The Happiness Myth_ An Expose - Jennifer Hecht [58]
People will probably always need what he called “artificial paradises,” he mused, because “most men and women lead lives at the worst so painful, at the best so monotonous, poor and limited that the urge to escape…is and has always been one of the principal appetites of the soul.”
Huxley borrowed H. G. Wells’s phrase “doors in the wall” to refer to “art and religion, carnivals and saturnalia, dancing and listening to oratory.” Huxley noted that all these activities require so much effort and collaboration that they are not for daily use: “For private, for everyday use there have always been chemical intoxicants. All the vegetable sedatives and narcotics, all the euphorics that grow on trees, the hallucinogens that ripen in berries or can be squeezed from roots…have been used by human beings from time immemorial. And to these natural modifiers of consciousness modern science has added its quota of synthetics—chloral, for example, and benzedrine, the bromides and the barbiturates.” Sighed Huxley, “Countless persons desire self-transcendence and would be glad to find it in church. But, alas, ‘the hungry sheep look up and are not fed.’”8 They go to church, he explained, but it isn’t a place of transcendence. For solace they turn to alcohol: “God may still be acknowledged; but He is God only on the verbal level…. The sole religious experience is that state of uninhibited and belligerent euphoria which follows the ingestion of the third cocktail. We see, then, that Christianity and alcohol do not and cannot mix. Christianity and mescaline seem to be much more compatible.” Huxley ends the book with these remarkable words: “The man who comes back through the Door in the Wall will never be quite the same as the man who went out.” He will be “wiser but less cocksure, happier but less self-satisfied,” better equipped to understand the relationship of words to things, and “the unfathomable Mystery.”9
Walter Pahnke’s famous 1963 “Good Friday Experiment” was conducted as research for his Doctor of Divinity degree at Harvard. Pahnke invited twenty divinity school students to take part: ten received a capsule with some psychedelic mushrooms in it, and the other ten students got a placebo. A Good Friday church service was held for them while psychiatrists, doctors, and scholars watched and later held interviews. The psychologist and famous proponent of psychedelic drugs Timothy Leary was among the experts on hand. Pahnke devised a test for a “mysticism scale,” and the stoned students scored much more mystical than the sober ones. Here are the self-rated experimental and control groups, shown as percentages of highest possible scores at six-month and long-term follow-up.10 Imagine each subject being asked how much he felt sacredness, for instance, that day.
The Good Friday Experiment
Experimentals
Controls
Six-Month
Long-Term
Six-Month
Long-Term
Unity—Internal
60
77
5
5
Unity—External
39
51
1
6
Transcendence of time and space
78
73
7
9
Deeply felt positive mood
54
56
23
21
Sacredness
58
68
25
29
Objectivity and reality
71
82
18
24
Paradoxicality
34
48
3
4
Alleged ineffability
77
71
15
3
A follow-up study in the 1990s found that, for most of the participants in the study who got the drug, the experiment was remembered with gratitude. Many had become clergymen. One described the experiment thus: “Religious ideas that were interesting intellectually before, took on a whole different dimension. Now they were connected to something much deeper than belief and theory.”11 Interestingly, this man served on Stanford’s campus as a drug counselor after finishing divinity school and later became pastor of a Unitarian congregation in Florida, and a husband and father. Years later, after much experience in the world and in the church, he is still