Science, Materialism, Mysticism

LSD and the Mind of the Future

1

Extraordinary experiences by the use of drugs: this issue has been growing ever livelier since 1954 when Aldous Huxley conducted experiments on himself and wrote on the consciousness-changing effects of Mescaline. With the many- sided study of a drug 7000 times as potent - LSD, after the German Lyserg Saiire Diethylamide (=Lysergic Acid in common English) - we have reached the peak-point of controversy. For, with a pill weighing 1/200,000 of an ounce, LSD not only releases the human consciousness from its common bounds but also expands it to an extent which seems infinite. We thus pass beyond medical science and even psychotherapy into profound parapsychology and impinge on the realm of metaphysical values. Two questions of extreme significance arise:

(a) What is the bearing of psychedelic drugs, as they are called, on the ultimate being of man, the ultimate reality of the universe?

(b) If the bearing is truly revolutionary, how far is it permissible to use in the interests of the mind of the future a chemical as powerful as LSD, which is fraught with the gravest dangers in unqualified hands and for unfit subjects?

2

Of course, critics will urge: "An experience produced by an artificial agent like a chemical can only be hallucinatory and bear not at all on any ultimate truth."

Well, while alcohol or opium weakens the commonsense grasp of things, coffee or dexedrine is known to strengthen it: an artificial agent like a chemical can make us contact day- to-day reality with a surer and more penetrating power. In

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LSD we have an artificial agent which paradoxically combines the two opposite workings and carries them much farther.1

Now we are not borne along in a happy haze which is out of touch with the known world, but rather the known world itself grows richer, more vivid and concrete. Flowers, leaves grass, even inanimate objects acquire a mighty "Van-Gogh" intensity of colour and they pulse and breathe with some life of their own. They also become endowed with qualities that make us intimate with their very selves, as it were. One may be lost "for hours in rapt contemplation of a piece of wood, a stone, a flower, and feel that at last he understands the essential nature of these things". "Intensification of sounds too (such as the singing of birds, though far away) is often commented on with fascinated surprise." And when one "discovers what an ample store of unhastened attention he can give to all the rich content brought him by eye and ear, he finds it hard not to believe that somehow time has been stretched. But a glance at his watch tells him it is a new-given power of super-attention that is allowing him to make such full use of every moment".

Side by side with the intensification of individual objects and the increasing insight into them, there may come a "flowing" and "waving" of shapes; and one's sense of personal distinction from things may tend to be over- whelmed and one's own self may seem not quite to hold together.

Then the known world, outer and inner, opens up, so to speak, into subtle forms and views, remarkable for their plasticity. "Brilliantly coloured geometrical patterns present a constantly changing spectacle of aesthetic delight." "Crystalline landscapes, jewel-encrusted mountains of gold... flowers, birds, butterflies, fountains of color" kaleidoscope before the attentive gaze. "The visions may portray scenes and incidents, as in a technicolor dream, or they may take the form of abstract symbols, and may become fraught with meaning..."

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Next, the awareness deepens into the complex secret places of the subliminal being. Memories quicken up, old events with people and objects participating in them, voices from early childhood - and one "may feel that he is 'reliving' the experience with the same emotions he had then". But, while a detailed exploration goes on of such "subconscious" or "unconscious" material as figures in Freudian or Jungian psychoanalysis, the explorer remains detached and lucid. So the knots of the forgotten past are slowly untied and one "accepts himself completely for what he is with a massive reduction in self-conflict and guilt". New insights are obtained also into the individual's place in a larger, more meaningful pattern. A keener feeling of relationship to other people develops. Not uncommonly there is a "humanity- identification", in which one feels "love, grief, loneliness or physical suffering as though he is experiencing it as it has been felt by all people at all times and places".

Finally, the outer and the inner world widens into a dimension whose nature, supernormal in the extreme, may be best indicated by a few substantial testimonies from those who have gone into it with their different temperaments:

"During this stage... comes that experience called by the mystics 'the realisation of the God within us'... This... is an indescribable, piercing, beautiful knowledge and knowing, which goes beyond the body, the mind, the reason, the intellect, to an area of pure knowing... There is no sensation of time. God is no longer only 'out there' somewhere, but He is within you, and you are one with Him... You are beyond the knower and the known, where there is no duality, but only oneness and unity, and great love. You not only see Truth, but you are Truth. You are Love. You are all things! It is not an ego-inflating experience, but on the contrary, one which can help one to dissolve the ego...."

"...I am much struck with the older looking hills... Feel they were there before time, before eternity, before God... but - not before me. What does it mean? Terror and bewilderment and then a burst of tremendous truth. J am God. I am

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utterly shaken by sobs and trembling all over. The enormity is too much; sudden blazing joy, realization, humility, power, tumbling one on the other. Can I accept this? This' the Ultimate Reality... I am God, the universe, Christ, all men, all everything - all exists within me. The Self is limitless, endless, eternal - it is all knowing, all aware, and at bottom God... And this Truth is not only true of me but of all men...."

"Suddenly I burst into a vast, new, indescribably wonderful universe... I was immediately aware that I exist (not just at that moment, but always) in a trans-physical universe, perceived spatially although it seemed clear that the usual space concepts don't necessarily apply. The feeling was that just as when one turns his attention outward he finds the vast physical universe stretching out an infinite distance in all directions, so on turning inward I had come to a vast realm of inner space which likewise extended out in all directions without limit. But I too am limitless, I perceived, and all of this vast realm is somehow me. Even as I perceive it I am only becoming aware of myself... I knew too that the T I was now experiencing had existed long before the physical me was born and would continue to exist long after the organism was dead. In fact, this newly discovered T', outside of physical time and space, is responsible for the creation in space and time of the physical universe...."

Gerald Heard, himself the subject of an LSD-experiment, has given a description in general terms of "the full power of the experience" which comes during the third and fourth hours after the drug has been taken:

"Now the whole outside world becomes a composition that embraces and interfuses everything. And yet this composition, though constantly changing, is also (strange paradox) all the while complete and instant in a fathomless peace. At this point one could say that he crosses a watershed. In this all-pervading

Energy he feels around him, the subject realizes that he cannot be isolated. It is flowing through him, as it flows through all that surrounds him.

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"Here his experience with time goes still further. Time appears to have stopped, disappeared. What has now befallen the 'voyager' is not merely that he is on the high sea with his ship in a vast calm, but that the ship itself no longer seems distinct from the infinite ocean. He stands outside of and apart from his familiar ego, all its protective barriers having been shed; and this can lead in some to transcendent experience, while in others to a deep panic. To those for whom their ego is their only possible self, the only possible mode of consciousness, its disappearance is a kind of death.

"It is here that the subject, however independent minded, may literally welcome a helping hand. Of all the senses, touch is naturally most firmly anchored in the material world. So it is the least liable to illusions. It has been found that if at the moment of this 'trans valuation of all values', this double change of the view of one's self and one's view of nature, a hand is actually held out to the subject, he will be able to keep his bearings. If the subject uses this simple 'sea anchor', he may discover that he is not merely 'riding the swell' but has entered a condition of what until then may have been inconceivable. With his consciousness enlarged out of all bounds, he may - if all goes well - find that he no longer feels any anxiety about past or future."

In philosophical language we may sum up: there is a widening out into a dimension where the perceiver is united with the perceived and both fuse into an immensity felt as creating, containing, pervading, harmonising, illuminating all - a limitless existence beyond the separative ego, the outsideness of one object to another, the cross-purposes of poignant combative particulars, the ravage of death and, despite the altering aspects everywhere, the very passage of time.

To all appearance, the culmination of the LSD-experience is akin to the "unitive knowing" of mysticism. Everyone may not reach this culmination. Some may stop short with the amazing artistic splendour of the world. Others may progress no more than to a clearing up of their own depths.

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Those who are not willing to make terms with the strangeness' of the new perceptions and feelings and either resist it or try to fit it into old frameworks of ideas and reactions may become uncomfortable and confused, with their sense of single personality temporarily affected. But when the final possibility is present not only of a finer psychological reorganisation but also of what has been named "liberation"- therapy, which yields conceptions exceeding even the largest and boldest terms of Western psychiatry and seems analogous to the highest Vedantic realisation - the Universal Self and the Cosmic Consciousness - we cannot help seeing that a tremendous breakthrough is made available towards the ultimate of both the subjective and the objective worlds.

Here we must keep sharply before us a few important points. Not merely is the LSD-user in a state of "realistic" awareness, free from amnesia, capable of clearly recalling - though with a wise disinterestedness - past businesses and future concerns, convinced that he is as little under any delusion as when he knows the life from day to normal day. He can, in addition, be shown to be under no suggestive influence of upbringing or inclination. In a paper jointly written by Dr. T. Leary and W. Houston dark,² we find that when psylocybin, a drug allied to LSD but quantitatively 100 times weaker, was administered to more than 400 volunteers, "less than ten per cent... were orthodox believers or churchgoers, yet such terms as 'God', 'divine', 'deep religious experience', 'meeting the infinite', occurred in over half of [the] reports". The paper 3 even declares that "about One-half of the 'hardened cynics' who were given the drug behind the walls of Concord Prison experienced 'classic mystic conversion reactions'".

Scientific scepticism is thus fairly well countered. Scepticism from the religious side can also be parried. For, religious experience, like all experiences of the psycho-physical human system, may be presumed to have chemical or hormonal bodily changes as accompaniment, dark and Leary make the highly instructive statement:4 "we know that the natural

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chemistry of the body includes biochemical substances, known as the indoles, which are similar in structure to the consciousness-expanding chemical and seem to be connected with some of the same psychological states as those produced by psylocybin. The question then immediately arises whether a naturally-occurring excess of the indoles might not predispose some people to certain kinds of mystical experience or whether a mystical state of mind might not, on the other hand, stimulate chemical changes in the body." The truth would seem to be that in both ways religious experience is associated with the indoles during at least its "take- off" stage and thus the outcome of psychedelic drugs carries no special materialistic taint in comparison with the analogous result which may take place without them.

Hence the charge of hallucination, from whatever quarter it may hail, against the LSD-"liberation" should, in reason- able eyes, fall to the ground.

Nor are the amazing philosophical implications of LSD necessarily to be paid for by serious sacrifices in other respects. None of the psychedelics can run off the rails, so to speak, during an experiment. Their effects can be stopped immediately at any stage by means of an antidote at hand with the qualified attendant under whose care always the experiment is to be done. There need be no danger of any possible untoward reaction getting out of control.

LSD in particular is, clinically, a safe drug in the right microscopic quantities - for patients properly "vetted". As Huxley5 warned about mescaline, "those who have had a recent case of jaundice, or who suffer from periodical depressions or a chronic anxiety" must keep off it: it might literally let loose hell for them - at least for a time. Otherwise it is innocuous. And, according to Heard,6 "the optimum dosage - that which produces the most informative results - lies between 100 and 150 'gamma'; and 100 'gamma' is approximately one ten thousandth of a gram."

LSD is not habit-forming. Neither, as a rule, does it have unfavourable after-effects. Physiologically, it is less dangerous

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than aspirin. Even while its action is going on, there is n bodily disequilibrium: most often, except for a slight feeling of chilliness at the start and perhaps some dilatation of the pupils of the eyes some time later, the results are entirely psychological.

Further, Heard7 has noted: "Any sexual sensation, any erotic fantasy or preoccupation, is nearly always reported as absent. So, for all its liberating power, LSD remains noneuphoric: as the Greeks would say, it is 'eudaemonic' - 'a possession by the spirit of wholeness'." This characteristic brings it nearer to the traditional via mystica.

And the eudaemonism of LSD is, in certain ways, a long-term affair. Hallucinations, however brilliant, leave no lasting mark. But here the effect is such that the entire outlook on life may undergo a change. The great ideas of religious philosophy, which in themselves are life-influencing agents, spring to a potent sense of immediacy with the help of LSD. For, they turn, in their general implications, into direct knowledge and the individual begins to feel a contradiction between the infinite unity, to which his new knowledge testifies and the egoistic inharmonious nature of his ordinary actions. Slowly, old behaviour patterns tend to get removed and a beginning of moral regeneration to set in. LSD, there- fore, can lead not only to a new metaphysical outlook but also to a good deal of benefit in the field of social relations, political procedures and even international adjustments.

Again, as marked by both Huxley and Heard, psychedelics can be a spur to artistic creation. A study of the sense- impressions of the poet, the painter and the musician discloses striking parallelisms with the vision of object and scene, the perception of shape and sound, which the taker of LSD enjoys. An intensity of impression and a cross-light of significance such as plays in the process of artistic symbolism and, at the starting-point of experience, a greater sensitive- ness, a keener awareness, a more joyous responsiveness, a more spontaneous power to concentrate attention and integrate perception - all these developments may issue from the

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proper use of LSD on well-chosen and sufficiently spaced- out occasions. And they could serve the ends of scientific no less than artistic thought; for, the progress of science also depends initially on - in Heard's phrase⁸ - "the act of sudden insight, the brilliant hypothesis, the truly 'creative' leap".

All in all, there is much to be said in favour of LSD as an apercu to aspects of reality not compassed in common life. At its best, it is the most effective counteragent, apart from the mystical life itself, to the materialistic view of the cosmos. Modem science has departed from the strictly mechanistic model so dear to the old physics, but to pass from such a model to an abstract mathematical formula may be a good fillip to the speculative mind to seek affiliations on scientific grounds with non-materialism. But that is about all. The scientific attitude is still very positivist; and abstract mathematics, however four-dimensional or "indeterministic" in import, does not check that attitude enough; nor does it push the experiential level of man's consciousness above the surface of matter and its space-time limitations. Man, both as the quotidian perceiver and as the laboratory observer, cannot but be, in terms of experience, a materialist. The deeper reaches of the heart and mind, which artists glimpse and the adepts of mysticism and Yoga explore, are mostly outside his range. Whatever he may choose to think, his sensation and feeling are caught in a materialistic mesh. And there can be no genuine and permanent break-away from it except through a spiritual discipline. But such discipline is usually impossible to the common man - whether he be directly the homme moyen sensuel of Montaigne or the more systematic lover of the sense-world that is the scientific student. LSD would prove for him a shining window thrown open on "more things in heaven and earth" than positivist philosophy dreams of, and on a mysterious ever-living one- in-all whose concretely experienced influence must work a revolution in his outlook and inlook.

The benefits we can think of are indeed impressive. Still, the last word on this psychedelic - no matter with what

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scientific care it might be employed - cannot be a sweeping "Yes". The doubts and reservations of a higher court of judgment than any to which we have so far appealed have yet to be considered.

3

Now we may enter a number of important caveats.

Nothing that LSD may provide can be equated altogether with the revelations of the mystical life as practised in various modes down the ages. First, there is no permanent establishment of whatever supreme experience is accessible to LSD in the consciousness of its user. The experience is a wonderful visitation and no more. Doubtless, as we have stated, a certain behavioural sequel of its eudaemonism is there, yet the immediacy of the "liberation" itself is short-lived. Mysticism, in the true sense, means a constant presence of the Infinite, the Eternal, the Divine - an abiding realisation.

Again, LSD at its highest effectivity does not leave behind a persistent aspiration to live at all moments in the state of "unitive knowing". It can spread a general regenerative influence over one's common condition but does not render one a dedicated soul. Whatever the numerous redeeming features of improvement in conduct, it lets one go back to many of the ordinary hungers. For instance, no report tells us of a complete change in the individual's sexual stance. The sex-appetite, progressive freedom from which is part of all mystical endeavour, encounters no new force in the will to curb it, much less to outgrow it and convert its energy into a pure flame of amor dei. Neither do the reports give news of that patient general striving after a desireless though not passive equanimity, which distinguishes in India the seer, the sage, in the making. The highest effectivity of LSD is thus not a straight evolutive nisus. The via mystica aims at a wholesale transformation of one's being, a radical irradiation of all that one is and does.

Finally, what is analogous in the LSD-experience to

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"unitive knowing" is not actually the Vedantic Knowledge in however temporary a form. All practitioners of Yoga9 are aware that there are many "planes" of existence and on each plane there is a universal consciousness which is not the ultimate Ground - Atman, Brahman - or the total Cosmic Consciousness, but only an immensity of the principle basic or active on that plane - the Life Force or the Mind Force or any other Force intermediate between them and the earth. And what LSD is likely to do is to expand our consciousness for a while into any of the planes that are in constant commerce with the organic physical state - the Life-plane or the Mind-plane or the planes of the "subconscious" and "unconscious". It is, prima facie, impossible that a drug could direct our consciousness into occult dimensions with which we are not already in rapport either through our waking life of imagination and phantasy or through our dreams and nightmares. To penetrate truly mystical and spiritual dimensions our life has first to be oriented in their direction and set communicating with them. It is vain to hope that all on a sudden we can fly straight into the "transcendental" by chemical reactions in our brain cells.

Another point to remember is that, in its true connotation, the "transcendental" is even more than Cosmic Consciousness and the Ground of things. It is the Supra- cosmic, whose emanations are both the mutable universe and its immutable support of Self. And the Supracosmic is not only an Impersonal Absolute but also a Personal God, an Everlasting Being who is capable of intimate relationship with all the creatures forming part of His world-play - a Being whom these creatures can experience as Supreme Lord, Father, Mother, Lover, Friend, Guide - a Super- Person, in consecrated communion with whom man as an individual can feel the deepest and most dynamic fulfilment. The LSD- expansion of consciousness carries no trace, be it ever so remote, of this sovereign Divinity.

Nor is it the authentic "soul", the secret portion or spark within us of this Divinity, that is likely to be attained: we are

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not ordinarily in direct contact with our souls - our souls function through several media or instruments in us and what LSD makes us free of are the ranges of the instrumental mind and life and other subtle go-betweens, whose independent existence is mostly covered up by the mélange, if not melee, of them all in our surface being.

Huxley10 himself, for all his claims for drug-mysticism, has hit the truth of the matter in saying: "I am not so foolish as to equate what happens under the influence of mescaline, or any other drug prepared or in the future preparable, with the realization of the end and ultimate purpose of human life:

Enlightenment, the Beatific Vision. All I am suggesting is that the mescaline experience is what Catholic theologians call a 'gratuitous grace', not necessary to salvation but potentially helpful and to be accepted thankfully, if made available."

As "gratuitous grace", LSD may be expected to play its part more and more in the lives of men, but it will not be practising mystics who will usually care to go in for it. They know that the expansion and release it gives is only into the intermediate planes and that too much interest or absorption in these planes can be in the long run an obstacle to Enlightenment. Besides, they have, in the course of their inward career, experience enough of marvellous colours and designs and queer recesses and astonishing extensions of themselves in the Subtle dimensions. Neurotics will be drawn to the supposed "kick" of LSD, but they are the least fit for it, and most psychotherapists have understood that except as an adjunct to ordinary methods of treating "twisted thought" LSD should be kept out of their reach. It is rewarding pre-eminently for "normal" people. And, among these, the subjects who would be most worth treating with an eye to the future of humanity are the practical thinkers, the matter-of-fact seekers, the leaders of organised common sense. As a result of their personal flashes of supernormal knowledge they would co-ordinate with the information of ordinary science the parascientific semi-mystic weltanschauung

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which LSD has proved on their pulses. And, under its inspiration, they would benefit the race by working constructively towards what the intuition of Teilhard de Chardin has called Omega Point, man's evolutionary ascent to a collective participation of consciousness in the Universal Self pervading as well as containing all things - the "Cosmic Christ", in the terminology which Teilhard has built on his own religion. To put it with a nearer view and in less metaphysical language, they would bend their energies with passionate conviction as never before to bring about what the idealists of internationalism have dreamed of as "One World".

But a very crucial problem still remains to be faced. And it stems from the nature of the "planes" into which LSD provides an entry. Valuable indeed as revealers of realities beyond the mere physical and as indicative in their own manner of the single yet multiple World-Spirit, they are yet not themselves strictly spiritual levels, and through the opening made in the LSD-subject the powers and beings of these occult ranges can come into him and move him to their own ends. He may be, according to the standards of medicine and psychiatry, "normal", but for the purposes of contact with such occult ranges normality would consist not only of a certain inner strength in addition to balanced nerves and sound health but also of an inner refinement and purity as well as an inner poise and impersonality. Indian Yoga speaks always of adhikara, "fitness", in a special sense, for any venture into the unknown beyond the earth. If the fitness is not already there, it can be acquired by a slow process of self-discipline. Without it, one lies exposed to disrupting forces which would insidiously take hold of one and, even if several experiences are enlarging and elevating, the final upshot may be disastrous. The subject may become either helplessly insane or powerfully paranoid. In ancient times there was a wide-spread wisdom which made each man recognise his own place and the need of preparation in order to move up in the psychological series. Modem man

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believes in equality and liberty and the right to rebel and be his own master. Not only does he flout the idea of total submission to a spiritual Guru or Teacher; he also cannot remain always under even a psychiatrist. If he feels that LSD supplies him with wonderful experiences, he may take the future administration of it into his own hands and somehow or other, through the numerous channels possible in the market of today, get possession of it. And when he is unprepared in the spiritual sense the very forces and beings that belong to the occult planes would secretly urge him to assert his claims and deal with himself independently.

Of course, these planes have fine and uplifting agencies too at work. We see them in great art and heroic enterprise and devoted service and altruistic endeavour: many a movement of bright idealism starts from there. But seldom is the work done without lower admixture. And what is done is through the accomplished organisation of established Nature, and the framework of sanity is not broken. But with a push beyond this organisation into unchartered domains - and an untimely or unprepared push at that - it is the more dubious agencies of the occult who would come into play sooner or later, leading to a shipwreck of all the hopes built on the grand experiences had at the beginning.

Even in the course of mystical discipline, even with a Guru in charge, lack of caution and of discrimination may lay one bare to dangerous attacks. Sri Aurobindo has very vividly brought them home to his own disciples. Referring to those who do not guard themselves and are led away by the intermediate planes, he" writes:

"Overwhelmed by the first rush and sense of power of a supernormal condition, they get dazzled with a little light which seems to them a tremendous illumination or a touch of force which they mistake for the full Divine Force or at least a very great Yoga Shakti; or they accept some intermediate Power (not always a Power of the Divine) as the Supreme and an intermediate consciousness as the supreme realisation

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Very readily they come to think that they are in the full cosmic consciousness when it is only some front or small part of it or some larger Mind, Life-Power or subtle physical ranges with which they have entered into dynamic connection. There are worse dangers in this intermediate zone of experience. For the planes to which the sadhak12 has now opened his consciousness, - not as before getting glimpses of them and some influences, but directly, receiving their full impact, - send a host of ideas, impulses, suggestions, formations of all kinds, often the most opposite to each other, inconsistent or incompatible, but presented in such a way as to slur over their insufficiencies and differences, with great force, plausibility and wealth of argument or a convincing sense of certitude. Overpowered by this sense of certitude, vividness, appearance of profusion and richness, the mind of the sadhak enters into a great confusion which it takes for some larger organisation and order; or else it whirls about in incessant shiftings and changes which it takes for a rapid progress but which lead nowhere. Or there is the opposite danger that he may become the instrument of some apparently brilliant but ignorant formation; for these inter- mediate planes are full of little Gods or strong Daityas or smaller beings who want to create, to materialise something or to enforce a mental and vital formation in the earth-life and are eager to use or influence or even possess the thought and will of the sadhak and make him their instrument for the purpose. This is quite apart from the well-known danger of actually hostile beings whose sole purpose is to create confusion, falsehood, corruption of the sadhana and disastrous spiritual error. Anyone allowing himself to be taken hold of by one of these beings, who often take a divine Name, will lose his way in the yoga. On the other hand, it is quite possible that the sadhak may be met at his entrance into this zone by a Power of the Divine which helps and leads him till he is ready for greater things; but still that itself is no surety against the errors and stumblings of this zone; for nothing is easier than for the powers of these zones or hostile powers to

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imitate the guiding Voice or Image and deceive and mislead the sadhak or for himself to attribute the creations and formations of his own mind, vital or ego to the Divine...

"The sadhak thinks that he is no longer in the old small consciousness at all, because he feels in contact with something larger and more powerful, and yet the old consciousness is still there, not really abolished. He feels the control or influence of some Power, Being or Force greater than himself, aspires to be its instrument and thinks he has got rid of ego; but this delusion of egolessness often covers an exaggerated ego..."

A drug like LSD is thus at the same time a promise of light and a potentiality of darkness. As the former, it is the mightiest member of the group of artificial aids that have been pressed into the service of religion and spirituality from ancient times for the sake of the common "normal" man in particular. In all the old Mysteries and initiation rites there seems to have been some sort of intoxication by whose help the individual caught a glimpse of supraphysical realities and became convinced that the visible and tangible of earth's time and space were not all. Even in the days of the Rigveda there was the sacred wine of delight and immortality: Soma. Soma, to the spiritual seer, is the Godhead of transcendental and world-creative Bliss, whose being flows into him as a result of Yoga and suffuses his consciousness with the direct sense of Eternal Life and Infinite Beatitude. But as a material analogue to this God-intoxication there appears to have been for ceremonial use the juice of some rare herb gathered on Himalayan heights. Sir Aurel Stein has suggested that Soma (Persian Haoma) was extracted from the plant Ephaedra pechyclada (intermedia) growing in the Western Himalayas and Western Tibet and known in the present Trans-Indus vernacular as Hum. When mixed with sugar, the juice of this plant does inebriate, but Stein's identification is very far from certain. We know with greater confidence some of the drugs employed in religious sects of a less ancient period. The most

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familiar derives from the hemp plant, Cannabis sativa. And Mexican Indians even today resort to the cactus Peyotl, source of Mescaline, in their religious rites.

But all truly fruitful "liberation"-therapy connected with religion has had a spiritual supervisor who was himself in masterful touch with the planes beyond and could keep guard over the man chosen by him for a mind-changing experience. The man too approached the experience with the proper attitude: he got ready for it by purifying his life, practising the mood of prayer, submitting his mind to the Guru. And the drug was the Guru's monopoly: he prepared it and, except from him, it could not pass to anyone.

If LSD, as a means to spiritual insight, could be operated under these three conditions, it would be safe not only in the mere scientific or clinical sense but also in a profound psychological one. In the absence of these conditions it should be restricted very rigorously, handled with the utmost care by the psychiatrist in his limited field of complexes and fixations, and dispensed in the most select cases alone - and perhaps no more than once to each of such psychologically "screened" subjects - for breaking through the protective barrier of the familiar self with indefinite expansion.

This expansion may be allowed more freely if by any chance a real adept of Yoga - at once mystic and occultist and living in the true Cosmic Consciousness - can vouch that when the subject breaks out of the familiar self he somehow experiences something essentially or predominantly spiritual rather than the ambiguous lights and largenesses of the supraphysical "mid-worlds".

Only after such an assurance - and even so with not a little discrimination - the qualified psychiatrist may step forth in the open to work creatively with LSD for the mind of the future.

Till then, LSD is fit to be dispensed on an extensive scale for its few hours of "liberation" by none except a Master of Yoga.

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But it is to be hoped that the Master will be found. For this far-reaching psychedelic appears indeed to deserve him.

11.3.1964

REFERENCES

1. The account that follows has been collated mainly from three sources :

(a) "Can This Drug Enlarge Man's Mind?" by Gerald Heard, Horizon (New York), May 1963, pp. 30-31.

(b) "The Chemical Mind-Changers" by Robert Coughlan, Life (New York) Vol. 32, No. 7, April 22, 1963, pp. 70-71.

(c) "The Issue of the Consciousness-Expanding Drugs" by Willis W. Harman, Main Currents in Modem Thought, Sept.-Oct., 1963 Vol 20 No 1 pp. 7, 10-11. ' ' '

2. Quoted in "The Hallucinogenic Drug Cult" by Noah Gordon, The Reporter (New York), Aug. 15, 1963, p. 38.

3. Ibid., p. 39.

4. Ibid., p. 38.

5. The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell (Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, 1961), p. 45.

6. Heard, op. cit.

7. Ibid.

8. Ibid., p. 114.

9. Yoga, in its true sense, does not mean merely the science and art of extraordinary body-postures and of an altered breath-rhythm to activate certain psycho-physical powers. It can do without these things altogether and is essentially a methodised movement of the inner life, a concentrated progression of the consciousness towards the Highest Reality.

10. Huxley, op. cit., pp. 59-60.

11. On Yoga (Letters), Vol. II, Tome Two, (Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry, 1958) pp. 1003-1006.

12. Follower of a spiritual discipline and process (sadhana).

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4. Ancient India in a New Light

5. The Beginning of History for Israel

6. Is Velikovsk's Revised Chronology Tenable? A Scrutiny of Four Fundamental Themes

7. Life-Literature-Yoga: Correspondence with Sri Aurobindo

8. Life-Poetry-Yoga, Personal Letters, Vol. I

9. Life-Poetry-Yoga, Personal Letters, Vol. II

10. Life-Poetry-Yoga, Personal Letters, Vol. Ill

11. "Two Loves" and "A Worthier Pen" — The Enigmas of Shakespeare's Sonnets

12. The English Language and the Indian Spirit: Correspondence between Kathleen Raine and K.D. Sethna

13. Indian Poets and English Poetry: Correspondence between Kathleen Raine and K.D. Sethna

14. The Obscure and the Mysterious: A Research in Mallarme's Symbolist Poetry

15. Blake's Tyger: A Christological Interpretation

16. The Inspiration of Paradise Lost

17. Inspiration and Effort: Studies in Literary Attitude and Expression

18. "A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal" — An Interpretation from India

19. The Thinking Comer: Causeries on Life and Literature

20. Adventures in Criticism

21. Classical and Romantic —An Approach through Sri Aurobindo

22. Mandukya Upanishad: English Version, Notes and Commentary

23. The Spirituality of the Future: A Search apropos of R.C.

Page 357

Zaehner's Study in Sri Aurobindo and Teilhard de Chardin

24. Teilhard De Chardin and our Time

25. The Poetic Genius of Sri Aurobindo

26. Sri Aurobindo - The Poet

27. The Vision and Work of Sri Aurobindo

28. Aspects of Sri Aurobindo

29. Sri Aurobindo and Greece

30. Sri Aurobindo on Shakespeare

31. The Passing of Sri Aurobindo: Its Inner Significance and Consequence

32. The Development of Sri Aurobindo's Spiritual System and the Mother's Contribution to it

33. The Secret Splendour: Collected Poems

34.' "Overhead Poetry": Poems with Sri Aurobindo's Comments

35. The Adventure of the Apocalypse (Poems)

36. Altar and Flame (Poems)

37. Poems by Amal Kiran and Nirodbaran with Sri Aurobindo's Comments

38. Talks on Poetry

39. The Sun and the Rainbow — Approaches to Life through Sri Aurobindo's Light

40. Our Light and Delight — Recollections of Life with the Mother

41. The Mother: Past-Present-Future

42. Light and Laughter: Some Talks at Pondicherry by Amal Kiran and Nirodbaran

43. A Follower of Christ & a Disciple of Sri Aurobindo:

Correspondence between Bede Griffiths and K.D. Sethna (Amal Kiran)

44. Problems of Early Christianity

45. The Virgin Birth and the Earliest Christian Tradition

46. Science, Materialism, Mysticism

47. The Indian Spirit and the World's Future

48. India and the World Scene

49. Evolving India: Essays on Cultural Issues

Page 358