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Now, traditionally spiritual people in our culture are horrified at this idea, because everything to do with chemistry is labeled artificial—in the bad sense. As if, somehow or other, anything achieved by chemical change isn’t real, but it is somehow synthetic. Like a plastic glass instead of real glass, or like synthetic vitamin C instead of vitamin C derived from rose hips, or wonder bread instead of real bread.
But this isn’t so easily solved. The word “drug,” to begin with, is an alarm word—except in certain contexts. Nobody is alarmed when they see the notice “drugstore.” That’s folksy and natural and belongs as part of our life.
“Pharmacy” is a little more threatening, actually. But “drugstore” is okay. But when you say, about somebody, “He takes drugs.” Oh, wowee!
That’s pretty dreadful. That sounds… it’s got the idea of drug = dope. And as everybody knows, a dope fiend is a character with circles under his eyes, who lies around all day in a kind of stupor, experiencing inner fantasies and bliss (probably sexual) and all sorts of weird things going on, and he is in a frightful state where he depends on taking more and more of this stuff, and he gets increasingly dependent on it, and oh my!
That’s terrible. Of course, some of one’s best friends are alcoholics. There is a little difference in status from being a dope fiend.
Although an alcoholic, of course, can lie around and do nothing for hours and hours and just drink and get more and more dependent on it, and have to drink more and more in order to keep going. And when he gets to feeling guilty about it, he has to drink more in order to stop his sense of guilt hurting. Of course, he finds out he can’t stop.
So he has to go on. But there’s some kind of a status symbol in being alcoholic. It goes with the culture.
It’s a mildly approved sin. People can boast about alcohol, how much they can drink, what fun it was the drunk we had the other night. And you can get away with it.
The Chinese and the Japanese have absolutely no sense of guilt whatsoever in connection with imbibing alcohol. They are known (among people who use other chemicals) as juicers, and they are amazing. You see a party of Japanese businessmen going down the street at night, all with their arms ’round each other’s necks and swaying across the street and singing.
And nobody bothers. They’re quite harmless. They’re not going to fight anybody.
The police don’t care. There they are. Everyone says it’s all right.
They’re happy. The great Chinese poets are full of references to the joys of getting gloriously drunk and then writing poetry. There was one famous Zen monk who used to get very drunk, and then he’d soak his hair in Sumi ink and splosh it all over a piece of paper, and then he’d wash it out and look at this thing that he had done, and he would do a Rorschach blot on it until this thing became a landscape.
Then all he’d have to do was to touch his brush to certain points, and whoops! This land magnificent landscape would appear. But he had to get to just the right degree of drunkenness to let go and slosh this paper with his inky hair.
I was one day talking with a Zen priest who was a student of mine several years ago, and he said, “I had a letter from my teacher this morning.” “Oh,” I said, “that’s interesting. How is he?” “Oh, he’s fine. But he said he’s very drunk.
He drink too much.” I said, “This is your teacher? Your Zen teacher?” He said, “Yes my Zen teacher.” He said, “He live in mountain where very cold. Only way to keep warm—drink sake.” And so nobody has any feeling about it; that it’s bad.
But it is a drug, and it is a narcotic—in the strict sense of the word of one that, in quantity, will induce narcosis or torpor; even sleep. So, you see, the word “drug,” though, isn’t normally applied to alcohol. If the doctor says to a patient, “Are you taking any drugs at this time?” The patient thinks, “Let’s see, penicillin,” or whatever, you know, sleeping pills, barbiturates, and so on.
And he says, “No. No, I’m not taking any drugs.” Forgot to mention alcohol. Because that doesn’t count; it’s not recognized as a drug.
So, you see how loaded the word “drug” is? So if we want to keep our conversation clean, we don’t use it. There’s too many double takes and funny associations.
We say instead, chemical. Nice, neutral word. So you see, then, there are states of consciousness that correspond to chemistry.
Here we get another difficulty. There is a certain prejudice going with the word “chemical.” To say that life, to talk about biochemistry, as if life were explainable entirely in terms of chemistry or controllable in terms of chemistry seems to be a put-down to life. There are many—it’s much within the culture that we live in that mind should always triumph of the matter.
This is why Christian science is so popular in the United States, and all kinds of so-called metaphysical things (divine science, religious science, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera) all concentrate over “think positively and all will be well.” Keep your thoughts pure and clean and strong, and always look on the better side of things, and then the physical world—money and all that sort of thing—will take care of itself. And if it doesn’t… well, be happy just the same. Mind over matter.
This is a great thing in America, but it’s impossible to practice because one is also material. If you could perfectly practice mind over matter, of course you should abstain from eating, and not be dependent on this murdering business that we all have to do in order to stay alive. You should certainly renounce aspirin.
You shouldn’t take vitamins—they are chemicals and, in a sense, drugs. Coffee, tea, all that that’s very wicked. And, of course, don’t drink wine.
When Italian people are asked to specify what they spend on liquor, food, et cetera, they always list the wine under food. Liquor means strong drink. Because they consider wine as healthy, normal, everyday drink that everybody naturally has.
And the French would think of it the same way. You see how culturally relative these ideas are? Depending on what you’re used to and how you’re used to classifying things.
But, you see, the chemistry of things is simply a certain way of describing what happens. You can describe anything from a chemical point of view. In other words, you take an oil painting by a great master, and there is a chemical description of it possible.
A musical composition can be described in terms of the physics of sound and accurately measured in those terms. But the only thing is that the language of chemistry is rather clumsy when you’re trying to explain what the artist was attempting to convey through his painting. And the language of the physics of sound is rather clumsy when you’re trying to explain the intentions of Mozart.
And from some points of view, also, the language of biochemistry is clumsy when you are attempting to discuss the nature of various intellectual or spiritual insights. But nevertheless, there is a chemical aspect to all spiritual things. Just as, for every photograph—whether it be a photograph of a great saint or a striptease artist in the newspaper—there is at the basis of all of them that grid which is necessary for reproducing a photograph at all.
So let’s not be too snobbish about our relationship to processes that have chemical and physical descriptions attachable to them. Even the Catholic Church admits there are such things as sacraments. And that, through the physical agency of water, a person may be given the grace of baptism, and through the physical agencies of bread and wine he may partake of the body and blood of Christ.
Using physical means to a spiritual end. And I always detect in people who want to make mind entirely superior to matter—matters completely subordinate to mind—a certain kind of spiritual pride. Which, in Christianity, is the most insufferable of sins.
G. K. Chesterton used to recommend, as a spiritual exercise, putting your head on the ground and looking between your legs so that you could see everything as if it were hanging from the earth. Everything dependent on the earth. Dependent means, in Latin, hanging down, hanging from.
And this is a good point of view. Because, you see, as I may have indicated in the seminar (I think it is in this), people who are too spiritual are like wine or drink which is pure alcohol: it has no body. And people who are too material are like grenadine.
It’s a soft, sweet drink with no bite, no spirit. And we have to follow the middle way. So therefore, there are chemicals which bring about changes of consciousness which can be, in my opinion, aids to the meditation process.
I remember a Chinese taoist philosopher once said to me, “When you start meditating, you should have a few drinks. It will increase your progress by about six months.” That’s a taoist attitude, and it’s a very Chinese attitude. That may be true for Chinese people.
I don’t like to work that way myself. But when it comes to what can be done with the type of chemicals that have been called psychedelic—that is a very meaningless word. That means nothing at all in Greek, except perhaps “soul-destroying”—but it’s meant to mean “mind-manifesting.” I call them psychotropic, which, although it is a very vague term, just means consciousness- or mind-changing.
Of course, all the narcotics are psychotropic. They change the mind. It’s very difficult to find a word for those chemicals that have to do with these states.
But there are, in a way, these certain ones to be considered. And we can say they are roughly form into three types. There’s the cannabis or Indian hemp, there is mescaline, and psilocybin, and there is LSD.
These are the principal ones that are under discussion today. And over here, of course, you see, in this domain we have alcohol, opiates, and I suppose barbiturates. In other words, the true narcotics.
Well, now, in the use of any of these substances there are three factors to be considered—or what is called more strictly three variables. One is the chemical itself. Two is the setting in which it is used: the surrounding circumstances, both physical and social.
And three, the set. And the set means the attitude and character of the person using them, his background, what he brings to it. And because there are three variables, it’s impossible to say of any one of these chemicals that they are specific in what they do.
And so, in a way, everybody has to speak for himself, because he speaks of what happens in the set and setting in which he used them. But some generalizations can be made, all things being more or less equal. But you always have to take it with a certain grain of salt and with certain reservations.
So what we’re talking about, then, is the alteration of consciousness, which these things will do pretty much of themselves. And then, over and above that, what they will do given the optimal set and setting. Now, from my point of view, I do not know (and nobody really knows) whether any of these chemicals are specifically therapeutic.
There have been, in the past, therapeutic uses of cannabis or Indian hemp. I looked at a British materia medica dated 1918, and there were all sorts of ways in which this was then prescribed. But there is no conclusive evidence that these are specific chemicals to be given for specific ailments.
And normally, you see, when a physician prescribes a drug of a chemical of any kind, he feels that he is only justified in introducing the subject into the human system for purposes of healing a specific disease. With the exception, perhaps, of vitamins, which he feels our health builders and could, as a matter of cost, be taken as dietary supplements. In that case, he is using these chemicals as diet rather than medicine.
There is an important difference, you see, between medicine and diet. Medicine is for a specific occasion, diet for a regular occasion. And if it’s medicine, it is important, too, that you do not become hooked on medicine.
One of the most important differences between the practice of a physician and the practice of a clergyman is that a physician is trying to get rid of his patients as fast as possible. He wants to cure them and send them away, so that the medicine can be stopped and they don’t have to come to his office or hospital anymore. Whereas a clergyman is trying to get you hooked on the medicine.
He wants you to continue to come to church, to pay your pledge, to be there every Sunday, and become a regular member or disciple of the congregation. It’s rather funny. So, many, many centuries ago, the physician and the priest were the same person.
They had an argument at one point, and they split. Because the physicians became more and more empirical in their approach, and the priests became more scholastic. The difference between a scholastic and an empiricist is that the scholastic knows everything that’s written in the book, and he takes his idea of truth from the books, and serves as a very ancient and venerable book like the Bible or the Vedas or the Confucian classics.
The Scholastic looks for all truth in their pages. He does not look outside for just the same reason that the theologians would not look through Galileo’s telescope. Because they said, “Well, if it agrees with what is in the Bible, we do not need to look through it.
If it does doesn’t agree with what’s in the Bible, it must be the work of the devil.” But increasingly, physicians began to take an empirical point of view, which was opposed to the scholastic and the theological. And therefore, priest and physician could not be the same person. But this has had unfortunate results, in that it has impoverished both professions.
If somebody is seriously disturbed in mind today, and he goes to a clergyman, the clergyman will immediately send him to a psychiatrist. Because no clergyman today feels (except perhaps a few Catholic priests) that he has the power to cast out demons. When did you last year of somebody being exorcised?
So, in other words, most clergy do not believe in their religion. They do not have any sense that they possess any true power anymore. And so, instead, they send you to some psychiatrist.
Now, this is not true by any means of all psychiatrists, but, as I find, it is true of most psychiatrists, and especially those who are the residents and the permanent staff of mental hospitals. The moment a patient there begins to talk about religion, they know he’s crazy. Because religion, from the point of view of the philosophy of science at the end of the nineteenth century—which was the birth time of psychoanalysis and of a great deal of modern psychiatry—it was the fashion then to regard all religious beliefs as purely superstitious.
And that philosophy has carried down to the present day. There are some awkward alliances between psychiatrists and clergymen. And there is a thing called pastoral psychology, or pastoral psychotherapy: there are psychiatrists teaching in theological schools.
But the arrangement between them is unhappy—or has been, because especially when you say, well, a lot of people’s troubles are due to their sexual repressions (if you take a Freudian standpoint about that). Well, the church can’t agree with you, because the church is a sexual regulation society above all else. Whatever otherwise it pretends, sexual irregularity is about the only thing you can get kicked out of the church for.
So then, the doctor, the physician, feels out of role when he prescribes medicine—there being no disease. He doesn’t like to do that. In the same way, the doctor is shoved out of role when a patient is certainly dying and nothing will help.
He is not allowed by his ethic to administer some painless death pill to the patient. But instead, it’s much worse than that. He often feels obliged to keep the patient alive as long as possible, in a state of suspended animation on the ends of all sorts of tubes, feeling very uncomfortable and miserable.
Because however he may be doped up against actual physical pain, all the family’s savings are going away, and there’s a great difficulty. It drags on and on and on. And furthermore, the general hospital attitude to a dying patient is one of absolute falsehood: to say “You’re coming on.
You’ll be all right.” Maybe a couple of weeks from now and all the friends come and say, “Cheer up, old boy! The things are not so bad as they seem.” They don’t add, probably, they’re much worse. But there there’s a complete failure to face death as an important event.
And that isn’t the physician’s fault. It is a very complex thing. His role has been socially defined in such a way that he is out of role in these emergencies, as he is out of role when it comes to using chemicals for something other than the curing of disease.
Now, in my own opinion, these particular chemicals look as if they are not going to be therapeutic agents, but research tools, just as you magnify your senses with a telephone (which enables you to hear for thousands of miles), with television (which enables you to see for thousands of miles), or with the telescope, or with a microscope (which enables you to see things totally invisible to the naked eye). May I ask whether these things are bad artificialities? Whether it’s really wrong to use telephones, television, microscopes, telescopes?
Is that bad? Well, if it’s alright to use a microscope outside your skin—here it is, a brass gadget with lenses in it—it’s alright if it’s outside your skin. Couldn’t it be alright to use an instrument inside your skin, which would do a kind of magnification process from within the nervous system, provided that this does not seriously damage you?
(I suppose you can ruin your eyesight by using microscopes.) But if it’s not damaging and if you handle it expertly, anybody can have fun looking through a microscope and see all the little things go wiggle, wiggle, and see the jazz go by. But if you happen to have biological or chemical knowledge, then a microscope is an extremely useful tool, as is the telescope to an astronomer or to a navigator.
So I regard these substances as instruments for investigation of the nature of consciousness—which require careful use, because like all things that take you into unfamiliar realms, all exploring is dangerous. It’s dangerous to explore outer space. It was dangerous to settle the West, because there you encountered wild Indians.
In this sort of situation, you don’t encounter wild Indians, but you encounter psychoses. And that’s always dangerous, of course. And you might get into a psychosis, especially if you were predisposed to do so in the first place.
But just because something is dangerous doesn’t mean at all that we shouldn’t do it. It’s dangerous to practice yoga. You can go crazy with that.
Lots of people have. It’s probably less dangerous to practice yoga than to drive on the freeway. It’s probably safer to take a ride by plane than to practice yoga or to take LSD.
But certainly, LSD is not so unsafe as to drive your car on the freeway, or even around town. So, assuming the responsible use of these substances, really, things can be done with them. So let’s consider the possibilities of each of these three groups that I’ve put up here.
I’m going to show that, normally speaking, what they will do and how far they will go of themselves. This one, cannabis, will of itself go about this far. In other words, it will add the dimension of the sensory consciousness to the symbolic, pretty much of itself.
Cannabis, incidentally, is commonly known as marijuana, and it is a non-habit-forming chemical which has a usually calming but sensory alerting and intensifying effect, which is perfectly harmless if not used in very large quantities. And practically every medical authority who’s ever published anything on it agrees with this position. It does not lead to anything except itself, unless it so happens that somebody is selling it to you who really wants to sell you heroin.
Then he will try to tempt you and say, “Oh, sissy. Come on, try some real good stuff.” You see? And dare a kid, say, to take heroin.
But heroin belongs over here and moves in this direction. It’s a narcotic. Cannabis belongs on this side of symbolic consciousness, and moves in this direction.
These two, mescaline and psilocybin, will of themselves take you about that far—into what I described in this morning’s session; various characteristics of what I call the cellular consciousness. Both of them are curious in respect that, of course, you know, that masculine is the same as peyote. It is a distilled synthetic which corresponds to the main active principles in the peyote cactus, and is used by the Indians of the southwest for a religious sacrament.
That is the Native American Church, which is a Christian Indian church, which has a very good reputation as a kind of a law-abiding, pleasant people. The characteristic symptomatology of both these substances—this, incidentally, psilocybin is also from the southwest. That is a synthetic of the active principle of certain mushrooms that are to be found principally in the state of Oaxaca, but actually along the whole west coast of America as far north as Vancouver.
The mushroom psilocybe mexicana heim is the principal one so used. And likewise, here again, this mushroom which is called teonanacatl, or the flesh of God, is taken for religious purposes in a sacramental way. Both of these, as I would say, have a general atmosphere about them which is rather earthy.
They go extraordinarily well with the vegetative world. They bring to life one’s vision of nature and water and plants and sky in an extraordinary way. On the other hand, LSD has a more… I can only call it electronic feel about it.
I don’t know why. But the possibility of LSD by itself is to get to about here, and all that I described as the molecular kind of consciousness. LSD is produced from wheat ergot—from, first of all, lysergic acid, which is derived from wheat ergot, and then refined into a very complex molecule: diethylamide of lysergic acid.
And the diethylamide in particular is number 25. So it’s LSD 25 is the normal correct initials for it. The peculiarity of this substance is that a lot will be done by a little.
It is given in microgram doses. Now, a microgram is a millionth—isn’t it a millionth of a gram? A Thousandth.
A milligram is a thousandth of a gram. A millionth of a gram. And that you can’t see.
Vitamin B 12 is also given in my micrograms. And as little as 75 or even 50 micrograms will produce the characteristic effects of LSD in most human subjects. 100 will certainly do it.
I would say any dosage over 200 involves risks. And so when irresponsible experimentation involves people vying with each other as to how much they’ve taken, and they start to go up towards a thousand, they’ve being just plain stupid. You know, it’s like sitting around on a great drunk and betting on whether you could demolish a whole quart of whiskey in an hour.
Well, what a ridiculous thing to do! I mean, that’s like trying to land a jet aircraft on the freeway. It’s just stupid.
And so one always feels that, in the use of these things, that they have the same sort of dangers that high-powered things of any kind have—rifles or automobiles or planes—and therefore that the use of them should be licensed. The question is: we don’t know quite how to license them, because we don’t know who is really qualified to decide. This is one of the most problematic things of the whole of our technological advance: who is to decide?
Because, you see, to be a qualified expert on any of these subjects it isn’t enough to be a psychiatrist alone. It isn’t enough to be a psychopharmacologist—that is to say, one who specifically studies the biochemistry or the neurology of these substances. The psychiatrist should also have some knowledge of religion, of sociology, of mythology, of, you might say, mythology including symbols and all that sort of thing.
That should go along with it. And, you see, we don’t yet train a class of person who has all these disciplines at his disposal. And so every trained class of person who belongs in a particular category—minister, psychiatrist, pharmacologist—all feel at a bit of a disadvantage, and therefore reluctant to assume responsibility for this kind of investigation.
But, you see, the trouble is, it’s one of those things you can’t get out of. Somebody has got to assume responsibility for it, because it’s happening. All these things are being used and nothing is going to stop their use.
You can’t prohibit LSD—at least you can write it down in the books that it is prohibited and you could tell the police to stop it. But why? The police are harassed enough with enough jobs as it is.
Why send them on a task considerably more difficult than looking for needles in a haystack? LSD can be disguised so as to appear like almost anything. It can be made into gum for envelopes.
It can be disguised as Kleenex or blotting paper or peanut butter or honey or just anything you choose. And it is so minute, it is tasteless, it has no odor. So there is no way whatsoever of concealing this.
It is the perfect secret weapon. It is the perfect elixir. You know, the thing that is the mystery.
And therefore, it can induce fantastic paranoia. Not only—it’s so funny when you read some of the alarmist notices written about LSD from people who’ve never taken it. They read just as if they had taken it and then had a bad trip, because they’ve got paranoia.
They see it on all sides, everywhere: this menace creeping in, in the marmalade, you know? In the drinking water. You know, just drop a pound of it in the local reservoir and the whole town’s turned on!
Argh! So, like the general in Dr. Strangelove who is objecting to the communist plot to put fluoride into the water and destroy our natural juices, similar personalities are terrified that there’s a big communist plot of something or other to circulate LSD to undermine the youth of America and make them all peaceable so that they won’t fight. Well, that’s not the way to handle things.
All these things are best when they’re out in the open. And then, when we can have no paranoia about it, no hiding things as it is. Supposing a group of students who are not out for kicks—incidentally, kicks as a way of putting down young people.
It’s not taking them seriously. If you want to put down the young people and say they’re only out for kicks, you’ve no business sending them to fight wars in Vietnam, which is a very responsible undertaking. So if a group of kids in college decide that they, for serious reasons of religious or personal investigation, want to take LSD, it would be very sensible of them to ask a psychiatrist to come over and sit with them for the day.
And they would each put up enough money to pay him for his time. But they’re not allowed to do so. That would be illegal.
It would be illegal for the psychiatrist to take part in such a thing. That’s the kind of nonsense you get to. So that what happens instead is that crime takes over.
And organized crime hasn’t really moved into LSD yet, because there haven’t been enough enthusiastic graduate chemistry students who would manufacture it. And they’re idealists and they only want to make a relatively small amount of money on it. And they want to turn everybody on.
They want to turn on the president of the United States, the president of the Russian republic, and everybody they want to get high on LSD so as to make them see things. And here lie the dangers. The only way of getting LSD at the moment is on the black market.