Last spring, I celebrated the twenty-fifth anniversary of the greatest turning point in my life. In April 1970, at the age of twenty-three, I found myself climbing the western slope of the Mount of Olives, facing Jerusalem and the Dome of the Rock. By midafternoon I had returned to the foot of the mountain and entered the Garden of Gethsemane, a lush patch of green adjoining a Russian Orthodox church and filled with roses and olive trees. The ancient trees inspired within me a deep sense of awe surpassing any I’d ever felt, though comparable to my childhood response to the blowing of the shofar that signaled the close of Yom Kippur each year.
As I walked through the garden, the certainty that God was about to speak to me grew to the point where I could no longer stand up. I paused in front of an opulently flowering rosebush, then dropped to my knees and proceeded to lose consciousness (though the expression hardly seems accurate). Inwardly, I perceived a multitude of fiery Hebrew letters streaming toward me from every corner and direction of infinite space. The letters were quf, dalet, and shin, spelling out qodesh, Hebrew for “holiness” or “the sacred.” Simultaneously there dawned within me a feeling of prodigious joy, a realization that the entire cosmos springs from a single, nonphysical Source with twin attributes that are nonetheless one: Love and Intelligence.
Before going into just how this realization shattered my prior conceptual framework and shaped my subsequent conduct, I feel obliged to admit what many of my contemporaries may have already surmised: the trigger for this beatific vision was a standard dose of mescaline.
Of all the crimes that have been laid at the door of the late Cultural Revolution (commonly known as “the sixties”) by the unrelenting forces of repression and reaction (commonly known as “the Right”), few have been as successfully stigmatizing as the use of consciousness-altering substances (commonly known as “drugs”). Ever since Ronald Reagan was compelled to withdraw the nomination of Douglas Ginsburg to the Supreme Court after the nominee was discovered to have smoked some pot (despite public indifference to the revelation), baby boomers have been confined to an official posture of “not inhaling” if they wish to be accorded any legitimacy in public discourse — and not only among office-seekers.
The threat of career oblivion seals the lips of those popular entertainers to whose freewheeling mental audacity adheres an unmistakable whiff of contraband. Not even in the electronic Babel of confessional talk shows, havens for the proudly aberrant, can a word be said in celebration of getting high. Attaching disgrace to drug use is the hidden keystone of the campaign to smear the entire range of liberating idealism that a quarter-century ago gave hope, heart, and character to a generation.
Lest I be accused of the same oversimplification that mars so much of the so-called debate on drugs, let me clarify a couple of points: First, when I use the term “drugs” here, I will be referring exclusively to those that were the common currency of the counterculture, drugs perceived as having a liberating, mind-expanding, even sacramental (and, some would say, subversive) character: marijuana (or hashish) and the psychedelics (LSD, psilocybin, mescaline, and peyote foremost among them). Crack, heroin, amphetamines, barbiturates, and even cocaine played insignificant roles in the drug culture as I knew it, a culture in which drugs were merely stepping stones, albeit mighty ones, to a radically altered view of human potential and the meaning of life. To those who protest that this is a dodge to exempt from censure those drugs of which I personally approve, I submit the widespread cultural acceptance — despite their documented hazards — of alcohol and tobacco. Equating hash brownies with crack is like classing Jane Austen with Jackie Collins.
Second, it is not drug policy per se that I wish to address, but rather drug-discussion policy. The current taboo on any public evaluation of drug-use experience (other than shamefaced and remorse-laden accounts) has political and social repercussions far beyond the question of legalization. It is a taboo that, individually and generationally, reinforces hypocrisy, denial, guilt, inhibition, and repression. Like any ban on the utterance of truth, it warps public morality and cripples the soul.
When I returned to “normal” awareness that day in Jerusalem, my first thought was that an experience of such magnitude could hardly have come from inside a small pink pill. Like the biblical Jacob waking from his dream of the angels, I said, “Truly the Lord was in this place, and I knew it not.” What I (and possibly Jacob) meant by “this place” was not just the miraculous site, but my body/mind itself, and indeed (as I now perceived it) the extension of my body/mind that unfolded as the panorama before me, united and sanctified by the indwelling presence of Love. The songs of birds, the sky and sunlight, the monks and tour buses, the schoolchildren at play, the Hasidic father chastising his small son, the very stones and hills of Jerusalem — all seemed joined to me with bonds of holy sympathy. Grievances and anxieties I had carried for a lifetime became inconsequential when viewed beside the splendor of life and my inherent place in its unfolding. For days after the mescaline wore off, the concept of the Other ceased to beguile me. I knew my task from here on out was to keep it that way.
This awakening strikes me as anything but unique. Within a month, I was back in America, where I encountered two phenomena that identified my generation for me: the release of the film documentary Woodstock and the publication in the New Yorker of Charles Reich’s The Greening of America. Eros and Logos were shaking hands; Dionysus and Apollo were getting stoned together, while the clueless Nixon White House served up Cambodia and Kent State. Something unforeseen was coming to birth: an infusion of spiritual values into political discourse. To some of our fellow Americans it seemed a very vexing arrival indeed.
For one thing, it raised the question of whether God wants us to be happy, or just well-behaved. Good behavior offends no one, but happiness can repel as well as attract. Good behavior can be taught; happiness must be discovered. The issue may seem abstract, but consider where the answers ultimately lead: to patriarchal conformity and social control, on the one hand; or to Paul Goodman-esque utopian anarchy, on the other. To William Bennett, or Woodstock. Shall our children pray to an authoritarian Sky Daddy who will keep them in line, or to an inner Source of Wisdom who will help their souls to flower? Shall we view life as an accountant’s ledger divided between rewards and punishments, or as a gift that flows out of a Mystery? Or perhaps both? America’s root paradox — of having been founded by a swarm of Puritan control freaks in the name of religious freedom — burst wide open to the sweet scent of reefer and the jingle of temple bells.
One of the anonymous hippies speaking on camera in Woodstock put the issue with pungent clarity: “What’s so great about taking all the earth’s resources and turning them into dollar bills?” The idea that human ingenuity could be harnessed to a more worthy goal than an infinitely expanding gross national product has rarely been stated better. While the Vietnam War may have convinced those who opposed it of the immorality of corporate-American imperialism, it was the emerging drug culture that helped frame an alternative to the system.
Reich’s The Greening of America was, in its time, possibly the clearest exposition of that alternative (along with the Whole Earth Catalog). Reich analyzed American culture from a perspective rooted in the thought of psychologist and social critic Herbert Marcuse, himself a hero of sixties radicals. Both men saw in capitalist consumerism a jittery wilderness of commercially generated false needs reinforcing (and, in turn, reinforced by) a false consciousness, despoiling the environment in return for more stress than happiness.
Reich assigned to pot and acid a function enthusiasts had already discovered: that of exposing the hollowness of the consumerist game. In this view, stoned thinking was like the little boy noticing that the emperor’s new clothes are merely a birthday suit. Significantly, head shops from coast to coast offered reproductions of the now classic print of an alchemist breaking through the confines of his worldview and throwing back his arms in wonder at the sight of a new, unimagined sphere beyond.
Perhaps the most important aspect of this breakthrough in consciousness was that it could be shared. Returning from Jerusalem, I found a new culture forming, composed of countless young men and women who’d had similar experiences, or wanted to. They might not all have read Marcuse, or Alan Watts, or William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience (at that point, neither had I), but they knew instinctively that distinguishing true from bogus at the cosmic level called for more than mere blind acceptance of the puritan paradigms of right and wrong that had tumbled America into the Vietnam War. At the same time, such truth-questing could not be purely solitary; it demanded a degree of reality-checking unattainable without the engagement of one’s peers. “I get high with a little help from my friends” says it best.
From the moment marijuana and psychedelics entered the bodies and minds of the baby-boom generation, no one who resisted the experience had a decent word to say about it. Such grudging legitimacy as was eventually conferred on nineteenth-century New England transcendentalism’s absorption of Buddhist and Hindu thought has never been accorded to the same set of insights derived in the twentieth century from chemical stimuli. Yet the generation that drugs inspired launched a shared vision no less compelling than the one Emerson’s circle found in the Bhagavad-Gita — and one of considerably wider scope.
Underground papers, alternative bookstores, and radically new forms of spirituality spread from coast to coast, and beyond. Despite unwavering governmental, societal, and parental disapproval, the consciousness scouts of the sixties found and supported each other, confirmed one another’s resolve, and laid the foundations for a transformed global culture. The movement ultimately may have ebbed under the combined onslaught of co-optation, hostile conservatism, and entropy, but its offshoots, generally characterized as “new age,” continue to prosper, arouse controversy, and provoke the derision of puritan and cynic alike.
Of course, unlike transcendentalism, transformational drug mysticism wasn’t primarily an intellectual movement, and in this lay both its power and its weakness. The subtlety, unpredictability, and fluidity of the drug experience opened the minds of initiates to a flowing, intuitive level of awareness not dependent on conventional education, an awareness that was universal but hard to communicate in words, and thus highly vulnerable to verbal attack. Control freaks of both the Left and Right dismissed as incoherent what was merely inarticulate.
The redemptive potential of drugs well used was nearly impossible to explain to someone who hadn’t personally experienced it: you had to be there. As the lights dimmed prior to a screening of 2001: A Space Odyssey, the front two rows of the audience would begin to chant, “Have a good trip, have a good trip.” What was being invoked wasn’t merely the Cinerama light-show finale, but the metaphor of the “star child” itself: a wiser, more humane species emerging from the womb of mechanistic, reductive technoscience. Our highest visionaries — starting at least with William Blake, and on through the Romantic Movement — have seen the need for just such an evolution since the dawn of the Industrial Era. Sixties drug culture translated their vision into the common currency of rock music and poster art, and the unappreciative reductionists responded by making messianic a put-down.
The continuing refusal of government and media to heed the urgent message of the drug culture drove it increasingly underground and eventually corrupted it, as well. Not only did a rapacious black market drive the nickel bag off the streets and replace it with crack, but the entire context of drug use shifted from good vibes, exploration, and social engagement in the sixties to violence, crime, and anomie in the nineties.
To some extent, this shift reflects the limitations of drugs themselves. As Alan Watts put it, “When you get the message, you can hang up the phone.” Wall Street brokers and lawyers who fail to challenge the destructive practices of their work environment except by lighting up a joint when they leave it are clutching a phone with no one at the other end. Parents who dare not tell their children that there is a right time when drugs can be useful may end up facing the painful consequences of kids’ using them at the wrong time. Drugs are the dreams of a materialist culture, and, as any therapist will agree, dreams whose message is repeatedly disregarded can become insistent nightmares.
No self-fulfilling prophecy is more nightmarish than that of the Partnership for a Drug-Free America. If its faceless corporate leadership truly wished to eradicate social decay, there were a hundred better ways to spend the money. How many after-school programs for latchkey kids could be funded, how many teachers and counselors hired, how many entry-level computers purchased for the price of one “This is your brain on drugs” commercial? Do drugs really do as much harm as the soul-killing social milieu from which they offer temporary, if illusory, escape? Perhaps the Partnership has another target, as well: the very notion of expanded awareness, and the subversive questioning of the status quo that drugs tacitly symbolize for all who lived through the upheavals and revelations of that radical age gone by.
In his 1995 commencement address at Harvard, Václav Havel, speaking about the hazards of technoglobal civilization, observed that, “in our era, it would seem that one part of the human brain, the rational part which has made all these morally neutral discoveries, has undergone exceptional development, while the other part, which should be alert to ensure that these discoveries really serve humanity and will not destroy it, has lagged behind catastrophically.”
What is this “other part”? How does it ascertain whether humanity is really being served, and why has it lagged behind?
Another look at my Mount of Olives experience may point to some answers. The perception that there is no Other — that humanity, like the God of Judaism, is one — obviously comes from a part of the mind different from that which negotiates contracts and calculates budgets. Contracts and budgets may be “morally neutral discoveries” in themselves, but when they assume hegemony over every aspect of human endeavor, something vital gets lost. The woman who sits in her booth selling subway tokens ceases to be seen, or to see herself, as an individual soul made in God’s image, and becomes instead an “economic unit.” So, for that matter, does the executive who earns millions purveying a nutritionally worthless soft drink.
The rational mind sees no problem here, just as it saw no problem in destroying Indochinese villages in order to “save them.” If, as Marx said, logic is the money of the mind, then you can use it to buy anything. People who are reduced to economic units are more susceptible to efficient management, at least in the abstract (the rational mind’s favorite realm). That such an arrangement tends to produce, in Marcuse’s phrase, a “one-dimensional man” is of little consequence to the rationalist. Late-industrial consumerism can churn out plenty of goodies (including a banal psychiatric industry) to distract one-dimensionals from the still, small voice that suggests there might be something wrong.
What is wrong is the failure of communality, a failure that allows the soft-drink CEO his immoderate profits from irresponsible behavior, while begrudging the subway worker even a dollop of civility. More than at any other time since Lincoln, we live in a house divided, and the division extends into so many facets of culture that the reductive political bromides of Right and Left only obscure the problem. An economy that divides people into producers who want to sell high and consumers who want to buy low may have been effective a century ago, when the line between consumer regions and producer regions (or nations) was comparatively clear. In today’s global economy, however, the distinction has lost its meaning. Does the laid-off Alabama textile worker rejoice because the slave wage paid to her Korean rival lowers the price of jeans? Not when her unemployment benefits run out. And what ultimate fate awaits investors in companies whose low Pacific Rim overheads spell rising profits, on the one hand, and falling wages, on the other? Surely an economy that pays its workers peanuts is oiling its own gears with peanut butter.
But this is not primarily an economic issue. Although a pension-fund economy that makes workers stockholders in the very companies that are depriving them of work may imply schizophrenia beyond even Kafka’s dreams, it is the schizophrenia that shapes the economy, not vice versa. We must therefore seek solutions not in economic theory but in new modes of awareness, shared redefinings of the human enterprise that embrace and include rather than polarize and separate.
The intelligence that draws distinctions has, as Havel points out, created both technological marvels and social ills without number. But what of associative intelligence, which William James called the source of all genius? What of the intelligence that sees connections, the intelligence of love?
The drug culture awakened this kind of connective consciousness in any number of ways, of which the rock festival, happening, and spontaneous eruption of community known as Woodstock became the immediate symbol. The failure of Woodstock ’94, the original’s mercantile offspring, to achieve anything comparable only demonstrates that it was not just the effects of music and drugs that mattered, but the context in which they were encountered. A circle of friends, or strangers, passing a joint around got high on more than the smoke: there was ritual involved in the shared defiance of law and convention; trust and solidarity in affirming the value of a forbidden alteration of consciousness; welcome into an officially despised class of pariahs for whom inhibition could magically dissolve into hilarity; and, above all, there was the act of sharing, giving away the illicit substance itself in rogue communion.
When cartoonist Gilbert Shelton had one of his Furry Freak Brothers declare that “dope will get you through times without money better than money will get you through times without dope,” he was stating a principle that went to the very heart of the assault on materialism for which drugs, in their highest application, stood. “Dope” in this sense represented free-circulating, spontaneous Dionysian energy, and “money” represented just the reverse: hoarding, quantifying, hierarchical disconnection. In times without money, there is always community to fall back on, as “poor” cultures repeatedly demonstrate; but in times without community, the comforts of property are few and cold, as “rich” cultures show with equal regularity.
Had it not fostered an awakening of community, the drug culture would have been nothing more than the exercise in hedonism its detractors have always branded it. But they failed to see its wider implications, or else felt actively threatened by them. The subsequent burgeoning of environmental reverence, of nonsectarian and body-affirming spirituality, of holistic therapies and egalitarian liberationist politics might plausibly have occurred if millions of people had suddenly gotten turned on to Walt Whitman, but instead we have the psychedelic movement to thank, or to blame.
If drugs had led their enthusiasts straight into the arms of fundamentalist religion and reactionary politics (as, in scattered instances, they did), chances are the outcry against them would be considerably muted. But in the main their effect was just the opposite, fostering reappraisal and radicalism by uncorking regions of the mind long suppressed by the dominant culture of materialism. When the establishment of a professorship in economics was first proposed at Oxford after the Napoleonic Wars, the revered provost of Oriel College, Edward Copleston, expressed grave doubts about admitting into the curriculum a study “so prone to usurp the rest.” A century and a half later, that usurpation had prevailed so thoroughly in the industrialized world that it might have continued unnoticed but for a social revolution fueled, on the one hand, by revulsion toward an unjust war and, on the other, by drugs. The “doors of perception,” as Aldous Huxley titled the book recounting his mescaline experiences, were flung open, and life in the West has never been the same since.
Of course, there are regressive forces in our society who would like nothing better than to shut those doors and pretend they never opened, and these people have succeeded to the point of completely setting the terms of debate about drugs. Even though use of marijuana and LSD is again on the rise, no one is asking so simple and preliminary a question as “If drugs are so awful, then why are they popular?” There are no ad campaigns on their behalf comparable to those promoting alcohol and tobacco. On the contrary, drugs are fervently damned from every electronic pulpit.
But what are young people looking for when they get stoned? What is anyone? Must not our culture, sooner or later, make a place for the alchemist, at least as metaphor? These questions have to be faced honestly, because our present drug policy — if thoughtless repression can be called a policy — is clearly not working. If we pretend that drugs are irredeemably evil, our children will know we are lying. Or, if successfully brainwashed, they will resent the drug-flecked past of their lawless parents, or force the parents to conceal it. None of these scenarios seem conducive to the kind of respect for truthfulness we would like to instill in our children.
Certainly drugs have a potential for danger, and can be misused. The same can be said of automobiles, television, and voyages of discovery. Drugs can provoke addictive tendencies, but so, too, can the values and methods of the marketplace. Who would dispute that the number-one abused substance in America today is money?
I freely confess that, although I started smoking pot at twenty, I cannot imagine how I’d have made it through high school under its influence: as soon expect a preadolescent to understand Jung or Yeats. To everything there is a season, including innocence and initiation. Viewing drug consumption as a stage of adult education from which, as from college, one graduates and moves on seems to me a useful model, but it implies that there is something to be learned from drugs, and who will admit that in the Christian Coalition’s nineties? What is it about drugs that, like sex, so fiercely vexes the puritan mind? Why is it a given in our culture that religious ecstasies, creative visions, or instances of simple elation are more discredited if drug-induced than if attributed to the influence of music, poetry, nature, a page of Scripture, or a pretty face?
Would the Psalmist who saw “the mountains skip like rams, the hills like young lambs” be kicked out of the biblical canon if he turned out to have been tripping? Would the visions of Isaiah and Ezekiel — images of singing trees and clouds filled with cherubim — lose their validity if sacred mushrooms had brought them on? Or would they retain their power as symbols of the ravishingly beautiful spiritual energy latent within physical form, beckoning ceaselessly to the captive human mind, teasing it out of the solemn prisons of fear and calculation, and guiding it into a new, no longer unimagined sphere of harmony, community, and love?
“Out of the Psychedelic Closet” is reprinted with permission from Tikkun Magazine: A Bimonthly Jewish Critique of Politics, Culture, and Society. Subscriptions $31 per year. Write to Tikkun, 251 West 100th Street, New York, NY 10025.
— Ed.
