Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-x5gtn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-05-30T22:52:50.363Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Mysticism and Drugs

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2008

J. Kellenberger
Affiliation:
Professor of Philosophy, California State University, Northridge

Extract

In recent years the issue of whether mysticism can be induced by drugs has been pursued by both scholars of mystical literature and psychological researchers. R. C. Zaehner is perhaps the best known among the scholars of religious literature who have addressed the issues of drug-induced mysticism. While on the side of empirical psychology investigators such as Walter N. Pahnke, R. E. L. Masters, and Jean Houston have pursued some of the same issues using the techniques of laboratory experimentation. Zaehner, who was familiar with both Eastern and Western mysticism, argued that drug-induced experiences are not the same as religious mystical experiences of the theistic variety. It was farcical, he argued, for Aldous Huxley to posit a connection between his preternatural feeling of oneness with his chair and the Beatific Vision. The issue between Zaehner and Huxley was not over the veridicality of Huxley's mystical experience. It was over the significance of Huxley's experience: Was it or was it not a drug-induced mystical experience of the sort attained by mystics after heroic struggles of self-discipline? This was the issue again when Zaehner came to address himself to the claims of Timothy Leary, a chief proponent of ‘the LSD experience’, and, in general terms, this has been the central issue pursued by the psychological researchers.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1978

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

page 175 note l Zaehner, R. C., Mysticism Sacred and Profane (New York: Oxford University Press, 1961), pp. xiii, 29 and passim.Google ScholarSee Huxley, Aldous, The Doors of Perception (New York: Harper & Row, 1954), pp. 22, 42 and 73.Google Scholar

page 175 note 2 The numinous experience is discussed by Otto in his The Idea of the Holy, trans. Harvey, John W. (second edition; New York: Oxford University Press, 1950). Otto and some who follow him, for instance W. T. Stace, see a closer relationship between the numinous experience and mysticism than do others.Google Scholar

page 175 note 3 Zaehner, R. C., Drugs, Mysticism and Make-Believe (London: Collins, 1972), p. 103Google Scholar; and Masters, R. E. L. and Houston, Jean, The Varieties of Psychedelic Experience (New York: Dell Publishing Co., 1966), P. 259.Google Scholar

page 176 note 1 Quoted by Huston Smith, ‘Do Drugs Have Religious Import?Journal of Philosophy, LXI (1964), 523–4.Google Scholar

page 176 note 2 Zaehner, , Mysticism Sacred and Profane, pp. 28–9 and 198–9.Google Scholar

page 176 note 3 Zaehner, , Drugs, Mysticism and Make-Believe, pp. 93, 107 and 109.Google Scholar

page 176 note 4 Zaehner, , Mysticism Sacred and Profane, p. 19.Google Scholar

page 177 note 1 Life, chap. XXVII; The Complete Works of St Teresa of Jesus, trans. and ed. Peers, E. Allison (London: Sheed and Ward, 1972), I, 170.Google Scholar For both St Teresa and St John of the Cross, visions and locutions (the auditory analogues of visions) could be ‘corporeal’, ‘imaginary’ or ‘intellectual’. With intellectual visions nothing is seen by the eye, nor is there an ‘impression’ on the imagination (which the Scholastics thought to be an intermediate faculty between the senses and the intellect). Rather an impression is communicated directly to the intellect. Teresa does not say that she saw Christ, but that she was ‘conscious of Him’.

page 177 note 2 Interior Castle, VI, xi; Peers, , The Complete Works of St Teresa, II, 327.Google Scholar

page 177 note 3 James, William, The Varieties of Religious Experience (New York: The Modern Library, 1902), p. 372.Google Scholar

page 177 note 4 Zaehner, , Mysticism Sacred and Profane, pp. 198–9.Google Scholar

page 177 note 5 Stace, W. T. (ed.), The Teachings of the Mystics (New York: Mentor Books, The New American Library of World Literature, 1960), p. 11.Google Scholar Cf. Stace, W. T., Mysticism and Philosophy (London: Macmillan, 1960), pp. 4751.Google Scholar

page 177 note 6 Life, chap. XXVIII; Peers, , The Complete Works of St Teresa, I, 183.Google Scholar

page 178 note 1 Interior Castle, vi, ix; Peers, , The Complete Works of St Teresa, II, 319.Google Scholar

page 178 note 2 John, St of the Cross, Dark Night of the Soul, trans. and ed. Peers, E. Allison (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday Image Books, 1959), p. 161.Google Scholar It is worth noting that the Beatific Vision, which Zaehner describes as ‘a direct apperception of God, not through a glass, darkly, but face to face, with all the veils of sense stripped aside’ (Mysticism Sacred and Profane, p. 21), is more an intellectual vision than an imaginary vision and thus, strictly, not a literal vision at all.Google Scholar

page 178 note 3 Yasutani-roshi's ‘Introductory Lectures on Zen Training’ in Philip Kapleau (ed.), The Three Pillars of Zen (New York: Harper & Row, 1967), p. 47.Google Scholar

page 178 note 4 Life, chap. XXXXII; Peers, , The Complete Works of St Teresa, I, 215 and 216.Google Scholar

page 178 note 5 Life, chap. XXVIII; Peers, , The Complete Works of St Teresa, 1, 182 and 183.Google Scholar

page 179 note 1 St John of the Cross, Dark Night of the Soul, pp. 76 and 79.Google Scholar

page 179 note 2 St John of the Cross, Dark Night of the Soul, pp. 159–60.Google Scholar

page 179 note 3 St John of the Cross, Dark Night of the Soul, pp. 162–3.Google Scholar

page 179 note 4 John of Ruysbrceck, The Book of Supreme Truth, chap. x.

page 179 note 5 Bonaventura, St, The Mind's Road to God, trans. Boas, George (New York: The Library of Liberal Arts, Bobbs-Merrill, 1953), p. 13.Google Scholar

page 179 note 6 Zaehner, , Mysticism Sacred and Profane, pp. 172–3.Google Scholar

page 179 note 7 John of Ruysbroeck, The Book of Supreme Truth, chap. V.

page 179 note 8 St John of the Cross, Dark Night of the Soul, pp. 59 and 76.

page 180 note 1 Smith, Margaret (ed. and trans.) Readings from the Mystics of Islām (London: Luzac & Company Ltd., 1950), pp. 6970.Google Scholar

page 180 note 2 Smith, , Readings from the Mystics of Islām, pp. 6263 and 71.Google Scholar

page 180 note 3 Life, chap. xx; Peers, , The Complete Works of St Teresa, I, 119–20.Google Scholar

page 180 note 4 Interior Castle, vii, ii; Peers, , The Complete Works of St Teresa, II, 235.Google Scholar

page 181 note 1 Kapleau, , The Three Pillars of Zen, p. 45.Google Scholar

page 182 note 1 James, , The Varieties of Religious Experience, pp. 371–2.Google Scholar

page 182 note 2 Stace, , Mysticism and Philosophy, pp. 131–2.Google Scholar

page 183 note 1 Zaehner, , Drugs, Mysticism and Make-Believe, p. 93.Google Scholar The typology that Zaehner employs here is slightly different from that of Mysticism Sacred and Profane. While the fourth sort of mysticism he distinguishes here corresponds to theistic mysticism, and the third sort corresponds to monistic mysticism, he has broken down nature mysticism into the first two types.

page 183 note 2 Cited by Zaehner, , Drugs, Mysticism and Make-Believe, pp. 92–3.Google Scholar

page 183 note 3 Interior Castle, vi, iii; Peers, , The Complete Works of St Teresa, II, 281.Google Scholar

page 184 note 1 It seems that one of the goals of some in ‘the Drug Movement’ was or is to maintain ‘a high like [the LSD high] all the time without drugs’. Masters, and Houston, , The Varieties of Psychedelic Experience, p. 61.Google Scholar

page 184 note 2 James, , The Varieties of Religious Experience, p. 374 n.Google Scholar

page 185 note 1 Slotkin, J., The Peyote Religion; cited by Masters and Houston, The Varieties of Psychedelic Experience, p. 257.Google Scholar

page 185 note 2 Masters, and Houston, , The Varieties of Psychedelic Experience, p. 257.Google Scholar

page 185 note 3 Zaehner, , Drugs, Mysticism and Make-Believe, p. 83.Google Scholar

page 185 note 4 Zaehner, , Mysticism Sacred and Profane, p. 32.Google Scholar

page 186 note 1 Zaehner, , Drugs, Mysticism and Make-Believe, p.109. Italics in the original.Google Scholar

page 186 note 2 Zaehner, , Drugs, Mysticism and Make-Believe, p. 93.Google Scholar

page 186 note 3 Zaehner, , Drugs, Mysticism and Make-Believe, p. 99.Google Scholar

page 187 note 1 Masters, and Houston, , The Varieties of Psychedelic Experience, p. 267.Google Scholar

page 187 note 2 Masters, and Houston, , The Varieties of Psychedelic Experience, p. 307.Google Scholar The category of introvertive mystical experience is, of course, one of Stace's. Masters and Houston observe that all of the six were ‘over forty years of age, were of superior intelliegence, and were well-adjusted and creative personalities’ who had either ‘actively sought the mystical experience in meditation and other spiritual disciplines’ or had ‘demonstrated a considerable interest in integral levels of consciousness’.

page 187 note 3 Masters, and Houston, , The Varieties of Psychedelic Experience, pp. 269–71.Google Scholar

page 187 note 4 Masters, and Houston, , The Varieties of Psychedelic Experience, p. 266.Google Scholar

page 187 note 5 See Masters, and Houston, , The Varieties of Psychedelic Experience, pp. 267301 (esp. pp. 283–98) for the case of this subject.Google Scholar

page 188 note 1 Zaehner, , Drugs, Mysticism and Make-Believe, p. 108.Google Scholar

page 188 note 2 2 Esdras 11:36–12: 35.

page 188 note 3 If it was: the subject's struggle may have begun some years before. See Masters, and Houston, , The Varieties of Psychedelic Experience, p. 271.Google Scholar

page 188 note 4 Masters, and Houston, , The Varieties of Psychedelic Experience, p. 299.Google Scholar

page 189 note 1 Zaehner, , Drugs, Mysticism and Make-Believe, p. 96.Google Scholar

page 189 note 2 Masters, and Houston, , The Varieties of Psychedelic Experience, p. 263.Google Scholar

page 190 note 1 Interior Castle, VI, iii and ix; Peers, , The Complete Works of St. Teresa, II, 284 and 319.Google Scholar

page 191 note 1 Pahnke, Walter N. and Richards, William A., ‘Implications of LSD and Experimental Mysticism’, Altered States of Consciousness, Tart, Charles T., editor (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday Anchor 1969), P. 432.Google Scholar