds of manipulation of symbols, that we are not in contact in an aware way with the physical world. We are alienated from the physical world.
We are fighting it. We are fighting our own bodies. And so, therefore, imaginative young people become aware of this and see the disaster all around them.
The terrifying depredations of nature. They see it growing and growing. They see the final achievement of great Western physics as the hydrogen bomb.
And they say it’s high time for us to get back to reality. And therefore, naturally, they are accused of peddling hallucinations. But who is under a hallucination?
Look at it: recently, Congress passed very strict laws against burning the American flag. And they did it with great fervor and all sorts of patriotic speeches, and this, that, and the other. While they are—by acts of commission or omission—they are burning up the country for which the flag stands: allowing continued pollution of the atmosphere, of the water, ravaging of the forests, destruction of wildlife on a fantastic scale.
Oh yes, that doesn’t matter. You can tear the physical territory to pieces—just so long as you don’t burn the flag! And this is the hallucination.
This is the divorce from reality. And so not—reserving the question for the moment as to whether LSD and marijuana and mescaline and psilocybin and so on and so on—as to whether they are good things or bad things. We’ll put that for the moment aside.
But one thing seems to me to be in no doubt at all: that something has to happen, and happen fast if we are to again get people to be aware of physical reality, to get in touch with the natural universe, with their own bodies, and feel that they are one with all that. Because if you feel—obviously—if you feel that you really belong, that Mount Tamalpais is as much part of you as your own hand, and that these waters around here, that everything is something in terms of which and in the context to which you exist, then you can take a friendly attitude towards it. And you’ll want to use technology in a cooperative way with all that.
And do on the mountain what the mountain would be like. Now, you can look out of this window and you can see right across here an extraordinary point. When I first came here in the summer of 1961, that was a reasonable, beautiful hill.
But an idiot called Eichler went in with bulldozers and made flat terraces. He took the top right off the hill and dumped it down in the bay so that he could get extra land. And instead of cooperating with the hill, he treated it as one would treat a flat area—so as to build houses on it, when it’s perfectly simple to build an adequate house on a hill without altering the hill at all.
Preserve the trees, preserve the topsoil, and you can build. But this is what has happened. And that’s happening all over because these people are quite mad.
It’s like San Francisco, which is a mass of hills on which they just dropped a gridiron pattern of streets that would be suitable for Kansas City. Paid no attention to the hills, so you get streets that go like this and the cars get lost and runaway, cable cars and everything—always troubles. You see, this is a symbol of man’s lack of relationship with nature.
He doesn’t know how to cook, he doesn’t know how to clothe himself, he doesn’t know how to make love. Nothin’. Because it’s all concepts, it’s all ideas—which are the true hallucinations bugging our brains.
Those are the real bats in the belfry. Not because ideas are not good things to have; that one, say, shouldn’t have concepts, shouldn’t use words, but because one should realize that ideas and concepts and words are purely instrumental. There are things to use.
But when you get used by them, then the machines have run away from you. And I suppose they will soon have computers that are breeding and making decisions about their own future, and we’ll say, finally: “Let’s get rid of human beings. They’re a nuisance.” Having described a sort of historical and cultural background of the psychedelic explosion, I want to go on next to the subject of the actual relationship between the use of psychedelic chemicals and mystical experience.
And here we get, again, into an extremely tricky problem; a problem raised by all those people who question whether anything in the way of profound understanding, life-changing experience can simply come out of a bottle. And this is not altogether an easy problem to deal with, because one of the eternal questions about any kind of spiritual initiation (by one means or another) is simply that it seems, from time to time, there are so many cases in which it just doesn’t take. In the early history of Christianity, there was a long, long argument about people who were called Lapsi—that is to say, those who had been baptized and had been initiated into the church, but somehow fell away either in allegiance or in morals.
And it was a great puzzle how a person who could have undergone the sacrament of baptism—this great union with Christ conferred upon him—how they could lapse and what to do about them. Supposing they wanted to come back. And there were people who took a very rigorous line on this and said no, once you’ve been baptized and you fell away, you were absolutely more than ever sold to the devil, and there was no hope for you at all.
But, after all, because human beings are really creatures who muddle through life, a compromise was arranged and it was possible for them, through some form of penance, to come back in. And I am amazed at the way in which the psychedelic movement shows so many parallels to the history of religious movements at other times. It’s simply fascinating.
First of all, let’s take not so much the sacrament of baptism, but the sacrament of the Holy Communion (the conversion of bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ) as a sort of parallel to this. Because here, after all, was a religion saying that you didn’t really get the salvation unless you partook of a particular material substance which had been formulized in a certain way. See, the whole idea of transubstantiation was that the priest took the bread and wine, and he had to say a certain formula over them.
Hoc est enim corpus meum: this is my body which is given for you. And this is my blood of the new and eternal Testament, which is shed for you and for many for the remission of sins. Actually, all he has to say is “this is my body and this is my blood.” And if you are an ordained priest in the apostolic succession, it is held that just saying those words actually changes the bread and wine into a spiritual instrument which will be equivalent to eating the body and blood of Christ.
And since—on the principle that you are what you eat or that you become what you eat—you are converted by this sacrament into a member of the body of Christ, and therefore united with God. Now, just look at that for a moment and ask the question: how does that differ from a chemical operation? See, in chemistry there are involved the same sort of things.
There’s the formula: the form of words through which one constitutes the chemical. There is the material: bread and wine or wheat ergot. There is also the problem of authorization.
Now, this is a very, very tricky question, because the early Christians quarreled among themselves a great deal as to who had the true sacraments, just as psychoanalysts quarrel among themselves as to: are you really in the line of Freud? Were you analyzed by someone who was analyzed by someone who was ultimately analyzed by Freud? And in psychoanalysis there is a huge apostolic succession.
So in the same way now with LSD, to take one example. There is a great deal of controversy going on as to whether Owsley’s LSD is as pure as Sandoz’s LSD. And certainly, anybody with less genius than Owsley put LSD on the market that is just crud, and is stacked with amphetamines and heroin and belladonna and goodness only knows what.
Also that it’s shortchanged, badly made, and so on. So the same controversies are taking place about the nature of the sacrament as took place in the early history of Christianity. Also, good and bad trips correspond to the ancient Christian arguments about the state of grace in which you were when you received the sacrament.
If you were in a good state of grace, then it redounded to your salvation. But if you were in a state of mortal sin when you took the sacrament, it would redound to your damnation. Saint Paul mentions this in the New Testament.
And so one might say people who have good trips are in a good environment, are prepared properly. People who had bad trips are in a bad environment, improperly prepared, and so the sacrament redounds to their damnation. And in this case, damnation—instead of being something of a post-mortem nature gets up to date and modern—as I pointed out, it is an unpleasant state of consciousness; a psychiatric condition.
And therefore you have to go not perhaps to the torture chambers of the devil, but to the dungeons of the insane asylum. So that watch for these parallels. They’re very instructive.
History does indeed repeat itself, just as human beings are the same human beings generation after generation, and they’re always doing the same sort of things in different ways. So, as in the history of Christianity, so in the history of this, questions were raised by philosophers who said, “Why on Earth should it be necessary to be baptized with water or to eat this particular bread and wine in order to attain salvation?” Because surely, true salvation has nothing to do with material agencies. We would say now true spiritual insight has nothing to do with artificial means.
It’s something you do yourself by your own will, by your own efforts, by, say, your own meditation exercises. And so this isn’t nearly as simple as it sounds because it raises the question of: well, what do you mean by “yourself”? And as we examine that question, we have a whole host of subquestions.
“Yourself.” Does this word, “yourself,” refer to your total organism? Does it refer to some sort of psychic entity which inhabits your organs? And if the former, then if you are your whole organism, you cannot neglect the principle that you are what you eat.
And that, for example, if you don’t have the right kinds of vitamins and the right kinds of minerals, you’re not going to be healthy. If, on the other hand, your spiritual sanity—let’s call it that—really doesn’t depend on the state of your body (because, after all, we know many people with extremely sick bodies who are nevertheless absolutely marvelous as individuals), then it would suggest that the functioning of the psyche is fundamentally different and independent from the functioning of the physical organism. But, on the other hand, we know all sorts of people who are quite plainly neurotic or even psychotic, but who are also geniuses and very creative.
So if you can function well with a sick body, if you can function well with a sick psyche, who are you? What are you? Now, I tend to the view of what I would call body and spirit as being aspects of the same process.
That, in other words, it is sort of artificial to make a distinction between the human organism and the human mind—for the reason that a sophisticated view of the physical world does not require this separation, because it does not require the idea that there is some sort of material stuff out of which bodies are made, as tables are made of wood. To me, the human body is a pattern dancing in space. “A pattern,” you will say, “of what?” It doesn’t have to be of anything, all you need is the pattern.
Because when you try to describe the component materials of which bodies are composed, what you describe is always another pattern working on a smaller scale at a lower level of magnification—and nobody ever described anything except that. So imagine, then, that we have a rope which is made of various materials. At the beginning, the rope is made of hemp.
Next stage it’s made of cotton. Next stage it’s made of silk. And so on.
You can think of a nylon or all sorts of things the rope might be made of. Now you tie a knot in the rope; a simple, ordinary knot. And everybody can see the pattern of the knot.
Now move the knot along the rope. And as you move it, it is first of all hemp, then it is linen, then it is cotton, then it’s silk, then it’s nylon—but the pattern stays constant. And it is so, also, you see, with the human body.
The human body has every conceivable kind of materials flowing through it. We are a stream—or we are a form in a stream, like a whirlpool. And the stream consists of milk, and beefsteak, and water, and beer, and every conceivable sort of thing.
Air, cosmic rays, and so on. And each one of us is a wiggle in this field of energy. And so long as we wiggle in approximately the same way—of course we get older, and as we get older, you haven’t seen someone for ten years, but for some reason or other you still recognize them, maybe, after ten years of not seeing them.
Because you recognize that it’s still wiggling in more or less the same way. It has the same pattern. So you have a continuity in terms of pattern integrity.
But there isn’t any substance there, in the sense of a kind of stuff which remains with you permanently. The only thing that continues as you go through life is the dance you’re doing; the pattern. Who does the dance?
That’s a question that’s really very silly, because it’s based on our commitment to speaking a language in which all verbs have to be accounted for by nouns called their subjects. As if an action could only be initiated by a thing. But when you begin to go into that and really think it through, you see that something that is different from a verb—that is to say, different from action—could not possibly initiate action.
Action comes from action. So as Buddhists and Hindus say, all this world is karma, and karma means “doing,” “action,” “motion,” “energy.” So, then, your body is an energy pattern. Nobody is doing the pattern.
The pattern is, shall we say, doing itself. And what you are experiencing—in every conceivable sense of the word “experience”: what you feel, what you sense, what you think—all that is you. And it’s merely a social convention that we think about some agent who does deeds, who feels feelings and thinks thoughts, standing as a constant behind them.
What is the constant is not some kind of spook, but the constancy in the form of the pattern through which one recognizes a person even after ten years’ absence. It’s like you would always recognize, say, a certain Bach Invention whenever it’s played, and you say, “Oh yes, that’s Bach’s Invention number so-and-so.” And so it’s for just that reason that you recognize another human being. Now, of course, when we talk about music, then we say, “Well, who’s playing it?” There is an instrumentalist at the piano, true.
But this is a pattern playing a pattern. In other words, it is all really the same pattern. This pattern sometimes is in a whirl which doesn’t include a piano, but in other times it’s a whirl which does include a piano.
And the pattern called the being flows into the pattern called the piano, and as a result there is music. So if you think that way when you eat something, that’s a pattern, too. And you, in relation to certain kinds of food, are in one state.
In relation to other kinds of food you’re in another state. One man’s meat is another man’s poison. And so, in the same way, you in relation to certain chemicals feel one way, in relation to other chemicals you feel another way.
And there is no way of abolishing our ingestion of foods (or whatever), because if we didn’t, we’d just cease to exist. But we know that there are certain things that may not be chemicals in the strict sense. They may be simply natural plants lying around, like the peyote cactus, the mushroom psilocybe mexicana, the plant cannabis sativa (otherwise known as marijuana) just growing around.
Or locoweed, or amanita muscaria. It is a mushroom. And if we eat those things, our consciousness changes.
Now, some time ago, the American Medical Association and the American Bar Association formed a joint committee for legal purposes to try and find a definition of addiction. And every time they thought they had addiction defined, they found that their definition was indistinguishable from a definition of dependence on food. And they had the greatest difficulty in pinning down any distinction between a food and a drug—like the Food and Drug Administration.
What is the difference between a food and a drug? Obviously, we can see there is a difference, but we can’t pin it down. It’s like when St. Augustine was asked, “What is time?” He said, “I know what it is, but when you ask me, I don’t.” And so, in a similar sort of way, we we can see a difference between a food and a drug, in that food is something that sort of comes directly from nature, whereas, on the whole, a drug is something that has to be prepared in a special way, is a sort of extract, a quintessence, a distillation, a concoction, or something in a pill.
But that’s a very superficial distinction. It’s all a matter of how you cook it. And so it is argued by some people that the human organism needs psychic vitamins as well as what we call bodily vitamins, and that your psyche cannot be in a healthy state unless you take your psychic vitamins—like that cartoon in The New Yorker where two very hip parents are saying to their little girl, “How can you expect to have hallucinations if you don’t eat your mushrooms?” Now, there is a course to a sense in which the possession of, or the exercise of, spiritual insight is analogous to, say, being a good painter or a good musician.
And you can’t accomplish that without a great deal of practice so that you have it in your bones how to do it. And I don’t for one minute deny that a Buddha, an enlightened one, has his enlightenment in him in very much the same way that a painter has his skill. And obviously, the capacity to exercise this skill all the time will not come because the painter took certain vitamins.
It may be that he will not be able to exercise his skill if he doesn’t take the vitamins. But we can’t attribute it, the insight that he has, the capacity he has for dealing with it, directly to anything that he eats. On the other hand, various painters who have taken psychedelic chemicals have been enormously encouraged in their work, because they saw Into the world more deeply than with the naked eye and they came back to their painting and tried to bring across that vision.