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I’m a perfect saint.” And that is immediately spiritual pride. You can’t possibly claim that. All saints are measured as saints by the degree to which they declare themselves to be sinners.
“My sins are worse than your sins!” “I am more sorry for my sins than you are!” You can see, then, from the point of view that these chemicals give: you become aware of all these intricate games that people are playing. I remember once, long ago, Jano [Mary Jane Yates King, Alan’s third wife] and I had a wonderful psychedelic session in which we were listening to the radio on a Sunday evening. And all these preachers were coming on with their messages.
And the only one that rang true was a Negro revivalist. And he was stopping to make any sense at all. He was saying, “The gift to the Lord is for everybody!
ItellyouyourGodisgreat!” And the whole congregation was saying, “We hear you, baby! Amen! We hear you, baby!” Yeeeeaadebadeewhoo!
Aaaayewadebaooo! You know? He got that far and they shut him off and changed the program.
But that was alright. Then there’s a poor little man who was talking in an echo chamber so that it sounded like a great, great cathedral. And he played records of hymns, and then he came on with this Bible message, you know.
And he kept saying, “If you want a copy of this message, be sure to send one dollar to the station. Be sure to enclose your dollar.” And we listened to that and went, “Oh dear. Isn’t that grubby?” But then you listen down into this voice saying that “Be sure to send in your dollar,” you realize this is a poor little creature saying, “Well, I’ve got to make a living somehow, too!” And in that voice, that awful corny voice, saying “Be sure to send in your dollars,” you hear a crying child.
Or you hear a lost animal calling out, “Please help, mama. I want help.” And you listen down into that, and you go further listening to the sound. And finally, the human voice becomes like breath going through a flute.
Whaa-oo whaa-oo whaa-oo woo woo woo woooh whaa-oo. You know? And you think at first that’s sad.
And after a while you realize it isn’t. It’s just one of the ways things happen. It’s the fundamental sound.
It’s the Om. It’s the voice of God playing a particular tune. And you think: marvel of marvels.
You heard the divine sound through the throat of a Baptist preacher. Incredible! So, you know, that’s one of the really great things about this kind of experience.
You can tackle, you can confront things that in the ordinary state of consciousness you think were downright awful, and learn to understand them; why they’re there. You can take people that you thoroughly disapprove of, and you can begin to understand why they are the way they are. For example, from my point of view, I’ve always been an argumentative person because I liked discussions and talking about philosophy and religion and so on.
But I won’t argue about anybody’s religion anymore. I regard all the different opinions as so many different flowers in a garden. And they need each other.
In other words, if somebody disagrees with me, then I know where I stand. If there wasn’t somebody who disagreed with me, I wouldn’t know where I stood. And so I have to thank him for pointing out to me what I think and say, “Keep it up!
That’s great!” We’re all, you see, by our differentiations of point of view, making up a great pattern which you could call the intellectual life. It depends on that. But the basic point that I want to make in all this, what I am then really talking about, is: how, through the use of the psychedelic chemicals, you can be so shocked, you can be so disturbed, that you will learn that you’ve got nothing else to do but completely relax your controller, your sensor, your ego.
And that, to the degree that you really let go and don’t try to hold on to life anymore, you become enormously strong and able actually to control things. But all fundamental control depends on giving up control. And this paradox—which scares the hell out of us—is the is the main lesson of the whole thing.
Now, the final problem that comes up in this discussion is what we might call psychedelic control. The whole question of: since there is a widespread circulation and knowledge of these substances among us, what are we going to do about it? I want to make the initial point that there is a very strong difference between controlling something and suppressing it.
If you are controlled—to go back to the great General Motors image of life—if you are controlled as a driver of a car, that is quite different from a person who never drives; keeps the car locked up in the garage. If you are controlled as a writer, you are not a person who never picks up a pen. If you are controlled as a dancer, you are not a person who never dances.
But this has been utterly misunderstood throughout the whole history of the Christian West. And in the United States we just haven’t learned from any of the historical lessons. I recently was discussing this problem with an Indian tribe; a tribe which incorporates the Native American church, where they use peyote in a religious ceremonial.
And the significant thing about this particular order is that the peyote Indians are exemplary in their tribes as stabilizers. They are stable in their families, in their work, and they don’t drink alcohol—which for some reason is extremely demoralizing to Indians, and they’re very much against it. They won’t allow it on the reservation at all because they can’t take it.
It may be a question whether we don’t have the same predicament in reverse: can we take peyote and stay sane? We’re used to alcohol, but it doesn’t help us to be particularly sane. But it does something for us, I guess.
But the peyote Indians are really exemplary. They are wonderful people. And the peyote ceremony is absolutely marvelous, although it’s quite a test of endurance.
People who practice Zen talk about the sesshin, you know, where you sit in zazen practice for a couple of hours maybe. But in the peyote ceremony, you sit all night, from sunset to dawn, and you hardly move except once at midnight when you get a drink of water passed ’round, and you can go out to the john if you want to. They say—because their religion is legal, there have been court tests of it—and their view is that peyote (being a natural plant) is God given, and the government has no right whatsoever to interfere with it.
They would say, for example, that if the growth and distribution of peyote were under government regulation and they were given the special privilege of being able to use it because they’re a church, they would still protest and say this is not the business of any government whatsoever. Because it grows, and all things that grow, and all things that are natural are essentially good. And in this they concur with the Hebrew view of things.
Because in the Book of Genesis it is explained that God created all things whatsoever. And only, of all things, the tree of knowledge was forbidden. Of course, it’s always a problem of why it was there at all.
But it says “every herb and every plant is given for the good of man.” And the Hebrew insists that, in other words, the material world—because it’s the creation of God—is a good world, and that evil can only arise through the misuse of natural things. So they very strongly, the Indians, contest the interference of government in the use or possession of any natural plant or herb whatsoever. And so naturally, then, under this category, there come three of the major psychedelics—and actually, there are more.
But the three that are best known are peyote (the cactus), the mushrooms (psilocybe mexicana), and the hemp plant from which we get marijuana. I suppose you would also say tobacco. Incidentally, we don’t smoke real tobacco.
We smoke treated tobacco. The Indians smoke real tobacco and they mix it with willow bark. It’s rather a different scene.
When it comes, however, to LSD and to dimethyltryptamine and synthesized drugs, there might be some cause for dispute about this. Just as there would be if we completely freely circulated penicillin, or barbiturates, opiates, and strong-acting drugs of that description, we might say, yes, there is some good cause for imposing rather strict controls on the actual possession or purchase of these substances. Just as there is an obvious reason for controlling the purchase of dynamite or TNT, or licensing people to own guns, drive cars, and so on.
But you’ll notice there is no law prohibiting the growing or possession of amanita pantherina. Amanita pantherina is a mushroom that looks very like edible mushrooms and is deadly poison. There is no really effective antidote to it, but it’s not forbidden by law.
There is no law against growing belladonna, deadly nightshade. So the whole nature of a law against especially the possession of something that grows naturally on God’s green Earth has a certain degree of insanity about it. Because there are many points of view from which this can be considered.
First of all, anyone can use a gun to kill a person, or you can just use it for plinking and shooting tin cans. It is not the possession of a gun which is criminal, it is the misuse of a gun—as it is also with the misuse of an automobile. And therefore, the very nature of crime consists in a specific action which misuses some substance to the detriment of other people.
When you make a law in which the possession of a given substance is a felony, you thereby invite endless corruption and problems. Let us consider, first of all, the problem of marijuana. It’s very easy indeed to prove that someone possesses marijuana.
All you have to do is sprinkle a little dust of the substance on somebody’s coat, and then you can declare to the police that you have reason to believe that they possess marijuana, and they can vacuum clean your coat and find some small dust of marijuana there, and you can be put in jail for five years. In some states you can even be put to death, although this hasn’t happened in quite a while. In other words, if you have a political rival and you want to get rid of him, you just plant some marijuana on his premises and tip off the police.
If you have a wife you want to get rid of, if you have an enemy of any description, this is what you do. And, in turn, if the government wants to get rid of you because they don’t like your politics, they can just send the police around with a search warrant to your home and they will carry in their pockets a few roaches—you know, which are the butts of marijuana cigarette—and just find it in something that you have. So, you see, a law against possession is is completely insane because it invites all those sorts of possibilities.
In the case—you know, like when Al Capone was giving trouble, they couldn’t get at him directly for any of his crimes, so they found an error in his income tax. Well, it’s so much easier to find someone guilty of possessing marijuana. And the penalties for possessing it are worse and higher than those for fudging your income tax or for armed robbery.
All sorts of quite desperate crimes are punished less heavily than possessing—and especially pushing, or selling—marijuana. And so far as this particular herb (which is what it is) is concerned, the laws about it are based on pure superstition. There is not one single reputable scientific study of any description whatsoever that can prove a link between the use of marijuana and crime and insanity.
There is no proof whatsoever that it leads inevitably to the use of heavy stuff like heroin. It is all worked up by Mr. Anslinger, who used to be head of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics. His history is rather interesting because, before that time, he was a great prohibition enforcer.
And the law put him out of a job and he had to find a new job. So he worked up the myth that marijuana was a very dangerous drug and got himself made head of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics. And he’s worked all over the world.
He’s got it written into international treaties. And an enormous amount of nonsense has sprung up around this. And the British government, back at the end of the last century, realized that marijuana was in extensive use in India.
And they had to decide what to do about it, and they made a very, very extensive investigation and published its results in several volumes, and concluded not to take any steps against it in India. The United States surgeon general investigated its use in Panama and they decided that there was no point taking any action. From from their standpoint, they found nothing particularly wrong with it.
And when Mayor La Guardia was in charge of New York, he had the New York Academy of Medicine make a very thorough investigation of its use, and their report was that they saw no particular harm in it, and at most it could be called a social nuisance. But for some reason, the AMA, the American Medical Association, condemned the New York Academy of Medicine for premature judgment and an unscientific investigation. But you know what lies behind that.
One of the difficulties of the whole situation is that the use of marijuana is a substitute for alcohol. And alcohol is big business. So are cigarettes.
And there’s a fear among producers of alcohol that if people got onto marijuana, they wouldn’t drink so much. And so they have a slush fund—a quite considerable sum which they spend—keeping up the notion that marijuana is very destructive. Also, it’s very easy to grow—although I don’t think that, if it were legal, many people would bother to grow it and prepare, because there’s quite a problem involved of cleaning it and getting out stalks and seeds and all that crud.
I don’t think most people would bother. So that the tobacco companies could very well switch crops. Be quite easy; in fact, much cheaper than growing tobacco.
And they could supply marijuana cigarettes in beautiful packages with all kinds of psychedelic colors on them and wonderful brand names, and make a terrific business out of it—as well as the get the excise tax that would naturally be imposed on it could finance a whole new war. But one must face the fact that, in the free use of marijuana, there are certain dangers—but perhaps not such great dangers as are involved in the free use of alcohol. But I would want to say a clear warning: that there are varieties of marijuana which are extremely strong (especially in the form known as hashish, which is simply marijuana resin concentrated), which, if it were commonly used, we should run into certain social problems.
And I’m going to deal with this first, and then later with LSD because the situations are rather different. The social problems that we could run into are that people who are under a very strong marijuana influence often don’t know where they are; can easily get lost and confused. They’re not liable to be violent unless there is some completely separate predisposing reason for them to be violent.
It does not of itself make people violent—on the contrary: it makes them quiet, pacific, and slowed down. But you could get very confused. You might also get paranoid over fearful.
And you might also become, in a certain sense, irresponsible. Because one of the characteristics of marijuana is wonderfully described in a story—I forget at the moment its exact origin, but it’s about a Negro and a young white boy who are close friends. The Negro is a hand on the farm owned by the boy’s father.
And one day the Negro explains marijuana to the boy, and he says that it makes everything transparent. You see right through everything—not in the literal sense, that it becomes like glass; that’s a metaphorical sense—but that you understand what people are up to, what the game is, and you get to laughing. It induces a certain kind of what I would call loving cynicism, where you see the schemes, the ego-inflating and -promoting tricks that everybody’s up to.
And you see the unimportance of a great deal of activity that human beings consider to be extremely important. In the case of almost all psychedelics this is true. Because what happens is you suddenly slow down and you realize that this moment is really worth living.
And in fact, it’s the important thing: what’s going on. And you look around you, and you see people going about their everyday business, and they all look frantic. They’re quite insane, rushing off in cars and driving and getting there and making it on time and delivering that stuff and so on and so forth.
You think what on Earth’s the matter with them? And in this respect, you get into a state of feeling which (quite apart from anything to do with drugs) is the normal state of feeling for, say, an Indian. That’s why, in the United States, we can’t understand the Indians and never have got on with them.
And all our best efforts to do something good for them are always futile. Because, for example, we want them to have big factories, better pay, but go and live in Los Angeles. But they don’t want to live in Los Angeles!
They say we’re quite mad because our men work for days at some frantic job so they can take a little time off to go fishing or hunting. They say: “We’re there already. We’ve arrived!
We fish, we hunt, and we’re happy with that.” Indians live in a kind of present which involves both the past and the future, but they don’t have our idea of time as a clockwork thing—tick, tick, tick, tick—which you keep up with. Indians value time in a very special way. For example, when they have a meeting on some important question for the tribe, they’ll come, and for four hours or so they’ll sit and just talk.
And at the end, for reasons that the white man can’t understand, they’ve come to a decision. Because they say time made the decision. You know, you ask them, “What do you think about so-and-so?
What would you like to do?” And they won’t give you a direct answer because it’s not the time for the answer. They believe that if you wait around and let it cook, time itself will deliver the decision. And we think that’s terrible, that it’s improvident, that it’s—if you don’t make up your mind… make up your mind now!
See? Decide now! You can’t.
But I’ve always known this and have constantly run into trouble because I would put off decisions because I knew that the moment for it wasn’t right; that when things developed in a certain way, I would know what to do. So under the influence of these substances, one does intend a little bit to become a sort of Indian. And, as they say, the only good Indian’s a dead Indian.
It’s that whole attitude, you see, to nature, and that absence of the competitive spirit which is in Indians, that the white Protestants strongly disapprove of. White Catholics, too. American Catholics and Protestants, crypto-Protestants.
So there would be the problem, from the point of view of our culture, that if the use of marijuana was widespread, people would get a bit mañana in their attitudes to things and say, “Oh, let it wait. We’re busy. What’s the point?” And they might be, therefore, a lack of pep and push and ginger.
There’s a little poem by H. V. Morton: “Thought that troubled a businessman during a sleepless night: supposing that St. Peter at the door finds pep and push and ginger, all abore.” Well now, in that sense, then, I think a widespread use of marijuana, especially if people started using it almost as frequently as they used tobacco, would result in a lot of extremely lazy people lounging around. Although I would say it would be stupid to use it as frequently as one uses tobacco, because he would lose the benefit of it. It would be something to be used—well, I would say, certainly not more than twice in a day.
Because it has a certain sacramental quality to it. In other words, why you can do a job and smoke a cigarette, you know, and forget that you’ve got a cigarette. And you can, to a certain extent, Drink and do something else, you know?
But if you’re smoking marijuana, you shouldn’t do anything else at all. You should really—like you would sit down to do justice to a marvelous dinner, and you should eat, and not try to smoke while you’re eating or watch television. You should really do justice to the dinner.
And so, in the same way, if you use marijuana, you should really do justice to it and be quiet. Yes, by all means, listen to music, et cetera, et cetera. But don’t do anything that will distract from that state of consciousness.
Like: don’t drive a car while you’re playing the violin. Now, this leads me to think that there is a good reason why a substance of this kind should be rather difficult to get. The Japanese have an idea about views, a lovely view: you should not have a lovely view too easily visible.
You should make a little bit of effort to go to the place where the beautiful view is. Because then you won’t just take it for granted, you really devote yourself to it. And so I don’t know if marijuana—what is the best way of controlling it as distinct from suppressing it, and making it a little bit difficult to come by?
Either you make it expensive or you make it necessary to grow your own and illegal to sell it or to market it. That could be a possibility. But you could [be] perfectly free to grow your own and take care of it and cure it and do everything that has to be done.
But if it is as easily come by as a package of cigarettes, I have a feeling that it might in some ways lose its effect. You see, when you go back into history, you will find all kinds of documentation for similar outcries and fears about tea, about coffee, about tomatoes, and of course about tobacco. All sorts of tracts were written.
Say, they’re tomatoes: they were very suspicious. And as for tea—why, tea was terribly expensive when it first came on the market in the West. And Dr. Samuel Johnson was a tea addict, and society hostesses were embarrassed when he came because he drank such immoderate quantities of tea, and he was a very expensive guest.
All these things have been looked on with immense suspicion. And, of course, they’re all relatively harmless—especially tomatoes. But, you see, this sort of superstition keeps running.
Now, I suppose that when tomatoes were suspect, people really sat down to eat a tomato. “Oh gee, we’ve got this dangerous fruit! That’s fantastic stuff!” And so when they ate a tomato, they made it a big thing.
And so the tomato tasted gorgeous simply because it was valued. Now, in exactly the same way, when we say we’ve got some pot, you know, this is great stuff! Terribly illegal!
So let’s not trifle with this. Let’s really sit down and enjoy this situation, you see? Well, that adds an enormous amount of value to the effect that it has.
Now, I’m not saying that it’s all psychological and that it’s nothing to do with the chemistry, but it’s always mixed. We are psychosomatic beings, and therefore the expectation, the setting in which one does anything like this, is of great consequence. It’s just the same, say, with wine.
You get one of those gorgeous French wines, and you’ve got this bottle and the special label and it’s that year. People sit and drink and say, “Oh, that’s marvelous!” But actually, very few people can tell the difference (if they’re blindfolded) between a cheap Petri wine and a fine French one. Yes, naturally, the person who is an expert on wines would know blindfolded what he had.
But the game of guessing wines is tricky, and most people can’t tell. But the buildup, you see—if the thing has got the buildup, and it comes in the right-looking bottle and so on, then you have a marvelous time. So if marijuana does indeed have beneficial effects—and to a certain degree it emphatically does.
I mean, it is the most perfect tranquilizer of all of them. You can forget librium and things like that; miltown. They have nothing of the effect of marijuana.
It will get people off alcoholism. I know a doctor who is just… he’s a very respectable doctor, and he is fighting mad because he can’t prescribe marijuana to his patients. And he is deluged with alcoholics and doesn’t know what to do about them.
And, you know, he’s a pillar of society; he’s a president of a county medical association and all that jazz. So it is unquestionably a healing herb. But like everything good in the world, it has to be used judiciously.
And so there would be a danger with very cheap, enormous supplies of marijuana, that people out of their minds would just smoke and smoke and smoke to be in the groove for some reason of that kind, and it could be troublesome. But obviously, the solution to that particular problem is, simply, primarily, to see the total unreason of any law prohibiting possession. If anybody wants to have their own plants and grow it and use it, there is no conceivable legal reason why they shouldn’t.
Selling is another matter. That should obviously be subject to some sort of regulation. It might be a tax regulation that makes the price high or whatever, but I’m not going—that’s a question that shouldn’t be decided until after very careful discussion.
But the idea that it’s a killer drug, or a sort of a demon thing is pure superstition, and a rather malicious superstition at that. And you realize that all this really perfectly harmless activity is compared with smoking tobacco or drinking. There are fifteen hundred people in jail on fairly long terms in the state of California alone right now.
And God only knows how many throughout the country—at your expense. Now, when it comes to the problems of the more strong psychedelics, like LSD, the problem becomes trickier. Because LSD can be so disorienting to many people and so terrifying that it is not wise to use it without the right sort of preparation and help.
But, of course, for that very reason it’s exciting. When I was giving a lecture some time ago on some subject not directly connected with these psychedelics at all at a private high school, a rather posh school, immediately the lecture was over I invited questions, and all the questions were about LSD. So I said to these boys, “I have given you a lecture on the Chinese philosophy of nature and you ask me about LSD.
What’s the reason for this?” Well, they sort of went into a huddle with each other and a little talk, and they said, “Well, we think that our parents and grandparents did a pretty good job exploring the external world and learning how to control it. We would like to explore the internal world. And furthermore, because it’s forbidden, it’s that much more interesting.” So there is a challenge here, and young people are always out for adventures.
They wouldn’t be young people if they weren’t. And one reason why we have so much trouble with young people is that we coddle them. We make too much safety.
Other people don’t coddle their young like that. In Japan, for example, children have an enormous amount—little children, especially—an enormous amount of liberty in dimensions in which we don’t have liberty. For example, I was going along the edge of a river or canal in Matsue, and about twenty feet above the canal there’s a water pipe crossing the canal on a few concrete supports.
And a small boy was crawling across it, having a wonderful time. Very dangerous. We would have a fit.
We would build a fence all along the thing and we would have—you know, like at schools: wherever there’s a school entrance, there are policemen with stop signs, and the children are herded across so that they won’t be knocked down by cars. Children are even escorted in groups to and from school. In Japan you’ll see a little thing, this high, with a little yellow hat on and a knapsack on its back going tchick tchick tchick tchick tchick tchick tchick down a crowded street.
Bicycles, taxis, cars going every which way. Mad confusion. This little thing is going along all by itself.
I remember Felix Greene once told me that he gave a lecture at a high school, and there was a great banner over the auditorium of the proscenium arch. In white letters on red it said “Safety first in all things.” You know? Well, that’s a way to die.
Death is safe. You can’t get into trouble if you’re dead. Also, if you go into solitary confinement, it will be rather difficult to get into trouble.
So stay home and be safe—although there are more accidents in homes than in any other place. So we must realize in our attitude to children that while, yes, you advise your children about streets and cars and things like that, there is no such thing as safety. There never was in life and there never will be.
And unless you take that as your first premise in living, nothing will happen. You must be insecure. There isn’t so any security.
Nevertheless, you can’t just say: alright, no restrictions, no controls on anything. Because then people could obviously go out and buy tons of dynamite, or private tanks, and machine guns, mortars, howitzers, and whatever. You know?
There are a lot of men who would love to own a Howitzer and have a terrific crash with a shell every morning, go out in the middle of the bay and just blow up. So something has to be done. I would say if and when it comes to LSD, then, that we’ve really got a dragon by the tail in this particular chemical.
Although I think that it’s a primitive chemical—that is to say that it’s very unpredictable in its results. And I’m quite sure that if research is pursued, we will be able to get something that is much more easy to handle than LSD, but as effective in a creative way. But, you see, there isn’t that research really being done, except by illicit graduate chemistry students who are working out all sorts of things, alternatives to LSD, so as to beat the law against its possession.