Hallucinogenic Drugs and Mystical (Inner) Experience

Throughout human history, intoxication has been forever present and always veering from a religious, or mystical, to a purely hedonistic experience. Opium, for instance, has been consumed by humans since about 3,000 B.C., and has been mentioned in Homer's Odyssey as well as in ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs. Probably the oldest fusion of magic, medicine and religion, however, was shamanism, which has always been an experiential religion rather than a dogmatic one. Shamanism involves techniques that put the shaman into an ecstatic state wherein he or she can move beyond the physical world that our senses perceive and travel through spiritual realms.

Drumming, chanting, singing and dancing were all effective approaches for attaining the shamanic trance state, but psychotropic plants were also used - and their effects were very similar to what we expect in the modern day from hallucinogenic drugs. Hallucinogenic plants used in the ancient world included henbane, nightshade, mandrake, and datura; but the most honored (and most familiar, to us) sacraments were peyote and psylocybin mushrooms.

Art has always been associated with transcendent experience, so it's no wonder that artists have courted psychotropic substances since antiquity. Laudanum, the fashionable 19^th century form of opium, was a favorite of all the great Romantic poets: Goethe, Coleridge, Shelley, Byron, Wordsworth, and Keats. Psychedelics returned to popular consciousness thanks to Albert Hofmann's famous (or notorious) invention in 1943: LSD 25 (lysergic acid diethylamine), which was first extracted from the ergot fungus.

LSD opened the door for the whole "consciousness expansion" movement of the 1960's, and the artistic and social revolutions that went along with it. It was even embraced by psychologists, who used it to try and release the repressed contents of their patients' unconscious minds. Acid, as it came to be called, provided many "trippers" with metaphysical experiences akin to what the shamans of antiquity had known. For many who took the substance, the words of the mystics and wise men suddenly seemed to be illuminated. Ego consciousness was dissolved, and the world stood revealed as a place more unfathomably rich and mysterious than had hitherto been suspected.

The problem with using any substance to attain this kind of enlightenment, however, is that one's realizations are lost when one "comes down". The mystics speak with the sure knowledge of a reality that they're able to perceive at all times, without any kind of chemical aid. Acid trippers are only able to make a relatively brief visit to those realms before they fall back to Earth where all their old problems are still staring them in the face.

For this reason, the psychedelic revolution may have had much to do with the spiritual revolution that occurred in its wake, which saw a revival of interest in Eastern philosophy, shamanism, Native American mysticism, as well as newer "alternative" schools of though like Jungian psychology. People who had experienced psychedelics and wanted to understand what they'd gone through did much of the exploration in these areas. They knew they couldn't sustain their insights with drugs, so they began searching for other ways to turn inward. And this, perhaps, is what one can expect from hallucinogenics: they can open a door into a wider world, but after that brief glimpse the task still remains for the true spiritual seekers to find ways to claim those visions for their own.