In every age, men have struggled to perceive God directly rather than as a tenuously grasped abstraction. Few succeed, and the visions of the world's rare mystics have normally come only after hard spiritual work—prayer, meditation, ascetic practice. Now a number of psychologists and theologians are exploring such hallucinogenic drugs as mescaline, psilocybin and LSD-25 as an easy way to instant mysticism.
In large enough doses, these drugs can simulate the effects of certain forms of psychosis—to the point, in some cases, of permanent derangement. But in controlled, minute doses the drugs produce weird and wonderful fantasies of sight and feeling; in Greenwich Village and on college campuses, they seem to be replacing marijuana as the hip way to get kicks. Some investigators who have tried the drugs claim to have undergone a profound spiritual experience, and these men are seriously, if gingerly, studying the undefined relationship between drug-induced visions and the classic forms of mystical ecstasy.
"The Void Was Lit Up." For at least 3,000 years, primitive tribes have had visionary orgies at feasts of certain sacred plants, often mushrooms. The use of the peyote cactus, from which mescaline is derived, is a regular part of the Communion services of the Native American Church, composed of 200,000 U.S. Indians. Novelist Aldous Huxley wrote, in The Doors of Perception, that mescaline produced in him an effect that seemed like seeing the beatific vision. Psychologist Timothy Leary, who was dropped from the Harvard faculty last spring after receiving strong criticism for his freewheeling research in the use of LSD and psilocybin, gave the drugs to 69 "fulltime religious professionals," found that three out of four had "intense mystico-religious reactions, and more than half claimed that they had the deepest spiritual experience of their life."
Such spiritual experiences range from heavenly to hideous: a number of subjects suffer through agonizing intimations of hell rather than of paradise. Most instant mystics feel that they have been "reborn," and have suddenly been given the key to existence, although their intuition usually appears in the form of an incommunicable platitude, such as "oneness is all." California Prison Psychologist Wilson Van Dusen, for example, imagined himself in a black void in which "God was walking on me and I cried for joy. My own voice seemed to speak of his coming, but I didn't believe it. Suddenly and unexpectedly the zenith of the void was lit up with the blinding presence of the One. How did I know it? All I can say is that there was no possibility of doubt."
Union With God. This kind of experience seems to be at least subjectively religious; but there are less convincing cases in which drug takers appear to have read religion into their visions or rigged the setting to induce a spiritual experience. One professor at a Protestant divinity school recalls that he was handed a rose to contemplate after taking his dose of LSD. "As I looked at the rose it began to glow," he said, "and suddenly I felt that I understood the rose. A few days later when I reread the Biblical account of Moses and the burning bush it suddenly made sense to me."