the TRUE BELIEVERS

Perhaps this so-called innate desire for transcendence is more like a natural yearning to alter our everyday reality.  Like hunger or sex, it may be that we all have a penchant to occasionally fall into a daydream state or a shift in consciousness.  The altering of consciousness is as common a cultural occurrence as is the belief in supernatural entities.  Perhaps they are correlated or even one in the same.

During my tenure as a practicing clinician I encountered many drug users who were sure they had regular meetings with God when they were high.  Some of my conservative friends thought it more likely a meeting with the devil.  You’ll remember, in the old days mental illness was a matter of driving the demons out via some kind of exorcism.  As we came to understand psychosis, we recognized these earnest endeavors only made matters worse.  Today we know that, in large part, mental illness is matter of neural short circuits or a lack of the brain’s “feel good” chemicals.  But just think how many poor folks were condemned as “sinners in the hands of an angry God” by well-meaning, sincere believers.  But that’s another story.

The universality of drug use by humans needs explaining.  From chocolate to cocaine, alkaloids to alcohol, marijuana to morphine, a large part of drug usage is an endeavor to alter everyday reality.  For a moment let’s suspend judgment about kinds of drugs.  In the USA, it’s difficult for us to realize that most men, women and children in this world lead lives of pathetic desperation.  At worst, sickness and starvation … at best a life so monotonous and poor that the urge to reach a transcendent state, if only briefly with drugs, may be considered a primary appetite like food or sex.

The use of chemical intoxicants, vegetable-narcotics or hallucinogens throughout mankind’s history is well documented.  Among the poor it’s legend!  Drug utilization over such an extended period in the human record has helped to reinforce the illusion that the feeling of transcendence comes from external things.  The illusion that my drug-using patients’ spiritual highs came from LSD rather than from their own nervous systems was precisely their problem.  They wanted something or someone else outside to be responsible for their plight.  During my clinical practice I met people who were, in one way or another, dependent on drugs or seemingly controlled by habits.  They all thought about life in a similar way.  They were all convinced that the best experiences in life come from the outside to the inside.  There is not a doubt in my mind that such reasoning and dependence on old habits is essentially a primary human problem.  It’s an error in thinking.

Let me say it another way: it makes no difference whether it is epilepsy, marijuana, alcohol, or profound meditation, believing the experience comes from outside oneself is erroneous.  To create an altered state is easy and commonplace in every culture.  But there is an illusion accompanying altered states.  It’s an illusion so commonplace that most think it’s normal to attribute the sensations of one’s own nervous system to some power outside themselves.  This kind of belief is at the core of every Terrorist act.