Do Drugs Do God

     Why, when I count several of my entheogen* experiences as being among the most important in my life, have I no desire to repeat them? On occasion I have gone so far as to rank them with family and world travel in what they have contributed to my understanding of things, yet — with the exception of peyote, which I took in the line of duty while working with Native Americans as described in chapter 8 — it has been decades since I have taken an entheogen, and if someone were to offer me today a substance that (with no risk of producing a bummer) was guaranteed to carry me into the Clear Light of the Void and within fifteen minutes return me to normal with no adverse effects, I would decline. Why?
     Half of my answer lies in the healthy respect I have for the awe entheogens engender; in Gordon Wasson's blunt assertion in the frontispiece to this book, "awe is not fun." I understand Meister Eckhart completely when he says that "in joy and terror the Son is born" (emphasis mine). I speak only for myself, of course — that durable formula of set and setting again — but if I am honest I have to say (and age may figure in this) that I am afraid of the entheogens. I will take them again if need be, as I did with peyote, but the reasons would have to be compelling.
     The second half of my answer is that I have other things to do. This may sound like a limp excuse for foregoing ecstasy, so I will invoke the Buddhist doctrine of the Six Realms of Existence to explain the force it has for me.
     Metaphysically, that doctrine posits six kinds of being and the realms they inhabit. (The doctrine can also be read psychologically as six states of mind that human beings keep recycling, but I will stick to its metaphysical reading.) The two populations that are relevant here are the demi-gods, who are always happy, and the human beings, whose lot is harder but who are actually the best off of the six kinds of beings because they alone possess free will with its power to change things. (The four I haven't mentioned are instinct-ridden animals, fiercely envious jealous gods, insatitiably greedy ghosts, and hell beings who are ravaged by rage.) Blissed out on Cloud Nine, the demi-gods are still subject to time, which means that sooner or later their holidays will end and they will find themselves back in the form of life from which they were granted temporary leaves. Only the human state opens into nirvana, which is why one of the three things that Buddhists give thanks for each day is that they have been born into a human body.
     I will not try to separate what is literal from what is figurative in this account; only its moral teaching interests me here for supporting my second reason for having no desire to revisit the entheogens. The Sufis speak of three ways to know fire: through hearsay, by seeing its flames, and by being burned by those flames. Had I not been burned by the totally Real, I would still be seeking it as knights sought the Grail and moths seek flame. As it is, it seems prudent to "work for the night is coming," as a familiar hymn advises. Alan Watts put the point more directly: "When you get the message, hang up the phone."
     The downside of swearing off is, of course, the danger that the Reality that trumps everything while it is in full view will fade into a memory and become like Northern Lights — beautiful, but cold and far away. The problem besets the psalmist's lament, "restore unto me the joy of my salvation," has already been quoted. During the three years of the Harvard experiments the entheogens were the most exciting thing in my intellectual life, but at this remove I have to work to get my head back into those years and revive the excitement. I suspect that there are thousands of people out there, possibly millions, who would have reached passionately for a book, such as this had they come upon it soon after their first ingestion when they thought the world would never be the same again, but who at this remove find its subject interesting but no more than that.
     The question comes down to which experiences we should try to keep in place as beacon lights to guide us and which we should let lapse. The intensity of the experience doesn't give us the answer....

*An entheogen ("God inside us," en εν- "in, within," theo θεος- "god, divine," -gen γενος "creates, generates"), in the strict sense, is a psychoactive substance used in a psychotherapeutic, religious, shamanic, or spiritual context. Historically, entheogens were mostly derived from plant sources and have been used in a variety of traditional religious contexts. Most entheogens do not produce drug dependency.

— Huston Smith, Cleansing the Doors of Perception, pp. 130-131.

[From a televised interview between Huston Smith and Jeffrey Mishlove:]
SMITH
     That's interesting and pertinent as well, but I won't go into how. The two cases are strikingly similar. But I think it's important to add another point. The evidence I cited shows only that grug and non-drug mystical experiences are alike while mysticism includes much more than mystical experiences. Its real concern is with mystical lives, including the compassion and other virtues such lives embody. I think it was Robert Ornstein who put this point graphically when he said that the object of mysticism is not altered states but altered traits. Experiences come and go, whereas it is life's sustained quality that counts. So we have to ask not only whether mystical experiences feel the same, but also whether their impact on the lives of their subjects is the same.

MISHLOVE
     Good point. And now that we have a twenty-year perspective on the original experiments you refer to, I think it's quite obvious that psychedelic cults don't have the staying power of authentic religious traditions.
     What about Leary's claim in Psychedelic Experience that the gods that people tend to project onto the world actually exist inside us, as parts of our own psyches? He seems to have been saying that the pantheons of the ancient pantheistic religions are forces that actually exist within us. I think he would hold that the same principle holds for monotheisms.

SMITH
     We live in a psychological rather than a metaphysical age, and I see no harm in putting things the way you attribute to Tim. Whether we go the psychological or the metaphysical route is a fielder's choice because the importance points can be stated either way. We have that option because geography doesn't apply to things of the spirit which elude spatial matrices....
— Huston Smith, Ibid., pp. 152-153.