Religion, God, Christ, Buddha, Saint, Sage, Church, Theology, Holy, Sacred, Sacrament

A belief is an opinion about the nature of reality based on a specific form of upbringing,
indoctrination, or reading of religious literature; it lacks direct experiential validation.

A healthy society provides and protects the sacredness of the teen-age psychedelic
voyage. A sick, static society fears and forbids the revelation.

A holy man is someone who doesn’t care about the little chess game of power,
possessions.

A Mexican Indian told a newspaper reporter who referred to peyote as a drug, “Aspirin in
a drug, peyote is sacred.”

A responsible religion dare not neglect this source of wonder, for it is in this way that
God is perceived.

A sacrament flips you out of the TV-studio game and harnesses you to the 2 billion year
old flow inside.

A tale told by an idiot or a tale told by a Calvinist? Give me the idiot every time. (That
was said by a fictional character in Aldous Huxley’s novel, Island.)

All the religious movements that have shaped human history were inspired and
repeatedly revitalized by visionary experiences or transpersonal realities.

Almost without exception, religious communities, churches, temples, work to establish
social institutions and not to see through them.

Although the experiences have been fulfilling in hundreds of ways, by far the most
meaningful have been the religious insights and feelings of spirituality.

An important aspect of the discussions in the preparatory period is exploration of the
subject’s philosophical orientation and religious beliefs.

Are they outlawed because we fear drugs or because we fear the social effects of altered
states of awareness, religious intensity, and mysticism?

As children, many of us were exposed to all sorts of doctrines about God without
anybody ever encouraging us to discover God first-hand within ourselves.

As objects become charged with symbolic meanings, they incorporate emotions, often of
a religious nature.

At the present time, man is so sick that today it is safe to say that drugs are the specific
and almost only way that the American is ever going to have a religious experience.

Because the teaching of Buddha was a way of liberation, it had no other object than the
experience of nirvana.

Belief in the divinity of the Sacrament called for an act of faith, whereas the Mexican
plants spoke for themselves.

Buddhas are made by themselves and the Truth…not by their friends. You have to go the
final stretch on your own.

Buddhism and Taoism are concerned with changing the consciousness of normal people,
unlike shrinks concerned only with disturbed people.

Buddhists set up a whole social structure centered on the cultivation of enlightenment and
higher consciousness.

By the act of self-abandonment, God becomes all beings, yet at the same time does not
cease to be God.

Certain forms of Eastern “mysticism” in particular Taoism and Buddhism, don’t
presuppose a universe divided into the spiritual and the material.

Certain myths keep appearing and reappearing and many of them refer to the magic and
wonder of the sacred drug, the potion, the elixir of life.

Christian imagery is very vague about the glories of heaven and amazingly specific about
the agonies of hell.

Christianity is a contentious faith which requires an all-or-nothing commitment to Jesus
as the one and only incarnation of the Son of God. (That was Alan Watts.)

Christianity is the religion of grace much more in theory than in practice. (That was Alan
Watts.)

Consciousness-changing devices initiated many of the religious perspectives which,
taking root in history, continued after their psychedelic origins were forgotten.

Contemplation is that condition of alert passivity, the immanent and transcendent
Godhead, the state of union with the divine Ground of all being.

Deep religious experiences can be found only within ourselves. (LSD is the key that
opens the door.)

Descriptions of visionary landscapes occur in the ancient literature of folklore and
religion.

Didn’t Christ center his teachings around the Brotherhood of Man? Haven’t all religious
leaders taught that we are all brothers.

Direct spiritual experiences are perfectly compatible with the mystical branches of the
great religions of the world.

Dismiss the Judaic-Christian-Marxist-puritan-literary-existentialist suggestion that the
drop-out is escape and that the conformist cop-out is reality.

Divine madness is described by the Greek philosopher Plato as a gift from the gods: “The
greatest blessings come by way of madness, indeed of madness that is heaven-sent.”

Doctrine is the interpretation of religious experience. (Western religions mistake doctrine
for the experience.)

“Drug” means positive things, possible growth, opening up the mind, beauty, sensual
awareness, religious revelation.

Drugs do not merely duplicate or stimulate theologically sponsored experiences but
generate or shape theologies themselves.

Drugs have light to throw on the history, phenomenology and philosophy of religion and
the practice of the religious life itself.

During any profound emotional experience, religious or otherwise, chemical or hormonal
bodily changes occur.

Each man is Buddha. The aim of life is to discover your Buddha-hood. You must retrace
the ancient path yourself. Discover your own Christ-hood.

East and West, civilized or primitive, religious thought and all that flows from it almost
certainly has been importantly influenced by psychedelic drugs.

Eternal life “stands in the knowledge of the Godhead, not in faith in anything less than
the Godhead.”

Even some of the moving expressions of the Bible and religion pale in my attempts to
describe the experience.

Every kind of typically religious emotion, symbol, and insight appears during
psychedelic drug trips.

Every person possesses a tremendous fund of God-given talents. I lay thinking that when
talents remain unrecognized and unused, it was because of emotional blocks.

Every religion uses the term infinite to describe its highest conception and all mystics
have seen infinity.

Everything that lives is holy. (That includes inorganic matter which is indeed alive.
Everything is alive and holy.)

Expecting the Second Coming of the Lord, obviously, the Church has been looking in the
wrong direction—in the outward skies and not in the realm of heaven which is “within”.

Experiencing one’s self as one with the universe or with God is the hallmark of the
mystic experience, regardless of its cultural context.

Experiences of cosmic consciousness has been described in many religious scriptures
throughout history.

Experiences of the consciousness of particular, stable, immutable and durable substances
are perceived as being high spiritual states involving an element of sacredness.

Experiential identification with inorganic matter is often accompanied by fascinating
insights of a philosophical, mythological, religious and mystical nature.

Far more people in our time experience neither the presence of God nor the presence of
his absence, but the absence of his presence.

Feelings of awe, reverence or sacredness are the natural emotional response to the
realization of the overwhelming power and radiance of the universal energy process.

Few people have much conception of what a religious experience really is. Few people
have any idea how the divine process presents itself.

For many religions, the celestial realms represent the most describable goal, the
destination of the spiritual journey.

For the mystical consciousness, “God is love” is a self-evident truth not a piece of
wishful positive thinking.

Full reality is awesome to contemplate. Man longs for God, but fears to meet Him. (It is
the ego that fears.)

God has no skin and no shape because there isn’t any outside to him. Your self is that
cleverly hidden because it is God hiding.

God is dethroned and un-godded by being put in opposition to nature and the world. (If
God is infinite, then God can’t be in “opposition” to nature or the world or anything else.)

God is divided in play, in make-believe, but remains undivided in reality so that when the
play comes to an end, the individualized consciousness awakens to find itself divine.

God is no specialist. (A specialist deals with one thing. God is ALL and way beyond even
being a specialist in everything.)

God is not dead; he is alive and close. (He’s closer than most people realize. In fact, you
can’t get away from him.)

God is “underneath” rather than “above” everything and he (or it) plays the world from
inside.

God will remain somehow remote and “out there” unless there is a complete turnabout
into which all references to the high and the beyond is translated into terms of depth.

Grass was good but only LSD could get you past the receptionist, through to God on the
phone.

Hallucinogenic agents throughout their long history have served primarily to stimulate
religious and spiritual understanding.

Hallucinogenic drugs do actually belong in the church, in a prominent place in the
church, for they are sacred drugs.

He prays best who does not know that he is praying, for prayer is self-forgetful
absorption in God.

Hell consists not in being deprived of union with God, but in willful failure to appreciate
it.

Hinduism and Buddhism have never been persecuting faiths, have preached almost no
holy wars and have restrained from that proselytizing religious imperialism.

Holiness does not reside in gods outside of nature. Holiness IS nature and our attitude
toward rocks, whales, and galaxies should be one of reverence.

How many are open to the idea that God might be easier to find with LSD in the body
than with white bread or bourbon or liverwurst in the body?

I begin to congratulate the priest on his gamesmanship, on the sheer courage of being
able to put up such a performance of authority when he knows precisely nothing.

I don’t think religion is, in its essence, a matter of belief at all. Reality is reality, whatever
you choose to believe about it.

If a member of a typical congregation were to have a profound religious experience, its
minister would very likely send him to a psychiatrist for medical treatment.

If God is separate from this world, then he is finite. (The Western view of God is a
contradiction in saying that God is separate from this world, but also infinite.)

If God is truly infinite and universally active, how can he be said to be more incarnate in
Jesus than in anyone else?

If God is universal, the knowledge of God should include all other knowledge as the
sense of light includes all the differing objects of vision.

If Jesus could realize his identity with God, you can also, but this God does not have to
be idolized as an imperious monarch.

If organized religion decides to avail itself of LSD’s efficacy in spiritual matters, the
church may once again be a strong spiritual force.

If religion rejects the magical side of life, it cuts itself off from the living forces of the
world.

If the religious vigor of a Westerner is enhanced by rich, mystical understanding, this is
certainly preferable to a foolish allegiance to a dead faith.

In all religious traditions, the paradises and other worlds have precisely the qualities
which are given in the descriptions of the visionaries.

In Buddhism, attachment or clinging to the material world is seen as the root of suffering
and releasing it is the key to spiritual liberation.

In cultures where truth-fact are tied to religious dogmas, their science wanes, practical
investigation languishes and thinking is subordinated to submissive belief.

In every age, men have struggled to perceive God directly rather than as a tenuously
grasped abstraction.

In every culture, the abode of the gods and of souls in bliss is a country of surpassing
beauty, glowing with color, bathed in intense light.

In religion and folklore, one finds in all the traditions, descriptions of paradise, of the
golden age, of the future life.

In Taoist and Buddhist thought, there is no conception of a God who deliberately and
consciously governs the universe.

In the Eternal Now, we shall find that strait and narrow gate, the needle’s eye, through
which we are taken into the infinite life of God.

In the LSD era, religion without drugs would be unnatural and pointless, like astronomy
without telescopes.

In the modern world, religion is often a social activity with mild ethical rules. Religion in
primitive society was an awesome reality.

In the right psychological environment, these chemical mind changers make possible a
genuine religious experience.

In this state of knowledge of God, the mind is enlightened from out of the depths of
divine wisdom which defy our scrutiny.

Inherent in the nondifferentiated unity of mystical consciousness is a profound sense of
holiness and sacredness.

Instead of effecting the union of God and the world, which is its central purpose,
Christian sacramentalism has kept the two apart.

Instead of religion and science being 2 different things, we need a view of the world in
which the reports of science and religion are as concordant as those of the eyes and ears.

Internal freedom is becoming a major religious and civil rights controversy. (Timothy
Leary wrote that in the 1960’s.)

It has been suggested that the resurrection of Jesus was an illusion created with the help
of mandrake (a drug)).

It is a perennial theme in literature, as in mystical religion, this distrust of the intellect,
the agency of ego, as the sole or dominant vehicle of life.

It is hard to imagine a more useful way to combine medicine, psychology and religion
than psychedelic therapy with dying individuals.

It is noteworthy that most of the world’s highest religious and philosophical thought
originated in altered states of consciousness in individuals.

It is through the experience of the sacred that the ideas of reality, truth and significance
first dawn.

Jesus explained that we all have the potential—the God-given right—to enter the
Kingdom, to become whole and holy.

Jesus did not say that this higher state of consciousness realized in him was his alone for
all time. Nor did he call us to worship him.

Jesus found the companionship of publicans and sinners preferable to that of the
righteous and respectable

Jesus showed us the way to a higher state and called upon us to realize it, to make it real,
actual—individually and as the race.

Jews and Christians think of God in political and monarchial terms, as the supreme
governor of the universe, the ultimate boss.

Judeo-Christian-Moslem, Marxist religions glorify conquest, expansion and murder of
nonbelievers. (That was Timothy Leary.)

Knowing about God is not enough. Transformation of the self is only through realizing or
feeling God.

Lacking warmth and drive, many churches and religions have either passed out of
existence or have continued in a kind of institutional living death.

Leary saw the revolutionary possibilities of psilocybin and later LSD for psychotherapy
and religion.

Life flows back into us when we turn from the stale oldness of theological notions to the
newness of spiritual experience.

Like any other form of imperialism, theological imperialism is a menace to permanent
world peace.

LSD experiments gave new impetus to exploration into the essence of religious and
mystical experience.

LSD has confirmed and strengthened what was already genuine in my religious
intuitions.

LSD subjects report numerous visions of archetypal forms, individual deities and
complex mythological sequences. (eyes closed)

LSD translates into the language not just of religion, psychology and psychotherapy, but
also of the physical and biological sciences.

Man’s obsessive consciousness of and insistence on being a separate self is the final and
most formidable obstacle to the unitive knowledge of God.

Many examples of the identification of a consciousness-changing drug with God and
associated with religious ritual could be cited.

Many of the world’s greatest religious figures were once considered criminal, mad or
both.

Many people discover a deep connection with an inner source, higher self, or God, and
they might experience the world as an expression of the Divine.

Many people report visions of brilliant light with a super-natural quality radiating divine
intelligence or experience God as pure spiritual energy permeating all.

Modern Church religion is little concerned with giving any consciousness of union with
God, mysticism.

Most art springs from intense inner experiences. Passionate religious feelings, for
instance, has inspired artists to produce their most deeply felt and moving works.

Most of the great religions have taken this goal, the going beyond the rational, as their
central program.

Most of the great world religions were based on inner exploration employing brain-
changing vegetables.

Mysticism in the form of realizing that one’s true self is the Godhead is something that
Western society would not tolerate.

Mythology, the repository of a culture’s sacred history, reveals the relevance and
universal nature of the experience of death and rebirth.

Myths, on the whole, have been much less dangerous than theological systems because
they are less precise and have fewer pretentions.

Never underestimate the sacred meaning of the turn-on. To turn on, you need a sacrament
which turns the key to the inner doors.

No less renowned a prophet than the late Aldous Huxley has suggested that humanity at
large may in fact come to avail itself of psychedelic drugs as a surrogate for religion.

No longer need man wonder with Job about God’s mysterious ways. LSD has the
answers and more. It is The Truth, The Experience, The Godhead.

Not only can psychedelic drugs deepen and broaden our understanding of religious
experience, but they may also contribute to genuine spiritual development.

Now I know what Blake and St. John of the Cross were talking about. This experience is
what I was seeking when I became a Catholic.

On the basis of these hyper-conscious moments, most of the great religions of the world
have been founded.

One of the important contributions of the drug movement to religion is that it has called
the attention of religious people to the necessity of ecstasy for vital religion.

One of the main goals of all religions is the realization of God and the transcendental
experience.

One of the things that is shaking to an individual on LSD is that he has to come to a
realization that he is Christ and then recognize that everybody else is.

Only when the mind and soul is empty, like clear glass, does it let through the light of
God.

Organized religion has very little to do with the non-verbal education of individuals for
spiritual insight.

Our churches feel like grim courts of law where we are all on trial for unspecified crimes
because it’s just silly lectures and has nothing to do with celebrating the union with God.)

Our Hebrew-Christian spiritual tradition identifies the absolute—God—with the moral
and logical order of convention. (God is not a narrow, little, meaningless convention.)

Our Judeo-Christian heritage has denied the connection between sensuous life-affirming
wildness and the experience of the sacred.

Our moral image of God is lacking in Beauty and Beauty’s handmaidens—joy, laughter
and in its sublimest sense, playfulness, a virtue which is at the very root of creative art.

Our religions, our Great Society, our culture and our civilization would be without even
the pretense to greatness without ecstasy in some form.

People who go to church don’t know that the power they sing to, pray to, kneel before, is
asleep within them.

Peyote-eating and the religion based upon it have become important symbols of the red
man’s right to spiritual independence.

Poor Jesus! If he had known how great an authority was to be projected upon him, he
would never have said a word.

Psychedelic drugs opened to mass tourism mental territories previously explored only by
small parties of particularly intrepid adventurers, mainly religious mystics.

Psychedelic substances have been used very wisely in primitive cultures. Our culture
doesn’t have this framework, the closeness to God and nature.

Pursuing the religious life today without psychedelic drugs is like studying astronomy
with the naked eye.

Reality, God, the Eternal Now, is entirely beyond speech and understanding and
attainment, but at the same time, is right here.

Religion has become to a large extent externalized and has lost connection with its
original experiential sources.

Religion is a form of organized group activity that may or may not be conducive to true
spirituality.

Religion is in its truest sense an instrument for awakening us to the revolutionary process
of growth to Godhood.

Religion to us is ecstasy. It is freedom and harmony. Kids should not let the fake,
television-prop religion they were taught turn them off. The real trip is the God trip.

Religions teach of the eternity of man, of the greater life beyond, of the soul, of that
which is greater than this physical life.

Religious ecstasy was not discovered by the drug cults. It has been known for centuries.
(Make that millennia, not just centuries.)

Religious experience can be defined as that experience which occurs when the “depths of
our being” are touched or confronted by the “Depth of Being.”

Religious experiences are not the same as a religious life and not the same as a religious
belief.

Religious ideas are like words—of little use and often misleading, unless you know the
concrete realities to which they refer.

Religious training or metaphysical inquiry seems to provide the ideal context for these
drugs.

Rudolph Otto uses the term mysterium tremendum to describe the fundamental religious
emotion, that which is felt in apprehending the numinous or holy.

St. Augustine wrote volumes of treatises basic to Catholic theology, toward the end of his
life had the experience of Pure Light and never wrote a word again.

Saints and other holy men are usually disturbing to any religious organization. They are
inclined to follow their own “inner direction” rather than of temporal authority.

Shamanism is the oldest religion of humanity, reaching back tens of thousands of years. It
is also a phenomenon that is practically universal.

Since one’s true nature is already the Buddha nature, one does not have to do anything to
make it so.

So long as man identifies himself with the ego, he is trying to be God. It is only when he
knows that his center of being is the infinite that he is really free to be man.

Something told me that if there was any microphone I could use to ask God a question, it
was peyote.

Spiritual experiences in psychedelic sessions usually do not take an orthodox religious
form. More frequently, they resemble what Einstein referred to as cosmic religion.

Talking to God or deliberately sitting or kneeling down to think about God only puts God
at a distance.

That which in the language of religion is called “this world” is the universe of reduced
awareness.

The action of consciousness-expanding drugs on the cortex can be holy and intensely
educational.

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.

The association of drugs with religious experience is so offensive to some that they will
deny that such things can be.

The atrocities of organized religion are due to mistaking the verbalized notion for the
given mystery to which it refers.

The average church will tend to reject any discussion of the drugs that does not damn
them.

The beauty and mystery, the gaiety and exuberance which we see in nature and art exist
supremely and perfectly in God.

The Buddha nature is “within” oneself and is not to be sought outside (like going to
India).

The Christian must accept by faith. The mushroom of the Aztecs carries its own
conviction; every communicant will testify to the miracle that he has experienced.

The Church has always been highly suspicious of mystics because they seem to be
insubordinate and to claim equality or worse, identity with God.

The Church is not a creative power in the modern world because Christians have, in
general, no consciousness of union with God.

The confrontation with God, the authentic religious experience, does have the power to
transform.

The discovery of LSD is as important to philosophy and religion as the discovery of the
microscope was to biology.

The distinction between the ordinary and the sacred disappears, and the individual—who
essentially is the universe— becomes sacralized.

The distinctions between magic, religion, and medicine have not always been so clear as
we make them, or profess to make them.

The end of human life is not action but contemplation or the direct and unitive awareness
of God.

The entire study of consciousness, the religious experience itself, remains in a state of
medieval ignorance and superstition.

The experience can open one’s eyes and make one blessed and transform one’s whole
life.

The experience of psychological and spiritual rebirth is typically associated with a sense
of love, compassion and reverence for life.

The experience of rebirth is typically associated with a sense of love, compassion and
reverence for life.

The gift of union with God means that our mental and physical space-time life is given
the dimension of eternity.

The God externalized in Christ exists within the center rather than beyond the outer
boundary of our consciousness. (There is no outer boundary to our consciousness.)

The God of Vengeance was one of the reasons the Christian religion did not add up for
me. I could not conceive of a God who was loving and also full of vengeance.

The great religious and spiritual traditions all teach that the source of wisdom lives within
us.

The Hindu says that the universe is God’s maya or dream, the creation of an illusion so
fabulous that it takes in its Creator.

The irrepressibly boisterous spirit of Tim (Leary) bequeathed to us the exhortation to be
sacred clowns who evolve into social change artists of compassionate rascalry.

The joy of the spirit is available the moment pride is swallowed and the free gift of union
with God accepted.

The kingly concept of God makes identity of self and God or self and universe,
inconceivable in Western religious terms.

The law against LSD is a violation of a people’s God-given right to experience their own
divinity.

The literature of creativity clearly indicates that true artistic, scientific, philosophical and
religious inspiration is mediated by nonordinary states of consciousness.

The man who lives in the light of God is conscious neither of time past nor of time to
come but only of one eternity.

The mere suggestion of a connection between psychedelic drugs and authentic religious
experience will outrage many and perhaps, puzzle most.

The Mexican Indian who said, “Aspirin is a drug, peyote is sacred,” was making a
distinction that our laws do not permit.

The mind is the key to life, for under illusion, it creates confusion and when clarified, it
reveals the Buddha nature.

The minister might become an extraordinarily helpful person if he could see through his
own religion.

The mushrooms might have been a “mighty springboard” which first put the idea of God
into men’s heads.

The mystic knows that in some mysterious and indescribable manner, God and his
universe are one.

The mystic perceives all things as one, all men as his brothers, all creatures as his fellows
and all matter holy.

The natural universe has been considered apart from and even opposed to God because it
has not been experienced as one body.

The new physics seem to be approaching the mystic vision of which seers and sages of all
traditions have spoken.

The plant sources of these drugs, the visionary vegetables, have been worshipped as Gods
in many times and places.

The playfulness of the child, the saint and of God are alike in this: that they are all actions
in the mood of eternity rather than the mood of time.

The power of psychedelics to evoke evolutionary archetypes awakened many women to
the goddess within.

The products of the goldsmith’s art, this sacred jewelry, have their place at the very heart
of every Mystery, in every holy of holies.

The psychedelic experience frequently involves elements totally alien to an individual’s
own religious tradition.

The psychedelic experience is man’s oldest and most classic adventure into meaning.
Every religion was founded on the basis of some flipped out visionary trip.

The psychedelic religious movement uses the same chemical aids or sacraments as the
first American religion—the peyote religion of the native American Indians.

The psychedelics ain’t junk. The psychedelics are holy sacraments! Everybody should
take acid at least once to straighten-out their heads.

The psychedelics’ special effectiveness for mental illness is closely associated with their
capacity to release ecstatic religious states.

The reality of religion and the reality of life are one and the same. (Religion is not
opposed to life or in conflict with it.)

The realm of insights or problem solutions is in any area which is meaningful to that
individual be it social or personal, intellectual, religious, philosophical, things like that.

The refusal to admit that drugs can induce religious experiences is like the 17th century
theologians’ refusal to look through Galileo’s telescope.

The religions of the world either worship sex or repress it; both attitudes proclaim its
centrality. To understand the mysteries, always look for what is veiled.

The religious and mythological symbolism is rich and multiform and can draw on
different cultural traditions. (eyes closed)

The religious experience is the ecstatic certain discovery of answers to spiritual
questions.

The religious systems of the world have been built up, in the main, by men and women
who were not completely selfless or enlightened.

The rift between God and nature would vanish if we knew how to experience nature,
because what keeps them apart is not a difference of substance but a split in the mind.

The sacramental process of our religion is the use of marijuana and LSD and nothing can
substitute for that.

The sage judges by the concrete content of the experience and not by its conformity with
purely theoretical standards.

The substitution of interminable chatter for mystical experience or immediate realization
of our union with God is the basic reason why the Church has no spiritual power.

The terms in which a man interprets this experience are naturally drawn from the
religious and philosophical ideas of his culture.

The trouble is that we are too proud to be children and appreciate the playing of God. For
sin is precisely the adult, unplayful action of taking oneself seriously.

The true religious ascetic has no particular interest in mystical religion. He is totally
under the domination of the symbol and does not actually understand its meaning at all.

The true sage rejects all distinctions and takes his refuge in Heaven, in the basic unity of
the world.

The two worlds, the divine and the human, are actually one. The realm of the gods is a
forgotten dimension of the world we know.

The universe is perceived as indescribably beautiful and radiant; individuals feel cleansed
and purged and talk about redemption, salvation or union with God.

The use of LSD is a ready way of stirring deeply buried sources of the religious life and
perceptions, which create feelings of awe, joy, wonder, peace and love.

The use of mind-altering drugs as religious sacraments was not restricted to a particular
time and place, but characterized nearly every society on the planet.

The use of psychedelics for ritual, religious and magical purposes can be traced back to
ancient shamanic traditions and is probably as old as mankind.

The usual Western concept of God is the conscious ruler and controller, the absolute
dictator.

The very fact of mystical experience belies the oft repeated assertion that human
consciousness can never rise above the level of formal religious symbolism.

The visionary experience bears a striking resemblance to “the Other World” as we find it
described in the various traditions of religion and folklore.

The vivid experiences of the mystics may be our only means of testing the truth of
religious and metaphysical hypotheses.

The whole notion of God as universal monarch, King of kings, is of itself, provocative
and almost calculated to stir up trouble.

The wind is experienced as a tangible manifestation of the awesome power of the
universe, as “God’s breath” or nature’s exhalations.

The wisdom of sages is not in their teachings; otherwise anybody might become a sage
simply by reading.

The wise man devotes his life to the religious search—for therein is found the only
ecstasy, the only meaning.

Theologians need to acknowledge the reality of other worlds, other dimensions of Being,
to which man has access.

There appears to emerge a universal central perception, apparently independent of the
subject’s previous philosophical or theological inclinations.

There is a close association between the cosmology of modern science and the
cosmology of some eastern religions.

There is a realm of spiritual wisdom which religion as we know it can express by analogy
only.

There is a universal likening of sages to lunatics. (That’s because most people have never
understood sages.)

There is about all really holy people a kind of guileless humor, a sense of one’s own
absurdity.

There is hardly a single large-scale crime in history which has not been committed in the
name of God.

There is no doubt that psychedelic drugs produce experiences regarded by those who
undergo them as religious in the fullest sense.

There is no dualism of heaven and earth, natural and supernatural, Man and God, material
and spiritual, mortal and immortal.

There is no “higher religion” without mysticism because there is no apprehension of the
meaning of reality without mysticism.

There is no such thing as an abiding public morality without a general realization of
union with God. (You cannot shove morality down someone’s throat.)

There is nothing that the more traditional churches fear so much as ecstatic religious
experience.

There is pretty clear evidence of the religious use of psychedelic drugs among the ancient
Greeks.

There was a time when the Jews exalted a man and made him divine and then nailed him
up when they discovered he was human after all.

These drugs, handled correctly, appear to offer incomparable opportunities for studying
religious experience.

These heroic figures of man’s visionary experiences (eyes closed) have appeared in the
religious art of every culture.

These sacraments are fantastic privileges. It is an undescribable grace, an undescribable
privilege.

These visionary experiences have a primary numinous quality, as C. G. Jung called it;
they were the original sources of all great religions.

They consider me insane, but I know that I am a hero and living under the eyes of the
gods.

They thought intellect was the only thing that mattered. They refused to let their feelings
live. Yet God can be found only through the heart.

They’re all beautiful, brilliant, perfect people—Buddhas all. Why do they continue to
play games?

Think of God as the one whose spontaneity is so perfect that it needs no control, whose
inside is so harmonious that it requires no conscious scrutiny.

This insistence on the inefficacy of symbolic religion for the ultimate purpose of union
with God has been stressed by all the Oriental religions.

This is a matter of immediate experience, a psychological fact which has been recorded
in folklore and the religious literature of every age and country.

This is the central experience Jesus sought for all people. This is the heart of Jesus’ life
and teaching, although it is now largely absent from the institutional Christian churches.

This is what Jesus taught and demonstrated—cosmic consciousness, the direct experience
of divinity dwelling in us and all things.

This other earth, where everything is brighter and clearer and more real than in our world
is, he says, a vision of blessed beholders. (That was Socrates, Plato’s mentor.)

Those who have experienced most keenly their union with God are intensely real and
unique personalities.

Those who use psychedelics with religious intent are now members of a persecuted
religion which appears to the rest of society as a grave menace to “mental health.”

Thoughts, even of the saints and Jesus, are hindrances to the sight of the pure God, the
mystical experience.

Through the Greek Mysteries, men became gods and celebrated their divinity in the
ecstatic light-space geometries of the great temples.

Throughout the ages, the church institution has been the great enemy of the interior
religious spirit.

To be alive spiritually, man must have union with God and must be conscious of it. Apart
from this union, his religious life will be an empty drudgery.

To be truly “in Christ” is to be less and less preoccupied with any external image of Jesus
derived from the Gospels.

To become a sage, one must get rid of all the rigidities of unregenerate adulthood and
become again as a little child.

To believe that God is angry at sin and that His anger cannot be propitiated except by the
offer of a certain sum of pain is to blaspheme against the divine Nature.

To the ordinary institutional-type psychiatrist, any patient who gives the least hint of
mystical or religious experience is automatically diagnosed as deranged.

To think of God as mere Power and not also, at the same time, as Power, Love and
Wisdom, comes quite naturally to the ordinary, unregenerate human mind.

Traditionally it was said that the devil, the embodiment of evil, opposes everything we do
towards enlightenment or tries to block our approach to the realm of Spirit, Self and God.

Under LSD you come to know that God is not apart and aside from Man but that God is
within Man and that Man is within God.

Union with God does not have to be attained but realized because it is a present reality
from the very beginning.

Unusual types of religious worship should be protected until they not only have been
proved harmful, but also more harmful than they are good.

Upon the certainty of this union with God depends the entire joy, power and world-
transforming character of the mystical experience.

Various archetypal images of deities can accompany the birth experience, as individual
visions or in the context of entire mythological sequences. (eyes closed)

Virtually in every religious tradition, both civilized and primitive, use has been made of
mind-changing drugs used for the purposes of inducing visionary experiences.

Wake up! You are God! You have the Divine plan engraved in cellular script within you.
You’ll be reborn.

We can go further than the religious sphere and see the need for ecstasy in all of life. This
is the solid core of truth in the message of the hippies.

We do not need a new religion or a new bible. We need a new experience—a new feeling
of what it is to be “I”.

We were seeking a clearer, purer realm. A realm of unbounded joy. The realm of
enlightenment. The Pure Land. Buddhahood.

We will attain to knowledge of the universe through the spirit of truth and thereby to
understanding of our being one with the deepest, most comprehensive reality, God.

Western religions call any idea about an inner level at which God and man are identical,
pantheism.

Western theology has tended to be out of touch with the mystical roots of religious
experience.

When a person accepts God’s love, he’s too rich to be bothered with things (possessions,
status symbols, etc.).

When such experiences are taken seriously, prophets rise up, religious beliefs are
formulated, and religious institutions are founded.

Who wants to talk to a preacher when you know damn well they’re all working for the
establishment.

Without the consciousness of God in the soul and of the soul in God, Christianity in this
age and for modern man can be no more than a superficial mimicry of spirituality.

Without the realization of God’s love for the world, we can love neither the world nor
God.

Worship of the Goddess predated worship of male deities in many cultures, East and
West.

You’ve got to laugh hard before you can get anywhere near God. (God is fun, not serious.
Lighten up and get with it.)

Your life begins when your TV game ends. Then you are free to walk out of the studio, a
God in the Garden of Eden.

A Christianity which is not basically mystical must become either a political ideology or
a mindless fundamentalism. Biblical idolatry is one of the most depressing and sterile
fixations of the religious mind.

A conception of the ultimate unity in being and consciousness of man and the universe is
common to all of the main religious traditions and is based on the experience of the
mystics in each tradition.

A deeper understanding of the transformative process, based on the synthesis of
historical, anthropological and experimental data, could have important implications for
many different areas, including psychiatry, art, philosophy, religion and education.

A new, deepened reality consciousness could become the basis of a new religiosity which
would not be based on belief in the dogmas of various religions, but rather on perception
through the “spirit of truth”.

A sacrament is something that engenders in those who use it certain spiritual resonances
which defy exact analysis and can’t be accurately described to one who does not
experience authenticity in himself.

A truly unselfconscious person has a kind of unaggressive but nonetheless unshakable
assurance, which at a deep level is religious faith or at its deepest level a kind of
metaphysical certainty.

According to Carl Jung, the main function of formalized religion is to protect people
against the direct experience of God. (That’s why formalized religion is a farce and a
fraud.)

After such experiences, contemplation may take on new meaning for the Western man
who finds little time to ponder the meaning of his own existence and the philosophical
presuppositions upon which his religious, political, scientific, and ethical convictions rest.

Although the Christian tradition does not recognize it, it seems obvious that if there is a
hereafter, then there must be a herebefore. And now I KNOW there is, for I was already
there when my mortal self was conceived.

Americans are permitted to do almost anything in the name of psychotherapy or religion
except use disapproved drugs. (That means the U.S. is a fascist state without religious
freedom.)

Any contact with divinity not subject to priestly mediation and formulation in terms of
traditional doctrines appears as a threat to the political and social order, and may be
classified as madness or vice.

Any point from which one sees the one-ness is a center. That one point of vision is the
eye of God, seeing, glorifying, understanding the whole. One such moment of revelation
is the only purpose of life.

Art and religion, philosophy and science, morals and politics—these are the instruments
by means of which men have tried to discover a coherence in the flux of events, to
impose an order on the chaos of experience.

As long as human beings have had these kinds of bodies, living on a planet of this sort,
certain myths keep appearing and reappearing and many of them refer to the magic and
wonder of the sacred drug, the potion, the elixir of life.

At present, Christianity tends to demand blind faith, rote words and mechanical behavior.
This leaves people empty and unfulfilled. But the cosmic calling we humans have will
not be denied forever, despite the ignorance of religious institutions.

Before the invention of Christianity, sex was more often identified with religion than sin.
(It is questionable whether sex was ever identified with sin before the coming of
Christianity, but there is no question that sex was identified with religion.)

Certain drugs can produce in otherwise normal individuals deep mystical and religious
states. Matrices for such experiences exist in the unconscious as a normal constituent of
the human personality.

Consciousness changes. Your nerve endings, neural cameras, cellular memory banks,
protein structures become broadcasting instruments for the timeless humming message of
God located inside your body.

Documentation of the wide-spread use of cannabis for medical, religious and intoxicant
purposes begins to appear about the tenth century B. C. (That’s right. The medical use of
marijuana is at least 3000 years old.)

During a government investigation of the use of peyote by the Native American Church,
an Indian made the statement, “You white men go to your church houses and talk about
God. We eat peyote and talk with God.”

Ego-consciousness must either live the world to the exclusion of God or God to the
exclusion of the world; there cannot be room for both on the objective plane. (The ego
doesn’t understand that God is not separate from the world.)

Emotional healing is combined with a movement toward a more fulfilling strategy of life
and a search for answers to the fundamental ontological and cosmological questions of
existence.

Every person who has a genuine mystical experience reports that he sees the unity, reality
and infinity in space and time of all creation. He feels joy, peace and a sense of the
sacred. He knows that his experience is true.

Every woman has built into her cells and tissues the longing for a hero, sage-mythic
male, to open up and share her own divinity. But casual sexual encounters do not satisfy
this deep longing.

For at least 3000 years, primitive tribes have had visionary orgies at feasts of certain
sacred plants, often mushrooms. (Were they primitive or is modern man, ignorant of all of
this, who is really primitive?)

For millennia, man has been involved in the ritual ingestion of substances reputed to
produce an awareness of a sacramental reality and has come to incorporate these
substances into the myth and ritual pattern of the culture in which they occur.

For persons who have been brought up to think of God by means of one set of symbols, it
is very hard to think of Him in terms of other and in their eyes, unhallowed sets of words,
ceremonies and images.

From the beginning of the 16th century to the beginning of the 20th, most of the Christian
nations of Europe have spent a good part of their time and energy in attacking,
conquering and exploiting their non-Christian neighbors in other countries.

Hallucinogens could lead to deepened understanding of religious and mystical content
and to a new and fresh experience of the great works of art. (Actually, with LSD,
whatever you look at becomes a great work of art, even if it’s dust or garbage.)

How is it possible that a being with such sensitive jewels as the eyes, such enchanted
musical instruments as the ears and such a fabulous arabesque of nerves as the brain can
experience itself as anything less than a God?

I, as an experienced student of the psychology of religion, can no longer pursue research
in the field. This is a barbarous restriction of spiritual and intellectual freedom. (That was
Alan Watts.)

I hope that religious organizations in this country will begin to understand that highs
triggered by drugs may be more relevant to spiritual development than appearances of
spirituality on Sunday mornings.

I think that religion will neglect the consequences of this powerful instrument and its
implications at its own peril. The experience recalls Otto’s mysterium trememdum. It was
awesome.

Ideation, images, body sensation and emotion are fused in what is felt as an absolutely
purposive process culminating in a sense of total understanding, self-transformation,
religious enlightenment and possibly mystical union.

If a Jesus or a Buddha were to appear in our midst today, he would be hard pressed to
convince anyone of the relevance to mankind of his teachings. (Our ignorant, sick society
would bash Jesus or Buddha just like they bashed Timothy Leary.)

If anyone brought up in a Christian culture says, “I am God,” we conclude at once that he
is insane. But, in India, when someone suddenly declares, “I am God,” they say,
“Congratulations. At last you found out”.

If organized religion is not sure enough of itself to face the religious issues posed by the
drugs, then it deserves the contempt with which many of the most idealistic of the rising
generation regard it. (That was written in 1969.)

If the perceptions touched off by the drugs are in any reliable sense religious, then an
invaluable means of studying the dynamics and effects of profound religious experience
at firsthand is available to us.

Immediate experience of reality unites men. Conceptualized beliefs, including even the
belief in a God of love and righteousness, divide them and as the dismal record of
religious history bears witness, set them for centuries on end at each other’s throats.

In Christian theology, the imagery of heaven implies that the saints and angels surround
God as an object of adoration external to themselves. (God is not external to anyone or
anything.)

In Jung’s model, many experiences that do not make sense as derivatives of biological
events, such as visions of deities, can be seen as the emergence of contents from the
collective unconscious. (eyes closed)

In many places of the world and in different historical periods, mythological figures and
stories became the central focus of sacred mysteries in which neophytes experienced
ritual death and rebirth.

In order to become directly acquainted with God, rather than merely to know about God,
one must go beyond symbols and concepts, which are obstacles to the immediate
experience of the divine.

In our society, the artist is a kind of harmless clown who can get away with a private life
that would be scandalous for a priest or a professor. (The artist is no clown. If anything,
it’s the priest and the professor who are clowns.)

In recent decades, after centuries of domination by Newtonian mechanics, scientific
understanding of time, space and matter has converged with visions of the universe
expressed in Eastern religious texts that are thousands of years old.

In the uniform of Athens you jailed Socrates. In the uniform of Rome you jailed Jesus
Christ and in the livery of Nixon and Reagan you have turned this land into a police state.
(That was Timothy Leary. Actually, Socrates and Christ were both murdered.)

In the West, Nature has been completely isolated from the religious context in which our
ancestors used to view it. Our non-human environment and our own physical existence
have now become domains exclusively reserved for science. (What a mistake.)

In these days of peril, no religious leader can afford to overlook any source of religious
motivation, no matter how strange and particularly one that in so many cases has proved
effective.

Individuals found a new ability to understand universal religious symbols, the metaphors
of holy scriptures and other sacred texts and the language of certain complicated
philosophical essays.

Institutional Christianity has hardly contemplated the possibility that the whole point of
the Gospel is that everyone may experience union with God in the same way and to the
same degree as Jesus himself.

Is it possible to celebrate the union of Heaven and Earth in a religion which has
consistently held that sexual love is disgusting and sinful except between married couples
for the sole purpose of reproduction?

It is an ecstatic state, characterized by the loss of boundaries between the subject and the
objective world, with ensuing feelings of unity with other people, nature, the entire
Universe, and God.

It is an inevitability of language and thought that all ideas of God, the infinite and the
Self, suggest some object apart from other objects, some “thing” to be known from other
things.

It is not easy for the pious Christian to realize that Jesus was not an expert on the history
of religion and had probably never met anyone whose mystical vision was as deep as his
own.

It seems likely that any religious use of the drugs will have to be carried on in cults,
outside traditional institutions. This is a pity, for it deprives the churches of a powerful
influx of ecstatic energy—the very element of which they are in shortest supply.

It was a time when our hearts were filled with the yearning for spiritual growth and the
desire to establish the kingdom of God on earth. (That was Nina Graboi talking about the
sixties.)

It’s really impossible to appreciate what is meant by the Tao without becoming in a rather
special sense stupid. This special kind of stupidity is not simply calmness of mind, but
“non-graspingness” of mind. (Don’t interfere with your mind. Leave it alone.)

Jesus called people to awaken, to repent. (To repent doesn’t mean asking forgiveness for
“sins.” To repent is to awaken to cosmic consciousness. Yes, Jesus was talking about the
equivalent of LSD consciousness.)

Jewish and Christian theologians will not accept the idea that man’s inmost self can be
identical with the Godhead, even though Christians may insist that this was true in the
unique instance of Jesus Christ.

Leary was advised—“Your advertising must stress the religious. Find the God within.
This is all frightfully interesting. Your competitors are naturally denouncing the brain as
an instrument of the devil. Priceless!”

Like sensitivity to beauty, the capacity to encounter the Holy seems to reside within
every human soul. Too often, it may sleep there eternally, but it is ready to be awakened
by the right combination of circumstances.

Most people, it seems, who relax and “let go” have the universal experience of
discovering a single Reality, a oneness with all things, an identity with God, with the
Supreme Being, with the Higher Self, or whatever you wish to call it.

Much of the key information about the nature of rites is usually considered sacred; it is
kept secret and transmitted within small circles to initiates. If the material is revealed to
the external world, it occurs traditionally in various cryptic forms.

My brain is God; your brain is too. Let’s learn to practice the technologies of God with
the grace, compassion and skill which the Judeo-Christian-Moslem Gods so obviously
lack.

Mysticism may be the ultimate source of ethics, morality and the life of righteousness,
mystical and ecstatic religious experience the sources of astonishing vitality and
efficiency in the pursuit of good works.

Mystics who believe that God is everywhere but is invisible to us due to our ego-centered
nature, will find it easy to believe that a drug that occasionally obliterates the ego can
also make God more visible.

No authoritarian government, whether ecclesiastical or secular, can tolerate the
apprehension that each one of us is God in disguise, and that our real inmost, outmost and
utmost Self cannot be killed. That’s why they had to do away with Jesus.

Obviously, you must be other than God so long as you conceive yourself as the separate
ego. (To be clear, you are God whether the ego knows it or not and the ego knows
nothing.)

One of the most fascinating by-paths of the history of religion is the one that traces the
use of chemicals in various religious traditions for the purpose of changing the state of
mind and producing enthusiasm, the sense of God within.

One transcends the ordinary distinction between subject and object and experiences a
state of ecstatic union with humanity, nature, the cosmos, and God. This is associated
with strong feelings of joy, bliss, serenity, and peace.

Our so-called scientific attitude destroys faith and throttles the spiritual development.
Things of real worth can never be proved: God, love, compassion, mercy, kindness,
charity and dozens of other wonderful values.

People perceive the mystical realms to be pervaded by a sacred essence and an
unfathomable beauty, and they frequently see visions of precious gold, sparkling jewels,
unearthly radiance, luminescence, and brilliant light. (eyes closed)

Peyote is not a plaything; Peyotists say that “if you play around with Peyote, it will turn
around and start playing with you”. The Native American Church is not for the curiosity
seeker: it is a serious religion.

Plants seem to represent pure being in the here and now, the ideal of many mystical and
religious schools. Not exploiting and hurting other organisms, most plants serve
themselves as a source of food and bring beauty and joy into the life of others.

Professionally, in relation to his chosen specialty, a man may be completely mature.
Spiritually and sometimes even ethically, in relation to God and his neighbors, he may be
hardly more than a fetus.

Psychedelic drugs offer new perspectives on every aspect of human thinking, human
behavior, human searching. There is no issue in psychology, physics, biology and
theology which cannot make use of these microscopes of consciousness.

Psychedelic rebels have likened modern medicine to a state religion. This established
religion is said to treat unorthodox healing practices as heresy or pagan superstition to be
eliminated by a mixture of official coercion and missionary activity.

Psychedelic research will be of great value in such diverse areas as philosophy,
parapsychology and the creative arts and in the study of literature, mythology,
anthropology, comparative religion and still other fields.

Religion somehow attracts those who like to lay down the law and point the finger of
accusation. (What does this silly ego nonsense have to so with real religion and
experiencing union with God?)

Religions whose philosophy has been least preoccupied with events in time and most
concerned with eternity, have been consistently the least violent and the most humane in
political practice.

Religious experience is the most profound and powerful aspect of the human personality
and is the aspect most capable of bringing out the compassionate and creative qualities of
the human spirit.

Religious, mystical, visionary states are powerful and wonderful—they open the doors of
perception, polish our sensory lenses, shake up our autonomic nervous system, and get
our hormones swinging—but they’re intimate and precious.

Shop-worn theological and devotional cliches are not only not the same as experience of
life in its immanent and transcendent fullness; they are actually obstacles in the way of
such experience.

Since the crisis in Christian culture is mainly sexual, we should not be surprised that
sexual elements are very prominent in the unconscious channels opened by the Drug
Revolution. These channels are a traditional part of religion outside Christianity anyway.

Some theologians tended to view LSD and other psychedelic substances as sacred and the
sessions as sacraments because they could bring the individual in touch with
transcendental realities.

Spiritual experiences in psychedelic sessions frequently draw on the symbolism of the
collective unconscious and can thus occur in the framework of cultural and religious
traditions other than the experient’s own.

Spirituality is something that characterizes the relationship of an individual to the
universe and does not necessarily require a formal structure, collective ritual, or
mediation by a priest.

Studies have indicated that when the experience is interpreted transcendentally or
religiously, chances are improved for the rehabilitation of hopeless alcoholics and
hardened criminals.

Subjects see new dimensions in the universe, have strong feelings of being an integral
part of creation and tend to regard ordinary things in everyday life—such as meals, walks
in nature, playing with children or sexual intercourse—as sacred.

The brain replaced the genitals as the forbidden organ that must not be touched or turned
on by the owner. The only way in which consciousness-change experiences could be
discussed was in terms of philosophic-religious.

The Church insists on the acceptance of certain particular analogies of God which cannot
always and invariably be meaningful and helpful. The supremely important thing is God
himself and not formal religion.

The concepts and practices found in the Buddhist, Hindu, Christian, Islamic and other
mystical traditions, based on centuries of deep psychological exploration and
experimentation, are indiscriminately ignored and dismissed.

The “death” which must be undergone to behold the vision of God is the death of a false
identity and the withdrawal from the world which is required for liberation is withdrawal
from the game that this particular person, so-and-so, is my one and only self.

The directors of the TV studio game do not want you to live a religious life. They will
apply every pressure, including prison, to keep you in their game. (The TV studio means
the establishment and the religious life here means religion with LSD.)

The drive for power is as prevalent in the church as in secular organizations. (That’s
because the Western “religions” aren’t real religions. They use religion as a propaganda
tool in their lust for power.

The esoteric core of the great religious and spiritual traditions could be seen as roadmaps
to higher states of consciousness, and some of the most profound material in these
traditions became especially clear and meaningful during psychedelic sessions.

The failure to accept the gift of union with God and the substitution of self-conscious
moralism for the contemplation of God in the here and now, are the basic reasons for the
present weakness of the Christian religion.

The function of the Church is not to be the world’s moral policeman, insisting on the
observance of various modes of conduct. The work of the Church is to share a sense of
union with God. (Will they ever wake up and realize that?)

The Hindus, the Moslems, the Buddhists, the Taoists, all the major religions have had
their sexual mystics and have honored them. Christianity is alone in thinking that sex is
entirely the Devil’s business and an offense to God.

The individual can be flooded with feelings of love and mystical connection to other
people, nature, the entire cosmos and God. Experiences of this kind are extremely
healing.

The insane man who has lost his mind is a parody of the sage who has transcended his
ego. (A society hung-up on ego sees the sage as insane because they have no idea where
the sage is at.)

The longer religion attempts to hold an absolute position and to be a substitute for
metaphysical knowledge, the more untenable, embarrassing and discredited that position
will become.

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 called
religious.

The members of the official religion have tended to look upon the mystics as difficult
trouble-making people. (That’s because they have no idea what the mystics are talking
about.)

The mind must be prepared and the conditions right for a profound mystical or religious
experience to occur. And even then, the drug user may go through a descent into torment
and even a seeming death agony before attaining joyous unity and rebirth.

The mystic consciousness is part of the heritage of the human race. In every religion,
creed, country and language one finds the mystics who have had this greater
consciousness.

The new life for Christianity begins just as soon as someone can get up in church and say,
“Wash out your mouth every time you say Jesus”. (It means that all the talk about Jesus
has nothing to do with what Jesus himself was talking about.

The point upon which orthodox theology wishes to insist is that the universe, definitively
and absolutely is not God. (How can they claim that God is infinite and at the same time,
claim that he is separate from the universe?)

The presupposition that one’s own religion is, even without examining others, the best
and truest of all is stupidity. Science, too, has a mythological level, which is the fiercely
held position that the physical universe, outside man, is dead and stupid.

The psychedelic drug doesn’t mean doctor-disease, dope fiend-crime or instant insanity
but ecstasy, sensual unfolding, religious experience, revelation, illumination, contact with
nature.

The psychedelic experience can be not only a challenge, but also a support of my faith. I
can see Judaism in a new and amazing light. (A Hassidic rabbi who tripped with Timothy
Leary said that.)

The really important division in the world of spirituality is not the line that separates the
individual mainstream religions from each other, but the one that separates all of them
from their mystical branches.

The religion of direct experience of the divine has been regarded as the privilege of a
very few people. I personally don’t think this is necessarily true at all. I think that
practically everyone is capable of this immediate experience.

The religious “establishment” dare not avoid facing the issues raised by the drugs without
laying themselves open to the charge that they are neglecting the very roots of faith. But
it often seems that there is nothing that the churches fear so much as religion!

The sacred scriptures of the great religions—the Vedas, the Torah, the Bible, the Koran—
are inspired writings that were channeled to their authors during non-ordinary states of
consciousness.

The sage often appears to be an idiot or “wildman” because he doesn’t take the choosing
seriously. It’s not life or death. It’s life and death and ultimately there is nothing to be
dreaded. There is nothing outside the universe, against which it can crash.

The sensation of relationship is the impulse underlying the great religious traditions of
the world—the sensation of basic inseparability from the total universe, of the identity of
one’s own self with the Great Self beneath all that exists.

The significance of incarnation and resurrection is not that Jesus was a human like us but
rather that we are gods like him—or at least have the potential to be. This is the secret of
all ages and all spiritual traditions.

The so-called “mushroom stones” really represented mushrooms and they were the
symbol of a religion, like the Cross in the Christian religion, or the Star of Judea or the
Crescent of the Moslems.

The spirituality revealed in the process of focused self-exploration sees God as the Divine
Within. Here the individual uses various techniques that mediate direct experiential
access to transpersonal realities and discovers his or her own divinity.

The United States was not originally intended to be a Christian nation. The founding
fathers specifically intended a secular government with an “unbreachable wall” between
church and state.

The veil which made you see duality drops away and you experience the world as a
blissful sport of God’s energy. You see the universe as supremely blissful light,
undifferentiated from yourself and you remain unshakable in this awareness.

The Western man who claims consciousness of oneness with God or the universe clashes
with his society’s concept of religion. In most Asian cultures, however, such a man will
be congratulated as having penetrated the true secret of life. He has arrived.

There are dedicated scientists trying to find some way in which supplies of LSD may be
made available for important research in brain physiology, psychology, theology or
mental therapy.

Theologians and intellectuals often deprecate “experience” in favor of fact and concept.
(What they don’t understand is that fact and concept mean nothing without experience or
experience of what the facts and concepts are about.)

There are dedicated scientists trying to find some way in which supplies of LSD may be
made available for important research in brain physiology, psychology, theology or
mental therapy.

There are mental spaces inside our skulls as enormous as the spaces out there. The
experience of distance, of inner distance and outer distance, of distance in time and
distance in space—it’s the first fundamental religious experience.

There are unusual manifestations of human mental function, ordinarily inaccessible. The
ability to produce them chemically clarifies similar obscure and puzzling experiences
found in religious, historical and mystical literature.

There cannot be, in the ultimate analysis, different Gods for different religions. We may
look upon God differently, we may have different approaches to the divine, but this force
or power that we call God must be there for all.

There is absolutely nothing in Catholic dogmatics or even the Bible to compel anyone to
believe that Jesus of Nazareth was the one and only incarnation of the Only-Begotten Son
in all time and space.

There is—in addition to the individual unconscious—a racial or collective unconscious
that is shared by all mankind. Jung saw comparative religion and mythology as
invaluable sources of information about these collective aspects of the unconscious.

There is indeed some analogy between the holy man and the crazy man since both may
be said to be “out of their minds,” as having “lost themselves” or as being “thought-less”
or “care-less.”

There is no doubt that a genuine comprehension of religion, mysticism, shamanism, rites
of passage or mythology is impossible without intimate knowledge of the death
experience and the death- rebirth process.

There is no doubt that the drugs have introduced many of the youthful generation to a
firsthand religious experience that they would have encountered in no other way. (That
was written in 1969.)

There is no non-ecstatic religious experience. (Yes, all religious experiences are ecstatic
or it’s not a religious experience. There is no such thing as a religious experience without
ecstasy. One can’t play baseball without the ball.)

This whole image of the universe as an imperial and monarchial state is a joke. The
ultimate identity of man with God is not identity with this Commander-in-Chief of the
universe.

Those aspects of the psychedelic experience which subjects report to be ineffable and
ecstatically religious involve a direct awareness of the energy processes which scientists
measure.

Thou shalt evolve to a higher state of being and ultimately return to the Godhead which is
your very self, your ever-present Divine Condition prior to all conditions, names and
forms.

Transformative experiences associated with positive emotions, such as feelings of
oneness with humanity and nature, states of cosmic unity, encounters with blissful
deities, and union with God, have a special role in the healing and transformative process.

We are dealing with a human phenomenon, the kind of phenomenon which cannot be
disregarded by anyone who is trying to discover what religion is and what are the deep
needs which it must satisfy.

We are going to see many of the hypotheses of our Christian mystics and many of the
cosmological and ontological theories of Eastern philosophers spelled objectively in
biochemical terms.

We have suggested that the divine mushroom played a vital part in shaking loose early
man’s imagination, in arousing his capacity for self-perception, for awe, wonder and
reverence. They certainly made it easier for him to entertain the idea of God.

We see that there is no conflict between the mystical approach to religion and the
scientific approach, because one is not committed by mysticism to any cut-and-dried
statement about the structure of the universe.

We would have to regard prisons as concentration camps where people are being
imprisoned because of their religion. (This is in reference to those in jail for using LSD
for religious purposes.)

What we call “respectability,” whether in church or in secular society, serves in part to
protect social and ecclesiastical institutions from the explosive influence of the prophet
and the mystic.

When the whole human race is rocking with laughter, laughing so hard that it hurts,
everybody then has his foot on the path. In that moment, everybody can just as well be
God as anything else.

When we feel ourselves to be the sole heirs of the universe, when “the sea flows in our
veins…and the stars are our jewels”, when all things are perceived as infinite and holy,
what motive can we have for the pursuit of power?

While at the cradle of all great religions are the direct visionary revelations of their
founders, prophets, and saints, in many instances a religion loses its connection with this
vital core over time.

Whoever attempts the awesome task of deliberately coming into the presence of God
takes the risk, calculated or uncalculated, of experiencing madness. (Rudolf Otto called it
the mysterium tremendum.)

William James was well aware that a deep religious conversion is the best therapy for
alcoholism. The importance of deep spiritual experiences for overcoming alcoholism was
also well known to Carl Gustav Jung.

Within a few hours, individuals gain profound insights into the nature of religion and in
many instances their purely theoretical understanding and formal belief is vitalized by a
deep personal experience of the transcendental realms.

A Church, a Christianity, in which Godmanhood is fully realized will not be a preaching,
finger-wagging, Bible-banging, breast-thumping Church. It will be the Church of all
Fools, laughing like Dante’s angels. (Is laughing foolish or is the pompous inability to
laugh that’s really foolish?)

A high does of LSD in the right circumstances brings you into contact not only with your
deep self but with other dimensions—extraterrestrial intelligence, a collective mind,
intelligent unity of life, living God, things that they don’t understand and can’t control
and don’t want free and available.

A science which fails to address itself to spiritual goals becomes secular, political and
tends to oppose new data. A religion which fails to provide direct experimental answers
to these spiritual questions becomes secular, political and tends to oppose the individual
revelatory confrontation.

ancient and Oriental religions and philosophy—It has become increasingly clear that
these systems of belief reflect profound understanding of the human mind and of unusual
states of consciousness, embodying knowledge that deals with the most universal aspect
of human existence, and thus is highly relevant for all of us

Because Christians believed that there had been only one Avatar (Christ), Christian
history has been disgraced by more and bloodier crusades, interdenominational wars,
persecutions and proselytizing imperialism than has the history of Hinduism and
Buddhism.

Christ was saying don’t get hungup in all the bullshit of the society and the You-game
because there’s something bigger happening. That’s dangerous talk, man. The authorities
were hip to it even back then. Jesus got the shaft for saying it too loud and too
convincingly.

Each atom is a structure of detailed intricacy held together by energy of such speed and
power that it eludes our conception. Each atom is a space-ship of galactic proportions and
at the center of each galactic structure God places the entire staff of his atomic engineers.
Do you understand the brilliance of the design?

Experiences of plant identification often mediate deep understanding as to why certain
plants have been considered sacred by some cultures. (Plant identification doesn’t mean
what the name of the plant is, but experiencing plant consciousness or what it is to be a
plant. Psychedelic plants are the most sacred.)

For us, a proposition is either true or false, a or not-a, God exists or does not exist and
countless gallons of ink and blood have been shed in disputes stemming from this kind of
rigid either-or logic. Indian and Chinese thought, as well as mystical and psychedelic
experiences, lead one to a logic of levels, rather than of propositions.

Here, the individual feels that he is experiencing the innermost divine core of his being.
His individual self is losing its seemingly separate identity and is reuniting with what is
perceived as its divine source, the Universal Self. This results in feelings of immediate
contact or identity with the Beyond Within, with God.

His drug-induced religious experience vitalizes his religious life and demonstrates the
error of those who think that only the logical and rational aspects of religion are valid.
(How logical and rational is it to think that you were born in sin because of something
from 2000 years ago which you had nothing to do with?)

“Holy madness” or “divine madness” is known and acknowledged by various spiritual
traditions and is distinguished from ordinary insanity; it is seen as a form of intoxication
by the Divine. Revered seers, mystics, and prophets are often described as inspired by
madness.

If certain conditions are fulfilled, human beings may cease to behave as the pathetic or
deplorable creatures they mistakenly think they are and be in fact what they always have
been, if they had only given themselves a chance of knowing it—enlightened, liberated,
“godded in God.”

In the course of my research, I found that in the mythology of every religions tradition I
am aware of, there’s some magic plant that talks, heals, mystifies, intoxicates, or turns
into fire, that either brings you to God, or gets you in a whole lot of trouble, or both,
depending on the context.

Introducing transpersonal experiences into psychology creates a conceptual bridge
between Western science and perennial philosophy. It also throws new light on many
problems in history, anthropology, sociology, psychology, psychiatry, philosophy, and
comparative religion.

Is the use of LSD the initial event that will guide us to a new morality and to new patterns
of human life on this planet? Will we keep our heads straight and our bodies and minds
clear? Or will we become anti-intellectuals devoted to the culture of “big fishes eating
smaller fishes” in the holy names of religion, education, civilization, progress.

It is highly desirable that each guide possess a broad background especially including
knowledge of history, literature, philosophy, mythology, art and religion. Materials from
all of these fields and from others, emerge in many of the sessions and the guide must
recognize the materials if he is to be of maximum effectiveness.

It is inept and boorish to claim that a certain philosophical or theological position is “the
Truth” and still more so to attempt to prove it. (You can experience “the Truth” but not
describe it. It can’t be put into a “certain philosophical or theological position” based on
words.)

It is most curious to find, from Japan to Western Europe, these same images coming
through again and again, showing how universal and how uniform this kind of visionary
experience has been and how it has constantly been regarded as of immense importance
and has been projected out into the cosmos in the various religious traditions.

It is notorious that popular ideas of God’s character are of a far lower standard than that
by which we discern saintliness in men. The saint forgives, but by many accounts, the
Lord does not forgive at all unless the offender grovels before him. (God is not a
pompous ass who demands that you bow down to him.)

It is significant that those who have been surprised by a mystical experience seldom fail
to feel that their experience is religious. Intuitively they become aware—at least
subjectively—that their state of mind somehow links them with the saints and prophets of
the ages. This is the case even with atheists.

Jesus had to die because he broke through the frontiers of consciousness, because he
broke through what it means to be religious. (Even in today’s “modern” and “civilized”
world, anyone who encourages others to be religious by expanding their consciousness is
likely to be jailed if not murdered.)

Jesus was aware of himself as a finished product of the new humanity which is to come—
the new humanity which is to inherit the earth, establish the Kingdom, usher in the New
Age. His mission and his teaching have at their heart the development of a new and
higher state of consciousness on a species-wide basis.

Jung came to the conclusion that there is—in addition to the individual unconscious—a
collective or racial unconscious, which is shared by all humanity and is a manifestation of
the creative cosmic force. Comparative religion and world mythology can be seen as
unique sources of information about the collective aspects of the unconscious.

Many transpersonal experiences have a strong influence on the individual’s values,
attitudes and interests. Thus, experiences of the collective and racial unconscious can
generate a sensitivity to the needs and problems of another culture and create a deep
appreciation for its religion, art and life philosophy.

Maslow disagreed with Freud’s exclusive concentration on the study of neurotic and
psychotic populations. He pointed out that focusing on the worst in humanity instead of
the best, results in a distorted image of human nature. This approach leaves out man’s
aspirations, his realizable hopes, his godlike qualities.

Metanoia is that profound state of consciousness which mystical experience aims at—the
state in which we transcend or dissolve all the barriers of ego and selfishness that
separate us from God. It is the state of direct knowing, immediate perception of our total
unity with God.

Most of the awe and reverent wonder stems from this confrontation with an unsuspected
range of consciousness, the tremendous acceleration of images, the shattering insight into
the narrowness of the learned as opposed to the potentiality of awareness, the humbling
sense of where one’s ego is in relationship to the total energy field.

Often, there is an actual experience of truths, they are KNOWN to be truths, which, when
presented in conceptual terms to the mind in its normal state, seem incomprehensible and
absurd. Such propositions as “God is love” are realized with the totality of one’s being
and their truth seems self-evident in spite of pain and death.

Only when the ordinary perception of the material world is transcended can
consciousness connect with the heavenly regions. For those who have had the privilege of
such experience, the existence of Heaven, God and celestial beings ceases to be a matter
of belief and becomes self-evident reality.

Organized religion had little offer. Faith in an invisible divinity was not enough. What
LSD promised was the direct, unmediated experience of self-transcendence—the
mystical enlightenment where we KNOW what the philosophers and the prophets talk
about.

Our capacity to identify with the consciousness of plants contributed to the fact that many
cultures hold certain plants to be sacred. Plants with psychedelic properties have been
incorporated into the religions of many cultures and are considered deities or the “flesh of
the gods”.

Our true nature is an aspect of a universal consciousness, Self, Being, Mind, of God. The
awakening to this true nature is the direct awareness that you are more than this puny
body or limited mind. It is the realization that the universe is not external to you. It is
experiencing the universe as yourself.

Physicists and mathematicians report that after using LSD they have developed “a
feeling” for such concepts as the photon, the hypercube or imaginary numbers. Similarly,
philosophers have reported they have “understood” the meaning of existentialism, and
theologians report having “experienced” that which they had been preaching for years.

Professional as well as public tradition has omitted serious consideration of creativity,
religious development and problem solving during reveries, daydreaming or other
unusual conscious states. In fact, there is a basic disinterest in the fields of psychiatry and
psychology as regards the entire topic of consciousness.

Profound religious experience is always moving and probably the most captivating and
shattering experience known to man. When I say “shattering” I mean that the experience
shatters certain fundamental assumptions about life which stand in the way of a broader
and more humane view.

Psychotropic substances of plant origin had already been in use for thousands of years in
Mexico as sacramental drugs in religious ceremonies and as magical potions having
curative effects. (It wasn’t just in Mexico but in many, in not indeed all, parts of the
world.)

Religion, I will be thinking of as the inner experience of the individual when he senses
Ultimate Reality, whether as God, a Beyond, transcendent cosmic process, a wholly
different and profound dimension of life, nirvana or however one chooses to name and
interpret this ultimate reality.

Religious art has always and everywhere made use of vision-inducing materials. The
shrines of gold, the jeweled symbol or image, the glittering furniture of the alter—we find
these things in contemporary Europe as in ancient Egypt, in India and China as among
Greeks, the Incas, the Aztecs.

The ancient and pre-industrial societies have held non-ordinary states of consciousness in
high esteem and used them for a variety of purposes—diagnosing and healing diseases,
ritual, spiritual, and religious activity, cultivation of extrasensory perception and artistic
inspiration.

The Christian message is essentially a call to be universal—a call to become cosmically
conscious. It is a call to place God at the center of ourselves, not through blind faith but
through insightful awareness, not through rigid adherence to ritual and dogma but
through graceful expression of cosmic principles. It is a call to “be as gods.”

The Church must abandon its spiritual imperialism and its craze for making converts. It
must desist from its proud and arbitrary claim to be top religion. Missionaries have ruined
many cultures and wrought incalculable harm and have nowhere succeeded in bringing
all mankind to the feet of Christ.

The current preoccupation with these latter-day mind modifiers ranges from a hedonistic
sensuality to a search for the highest of philosophical abstractions, from a tool for
deriving scientific data to a sacrament taken to achieve loss of self and union with the
All.

The descriptions of heaven, hell and the posthumous adventures of the soul were
misunderstood—frequently not only by critics of religion, but by clergy and theologians
themselves—as historical and geographical references rather than cartographies of
unusual states of consciousness.

The destructive side of organized religion is certain to be prominent in a world where the
loudest appeals for a revival are made by men whose deepest loyalty is not to their
professed Christianity or Judaism or Islam, but to Nationalism and whose aim is to use
the local faith as a weapon in the armory of power politics.

The fates of nations and the lives of billions of people have been profoundly affected by
the divine illuminations of spiritual prophets. We have only to remember the revelations
of Buddha under the Bo tree, Moses on Mount Sinai, Jesus in the desert, Paul on the road
to Damascus, and Mohammed during his visionary night journey for evidence of this.

The function of the guide is multifold: head nurse, tutor, baby-sitter, Mother Earth,
sympathetic ear, scullery maid, priest, trouble-shooter, tourist guide, doctor, navigator,
soulmate, and blank screen. The competent guide knows that it is the subject’s session,
not his.

The idea of drug use as a religious practice—in fact, of any connection between drugs
and religion—is one we are willing to indulge in pre-industrial cultures but violently
reject for ourselves. Orthodox religion in the West long ago abandoned the sacramental
use of drugs.

The individual in this state becomes deeply aware of his or her unity with other people,
nature and the entire universe and with the ultimate creative principle or God. This is
accompanied by an overwhelming positive effect that can range from peace, serenity and
bliss to an ecstatic rapture.

The inner experience of the spiritual Self and its intimate association with the personal
self, gives a sense of internal expansion, of universality and the conviction of
participating in some way in the divine nature. In the religious traditions and spiritual
doctrines of every epoch one finds numerous attestations on this subject.

The most lasting value of the drug experience for me appears to be a number of
convictions, most of them religious in nature, which are so strong that it makes not one
iota of difference whether anyone agrees with them or not. (When you know the truth, no
one can talk you out of it. The truth is the truth.)

The nature of consciousness is ultimately the only problem worthy of total intellectual
effort. It is the concern of all the world’s philosophies and religions. (Actually, the nature
of consciousness is not a problem. The problem is society’s lack of understanding about
it.)

The person feels a deep connection with the innermost spiritual core of his or her being.
The illusion of the individual self fades away and the person enjoys reunion with his or
her divine Self, which is also the Universal Self, the cosmic source of all existence. This
is a direct and immediate contact with the Beyond Within, with God.

The same way as the rivers and streams arise from different places but ultimately flow
into the same ocean, so do all the different religious sects and communities and
denominations arise according to historical, geographical and ethnic reasons but,
ultimately, reach the same goal.

The term spirituality should be reserved for situations that involve personal experiences
of certain dimensions of reality that give one’s life and existence in general a numinous
quality. C. G. Jung used the word numinous to describe an experience that feels sacred,
holy, or out of the ordinary.

The training for this new profession of psychedelic guides will aim at producing the
patience of a first-grade teacher, the humility and wisdom of a Hindu guru, the loving
dedication of a minister-priest, the sensitivity of a poet and the imagination of a science
fiction writer.

The whiskey-drinking white middle class imprisons those with different cultural and
religious preferences. (People who consider LSD a sacrament of their religion are being
persecuted and deprived of their religious freedom which is “guaranteed” in the First
Amendment of the Constitution.

There appears to emerge a universal central perception, apparently independent of the
subjects’ previous philosophical or theological inclinations. It is that behind the apparent
multiplicity in the world of science and common sense, there is a single reality, infinite
and eternal, all beings united in this Being.

There are gaps between the fingers; there are gaps between the senses. In these gaps is
the darkness which hides the connection between things…This darkness is the home of
the gods. They alone see the connections, the total relevance of everything that happens;
that which now comes to us in bits and pieces, in our limited perceptions.

There exists in all human beings an urge to self-transcendence, a wish to escape from the
prison of personality, a longing to become something other and greater than the all-too-
familiar Me. The religious man has attributed this universal urge to the workings of an
innate and deep-seated yearning for the divine.

There is apparently nothing in the Bill of Rights to protect scientific freedom. The
Constitution was written in the horse-and-buggy pre-technological era. But there was a
First Amendment protection of Freedom of Religion. After all, Catholic priests were
allowed Communion wine during Prohibition.

There is no accepted corner in our lives for the art of pure nonsense. There is no protected
situation in which we can really let ourselves go. Our difficulty is that we have perverted
the Sabbath into a day for laying on rationality and listening to sermons instead of letting
off steam.

These experiences have been known for millennia. Descriptions of them can be found in
the holy scriptures of all the great religions of the world, as well as in written documents
of countless minor sects, factions and religious movements. They have also played a
crucial role in the visionary states of individual saints, mystics and religious teachers.

They have put the chains inside our brains. They control our imaginings, our desires. Our
hearts are bound. Love does not prevail. And our dreams of the future are materialistic
and, therefore, mundane. The Establishment has won. The fascists have won. The
religious Fundamentalists have won. For now.

This richness of gem-like qualities, which is found in the Visionary World, does explain
many very strange facts about certain types of art and many facts about the curious,
uniform quality of religious traditions, folklore traditions, traditions of the nature of the
Golden Age and After Life, which are found all over the world.

To men and women who have had direct experience of self-transcendence into the mind’s
Other World of vision and union with the nature of things, a religion of mere symbols is
not likely to be very satisfying. The perusal of a page from even the most beautifully
written cookbook is no substitute for the eating of dinner.

Transpersonal experiences involving entities and realms that are not objectively real
according to the Western worldview can convey absolutely new information. For
example, in nonordinary states, many people have encountered deities and mythological
realms specific to cultures about which they have no personal knowledge. (eyes closed)

Wasson suggested that every major world religion had originated in the botanical
hallucinations of some early visionary. Food of the gods. Flesh of the gods. Even the
name Jesus Christ in Aramic, he claimed, was derived from the word for psychedelic
mushrooms.

We are dealing with an issue that is not new, an issue that has been considered for
centuries by mystics, by philosophers of the religious experience, by those rare and truly
great scientists who have been able to move in and then out beyond the limits of the
science game.

We are living simultaneously in the world of experience and the world of notions, in the
world of direct apprehension of Nature, God and ourselves and the world of abstract,
verbalized knowledge about these primary facts. Our business as human beings is to
make the best of both worlds.

We can mention the Jungian archetypes—the world of deities, demigods, superheroes
and complex mythological, legendary and fairy-tale sequences. These experiences can
impart accurate new information about religious symbolism previously unknown to the
subject. (eyes closed)

We may encounter entities, situations, and places that bear little or no resemblance to the
realities we know in our day-to-day lives. It is here that we go beyond more familiar
experiences and enter the world known to shamans and seers, the world of deities and
suprahuman beings known from myths and fairy tales. (eyes closed)

We overvalue the mind, that flimsy collection of learned words and verbal connections;
the mind, that system of paranoid delusions with the learned self as center. And we

eschew the nonmind, nongame intuitive insight outlook which is the key to the religious
experience, to the love experience.

We think of God as the King of the Universe, the Absolute Technocrat who personally
and consciously controls every detail of his cosmos. (God doesn’t “consciously control
every detail of his cosmos” any more than we “consciously control every detail” of our
circulatory or digestive systems.)

When one properly understands the religious life, it is only the courageous man who is
willing to face it. (Western “religions” don’t understand religion and religious experience
and persecute anyone who does. It also takes courage to let the ego die during an LSD
trip.)

Where you have theological systems, it is claimed that these propositions about events in
the past and events in the future and the structure of the universe are true; consequently,
reluctance to accept them is regarded as a rebellion against God, worthy of the most
undying punishment. (What a joke.)

While the religious establishment worries itself into reams of cross arguments on whether
or not God is dead, these thinkers merely smile and shake their heads. God isn’t dead; He
isn’t even lost. He is right there in the deepest recesses of the mind where he has always
been. Doubting Thomases need only allow LSD to show them the way.

Willingness to be insecure is the ultimate security. Willingness to suffer is the essence of
divine joy. Willingness to be finite is to know one’s own infinity. Willingness to be a
salve is to be truly free. Willingness to be a fool and a sinner is to be both a sage and a
saint.

A superior religion goes beyond theology. It turns toward the center; it investigates and
feels out the inmost depths of man himself, since it is here that we are in most intimate
contact, or rather, in identity with existence itself. Dependence on theological ideas and
symbols is replaced by a direct, non-conceptual touch with a level of being which is
simultaneously one’s own and the being of all others.

America is an irrational, materialistic, intolerant, religious state. General Motors is a
religious institution that worships mechanical power and money. Harvard University is a
religious institution that worships intellectual power and dogmatically clings to academic
taboos and empty rituals. Science itself is a religion defending its superstitious rites. The
American government is a monolithic religious structure.

America was experiencing a quantum leap in intelligence. For the first time in our
history, a large and influential sector of the populace was coming to disrespect
institutional authority, not as members of organized dissident groups but as intelligent
individuals, highly selective political consumers who demanded responsive and effective
leadership, which no existing party, no religion, no labor union seemed able to provide.

An individual can experience scenes from famous red-light and night-club districts of the
world, participate in the most ingenious strip shows and group orgies, become part of
Babylonian religious ceremonies involving indiscriminate promiscuous sex or witness
and partake of wild primitive rituals with sensual rhythmic dances and a strong sexual
undertone. (eyes closed)

Anybody who has been into the Sainte Chapelle in Paris or into Chartes Cathedral must
realize the extraordinary visionary power which these windows have. It is possible by
means of stained glass windows, to turn the whole of a vast building into one single
jewel. One is inside a great jewel. (With LSD, wherever you are is like that and much,
much more.)

Christianity and even Protestant Christianity has remained, willy-nilly, the most
authoritarian and bigoted of all world religions. He who attempts to question or modify
any of its dogmas quickly gets into very hot water in any Christian country. There has
been one “revelation” and it is enough. He who has new ideas is probably inspired by the
Devil or has been out in the woods taking strange drugs with the witch women.

Detailed study of psychedelic phenomena would require a long-term systematic team
cooperation of experts from diverse disciplines, such as psychology, psychiatry,
neurophysiology, neuropharmacology, ethno-botany, modern physics, zoology, ethology,
genetics, internal medicine, obstetrics and gynecology, anthropology, history of art,
theology, philosophy and comparative study of religion and mythology.

Each human being is equipped with a 120-billion-cell brain, but we haven’t learned how
to use it. Few of us are aware of our neural ineptness. The organized religions have
comforted us by providing infantile fairy tales about God and promises of discarnate
immortality. Pray and obey, keep your legs crossed, avoid orgasms, and you’ll get the
one-way ticket to heaven.

Eighteenth century churchmen criticized experiments with vaccination as blasphemous
attempts to deprive God of his prerogative of punishing the wicked through smallpox and
it was dangerous for a God-fearing scientist to look through Galileo’s telescope. Even in
our own century, teachers have been dismissed at the instance of the pious for declaring
that creation took longer than six days!

Exploration of the potential of these substances for the study of schizophrenia, for
didactic purposes, for a deeper understanding of art and religion, for personality
diagnostics and the therapy of emotional disorders and for altering the experience of
dying has been my major professional interest throughout these years and has consumed
most of the time I have spent in psychiatric research. (That was Stanislav Grof.)

Hallucinogens are still criminal. The “food of the gods” is illegal. The keys to the doors
of perception are against the law. Using LSD therapy with convicts, drug addicts, and
alcoholics is illegal. The great therapeutic tool of LSD that was proven so effective in
case after case of psychological maladjustment has been taken away from the doctors of
the mind by the fundamentalist, fascist guardians of our public morality.

How odd it is that writers may sing the praises of alcohol, which is responsible for about
2/3 of the car accidents and ¾ of the crimes of violence, and be regarded as good
Christians and noble fellows, whereas anyone who ventures to suggest that there may be
other and less harmful short cuts to self-transcendence is treated as a dangerous drug
fiend and wicked perverter of weak-minded humanity. (That was Aldous Huxley.)

I do not feel that any church known to me is seeking the truth. Each is certain it has the
truth. They do not want to help me find the truth; the only want me to worship that which
they have already decided is the truth. They are not interested in my soul, except to
surrender it to some concept they have. They are more interested in making me behave in
a certain pattern which they have decided is best for me.

I was proud to know that my people had a medicine that was God-powerful. Listen to me,
peyote does have many amazing powers. I have seen a blind boy regain his sight from
taking it. Indians with ailments that hospital doctors couldn’t cure have become healthy
again after a peyote meeting. Once a Crow boy was to have his infected leg cut off by
reservation doctors. After a peyote ceremony, it grew well again.

In Road to Eleusis authors Albert Hofmann, Gordon Wasson and Carl Ruck present
convincing evidence that the Eleusinian Mysteries, the oldest religion in the West,
centered around a mass tripping ritual. For 2 millennia pilgrims journeyed from all over
the world to take part in the Mysteries and drink the sacred kykeon. Plato, Aristotle and
Sophicles were among those who participated in this secret ritual.

In many traditions, the notion of “dying before dying” is essential to spiritual
advancement. Coming to terms with the fact of death as part of the continuity of life is
seen as tremendously liberating, releasing one from the fear of death and opening one to
the experience of immortality. As the 17th century Christian monk, Abraham a Santa
Clara wrote: “A man who dies before he dies does not die when he dies”.

In this day, when spiritual hungers and longings are both widespread and acute, LSD has
a great potential in the field of religious development alone. (That doesn’t mean that
LSD’s great potential is just in religious development, but also many other fields. To put
it another way, if LSD’s great potential was just in religious development, it would still
be very significant.)

Indians experience the collective unconscious as an immediate reality, not just as an
intellectual construct. It is significant that this experience of shared consciousness holds a
most important place in the society. In fact, as a sacramental ritual, it is the basis of tribal
unity because it proves and confirms the supposition that every person in the tribe is the
same as every other person in the most fundamental way.

Laws against mere possession or even cultivation of these plants are in basic conflict with
Biblical principles. “And God said, ‘Behold, I have given you EVERY herb bearing seed,
which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree
yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat’. …And God saw EVERY thing that he had
made, and behold, it was very good.” (Everything and every herb includes psychedelics.)

Liberal principles demand free speech, freedom of worship, and the right to privacy. The
government does not claim to know what sorts of experiences and thoughts its subjects
should and should not cultivate. But drugs are a special case. We do not admit, even to
ourselves, that outlawing psychedelic drugs could be in part an attempt to eliminate
certain kinds of experience and thinking.

LSD subjects often consider the possibility that consciousness is a basic cosmic
phenomenon related to the organization of energy and that it exists throughout the
universe; in this context, human consciousness appears to be only one of its many
varieties and outgrowths. Episodes of consciousness of inorganic matter can be
accompanied by various insights of a philosophical and religious relevance.

None of the hundreds of questions raised by the psychedelics, many of them fundamental
to the way the mind processes information, have been answered. Rather, the powers that
be have performed a holding action comparable to the one the Papal Curia tried with
Galileo, when they confined him to a house in Arceti and forbade him the right to
continue his research.

None of these people has the slightest idea of why the Indians use peyote, or what the
effects of the drug are. Since they do not know, and will not try to understand, they
presume that it can only be evil and therefore must be prohibited. Certainly, they feel, a
practice which is so incomprehensible to Christianity cannot be religious and therefore
has no right under the constitutional guarantees of religious freedom.

One may enter one’s visions and seem to be walking through gardens, art museums,
medieval castles, futuristic cities, etc. Archetypal imagery may appear, and one thus finds
oneself encountering mythological characters such as angels, demons, dragons, and
Grecian gods. On the boundary of mystical consciousness, it is not uncommon for
Christians to encounter an image intuitively identified as the Christ.

Our ordinary Newtonian-Cartesian consciousness can be invaded with unusual power by
various archetypal entities or mythological sequences that, according to mechanistic
science, should have no independent existence. The myth-producing aspects of the
human psyche will portray deities and rituals from different cultures that the subject has
never studied. (eyes closed)

Profound transcendental experiences, such as consciousness of the Universal Mind or of
the Void, in addition to having a very beneficial effect on the subject’s physical and
emotional well-being, are usually central in creating in him a keen interest in religion,
mystical and philosophical issues, and a strong need to incorporate the spiritual
dimension into his way of life.

Science could make no sense of certain evidence about the world or the mind that had
been considered central in older traditions, and therefore paid as little attention as
possible to that evidence. Whole areas of experience and fields of intellectual endeavor
were relegated to the domain of religious faith or consigned to the categories of fraud,
folly, and disease.

Specialists from various disciplines have asked me for specific details of my
observations, because they felt that these data may have important implications for such
diverse areas as personality theory, psychology of religion, psychotherapy, genetics,
psychology and psychopathology of art, anthropology, the study of mythology,
education, psychosomatic medicine and obstetric practice. (That was Stanislav Grof.)

That famous “revival of religion,” about which so many people have been talking for so
long, will not come about as a result of evangelistic mass meetings or the television
appearances of photogenic clergymen. It will come about as a result of biochemical
discoveries that will make it possible for large numbers of men and women to achieve a
radical self-transcendence and a deeper understanding of the nature of things.

The experience of cosmic consciousness provides important insights for deepening our
understanding of the highest forms of creativity. The literature on creativity is filled with
examples of extraordinary artistic, scientific, philosophical, and religious inspiration that
came from a transpersonal source and that occurred in non-ordinary states of
consciousness.

The findings from psychedelic explorations throw entirely new light on the material from
history, comparative religion and anthropology concerning the ancient mysteries of death
and rebirth, rites of passage of various cultures, shamanic procedures of all times,
aboriginal healing ceremonies, spiritual practices of various religious and mystical
traditions and other phenomena of great cultural significance.

The individual is flooded by light of supernatural beauty and experiences a state of divine
epiphany. He or she has a deep sense of emotional, intellectual and spiritual liberation
and gains access to breathtaking realms of cosmic inspiration and insight. This type of
experience is clearly responsible for great achievements in the history of humanity in the
area of science, art, religion and philosophy.

The mystics continuously get in trouble with religious authorities, but often also with
political authorities. By his teaching and by the very way he lives, Jesus appeals to
common sense and blows the pretense of public opinion to pieces. Common people said,
“Wow, this man speaks with authority, not like our authorities.” You can imagine how
the authorities felt about it and how they reacted: “This man has to die!”

There are people in this society who will do everything within their considerable power
to stop our research. The managers of consciousness, from the Vatican to Harvard, have
been in this business for a long time and they’re not about to give up their monopoly.
And after all, they’re the experts and we’re the amateurs. They’re the pros and we’re just
the lovers. (That was Aldous Huxley talking to Timothy Leary while both were tripping.)

There has arisen, in most of the great religious traditions of the world, a fantastic over-
valuation of words. Over-valuation of words leads all too frequently to the fabrication
and idolatrous worship of dogmas, to the insistence on uniformity of belief, the demand
for assent by all and sundry to a set of propositions which, though meaningless, are to be
regarded as sacred.

They’re not interested in mystical experience at divinity schools. They’re interested only
in words and in history. If someone had a mystical vision a safe 2000 years ago and left
some record of it, that might interest them. But mystical experience, the raw and vital
force that gives rise to a religion, is too much for them to cram into their semantic,
pseudoscientific endeavor to understand God.

Those who argue that LSD-induced spiritual experiences cannot be valid because they are
too easily available and their occurrence and timing depend on the individual’s decision,
misunderstand the nature of the psychedelic state. The psychedelic experience is neither
easy nor a predictable way to God. Many subjects do not have spiritual elements in their
sessions despite many exposures to the drug.

Until the government gets its bloody, reeking paws off our sacred psychedelics and
ceases to harass and persecute our members, until, indeed, every poor wretch now
suffering in prison because he preferred the mystical uplift of pot to the slobbering
alcoholism of the politicians, is set free, our attitude must be one of uncompromising
hostility.

We felt like people who had stumbled, almost by accident, onto a possible cure for a
virulent plague that was scourging the country. Yet the majority of the inhabitants,
sufferers from the plague, were denying that there even was this condition. Hence anyone
proposing a cure for it must inevitable be seen as either as a religious nut or a depraved
fraud, or both.

We use all sorts of drugs to ease our minds but none to reveal our minds. We seem to
want change, but not understanding. Most of us have never heard of psychedelic drugs,
and those who have would never think of using one themselves. Although man has used
drugs in religious rites to discover his relationship with God since the dawn of history,
the Judeo-Christian mind cannot accept such practices.

We were not to be limited by the pathological point of view. We were not to interpret
ecstasy as mania, or calm serenity as catatonia; we were not to diagnose Buddha as a
detached schizoid; nor Christ as a exhibitionist masochist; nor the mystic experience as a
symptom; nor the visionary state as a model psychosis. (That was Timothy Leary and
Aldous Huxley agreeing.)

What is needed is the clear voice of people who have no stake in disguising the truth. The
young must be taught to distinguish between psychedelics, which hold out the promise of
religious experience and of self-transcendence, and destructive drugs like cocaine,
amphetamines, heroin, crack. They must be taught to respect the psychedelics and to be
ready spiritually and psychologically before they attempt to take them.

When one sees God as light and beauty penetrating the whole of the universe, feelings are
far too intense and sacred to contain one iota of humor. (The writer doesn’t mean that
humor isn’t part of an LSD trip, but refers to someone insensitively revealing their total
ignorance of LSD by laughing at the person’s descriptions of some details of their
experience.)

With the Hebrew-Christian universe, God, the Absolute itself, is good as against bad and
thus to be immoral or in the wrong is to feel oneself an outcast not merely from human
society but also from existence itself, from the root and ground of life. To be in the wrong
therefore arouses a metaphysical anxiety and sense of guilt, a state of eternal damnation.
(This, of course, is absurd brainwashing, a vicious con game.)

If the human potential that Jesus demonstrated is understood to be within us, if the
capacity to grow to godlike stature is directly experienced by all Christendom as the key
to the Kingdom, then Christianity will fulfill its purpose by encouraging people to evolve,
to transform themselves, to rise to a higher state. (This means the LSD state of cosmic
consciousness. Do phony idiots such as Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson understand
that?)

In addition to the Freudian “individual unconscious”, there is also the “collective
unconscious,” which contains the memories and cultural heritage of all of humanity.
According to Jung, the universal and primordial patterns in the collective unconscious, or
“archetypes,” are mythological in nature. Experiences that involve the archetypal
dimensions of the psyche convey a sense of sacredness—or “numinosity,” in Jung’s
terms.

Leary the scientist, Alpert the intellectual and later the mystic, Metzner the scholar: what
held these three together was their shared faith in the power of the transcendent
experience to remove the blinders that keep us at odds with each other. A world where all
humans have access to the mystical experience would be a world transformed, they
believed. Everyone would then directly see what Jesus, Buddha, Moses and Mohammed
preached.

Our attitudes towards psychedelic drugs involve response to certain kinds of experience
as well as certain substances. We have a mysticism problem as well as a drug problem,
and its historical causes are older and more complicated than the causes of the drug
controversy. Mystical, messianic, and shamanistic religion always comes into conflict
with established authority after social evolution has reached the stage of hierarchal state
systems.

The guide must be a versatile individual. His functions may include that of nursemaid
and baby-sitter, priest and trouble-shooter, soul mate and sympathetic ear, scullery maid
and mother and any other role the situation may demand. The competent guide never
forgets that it is the subject’s session and not his. He must be adaptable to any of the
eventualities of an acid session; and he must leave his own emotional involvements
behind.

The richness of the experiential content is augmented by the fact that the process involves
an endless variety of illustrative material from biology, zoology, anthropology, history,
mythology and religion. Psychedelic sessions focusing on the death-rebirth process not
only have great therapeutic potential, but are a source of invaluable scientific,
sociopolitical, philosophical and spiritual insights. (That material is seen with the eyes
closed.)

The summer of 1967 was known as the “Summer of Love” and saw a great emergence of
unstructured communal living, new found sexual freedoms, and growing interest in
eastern philosophy and religion. Displays of spontaneity, trust, non-possessiveness and
non-evaluativeness among the new arrivals were attempts to deal with what was
commonly thought to be hypocriticalness, rigid adherence to rules and a lack of
emotional spontaneity between people.

A genuinely religious image is always intrinsically meaningful.
A God not seen as fully beautiful is less good and true and above all, less living.
A God to be grasped or believed in is no God.
A religion that doesn’t produce the ecstatic high becomes secular.
All doctrines about God are ultimately false because doctrines are forms of words.
All religious traditions start from mystical experience.
All things are in reality the Tao or the Buddha nature.
Are these biochemical visions religious? (Yes)
At the level of cell, God is the DNA code.
At root, you are the Godhead, for God is all that there is.
Beyond time, beyond past, present and future, in religious language, I was in eternity.
Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.
Blow the mind and you are left with God and life.
Books are not life. To idolize scriptures, even the Bible, is like eating paper money.
Break through the walls of the Judeo-Christian-Muslim myth into freedom.
Buddha “never said a word”. His real message remained always unspoken.
Buddha smiles his knowing Buddha smile.
Childlikeness is the ideal of the sage and the artist.
Church religion almost completely ignores the interior life.
Church religion is spiritually dead.
Drug-induced religious and mystical experience is unusually intense.
Drug-taking, it is significant, plays an important part in almost every primitive religion.
Drugs are the religion of the 21st century.
Every religion was founded on the basis of some flipped out visionary trip.
Everyone is potentially a creative genius. Every psychotic is a potential sage or healer.
Feelings of awe and sacredness have been overwhelming.
For oriental theologians, there is no eternal damnation.
God and brotherhood become living, palpable realities.
God dwells within all of us.
God exists at every level of consciousness.
God is a singing, swinging energy process who likes to laugh and make love.
God is an essence without duality.
God is everywhere.
God is here with each single one of us, but wholly within.
God is infinite in the sense of being at once indefinitely immense and indefinitely minute.
God is nearer to you than you are to yourself.
God is ours in the same intimate sense that our consciousness and life are ours.
God is the deepest inside of everything.
God is within us, within our hearts.
God knows how to produce the universe just as I know how to breathe.
God produced LSD.
God’s creative activity is not his labor but his play.
Godmanhood is to be discovered here and now inwardly, not in the letter of the Bible.
Gothic churches and Greek temples were brilliantly colored.
He discovers that he is not only himself but also God or that he is the whole universe.
Heaven is union with God. Hell is separation from God.
Hell is a total separation from God.
His religious and sexual interests could be combined. It’s an ancient union.
Holiness is the life of spontaneity and self-abandonment with humor.
Holy humor is the discovery of the ultimate joke on oneself.
I become as a little child again that I may enter into the Kingdom of God.
If it rejects the spiritual, religion becomes a mere weapon to dominate the world.
If life has a meaning for you beyond the TV-studio game, you are religious.
If people become spiritual, they will no longer differentiate between the religions.
In literatures of different religions, heaven is always a place of gems.
In this state of consciousness, everything is the doing of Gods.
Individuals gain profound insights into the nature of religion.
It is surely absurd to seek God in terms of a preconceived idea of what God is.
It is the paradise of God. It is the place of angels and the Gate of Heaven.
It is the very ground of mysticism that God and man are at essence one.
It looks like the ceiling opens up and God looks in.
It opens a religious vista or fulfills a sense of meaning in existence.
It would show a serious lack of Christian humility to lay claims to superior righteousness.
It’s all right. Remember the Buddha smile.
Jesus was one of the great Buddhas.
Join the holy dance of the visionaries.
Leary sought to find a common ground on which both science and religion could meet.
Liberating knowledge of God comes to the pure in heart.
LSD helps you find divinity and helps you discover yourself, discover God and meaning.
LSD is perfectly in tune with the wisdom of Buddha or the great philosophies of the past.
LSD, say these latter-day mystics, is the most powerful sacrament of them all.
Man, nature and God are one reality, are of one Suchness.
Many religious people reported that their spiritual sensitivities have been expanded.
Mystical religion is in no sense superficial.
Mysticism is the “exploration into God.”
Mysticism is the heart of all religion.
Nature will always be the enemy to the man who has lost God.
No known religion has become mature without embracing both the spiritual and magical.
Nothing exists except God.
Only the pure in heart can see God.
Our finding of God is hindered by the worship of the intellect.
People did not first “believe in” God: they experienced His Presence.
Personal religious experience has its root and centre in mystical states of consciousness.
Potentially, all of us are “infinite” in faculties and like gods in apprehension.
Psychedelic chemicals have religious properties.
Psychedelic drugs are capable of producing the whole range of religious experiences.
Psychedelic drugs can produce a sense of the holy.
Psychological labels have been put on all great prophets and sages.
“Pure science” and religion address themselves to the same basic questions.
Real religion has nothing to do with words.
Religion cannot be pompous. Religion is consciousness-expansion.
Religion grows from within.
Religion means being tuned into the natural rhythm.
Religious doctrines and ideas are quite distinct from mystical experience.
Religious experience has its roots and center in mystical states of consciousness.
Religious experience is closely associated with the best therapeutic results.
Research in the psychology of religion can utilize such drugs.
Ritual is anything done with loving awareness and reverence.
Sacredness is that which a person feels to be of special value.
Sex is sacred.
Sexual relations are religious, social, metaphysical and artistic.
So long as attention is fixed on the delinquent ego, it cannot be fixed upon God.
stained glass—Inside the church, one is inside an immense gem of jeweled vision.
Subjects experienced religious exultation and sensation of being one with God.
Such experiences may enrich and illuminate theological concepts.
The aim of religion is to become what you are.
The Aztec priests used the plants to commune with their gods and to induce visions.
The beauty of the real God, like so much other beauty, is rarely seen.
The Buddha was one of the first dropouts.
The cells of their bodies are billions of Gods.
The church shouldn’t dismiss anything that has the power to deepen faith.
The creative activity of God is playful.
The drugs make an end run around Christ and go straight to the Holy Spirit.
The enlightened ones in any religion have pointed to the God within.
The entire weight of American education is engineered to crush the religious impulse.
The essence of ecstasy, religion and orgasm is that you give up power and swing with it.
The essence of mystical religion is the consciousness of union with God.
The fact of union with God simply is, whether realized or not.
The glory of God is beyond all description and comprehension.
The Greeks frequently referred to mushrooms as the “food of the Gods.”
The heart of God is absolutely, divine joy, colossal gaiety.
The immediate experience of the One and the Holy is the supreme gift.
The Indians called the magic mushroom God’s flesh.
The infinite is God. (So are you.)
The inner life of God is meaningful and playful (as opposed to purposeful).
The Kingdom of God is already here, if we would only allow ourselves to see it.
The laboratory equipment for experimental theology, for internal science, is chemicals.
The LSD experience is a deeply spiritual event, a religious pilgrimage.
The mystical consciousness is the root of all religions.
The object is to draw closer to a oneness with God.
The psychedelic experience is an intimate, personal and sacred one.
The realization of union with God is the only source of creative virtue.
The river of life flows toward the mouth of God.
The road to God comes through the senses.
The sacred is not in the conceptual and conventional order of things.
The sacred truths are always there…waiting for us to remember them…and reapply them.
The saint sees that doing the will of God is joining in the play of God.
The same old world is transfigured with the “glory of God.”
The seed of God is in us.
The similarity of all religions is realized.
The soft breeze is the breath of God.
The surrender of the will to Jesus is all too easily a blind acceptance of patriarchal mores.
The taking of a drug should be a carefully thought-out and purposeful religious act.
The true mind is “no mind,” “original mind,” “Buddha mind.”
The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
The world is intelligible only as a revelation of the mind of God.
Theological controversies and their dualities are far removed from experience.
There is no monarchist or imperialist tyranny of God over the human puppet.
There is no such thing as a saint without joy. One cannot have true holiness without joy.
They are at once unique and eternal, men and women but also Gods and Goddesses.
Think of religion not as something about life, but as a form of life, a way of life.
This is what religion is all about.
This stone is love. God is in this pebble.
Timothy is a political prisoner in a religious war.
To be a holy man, you have to be a funny man.
To Him we shall return.
To think of religion as confined to church attendance was a mockery and a hypocricy.
Transpersonal experiences have a definite religious and mystical emphasis.
Ultimately, I hope, all religious dogma will be replaced by direct, personal experience.
Unitive consciousness is the goal of all religions and philosophers of mind development.
Wasson theorized them (mushrooms) to be at the origin of religion.
We are all gods in disguise.
We are all organically related to God, to Nature and to our fellow men.
We can become aware of God manifest within us.
We do not have to seek for God; he is already here and now.
We have a ready tool at hand for intensifying religion and making it more effective.
We have given little serious consideration to the aesthetic aspect of our image of God.
We have to rediscover God from within.
We need a clean heart to be able to see God in each other.
When “He” appears, we know it.
Where are the laughing Christians? Mystics, prophets, holy men are all laughers.
Without—in its true sense—the lustiness of sex, religion is joyless and abstract.
You are in fact just as much an incarnation of God as Jesus.
You are God, but only you can discover and nurture your divinity.
You are made in the image of God.
You are part of an ancient and holy process.
You can tap God’s power line.
You might feel baptized or cleansed by a beatific archetype (eyes closed).
You see through the game and laugh with God at the cosmic joke.
You shall enter into the kingdom of God.
You will experience the harmony and beauty of nature as deity.

They are at once unique and eternal, men and women but also gods and goddesses. For
now that we have time to look at each other we become timeless.

Under the drug, they claim to feel the glory of God and the spiritual glory of each other—
and all of mankind.

“This is the way I was born” Jane said once, giggling. “This is the way we were all born,
the way the puppies and kittens are born, absolutely at home in this world and delighted
with it. I haven’t felt like this since I was about 3 years old. God, how our society
destroys us…”

A godlike sublimity swallowed up my soul. I was overwhelmed but I leaned on God and
was immortal through all changes.

An endless sea of glorious golden light which was in truth God, stretched into infinity. As
I watched, an overpowering feeling of reverence settled into my very depths.

An endless variety of ecstatic experience spiraled out around me. I had taken the God-
step.

As the truth of the situation dawned on me, the word “father” resounded in this heaven of
light and I was taken up and absorbed by the unspeakable Godhead.

Because I was part of God, I was joyous to be nothing but dust. (With LSD, dust is
divine, like anything else.)

Certain pieces of music came across under LSD as so holy, it was almost as though God
was humming the tune.

Emotionally, aesthetically and religiously, the experience was the most intense,
impressive and valuable day I have ever experienced.

Everywhere there was godlike peace, the sum of all conceivable desires satisfied,
physical or spiritual.

Experiencing these emotions in all their intensity was both a way for me to discover that I
was capable of God feelings and for me to realize that they lay deep within me.

“God is Love” was no mere Biblical quotation but an overwhelming intense burning into
every nerve of my body. The wonder of it caused me to soar with joy.

I became increasingly cognizant of the sacredness of the experience I was undergoing
and felt an expansion of consciousness beyond the confines of my head and my body.

I belonged within peace and unity and wild joy, within something greater than my own
life or the Life of Man, to Life itself! To God, if you want to put it that way.

I could see God and life and everybody and myself in its reality and true proportion. It is
wonderful and full of meaning after all.

I distinctly had the sensation of having been with God in the energy center of the
universe.

I felt I was there with God on the day of Creation. Everything was so fresh and new.
Every plant and tree and fern and bush had its own particular holiness.

I felt in me an unshakable conviction that there is indeed a universal and God-created
energy which expresses itself as rhythm in all things.

I now knew what the shamans meant when they said, “the mushroom takes you there to
the place where God is.”

I saw a gleaming, blinding light with a brilliance. I knew that I was looking at God. (eyes
closed)

I saw the grasses bend in prayer, the flowers dance in the breeze and the trees lift their
arms to God.

I shouted for joy, I praised God with my whole heart. Everything looked new to me, the
people, the fields, the cattle, the trees. I was like a new man in a new world.

I thought that I was near death; when suddenly, my soul became aware of God, in an
intense present reality. I felt him. I cannot describe the ecstasy I felt.

I was overcome with reverence. And gratitude. To be allowed this glimpse, this
participation in the Holy company, in the venerable dance.

I wept without restraint, knowing that within my heart, love and beauty and God had
become one.

I wondered if I would ever return to normal consciousness. Mostly I hoped I wouldn’t.
God-consciousness seemed preferable.

Individual experience became lost and the experience became one of joining, entering
into God.

It began to dawn on me that the origins of some philosophical and religious ideas might
be better understood by a scholar who had ingested and experienced the psychedelics.

It was a day of drenching happiness, a great-day-in-the-morning kind of day, a day of
good cheer, one of extraordinary cosmic blessedness.

It was like being at the very center of the energy source. It was like being in God—not
just in God’s presence, but IN God and participating in God.

My experience was so deep, so moving, so meaningful. What I really discovered under
LSD is love. Some call it God.

No saint ever saw more glorious or joyously beautiful visions or experienced a more
blissful state of transcendence.

Once the God self was recognized and appreciated, all need for arrogance and egotism
was gone.

Suddenly I felt the presence of a strong energy field, as though I were at the center of a
vortex of sacred energy.

The awareness that God was in every nook and cranny of the universe was now so
tremendously increased and so richly fulfilling that a great reverence enfolded me.

The beauty I saw so clearly was not even noticed by anyone else, much less appreciated. I
realized this beauty was God.

The experience was as big as I thought it was. Others had seen it. The shared wow—the
sacred wow.

The revelation had come. The veil had been pulled back. The classic vision. The
fullblown conversion experience. The prophetic call. The works. God had spoken.

The sum total of all these emotions, feelings of ecstasy, aliveness, reverence and love,
seemed to blend into the music.

The veil—the web of maya as the Hindus call it—fell away from our eyes as we opened
the doors of perception.

They enjoyed the feelings of supreme happiness and well-being that explain the age-old
power these “sacred mushrooms” exercise.

This was a pre-religious experience. Religion now seemed superfluous next to being in
the presence of this source of life.

Waves of ineffable happiness flowed through my body. I had experienced the grace of
God.

We climbed the mountain. We drank the nectar of the gods and became one of the elite.
We danced the shaman’s dance together.

Whenever I’d taken LSD, I’d always sought a revelation of the sacred. Now I was in the
midst of one. It was a great honor, a blessing, and I felt very humble.

With the aid of LSD, I had recognized that God was the whole of this paradise which lay
deep within every person.

As I wept with joy, feelings of love became so intense that I knew they could only be of
divine origin and that this feeling was actually God residing within myself and in all
other persons.

At last, it came to me that one could never find God by intellectual probing and that
spiritual wealth could be gained only by allowing rich emotions to live within one’s
heart.

Every atom of my body and soul had seen and felt God. The world was warmth and
goodness. There was no time, no place, no me. There was only cosmic harmony. With
every fiber of my being I knew it was so.

God, who had always been so vague and remote before, was now real and near and I
knew that He would never again be invisible to me. Thus, I was given another rich and
lasting reward.

Having experienced the great power within me, having gone back over my life, and
having recognized the oneness of all things, I was ready for the greatest of all
experiences, the oneness with God.

I felt I had now experienced the grace of God. Truly I had been given a gift of infinite
worth. I could understand why human beings throughout history have relentlessly
pursued truth and sought enlightenment.

I felt within me the same glorious rhythm I had experienced all day. Now I knew this
joyous rhythm to be no less than the rhythm of the universe itself. I knew that at last I
was beginning to find God.

I found myself wishing that every living person might be given LSD and see beauty equal
to that which I had witnessed, have the same feelings, know the blessed nearness of God
and that these feelings might stay uppermost in all of us at all times.

I had not realized before to what extent such feelings as rapture, ecstasy and euphoria or
awe, devotion, reverence and holiness or any other positive emotion could reach, its
intensity.

I had the feeling that I knew what the purpose and the reason for life was. The feelings
that I had at the time could not be very well described in psychiatric terms but best
described in either religious or poetic ones.

I learned a different way to be. I learned what awe, delight, blessedness, and serenity
were, and recognized them as more than platitudes. I felt as if the good news was being
whispered to me. I was in on a big secret. I was beginning to see what it was all about.

I looked around the room. Ramakrishna’s statue breathed and his eyes twinkled the
message. Vivekananda’s brown face beamed and winked. Christ grinned to be joined
again with his celestial brothers.

It seemed that there was beauty, in all of nature, animate and inanimate alike and that the
eyes of the entire human race must somehow be opened to this magnificence and thus to
God.

It seemed to me that the feelings of joy, rhythm, appreciation of music and the many
other emotions I had experienced were all part of an intrinsic spiritual power which
pervades the universe, each of them different aspects of God.

Oftentimes, those who underwent psychedelic therapy reported dramatic personality
changes involving not only the relief of neurotic symptoms but a wholesale revamping of
value systems, religious and philosophical beliefs, and basic lifestyle.

Subjects had not only past-incarnation experiences but also complex and detailed insights
into this area that were strikingly similar to those described in various religious and
occult scriptures.

The intensity of the love feelings caused sexual hungers and reactions to be markedly
heightened. Intercourse took on such depth of meaning as to have a religious
significance.

There was a huge opening in the sky, I saw God. I had a tremendously mystical
experience. I was deeply moved, deeply in love. And when I say love, it’s not like the
level we know from analysis. It was the absence of all anger, the absence of all conflict.

They discovered within themselves that universal river of ecstasy from which flowed the
energy, power and refreshment to revive religious bodies tired out by too much
intellectualism, moralism and institutionalism.

When I read about such visionary states later, I felt especially grateful for my experience
because it seemed that much more authentic and because it gave me a window on the
knowledge of the sages.

Every object in the room was a radiant structure of atomic-god-particles. Radiating.
Matter did not exist. There was just this million-matrix lattice web of energies.
Shimmering. Alive. Interconnected in space-time. Everything hooked up in a cosmic
dance.

Everything was beautiful. Everything was right. Each smallest thing was uniquely
important, yet fitted perfectly into the whole. My little ego seemed removed and I felt I
saw clearly and purely for the first time in my life. I wept with relief and joy. I felt
unworthy of such blessedness.

I had a great awareness of life, truth, and God. I went to church and suddenly all parts of
the service made sense. My senses were sharpened. I became fascinated by the little
insignificant things around me. There was an additional awareness of the world that
would do artists, architects, and painters good.

I looked down below as if from a very high place and saw a rough square of pavement
which had laid out all of Manhattan in miniature, including people. The proportions, the
infinite detail were perfect. The city within the city. We could have swooped down like
gods and lifted up the Empire State Building.

I now felt I had had some direct experience of the ineffable realms of union with God,
and I discovered that my dissatisfaction with conventional religion was not due to the
death of God, as some theologians proclaimed, but rather to the impoverished concepts of
God, currently in vogue.

I understood, at that instant, what the concept of being born again was all about. Jesus the
Christ says in the Christian bible, “you must be born again.” And I knew what he meant.
You must go into yourself…all the way into yourself…to your beginning, your origin.
Into the waters of your unconscious. Into the core of you.

I’d given up even trying to talk. I just smiled at everything that was said to me, and
nodded my head up and down as the words went by. I felt beautiful and saw nothing but
beauty. I was a little child being led and protected by two wise saints. On the perfect path
to all-the-way-up now. Awake, finally, and headed for truth.

It dawned on me that all the building blocks of the social structure were really nothing
but an imposing veneer that kept you from being godlike, and that as soon as we knew
the true potential of our own energy frequencies to overcome or pass through the artificial
walls, the human spirit could be liberated.

It seemed as though the refreshing breath of some kind goddess of wisdom were being
gently blown against the surface of my brain…So delicate, so crisp and exhilarating was it
that words fail me in my attempt to describe it. Few, if any, experiences can be more
delightful…For me, this experience was liberation.

My understanding of mystical teachings, both Eastern and Western, Hindu, Buddhist,
Christian, and Sufi alike, took on a quantum leap. I became aware of the transcendental
unity at the core of all great religions, and understood for the first time the meaning of
esoteric states.

People came out of these sessions reeling with awe, overwhelmed by experiences of
oneness with God and all other beings, shaken to the depths of their nature by the
grandeur and power of the divine life-energy processes going on within their own
consciousness.

There was unity and life and the exquisite love that filled my being was unbounded. My
awareness was acute and complete. I saw God and all the saints and I knew the truth. I
felt myself flowing into the cosmos, levitated beyond all restraint, liberated to swim in
the blissful radiance of the heavenly visions.

They had understood for the first time what the sages of pre-scientific and anti-scientific
traditions were talking about. Psychedelic drugs opened to mass tourism mental
territories previously explored only by small parties of particularly intrepid adventurers,
mainly religious mystics.

Without rational thought, the experience had been the solution to my problem of trying to
find God. I could see that when intellectual development is overemphasized, the
subjective part of one’s self, in which religious experiences occur, is usually
underevaluated; thus, the feeling of God is hindered by the worship of the intellect.

I experienced a wave of extraordinary bliss, like a full-body orgasm, and the sense I was
in the presence of something absolutely awesome. Sex is nothing compared to the ecstasy
I felt at that moment. I had no awareness of my body or ego or time, only a profound
sensation of illumination and the feeling I was in the presence of ALL That Is, eternity,
God, whatever you might call something all-encompassing.

I felt that somehow every person must be made to recognize the divine within himself
and that such a recognition would influence his every action throughout life. It seemed to
me that our lives were hopelessly confused and cluttered with mundane things of no real
importance; and that the matter of greatest importance, the presence of a God part in each
of us, lay within our reach at all times.

I thought about the things I had studied in religion, and about how much more of it
seemed to make sense now. I had somehow touched what Jesus, Buddha, and others had
been talking about. Formerly confusing phrases out of various scriptures came to me and
each seemed perfectly beautifully clear. I became aware of a harmony and wholeness to
life that had previously eluded me. Disconnectedness was very clearly illusory….

I remember being particularly struck by the joy of hearing music as I never had heard it
before. I could laugh at my old self-image, which included “not being musical”. I was
deeply moved by each piece of music that was played. As I listened without distraction,
each one evoked a different aspect of my psyche, and at the center of each was the perfect
still point of pure being where one could experience union with God.

I was looking at my furniture as the pure aesthetic whose concern is only with forms and
their relationships with the field of vision or the picture space. But, as I looked, this
purely aesthetic, Cubist’s-eye view gave place to what I can only describe as the
sacramental vision of reality. I was in a world where everything shone with the Inner
Light and was infinite in its significance.

Large trees known for their longevity, such as sequoias and redwoods, were experienced
in the sessions as representing timeless and centered consciousness uninfluenced by the
turmoils and upheavals in the external world. Other insights associated with similar
experiences were related to the mystical consciousness and deep religious significance of
certain plants.

She lay down on the grass in a field beneath a bright sun and soon was living out an epic
of creation in which she identified with “the Great Goddess—Mother Earth.” Her
experience of this identification began when she first became aware that “for some time”
her body had “no longer existed in its usual limited form” and that now she was “one
with the earth.”

The feelings I experienced could best be described as cosmic tenderness, infinite love,
penetrating peace, eternal blessing and unconditional acceptance on one hand and on the
other as unspeakable awe, overflowing joy, primeval humility, inexpressible gratitude
and boundless devotion. Yet all these words are hopelessly inadequate and can do little
more than meekly point toward the genuine, inexpressible feelings actually experienced.

The psychedelic experience seemed to have opened new realms of mystical and cosmic
feelings within her. The religious elements that she experienced in her session
transcended the narrow boundaries of the traditional Catholic religion she had been

brought up with. She was now precipitating toward the more universal approaches found
within Hinduism and Buddhism.

During the experience, I felt I understood what mystics throughout the ages have claimed
to be the universal truth of existence. I had an academic background in philosophy and
comparative religion, but I realized that mystical teachings had now taken on an added
dimension. My perception seemed to have shifted from a flat, two-dimensional
intellectual understanding of the literature, to a three-dimensional sense of immersion in
the mystical reality.

I sensed a complete connectedness of everything. It was obvious to me that all of the
separateness I ordinarily perceived was, in fact, an artifact of cultural conditioning, and
was indeed less “real” that what I was supposedly hallucinating. At that moment, I knew
that I was, for the first time, experiencing things as they are, utterly continuous. There is
no discontinuity. There is not one thing and another thing. It is all the same thing, the
Holy Thing.

Thoughts spun around in my head and everything—objects, sound, events—took on a
special meaning for me. I felt like I was putting the pieces of a puzzle together.
Childhood feelings began to come back, as symbols and bits from past conversations
went through my head. The word religious and other words from other past conversations
came back to me and seemed to take on a new significance. I increasingly began to feel
that I was experiencing something like mystical revelations.

All infinity seemed filled with an endless ocean of golden light. Then I saw Him!
At last, I comprehended fully that the joy which possessed me was God.
Book jackets gleamed with godliness.
Everything was holy.
Feelings were those of absolute awe, reverence, and sacredness.
He saw “miracle”, heard “holy music.”
I felt a deep union with God.
I felt healed, as though I were suddenly touched by God.
I felt His presence. It was so overwhelming.
I got my deepest and clearest understanding of religion.
I had the sense of being with God and he was revealing life to me.
I thought “This is the truth behind all religions”.
I was ever aware that beauty was God.
I was godly and eternal.
In religious language, I was in eternity, beyond time.
It had been a real epiphany, a revelation of God.
It seemed to me that each object had somehow been touched by God’s sublime Presence.
The relationship of each being to the whole was somehow religious and also sexual.
Spiritual ecstasy, religious revelation and union with God were now directly accessible.
Sweeping across the heavens came the gold of love and God, rich beyond imagining.
The exultation was pure and holy.
The sacrament had unlocked the door.
There was nothing but God.
Things felt more sacred, more intense and indescribably wonder-filled.
This was the fulcrum moment of eternity. God was present

a conception of the holy man and sage who is not impossibly remote, not superhuman but
fully human and above all, not a solemn and sexless ascetic

a distinct increase of interest in religious matters, involving spirituality of a universal
nature

a firsthand, immediate perception of the Holy and the individual’s relation to it,
accompanied by emotion, excitement and feeling

a golden chance to tune in, to break through, to glorify, to really groove and dance with
God’s great song

a profound feeling of sacredness or holiness that is associated with certain deep processes
in the psyche

a profound mystical or religious experience involving elements of death and rebirth,
cosmic unity or communication with God

a radiance that seemed comparable to the light of super-natural brilliance that according
to Oriental scriptures appears to us at the moment of death

a religion which goes beyond symbols, a knowledge of God entirely transcending
symbolism

a religious experience, a feeling of oneness with God and the universe—the point at
which the individual is overcome with joy and good will

a religious experience, a oneness with the universe, insight into oneself and all other
mysteries

a religious experience culminating in a sense of total self-understanding, self-
transformation, religious enlightenment and possibly mystical union

a religious experience, though in a highly transcendental, ineffable sense not closely
related to institutional religion or a dogmatic, creedal theology

a spirituality that is quite independent of the individual’s childhood experiences, religious
programming, church affiliation and even cultural and racial background

a union beyond the realm of duality, where to be and not to be God presents no
contradiction

a vision of God as a radiant source of light of supernatural beauty or a sense of personal
fusion and identity with God perceived in this way

acid a boon to psychotherapy, an enlarger of creativity, a religious sacrament and a
liberation of the human spirit

an entirely new outlook on life, whereby everything becomes transformed and made of
the Glory of God

an inner dedication, an unruffled optimism, a deep belief in the religious experience and
the power of psychedelic drugs to produce it

an intimate, personal experience of the reality to which most forms of religion and
philosophy come no nearer than an intellectual or emotional description

awesome beyond-musical choruses that surged to holy crescendos of sound and then
receded to equally holy silence

beauty, fun, philosophic wonder, religious revelation, increased intelligence, mystical
romance, glamour, sexuality

Christianity which is uncompromising, ornery, militant, rigorous, imperious and
invincibly self-righteous

Christianity, with its politically ordered cosmology and technology, with its imperialistic
mechanization of a natural world from which man himself feels strangely alien

concrete archetypal symbolism related to specific religions and mythologies of different
cultures (eyes closed)

“cosmic consciousness” in which the individual feels that his own inmost Self behind the
superficial ego, is God

distinction between God as described in terms of conventional thought and God as he is
in reality

ecclesiastical Christianity with its nature-alienated religiosity (Will they ever realize that
nature and God are one?)

energy, fun, religious revelation, sexual enhancement, aesthetic kick, ecstasy, accelerated
learning

expanding consciousness through the use of sacramental substances in accord with
spiritual growth and well-being

experienced a breath of timelessness, liberation from the past and the future, blessedness
through being completely here and now

eyes closed—mosaics, temples, sacred objects, patterns of great intricacy and profoundly
meaningful

fear—is only because we do not really believe in the gift of union with God (It is the ego
which fears and doesn’t believe.)

feeling that what is apprehended is holy, sacred or divine, feelings of blessedness, joy,
peace, happiness, etc.

feelings of spiritual rebirth and unity with other human beings, the entire universe and
God

full appreciation of the therapeutic potential of the mystical and religious dimension of
the LSD experience

God as the cosmic stuffed shirt in whose presence no laughter is allowed (That’s what the
Western religions make God out to be. Is that God or is it a joke?)

had opened my eyes to beauty such as this world has never seen and to God (“This
world” means the so-called “real world” of ego, without LSD.)

higher levels and states of mind that lead to the realization of one’s divine nature and God
consciousness

his eternal inner spiritual core, something like the “inner Christ” in the writings of the
mystics

holiness a wise innocence, a relaxed intensity, a humorous humility, a supernatural
naturalness, a perpetual uncalculated life in the present

holy fools who indulge in a behavior incompatible with established morality (The real
fools are those who are hung-up on “established morality”.)

Huxley’s view of the scientist as one who bridges the disciplines of religion and
philosophy with science

images of God perceived as pure, spiritual energy, as a transcendental or cosmic sun
(eyes closed)

images related to religious rituals and ceremonies involving sex and wild rhythmic
dances (eyes closed)

increased powers of concentration and introspection and experiences deep religious
emotion

intellectual and emotional adventure, sensory pleasure, enhanced awareness, self-
exploration, religious and mystical insight

leaves of trees intricately patterned and at times resembled webs spun by God-inspired
spiders of a thread of unraveled emeralds

LSD a kind of telescope to scan the deep-space regions of the spirit and discover a greater
understanding of his religious instinct

LSD, its eerie power to release ancient, wise, at times even holy sources of energy, inside
the human brain

LSD religious experience—a Christian will report it in terms of the Christian vocabulary
and the Buddhists will do likewise.

making people aware of their religious potentialities, linking them consciously with a
great tradition of prophets, saints and martyrs

mediates understanding as to where and why religions went astray and lost contact with
true spirituality

psychedelic drugs especially valuable in the area of comparative religion where the
researcher might find a key to the understanding of the genesis of religious experiences

psychedelic drugs potentially useful for a wide variety of therapeutic, religious, and
creative purposes

psychedelic drugs the great liberating force of our time, the destined sacrament of the
Aquarian Age

relevant insights into the dynamics of important religions, historical and sociopolitical
movements

revealing the brightness and true beauty of God which would shine if we allowed the love
within us to glow to full capacity at all times

sees man’s unity with God in an ontological and natural principle in which all beings are
metaphysically one

self-understanding, religious enlightenment, mystical experience, harmony with the
universe and with other persons

similar to the heavens and fairylands of folklore and religion, the prototype of many
Paradises

spiritual awakening, a direct visionary experience of transpersonal realities, the original
source of mainstream religions

state of consciousness in which the individual discovers himself to be one continuous
process with God

suggesting, indicating the very essence and reality of religion by dropping religious forms
and terms altogether

talking yourself into believing some piece of foolishness because it happens to be in the
Scriptures

that Adam fell from Paradise when his “play became serious business” and that the mode
of God’s own activity is play

that Archetypal World where men have always found the raw materials of myth and
religion (eyes closed)

that drugs had been used in esoteric religious rituals from the days of antiquity right up to
the present, as a stimulus to religious experience

that Jesus was a man like ourselves who had an overwhelming experience of cosmic
consciousness in which it became completely clear to him that “I and the Father are one”

that peculiar naturalness and un-self-consciousness for which little children are loved and
which is sometimes regained by saints and sages

that psychedelic insight can supercede both science and religion as we presently
understand them

that the Beyond is within, that God is to be found in the deepest and innermost reaches of
consciousness

that union with God is a free and universal gift and that consciousness of it is presented to
us in the Eternal Now

the almost universal passion for flowers, the almost universal use of flowers in the rites of
religion

the ancient traditions of religious psychedelic use—always one of the places where
spirituality and psychotherapy have converged

the better minds of our age who believe in all sincerity that institutional Christianity is a
dead backwater and the multitudes simply follow their opinion

the conscious experience of unity behind the diversity of phenomena—said by sages and
mystics of all centuries to be the most blissful and uplifting of all human experiences

the divine source of our being—the source we have lost awareness of, what religion is all
about

the dramatic self-deception whereby the One plays at being the Many and the Godhead
lets itself be forgotten in pretending to be each individual being

the ecstatic experience of a mystical nature—the ultimate source from which the strength
of religion flows

the Flash of God growing out of a pile of shit (Psychedelic mushrooms grow out of cow
dung.)

the fulfilling and lasting feelings of reverence and spirituality, the awareness of the
continuous presence of God

the hitherto unconscious unity of life—a unity grounded in the fact that God is man’s
interior and not exterior center

the Jungian archetypes—the world of deities, demigods, superheroes and complex
mythological, legendary and fairy tale sequences (eyes closed)

the new relationship between religion and science that seems to be emerging from the
study of unusual states of consciousness

the part that passion born of ecstasy has played in the early stages of most religious
movements

the possibility of confrontation with the source level of reality, felt as Holy, Ultimate,
Ineffable, in an atmosphere charged with the most intense effect

the relation of the stranger and more remote areas of the mind with all kinds of cultural,
religious and philosophical aspects of life

the Rig Veda, the ancient Hindu text that spoke of the ecstatic visions obtainable from the
plant soma

the root of religion, namely religious experience, the most captivating and transforming
experience known to man

the sacred mushroom that gives visions and transports the eater to “the world where
everything is known”

the sage or “divine-man” whose consciousness transcends the opposites and who,
therefore, knows himself to be one with the cosmos

“the transcendent unity of religions,” the notion that underlying all the world’s greatest
religious traditions, there is a single and shared transcendent vision of the Divine

the truth that the creative and meaningful life is impossible without some realization of
union with God

the undoubted historical fact of the widespread use of visionary plants in religious
contexts

the world not yet ready to receive its saints (This society wouldn’t know a saint if it saw
one.)

the world of saints, heroes, magical forests, visions of delightful temples and jeweled
mansions (eyes closed)

timelessness, presence of God, ultimate reality, blessedness and peace, mystery, and
rebirth

to awaken and vitalize the religious sense, to give it color, vigor and motivation,
accompanied by emotion, excitement and feeling

to break down ego defenses and induce a “transcendental experience” which seems to be
almost always religious in nature

to talk about the mystic experience simultaneously in terms of theology, psychology and
biochemistry

to throb in harmony with the energies radiating on the sense organs—the mark of a sage,
holy man, a radiant teacher

usual idea of God—produced the world by making, Tao—produced the world by “not-
making”, by “growing”

visions of archetypal forms, deities and demons, and complex mythological sequences
that seem to have a life of their own (eyes closed)

visions of archetypal personages and themes, encounters with deities of various cultures,
and complex mythological, legendary and fairy tale sequences (eyes closed)

visions of religious ceremonies involving sensuality, sexual arousal and wild rhythmic
dances (eyes closed)

a memory of things, things related to things in some blessedly familiar way that could not
yet be clearly apprehended (When it does become clear, that is awakening,
enlightenment, liberation, etc.)

a state of which, because there are no longer any God-eclipsing obstacles between
themselves and Reality, they are able to be aware continuously of the divine Ground of
their own and all other beings

a 20th century version of a process that has been practiced through the millennia in
various temple mysteries, rites of passage, secret initiations and religious meetings of
ecstatic sects

an all-too-natural wild and satisfying, defiantly brave psychedelic religious pioneer
existence, backed by smiling Buddhas and holy Christian martyrs all giving me the nod
and the go-ahead

an area of human experience accessible through the intervention of a sacrament which is
whatever it is that helps make God present in man (God is in man. The LSD sacrament
makes it possible to realize that.)

mainstream psychiatric literature suggesting that direct spiritual and mystical experiences
in the lives of the great prophets, saints and founders of religions were actually
manifestations of mental diseases

persecuting men who are merely attempting to experience that part of their nature that
they feel most entitles them to regard themselves as human, namely, their encounter with
Ultimate Reality or what they call God

science—the systematic attempt to record and measure the energy process-data,
religion—the systematic attempt to provide answers to the same questions, by direct
personal experience

the Church’s disagreeable insistence on the reality of the totally malignant spirit of
cosmic evil, everlasting damnation and on the absolute distinction between the Creator
and the creature

the opening of areas of religious and spiritual experience that seem to be an intrinsic part
of the human personality and are independent of the individual’s cultural and religious
background

the opening up of religious and spiritual areas that appear to be an intrinsic part of the
human personality and are independent of the individual’s cultural and religious
background

the Protestant social web, so sterile and anti-sense and anti-Christ, so false to the memory
of that half-naked sensual Jew visionary prophet who sat on the floor to wash dirty feet
and then stood up to the Roman Empire (Timothy Leary wrote that.)

the scope of the sacred realms, the profound insight of the sensory and physical
manifestations of mystical experiences, this enormous physical, mental, emotional and
spiritual input

the significance of visionary experience, this manner of comprehending the world—in
cultural history, in the creation of myths, in the origin of religions and in the creative
process of which works of art arise

the state in which we transcend or dissolve all the barriers of ego and selfishness that
separates us from God, the state of direct knowing, immediate perception of our total
unity with God

to regain the lost dimensions, the encounter with the Holy, the dimensions which cut
through the world of subjectivity and objectivity and goes down to that which is not
world but is the mystery of the Ground of Being

unveils behind the urgent realm of good and evil a vast region of oneself about which
there need be no guilt or recrimination, where at last the self is indistinguishable from
God

the opening of spiritual areas of the unconscious that are intrinsic parts of the structure of
human personality and are independent of the individual’s racial, cultural or religious
background (One can refer to them as archetypal, belonging to the collective unconscious
which Jung wrote about)

those universal psychic archetypal structures that we share with the whole of mankind,
such as the archetypal idea of mana, the hero, the cosmic God-man, the mother earth, the
helpful animal, or the trickster figure, which we find in all mythologies and all religious
systems (These things are seen with eyes closed.)

a consciousness clear as crystal and open to truth, reality or God
a deepened and thereby religious reality consciousness
a direct, immediate, incontrovertible experience of the Mysterium, the sacred
a glance behind the veil through the holy holes poked by LSD
a godly feeling of devotion
a God-man or cosmic man
a holy state
a marvelous, captivating and mystery-producing encounter with Ultimate Reality or God
a mystical state, the unification of all immediate experience with “God”
a perfect state of wise Buddha-being
a psychedelic religious revelation
a purely spiritual religion that seeks the unitive knowledge of the Absolute Godhead
a realization of one’s original identity with God
a rebirth into great understanding and a greater appreciation of God
a releaser of profound religious experience of an ecstatic and mystical nature
a religion of immediate experience
a sacrament or means of grace
a sacred primordial vision (eyes closed)
a sense of sacredness
a sense of sacredness and of ultimate insight into the true and real nature of existence
a special feeling of sacredness
a turn-on sacramental love elixir
alchemists—the transformation of material consciousness into “spiritual God”
amazed at the whole religious content of his experience
an awakening of the God within
an ecstatic revelation, going beyond, confronting God, getting out of your mind
an experience of God or the Godhead
an experience of psychic integration, religious experience
an inner experience of the beauty and the joy of God
an intense religious experience, a mystical transcendent experience
an overwhelming, beautiful, blessed joy
ancient painting of an obviously psychedelic religious feeling
archetypal Gods of love (eyes closed)
as God is generally conceived in the West—to be dictator of the world
as though I had experienced everything that ever happened all in one instant
avoids the entanglements of religiosity and goes straight to the heart
aware of his real, organic relationship with God
awed reverence
awesome, full of reverence and wonder
awesome mystical-religious experiences
basking in the feeling of God’s presence
became aware of the “sacred unconscious”
becoming aware of her goddess nature
“Beyond theology: the science and art of Godmanship”
can see female guide as a goddess or the personification of wisdom, truth or beauty
communion with the Christ within
converted from righteousness to total selflessness and God-centeredness
cosmic religious experiences
cosmic-religious experiences, feelings of great enrichment and increased self-confidence
deep religious insight, moving spiritual insights
direct contact with God
direct contact with God’s energy
discover beauty and wisdom and God
discovers an inner world “infinite and holy”
drugs useful as spiritual preparation for reading holy writings or entering sacred places
drugs which have triggered a firsthand awareness of the religious consciousness
each time, awed by religious revelations as shattering as the first experience
Eastern religions non-urban and thus more in tune with nature
eating vegetables for religious experience—a human phenomenon
eidetic images of a religious nature (eyes closed)
Einsteinian physics and Buddhist philosophy
experienced a deep reverential attitude to the divine
experienced an intense awareness of God’s presence, a conversation with God
experiences deep religious emotion
experiences of the divine that are the living fount of all religion
experiential religion
feelings and perceptions of a religious nature
feelings of deep spirituality and tranquil reverence
genuine immortality in union with the timeless, eternal Godhead
God intensely real
God living within each of us
God, the ultimate reality, not an idea conceived but a reality experienced
God who inhabits each and every man
going beyond, getting out of your mind, confronting God
has a soul as deep as God
holy sex, sexual yoga, spiritualized sexuality
in direct communication with the sacred realms
in the holy now, in the infinite instant
in touch with this God world
inadequate theologies based upon psychological ignorance
individual gains profound insights into the nature of religion
intense and life changing religious experiences
intense holiness
introduced to the realities of religious existence through drugs
Judeo-Christian distinction between divinity (“up there”) and the self (“down here”)
liberated to know God
like a saint’s vision of beautitude
LSD a tremendous theological breakthrough
LSD the key to the religious or mystical state, could lead to a truer metaphysics of being
male guide can be seen as a Buddha or Buddha-like figure
man’s league with God
mystical awareness of God
mysticism the realization of one’s union with God
noble and free and at peace with all the gods of the new world
nonrational stirrings of the inner life the root of religion
on the trail of an ancient and holy mystery
open the windows of perceptive feeling and enrich the understanding of God
peace—everywhere godlike peace, the sum of all conceivable desires satisfied
philosophic-religious experiences, philosophic revelation
powerful rituals of taking plants in an atmosphere of reverence and harmony with nature
profound ecstatic religious experience
profound emotional experiences often called religious
pursuit of the Divinity through the sacrament of LSD
radiant holy people
ravishing blessings, ecstasies, ineffable pleasure
realized the Buddha nature of all creatures
reborn, renewed, radiant with affection and reverence
religion in a new, interior and spiritually creative sense
religious and mystical awareness
religious cosmology
religious ecstasies
religious ecstasy, ecstatic religion
religious emotions, religious awe
religious enlightenment
religious intensity
religious metaphysics
religious, mystical, visionary or cosmic experience
religious mystics
religious perceptions
religious rapture
religious revelation
religious wisdom
responsible religious use of chemicals
return to the undifferentiated unity of the Godhead
reverent awe, ecstatic humility before such power and intelligence
robot or Buddha
sacramental chemical like LSD
sacramental substances, spiritual growth
sacred beauty
sacred drugs
sacred mushrooms
sacred mysteries
sacred plants
sacred psychedelic plants
sacred radiance
sacred sensuality
seeing into one’s nature and attaining Buddhahood.
spiritual ecstasy, religious revelation
such mad dashes into sacred, revelatory territory
superior awareness, religious enlightenment
taking sacred substances to induce a heightened state
that enjoyment and perfection of union with God which is man’s true end
that God is your unconscious mind, that everybody shares the same unconscious mind
that holy place, that transcendent place
that real oneness with God
that religion itself is psychedelic in origin
that sacred realm
that they may release the life of God which is in them
the aimless splendor that fills the heavens in celebration of the joy of God
the ancient sacramental meaning of LSD
the central experience of reality from which religions originally arose
the clear, unbroken and infinite light of God
the concept of religion as mysticism or vivid inner experience of Ultimate Reality
the concept that God is not in any particular place but that God is everywhere
the creative God
the crucial agency of the drugs in a new religious birth
the cultural and religious influence of psychedelic plants
the curative, religious and heuristic properties of psychedelic drugs
the deepest religious (spiritual) experience of my life
the direct path to God
the discovery or re-discovery of God
the divine plant/god Soma as the inspiration for the Hindu religions
the divine purity, the infinity of God
the divinity of the day, the purity, the holiness of this moment in time
the ego, godless and full of thought (or full of bull)
the epic of Hindu mythology, the Bhagavad-Gita
the essentially religious nature of the experience
the eternal Ground or Godhead
the experience of death and rebirth, union with the universe or God
the experience of God
the glory of God’s process
the God self within every human being
the godly state
the grand harmony of God’s infinite creation
the great body of radiance, the state of the divine mind of the Buddha
the great liberating force of our time, the destined sacrament of the Aquarian Age
the heavens and fairylands of folklore and religion (eyes closed)
the heroic-mythic God trip
the high emotional content, sense of awe and reverence
the Hindu and Buddhist judgment that everyday consciousness is maya, illusion
the holy ground of the unconscious
the holy sense of unity and revelation
the Holy Spirit, the life force
the holy vision of the first beginning and the final end
the holy-orgiastic-ecstasy-revelation-thread inside
the hunger for a religious commitment to give meaning to life
the importance of religious experience in effective psychotherapy
the indestructible essence of Buddhahood within everyone
the inner essence of religion
the intuition and immediate spiritual consciousness of God
the limitations of established churches
the limitless God
the living reality of God as the Eternal Now
the magic world of ancient gods
the magical virtue of the sacrament
the mysteries of God
the mystery of the sacred
the mystical awareness of God
the need for more sophisticated religious language coordinated with the scientific data
the new cleansing sacrament of the Aquarian Age
the new religion
the ocean of God
the one thing that makes spiritual life possible and meaningful—union with God
the one thing the church should be offering and is not, spiritual and mystical experience
the pattern of God
the playful spirit of God
the poetic idea of the universe as the play or dance of God
the power of inner religious experience to mediate wholesome personality change
the powerful experience which is religious in its essence
the psychology of religion
the radiant eye of God
the rapture and contact with God
the raptures of the saints
the reality that underlies all religions
the relevance of mythology for psychology, religion and human life
the religious consciousness
the religious aspects and dimensions of the psychedelic drugs
the religious aspects of the psychedelic revelatory experience
the religious dimensions of the psychedelic experience
the religious potentialities of LSD
the religious significance of psychedelic drug experiences
the religious-ontological nature of the psychedelic experience
the revelation of some deep mystery about the nature of God
the reverent sense of clear reality
the sacred elixir
the sacred forests of the ancient
the sages who, abandoning learning, rest in spontaneity
the sense of sacredness
the sexual act as a religious sacrament, a mode of mystical knowledge
the social, philosophical and religious implications in the discoveries made
the state of Self-realization or God-realization
the study of consciousness which Leary calls religion
the transcendental mystical unity of all religions
the truth of our given union with God
the truth that union with God is given to man both as individual and as society
the ultimate identity of oneself and the Godhead
the ultimate perfection of a total union with the Godhead
the unitive knowledge of God, the Godhead
the unutterable mystery which is God himself
the value of these drugs as superlative means for the study of religious experience
the very depths of the roots of the religious life in the unconscious
the vision of the sacred achieved in ecstatic states
the visionary core of religion
the wisdom of the world’s oldest religion and healing art, shamanism
theological revelations from Cosmic Central
these rediscovered ancient sacraments
this eternal truth of religious revelation
this fascinating and holy drug
this God consciousness
this God-like awareness
this holy city, this Paradise city
this sacred dimension
to attain an intuitive knowledge of God
to “be still and know that I am God”
to enrich their religious life experientially
to experience the reality behind humanity’s religious beliefs
to explore the mystical and religious dimensions of psychedelic experiences
to go home to God
to revive a sense of the sacred in modern life
transcending self-centered ego and becoming God-centered
transformation in what people consider religion
unitive awareness of external stimuli, can set off revelatory imagery
universal spirituality transcending the divisive interests of religious sectarianism
unlocking the doors to man’s religious self
visionary states of a religious and mystical nature
was like uncovering a secret revelation or discovering the Holy Grail
wise, smiling saints
wonderful and holy and free
world mythology and religion which have their roots in the collective unconscious