The Seven Tongues of God
Timothy Leary
The Psychedelic Review, Number 3, 1964
http://www.luminist.org/archives/7tongues.htm
This piece by Leary was mentioned in Transcendent Knowledge podcast episode 1 or 2.
Leary heavily uses ‘energy’, like Martin Ball.
New Age overreliance on ‘energy’ as an explanatory theory-construct is a form of scientism.
I deleted these passages where Leary equates ‘energy’ in Science with tripping.
My friend died at 16 years old, which is why I emphasize the natural drive for entheogenic initiation at adolescence.
In that case, “Wait until you are 21” means *never*.
Adult Prohibitionists strive to stop children from doing what they are constituted to do: seek psychedelic ego death at adolescence.
Delaying initiation til age 21 is a PRETEXT for prohibiting altogether.
Prohibition = *pretext* for suppression and oppression of others. Even alcohol Prohibition, was a pretext to oppress minorities: European undesirables.
In the war between adults and children (youths), I side with the innate drive.
Adults = obstructors of enlightenment.
Children (youths) = seekers of enlightenment.
I condemn and curse *pretext*, phoniness, dissembling, misleading other people to take advantage of them.
(Alcohol) Prohibition did *not* really end, but when halted was immediate converted into drug Prohibition.
I am so sick of phoniness, pretexts, people claiming that they are doing A because of B, but they are really doing it because of C. I hate lying liars’ lies, and Prohibition is the largest heap of lies ever.
Stop lying; stop the reliance on pretexts. Tell the truth about your motivations. The purpose and goal of Prohibition was never harm reduction; it was always oppression of others. Prohibition is a tremendous success at accomplishing its real, covert goals: suppression of minorities and of anti-war people.
“I want to oppress others, I don’t want to admit that, so I have the *pretext* that I am motivated by harm-reduction, rather than by oppressing others.”
Leary writes “The psychedelic experience, far from being new, is man’s oldest and most classic adventure into meaning. Every religion in world history was founded on the basis of some flipped-out visionary trip.”
But he is self-contradictory and inconsistent on this.
Writers in the 60s were self-defeating: they disastrously failed to leverage the strategy, of recognizing that our own religion, Christianity, was always entheogen-based.
1960s psychedelicists supported the assumption-set (a false narrative) that our religion, Christianity, lacks entheogens.
Excerpts from Leary:
I ate seven of the so-called sacred mushrooms which had been given to me by a scientist from the University of Mexico. During the next five hours, I was whirled through an experience which could be described in many extravagant metaphors but which was, above all and without question, the deepest religious experience of my life.
There are many predisposing factors — intellectual, emotional, spiritual, social — which cause one person to be ready for a dramatic mind-opening experience and which lead another to shrink back from new levels of awareness. The discovery that the human brain possesses an infinity of potentialities and can operate at unexpected space-time dimensions left me feeling exhilarated, awed, and quite convinced that I had awakened from a long ontological sleep.
A profound transcendent experience should leave in its wake a changed man and a changed life. Since my illumination of August 1960, I have devoted most of my energies to trying to understand the revelatory potentialities of the human nervous system and to making these insights available to others.
I have repeated this biochemical and (to me) sacramental ritual several hundred times, and almost every time I have been awed by religious revelations as shattering as the first experience. During this period I have been lucky enough to collaborate in this work with several hundred scientists and scholars who joined our various research projects. In our centers at Harvard, in Mexico, and at Millbrook we have arranged transcendent experiences for several thousand persons from all walks of life, including more than 200 full-time religious professionals, about half of whom profess the Christian or Jewish faiths and about half of whom belong to Eastern religions.
Included in this roster are several divinity college deans, divinity college presidents, university chaplains, executives of religious foundations, prominent religious editors, and several distinguished religious philosophers. In our research files and in certain denominational offices there is building up a large and quite remarkable collection of reports which will be published when the political atmosphere becomes more tolerant. At this point it is conservative to state that over 75% of these subjects report intense mystico-religious responses, and considerably more than 50% claim that they have had the deepest spiritual experience of their life.
The interest generated by the research at Harvard led to the formation in 1962 of an informal group of ministers, theologians and religious psychologists who met once a month. In addition to arranging for spiritually oriented psychedelic sessions and discussing prepared papers, this group provided the guides for the dramatic “Good Friday” study and was the original planning nucleus of the organizations which assumed sponsorship of our research in consciousness expansion: IFIF (the International Federation for Internal Freedom), 1963, the Castalia Foundation, 1963-66, and the League for Spiritual Discovery, 1966. The generating impulse and the original leadership of our work and play came from a seminar in religious experience, and this fact may be related to the alarm which we have aroused in some secular and psychiatric circles.
… whether the transcendent experience reported during psychedelic sessions was similar to the mystical experience reported by saints and famous religious mystics.
… To each group were assigned two guides with considerable psychedelic experience. The ten guides were professors and advanced graduate students from Boston-area colleges.
… The dean of the chapel, Howard Thurman, who was to conduct a three-hour devotional service upstairs in the main hall of the church, visited the subjects a few minutes before the start of the service at noon and gave a brief inspirational talk.
Two of the subjects in each group and one of the two guides were given a moderately stiff dosage (i.e., 30 mg.) of psilocybin, the chemical synthesis of the active ingredient in the “sacred mushroom” of Mexico.
… the results clearly support the hypothesis that, with adequate preparation and in an environment which is supportive and religiously meaningful, subjects who have taken the psychedelic drug report mystical experiences significantly more than placebo controls.
Our studies, naturalistic and experimental, thus demonstrate that if the expectation, preparation, and setting are spiritual, an intense mystical or revelatory experience can be expected in from 40 to 90 percent of subjects ingesting psychedelic drugs. These results may be attributed to the bias of our research group, which has taken the “far out” and rather dangerous position that there are experiential-spiritual as well as secular-behavioral potentialities of the nervous system. While we share and follow the epistemology of scientific psychology (objective records), our basic ontological assumptions are closer to Jung than to Freud, closer to the mystics than to the theologians, closer to Einstein and Bohr than to Newton.
In order to check on this bias, let us cast a comparative glance at the work of other research groups in this field who begin from more conventional ontological bases.
LSD Can Produce a Religious High
Here, then, we have five scientific studies by qualified investigators — the four naturalistic studies by Leary et al., Savage et al., Ditman et al. and Janiger-McGlothlin, and the triple-blind study in the Harvard dissertation mentioned earlier — yielding data which indicate that (1) if the setting is supportive but not spiritual, between 40 to 75 percent of psychedelic subjects will report intense and life-changing religious experiences and that (2) if the set and setting are supportive and spiritual, then from 40 to 90 percent of the experiences will be revelatory and mystico-religious.
It is hard to see how these results can be disregarded by those who are concerned with spiritual growth and religious development. These data are even more interesting because the experiments took place at a time (1962) when mysticism, individual religious ecstasy (as opposed to religious behavior), was highly suspect and when the classic, direct, nonverbal means of revelation and consciousness expansion such as meditation, yoga, fasting, monastic withdrawal and sacramental foods and drugs were surrounded by an aura of fear, clandestine secrecy, active social sanction, and even imprisonment. The two hundred professional workers in religious vocations who partook of psychedelic substances (noted earlier) were responsible, respected, thoughtful, and moral individuals who were grimly aware of the controversial nature of the procedure and aware that their reputations and their jobs might be undermined (and, as a matter of fact, have been and are today [1964] being threatened for some of them). Still the results read: 75 percent spiritual revelation.
Liturgical practices, rituals, dogmas, theological speculations, can be and too often are secular, i.e., completely divorced from the spiritual experience.
… both science and religion are too often diverted toward secular-game goals. Various pressures demand that laboratory and church forget these basic questions and instead provide distractions, illusory protection, narcotic comfort. Most of us dread confrontation with the answers to these basic questions, whether the answers come from objective science or religion. But if “pure” science and religion address themselves to the same basic questions, what is the distinction between the two disciplines?
Science is the systematic attempt to record and measure the energy process and the sequence of energy transformations we call life. The goal is to answer the basic questions in terms of objective, observed, public data.
Religion is the systematic attempt to provide answers to the same questions subjectively, in terms of direct, incontrovertible, personal experience.
Science is a social system which evolves roles, rules, rituals, values, language, space-time locations to further the quest for these goals, to answer these questions objectively, externally.
Religion is a social system which has evolved its roles, rules, rituals, values, language, space-time locations to further the pursuit of the same goals, to answer these questions subjectively through the revelatory experience.
A science which fails to address itself to these spiritual goals, which accepts other purposes (however popular), becomes secular, political, and tends to oppose new data. A religion which fails to provide direct experiential answers to these spiritual questions (which fails to produce the ecstatic high) becomes secular, political, and tends to oppose the individual revelatory confrontation.
R. C. Zaehner … remarked that experience, when divorced from dogma, often leads to absurd and wholly irrational excesses.
… dogma, when divorced from experience, often leads to absurd and wholly rational excesses.
Those of us who have been devoting our lives to the study of consciousness have been able to collect considerable sociological data about the tendency of the rational mind to spin out its own interpretations. But I shall have more to say about the political situation in later chapters.
Religion and Science Provide Similar Answers to the Same Basic Questions
… those aspects of the psychedelic experience which subjects report to be ineffable and ecstatically religious involve a direct awareness of the energy processes which physicists and biochemists and physiologists and neurologists and psychologists and psychiatrists measure.
We are treading here on very tricky ground. When we read the reports of LSD subjects, we are doubly limited. First, they can only speak in the vocabulary they know, and for the most part they do not possess the lexicon and training of energy scientists. Second, we researchers find only what we are prepared to look for, and too often we think in crude psychological-jargon concepts: moods, emotions, value judgments, diagnostic categories, social pejoratives, religious clichés. Since 1962 I have talked to thousands of LSD trippers, mystics, saddhus, occultists, saints, inquiring if their hallucinations, visions, revelations, ecstasies, orgasms, hits, flashes, space-outs and freak-outs can be translated into the language not just of religion, psychiatry and psychology but also of the and biological sciences.
1. The Ultimate-Power Question
A. The scientific answers to this question change constantly — Newtonian laws, quantum indeterminacy, atomic structure, nuclear structure.
… the flimsy inadequacy of these words. We just don’t have a better experiential vocabulary.
… The psychedelic experience is the Hindu-Buddha reincarnation theory experimentally confirmed in your own nervous system.
… Your body is the universe. The ancient wisdom of Gnostics, hermetics, Sufis, Tantric gurus, yogis, occult healers. What is without is within. Your body is the mirror of the macrocosm. The kingdom of heaven is within you.
… The impact of LSD is exactly this brutal answer to the question, who is ego? The LSD revelation is the clear perspective. The LSD panic is the terror that the ego is lost forever. The LSD ecstasy is the joyful discovery that ego, with its painful shams and strivings, is only a fraction of my identity.
Oriental philosophy points out that every form is an illusion. Maya. Everything at every level of energy is a shuttling series of vibrations as apparently solid as the whirring metal disk made by rotating fan blades. Ego resists this notion and touches the immediate solidity of phenomena. We dislike slowing the motion picture down because the film flickers. Annoying reminder that we view not unbroken continuity but an off-on ribbon of still pictures.
Drugs Are the Religion of the People — The Only Hope is Dope
…
Metapsychology is the study of conditioning by the nervous system that has been conditioned. Your ego unravels its own genesis.
From the theological standpoint, everyone must discover the seven faces of God within his own body.
This task, which at first glance may seem fantastically utopian, is actually very easy to initiate because there now [since the archaic era -mh] exist instruments which can move consciousness to any desired level. The laboratory equipment for experimental theology, for internal science, is of course made of the stuff of consciousness itself, made of the same material as the data to be studied. The instruments of systematic religion are chemicals. Drugs. Dope.
If you are serious about your religion, if you really wish to commit yourself to the spiritual quest, you must learn how to use psychochemicals. Drugs are the religion of the twenty-first century [and Antiquity -mh]. Pursuing the religious life today without using psychedelic drugs is like studying astronomy with the naked eye because that’s how they did it in the first century A.D. [when culture was saturated in mushroom wine -mh], and besides, telescopes are unnatural.
There Are Specific Drugs to Turn On Each Level of Consciousness
Modern psychopharmacology is written and practiced by scientists who do not take drugs (and who therefore write textbooks about events they have never experienced). Current psychopharmacology is a superstitious form of black magic sponsored and supported by the federal Food and Drug Administration, a government agency about as enlightened as the Spanish Inquisition. Note that the rapidly growing enforcement branch of the FDA uses instruments unknown to Torquemeda — guns, wiretaps — in addition to the classic methods of informers and provocateurs. There is thus enormous ignorance about the science of consciousness alteration and a vigorous punitive campaign to prevent its application.
The decision as to which drugs turn on which levels of consciousness is empirical, based on thousands of psychedelic experiences. I have personally taken drugs which trigger off each level of consciousness hundreds of times.
But my findings can be easily checked out. Any reader can initiate experiments of his own with readily available chemicals.
If you are a diligent experimental theologian, you may wish to see if you can take the fantastic voyage down your body or down into time, using the appropriate chemical instruments. Psychedelic yoga is not a mysterious, arcane specialty reserved for Ph.D.’s and a scientific elite. Anyone who is curious about the nature of God and reality can perform the experiments. Indeed, millions of Americans have done just this in the last few years.
The Seven Religious Yogas
The psychedelic experience, far from being new, is man’s oldest and most classic adventure into meaning. Every religion in world history was founded on the basis of some flipped-out visionary trip.
Religion is the systematic attempt at focusing man’s consciousness. Comparative religion should concern itself less with the exoteric and academic differences and more with studying the different levels of consciousness turned on by each religion. [This section is poor and self-contradictory. Every religion is based on entheogens, and is equivalent. -mh]
…
The disciplines of neurology, psychology and psychiatry, however, have not yet reached a scientific state. No satisfactory language system exists in their fields. … Enormous priesthoods have developed in these three fields which jockey for power, funds, prestige but which fail to provide answers or even to define problems.
The entire study of consciousness, the religious experience itself, remains in a state of medieval ignorance and superstition. There is no language for describing states of awareness.
The humanistic sciences — neurology, psychology, psychiatry, psychopharmacology and the study of consciousness (which I call religion) — require a systematic language which will allow men to distinguish which levels of energy and consciousness they deal with.
… Western man developed a language of physics and chemistry and a highly efficient engineering based on physical-chemical experimentation long before he developed understanding and control of his own sense organs and neurological conditioning. Thus we now have a situation where blind, irrational, technical robots (who understand neither their makeup nor the purpose of life) are in control of powerful and dangerous energies.
… The religions of the future must be based on these seven scientific questions. A science of consciousness must be based on those different levels which center on the body and the biochemicals (i.e. drugs) which alter consciousness.
Dramatic changes in our child-rearing and educational practices, politics, communications will occur as man grasps this notion of the levels of consciousness and their alteration.
… the findings of the pure sciences do not produce the religious reaction we should expect. We are satiated with secular statistics, dazed into robot dullness by the enormity of facts which we are not educated to comprehend. … The message is dimly grasped hypothetically, rationally, but never experienced, felt, known.
… To experience (it’s always for a moment) the answers to the seven basic spiritual questions is to me the peak of the religious-scientific quest.
But how can our ill-prepared nervous systems grasp the message? Certainly the average man cannot master the conceptual, mathematical bead game of the physics graduate student. Must his experiential contact with the divine process come in watered-down symbols, sermons, hymns, robot rituals, religious calendar art, moral-behavior sanctions eventually secular in their aim? Fortunately the great plan has produced a happy answer and has endowed every human being with the equipment to comprehend, to know, to experience directly, incontrovertibly.
… If you can, for the moment, throw off the grip of your learned mind, your conditioning, and experience the message contained in the ten-billion-tube computer which you carry behind your forehead, you would know the awe-ful truth.
… the brakes can be released. … psychedelic foods and drugs, ingested by prepared subjects in a serious, sacred, supportive atmosphere, can put the subject into perpetual touch with other levels …
The Language of Ecstasy
But to what do these LSD subjects refer when they report spiritual reactions? Do they obtain specific illuminations into the seven basic questions, or are their responses simply awe and wonder at the experienced novelty? Even if the latter were the case, could it not support the religious application of the psychedelic substances and simply underline the need for more sophisticated religious language coordinated with the scientific data?
… the neurological and pharmacological explanations of an LSD vision are still far from being understood. We know almost nothing about the physiology of consciousness and the body-cortex interaction. … should caution us against labeling experiences outside of our current tribal clichés as “psychotic” or abnormal. For 3,000 years our greatest prophets and philosophers have been telling us to look within, and today our scientific data are supporting that advice with a humiliating finality. The limits of introspective awareness may well be submicroscopic, cellular, molecular and even nuclear. We only see, after all, what we are trained and predisposed to see.
… LSD subjects do claim to experience revelations into the basic questions and do attribute life change to their visions.
We are, of course, at the very beginning of our research into these implications. A new experiential language and perhaps even new metaphors for the great plan will develop. We have been working on this project for the past six years, writing manuals which train subjects to recognize energy processes, teaching subjects to communicate via a machine we call the experiential typewriter and with movies of microbiological processes. And we have continued to pose the questions to religious and philosophic groups: What do you think? Are these biochemical visions religious?
Before you answer, remember that God (however you define the higher power) produced that wonderful molecule, that extraordinarily powerful organic substance we call LSD, just as surely as He created the rose, or the sun, or the complex cluster of molecules you insist on calling your “self.”
Professional Priests and Theologians Avoid the Religious Experience
Among the many harassing complications of our research into religious experience has been the fact that few people, even some theological professionals, have much conception of what a religious experience really is. If asked, they tend to become embarrassed, intellectual, evasive. The adored cartoonists of the Renaissance portray the ultimate power as a dove, or a flaming bush, or as a man — venerable, with a white beard, or on a cross, or as a baby, or a sage seated in full lotus position. Are these not limiting incarnations, temporary housings, of the great energy process?
… After the session, the minister complained that the experience, although shattering and revelatory, was disappointing because it was “content-free” — so physical, so unfamiliar, so scientific, like being beamed through microscopic panoramas, like being oscillated through cellular functions at radar acceleration. Well, what do you expect? If God were to take you on a visit through His “workshop,” do you think you’d walk or go by bus? … the divine process operates in time dimensions which are far beyond our routine, secular, space-time limits. … Our science describes this logically. Our brains may be capable of dealing with these processes experientially.
The great process has placed in our hands a key to this direct visionary world. Is it hard for us to accept that the key might be an organic molecule and not a new myth [a new, restored comprehension of myth -mh] or a new word?
The Politics of Revelation
And where do we go? There are in the United States today several million persons who have experienced what I have attempted to describe — a psychedelic, religious revelation. There are, I would estimate, several million equally thoughtful people who have heard the joyous tidings and who are waiting patiently but determinedly for the prohibition to end.
There is, of course, the expected opposition. The classic conflict of the religious drama — always changing, always the same. The doctrine (which was originally someone’s experience) now threatened by the *new* [sic!] experience. This time the administrators have assigned the inquisitorial role to psychiatrists, whose proprietary claims to a revealed understanding of the mind and whose antagonism to consciousness expansion are well known to you.
The clamor over psychedelic drugs is now reaching full crescendo. You have heard rumors and you have read the press assaults and the slick-magazine attacks-by-innuendo. As sophisticated adults, you have perhaps begun to wonder: where is the evidence? As educated men with an eye for history, you are, I trust, beginning to suspect that we’ve been through this many times before.
In the current hassle over psychedelic plants and drugs, you are witnessing a good, old-fashioned, traditional religious controversy. On one side the psychedelic visionaries, somewhat uncertain about the validity of their revelations, embarrassedly speaking in new tongues (there never is, you know, the satisfaction of a sound, right academic language for the new vision of the divine), harassed by the knowledge of their own human frailty, surrounded by the inevitable legion of eccentric would-be followers looking for a new panacea, always in grave doubt about their own motivation — hero? martyr? crank? crackpot? — always on the verge of losing their material achievements — job, reputation, long-suffering wife, conventional friends, parental approval — always under the fire of the power holders. And on the other side the establishment (the administrators, the police, the fund-granting foundations, the job givers) pronouncing their familiar lines in the drama: “Danger! Madness! Unsound! Intellectual corruption of youth! Irreparable damage! Cultism!” The issue of chemical expansion of consciousness is hard upon us. During the last few years, every avenue of propaganda has barraged you with the arguments. You can hardly escape it. You are going to be pressed for a position. Internal freedom is becoming a major religious and civil rights controversy.
How can you decide? How can you judge? Well, it’s really quite simple. Whenever you hear anyone sounding off on internal freedom and consciousness-expanding foods and drugs — whether pro or con — check out these questions:
1. Is your expert talking from direct experience, or simply repeating clichés? Theologians and intellectuals often deprecate “experience” in favor of fact and concept. This classic debate is falsely labeled. Most often it becomes a case of “experience” versus “inexperience.”
2. Do his words spring from a spiritual or from a mundane point of view? Is he motivated by a dedicated quest for answers to basic questions, or is he protecting his own social-psychological position, his own game investment? Is he struggling toward sainthood, or is he maintaining his status as a hard-boiled scientist or hard-boiled cop?
3. How would his argument sound if it were heard in a different culture (for example, in an African jungle hut, a ghat on the Ganges, or on another planet inhabited by a form of life superior to ours) or in a different time (for example, in Periclean Athens, or in a Tibetan monastery, or in a bull session led by any one of the great religious leaders — founders — messiahs)? Or how would it sound to other species of life on our planet today — to dolphins, to the consciousness of a redwood tree? In other words, try to break out of your usual tribal game set and listen with the ears of another one of God’s creatures.
4. How would the debate sound to you if you were fatally diseased with a week to live, and thus less committed to mundane issues? Our research group receives many requests a week for consciousness-expanding experiences, and some of these come from terminal patients.
5. Is the point of view one which opens up or closes down? Are you being urged to explore, experience, gamble out of spiritual faith, join someone who shares your cosmic ignorance on a collaborative voyage of discovery? Or are you being pressured to close off, protect your gains, play it safe, accept the authoritative voice of someone who knows best?
6. When we speak, we say little about the subject matter and disclose mainly the state of our own mind. Does your psychedelic expert use terms which are positive, pro-life, spiritual, inspiring, opening, based on faith in the future, faith in your potential, or does he betray a mind obsessed by danger, material concern, by imaginary terrors, administrative caution or essential distrust in your potential? …
7. If he is against what he calls “artificial methods of illumination,” ask him what constitutes the natural. Words? Rituals? Tribal customs? Alkaloids? Psychedelic vegetables?
8. If he is against biochemical assistance, where does he draw the line? Does he use nicotine? alcohol? penicillin? vitamins? conventional [sic; exoteric, substitute, counterfeit -mh] sacramental substances?
If your advisor is against LSD, what is he for? If he forbids you the psychedelic key to revelation, what does he offer you instead?
/excerpts from Leary, by Michael Hoffman, Egodeath.com
The Egodeath theory 