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Mysticism and Drugs

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2008

J. Kellenberger
J. Kellenberger
Affiliation:
Professor of Philosophy, California State University, Northridge
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Extract

In recent years the issue of whether mysticism can be induced by drugs has been pursued by both scholars of mystical literature and psychological researchers. R. C. Zaehner is perhaps the best known among the scholars of religious literature who have addressed the issues of drug-induced mysticism. While on the side of empirical psychology investigators such as Walter N. Pahnke, R. E. L. Masters, and Jean Houston have pursued some of the same issues using the techniques of laboratory experimentation. Zaehner, who was familiar with both Eastern and Western mysticism, argued that drug-induced experiences are not the same as religious mystical experiences of the theistic variety. It was farcical, he argued, for Aldous Huxley to posit a connection between his preternatural feeling of oneness with his chair and the Beatific Vision. The issue between Zaehner and Huxley was not over the veridicality of Huxley's mystical experience. It was over the significance of Huxley's experience: Was it or was it not a drug-induced mystical experience of the sort attained by mystics after heroic struggles of self-discipline? This was the issue again when Zaehner came to address himself to the claims of Timothy Leary, a chief proponent of ‘the LSD experience’, and, in general terms, this has been the central issue pursued by the psychological researchers.

Type
Articles
Information
Religious Studies , Volume 14 , Issue 2 , June 1978 , pp. 175 - 191
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1978

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References

page 175 note l Zaehner, R. C., Mysticism Sacred and Profane (New York: Oxford University Press, 1961), pp. xiii, 29 and passim.Google ScholarSee Huxley, Aldous, The Doors of Perception (New York: Harper & Row, 1954), pp. 22, 42 and 73.Google Scholar

page 175 note 2 The numinous experience is discussed by Otto in his The Idea of the Holy, trans. Harvey, John W. (second edition; New York: Oxford University Press, 1950). Otto and some who follow him, for instance W. T. Stace, see a closer relationship between the numinous experience and mysticism than do others.Google Scholar

page 175 note 3 Zaehner, R. C., Drugs, Mysticism and Make-Believe (London: Collins, 1972), p. 103Google Scholar; and Masters, R. E. L. and Houston, Jean, The Varieties of Psychedelic Experience (New York: Dell Publishing Co., 1966), P. 259.Google Scholar

page 176 note 1 Quoted by Huston Smith, ‘Do Drugs Have Religious Import?’ Journal of Philosophy, LXI (1964), 523–4.Google Scholar

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