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This book does not seriously attempt a balanced view of the subject of hallucinogenic drugs. Such an attempt would no doubt have produced something very much duller than this. Most of the contributors are deeply involved in the psychedelic movement. If they do not produce addicts, these drugs certainly produce devotees, no doubt because they initiate some into experiences of the divine, of love and of divine love. I saw on the wall of a London underground station the other day, ‘Cannabis is love’.
Paul McCartney, for example, is reported to have said that he discovered God through L.S.D. Much of the book elaborates and documents this theme, with many first-hand descriptions of transcendental experiences. In their introduction (p. 16), Aaronson and Osmond say, ‘The fundamental thrust of psychedelic experience is religious and its fundamental challenge is to the forms of organized religion. It is one of the forces contributing to the ferment in contemporary Christianity …’ Again, ‘Our modern Luddites are not the dispossessed, but those who exist at the very centre of the power structure. The altering of values, the questioning of rules by those who have had psychedelic experiences, create much consternation, often by their very own children, among individuals who have made their way by those rules and under the value system of the existing society.’
The meaninglessness of time- or goal-oriented activity, and the unity underlying the diversity of things, is of course a common revelation vouchsafed by these drugs. Krippner, after describing how he ‘became’ the odour which he was inhaling and exhaling, and ‘became’ the candy he was eating, says, ‘Rolling the candy about my monstrous cavern of a mouth … The oriental Yin-Yang symbol emerged on the horizon of my consciousness … I felt as if I were slowly diving into the centre of the Yin-Yang. Once immersed, I experienced a negation of time. Past, present, future all seemed the same—just as the Yin-Yang symbolized unity and o