Word: lsd
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...directly rather than as a tenuously grasped abstraction. Few succeed, and the visions of the world's rare mystics have normally come only after hard spiritual work-prayer, meditation, ascetic practice. Now a number of psychologists and theologians are exploring such hallucinogenic drugs as mescaline, psilocybin and LSD-25 as an easy way to instant mysticism...
...Indians. Novelist Aldous Huxley wrote, in The Doors of Perception, that mescaline produced in him an effect that seemed like seeing the beatific vision. Psychologist Timothy Leary, who was dropped from the Harvard faculty last spring after receiving strong criticism for his freewheeling research in the use of LSD and psilocybin, gave the drugs to 69 "fulltime religious professionals," found that three out of four had "intense mystico-religious reactions, and more than half claimed that they had the deepest spiritual experience of their life...
...religious; but there are less convincing cases in which drug takers appear to have read religion into their visions or rigged the setting to induce a spiritual experience. One professor at a Protestant divinity school recalls that he was handed a rose to contemplate after taking his dose of LSD. "As I looked at the rose it began to glow," he said, "and suddenly I felt that I understood the rose. A few days later when I reread the Biblical account of Moses and the burning bush it suddenly made sense...
...experience with drugs was a special service in the basement chapel beneath Boston University's nondenominational Marsh Chapel on Good Friday last year. Organ music was piped into the dimly lit chapel for a group of 20 subjects, most of them divinity students, half of whom were given LSD while the rest took placebos. A minister gave a brief sermon, and the students were left alone to meditate. During the next three hours, all except one of the LSD takers (but only one of those who took placebos) reported "a genuine religious experience...
...Around Christ. Most churchmen are duly skeptical about equating an afternoon on LSD with the intuitions of a St. John of the Cross or a Martin Luther. R. C. Zaehner of Oxford, a Roman Catholic and an expert on Eastern religions, holds that the drug-induced visions are simply one of many kinds of preternatural experience, and are qualitatively different from the ecstasies granted mystics. Presbyterian Theodore Gill, president of San Francisco Theological Seminary, wonders whether the drug experience might be a rival rather than a supplement to what conventional religion offers. Says he: "The drugs make...