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By Root 1256 0

do, and maybe the particulars of these drugs have something to do with the particulars of given cultures. More important than their differences, though, are the similarities between drugs. They all make it clear that our common perceptions are just one turn on the dial. Drugs show that your brain is capable of the absolute reshaping of the information your senses bring it; and that leads to the revelation that your brain is always shaping the character of what your eyes tell it. But I’m not talking about only visual hallucinations: say, all your hairbrushes acting like cancan dancers. During the high, drugs make psychological symptoms disappear. They can reverse lifelong personality traits. The frightened get brave, the uptight come loose, the clown turns contemplative. Even simple booze can allow revelatory experiences about love, purpose, friendship, and hope. Also, mystical experience has been considered good for people’s happiness. I had thought that these experiences were brought on by putting the mind and body through tough exercises. Now I am sure that at least some mystical experiences were brought on by ingesting or smoking something.

Today, the politics are very silencing, and that may be just as well, because drugs can be very dangerous. Still, the relation of drugs to mystical experience is worth thinking about. Let’s see if we can pass over “the war on drugs” of the last decades, and read Smith’s conclusion with fresh eyes:

The conclusion to which evidence currently points would seem to be that chemicals can aid the religious life, but only where set within a context of faith (meaning by this the conviction that what they disclose is true) and discipline (meaning diligent exercise of the will in the attempt to work out the implications of the disclosures for the living of life in the every day, common-sense world).

Nowhere today in Western civilization are these two conditions jointly fulfilled. Churches lack faith in the sense just mentioned, hipsters lack discipline. This might lead us to forget about the drugs, were it not for one fact: the distinctive religious emotion and the one drugs unquestionably can occasion—Otto’s mysterium tremendum, majestas, mysterium fascinans.17

The Otto mentioned here is the much-beloved religious thinker Rudolph Otto. His Idea of the Holy (1923) is still held up as the modern work that best understands the ecstasy of trembling in awe at the great mystery of God. Smith wants to experience awesome trembling; this is all very important to him. I love the phrase “hipsters lack discipline,” and the fact that what churches are found lacking is here termed “faith.” Smith saw that transcendence outside a context of disciplined effort might not be wonderful. Still, for many people, a common life punctuated by some euphoric drug experiences is a life made fuller, more tremendous. This sort of drug use might be just as effective for overall happiness as the regular use of a drug that brings us to a level mood.

There are also “highs,” flights of exquisite happiness, that come to a person out of nowhere, unaided by drugs. These can also last an hour but inform a lifetime. You never hear anyone talking about this. By contrast, we all know that sometimes a black mood hits us, relatively unprovoked. It is a commonly mentioned phenomenon: sometimes we all feel dark and a little hopeless. So it is surprising that the culture does not have a similar message about happiness. If you hear of a man living in luxury or success, you may console yourself by remembering that he has sad moods, like everyone. But when things are bad, it is rare to hear anyone say, “Well, even if nothing ever helps, stay alive, because you will experience some inexplicable waves of happiness, some of them so intense as to be revelatory.” The only place you hear talk of this is in poetry. Consider Yeats’s evocation of sudden, transcendent happiness in this section of the poem “Vacillations”:

My fiftieth year had come and gone,

I sat, a solitary man,

In a crowded London shop,

An open book and empty cup

On the marble