The American Indians and the Indians in the rest of this hemisphere to the south have used peyote or the magic mushrooms as part of their religion for a long time. They also don't have bad trips because it's part of their culture and it's not looked down upon as insanity. There are a group of American Indians in the United States, numbering perhaps 250,000, called The Native American Church. They are legally allowed to use peyote as part of their religion. How strange it is that the government allows them to use psychedelic drugs for religious purposes, but won't allow anyone else to do the same.

We also think that the worst thing in the world is for a teen-ager to have a psychedelic experience. On that point, here is Timothy Leary, from pages 132-133 of his book, High Priest:

"We forget that for thousands of years the psychedelic vision has been the rite of passage of the teen-ager-the Dakota Indian boy who sits on the mountaintop fasting and sleepless, waiting for the revelation. The threshold of adult game life is the ancient and natural time for the rebirth experience, the flip-out trip from which you come back as a man. A healthy society provides and protects the sacredness of the teen-age psychedelic voyage. A sick, static society fears and forbids the revelation."

Our sick, static society not only fears and forbids the revelation in teen-agers but bans if for anyone, with the threat of prison. Your body belongs to you, not the government. It is your choice what you do with your body and your consciousness. Any government that interferes with this kind of freedom is a fascist government. All countries, including the United States, have fascist governments. Some are just a lot worse than others. Because our government is the least fascist in the world, we confuse that with having freedom. Soft fascism is not freedom. Freedom is freedom. There is no freedom of religion in this country if no one is allowed to have psychedelic drugs as part of their religion, except for those Indians, a small racial minority, living outside of the mainstream.

Here is what Timothy Leary said about LSD and religion. It's from page 135 of his book, The Politics of Ecstasy"

"The LSD experience is a confrontation with new forms of wisdom and energy that dwarf and humiliate man's mind. This experience of awe and revelation is often described as religious. I consider my work basically religious, because it has as its goal the systematic expansion of consciousness and the discovery of energies within, which men call 'divine'. From the psychedelic point of view, almost all religions are attempts, sometimes limited temporarily or nationally, to discover the inner potential. Well, LSD is Western yoga. The aim of all Eastern religion, like the aim of LSD, is basically to get high, that is, to expand your consciousness and find ecstasy and revelation within."

Alan Watts had an interesting comment about the Eastern religions on page 11 of his book, The Joyous Cosmology. Here it is:

"The transformation of consciousness undertaken in Taoism and Zen is more like the correction of faulty perception or the curing of a disease. It is not an acquisition process of learning more and more facts or greater and greater skills, but rather an unlearning of wrong habits and opinions. As Lao-tzu said, 'the scholar gains every day, but the Taoist loses every day'".