http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2009/oct/10/drug-use-spiritual-practice
Freedom of religion should be extended to the use of drugs in
spiritual practice
Alexander Beiner
10 October 2009
In the heavy, moist air of the Amazon rainforest, I sit waiting as an
old shaman pours an ancient sacrament into a cup. The brew he has
prepared is ayahuasca, a blend of two plants that provides a
visionary experience of such sublime, boundary-dissolving beauty that
it changes the way you see the world for ever. The shaman is
participating in humanity's oldest form of spiritual practice. Not
only does the use of visionary plants predate organised religion by
tens of thousands of years, but many anthropologists believe that the
presence of hallucinogens in the diet of our hunter-gatherer
ancestors had a significant influence on the way our brains evolved.
Millions of people, me included, use these substances for spiritual
growth, metaphysical exploration and healing.
However, shamanism cannot be described as a religion or a faith. No
faith is needed in a visionary experience; in these states, the
individual receives direct personal experience of the divine,
becoming unified with their own subconscious and with the rest of the
universe. In a timeless moment you realise that God is not an angry
patriarch somewhere in the ether God is within. We are the arbiters
of good and evil, entirely responsible for creating our own reality.
This ecstatic realisation cannot be enshrined in dogma, requires no
priests and does not ask one to have faith in the ancient ideas of
other people. It is no surprise that hallucinogenic plants and
chemicals are also known as "entheogens", a word derived from Greek
that means "that which generates the god within".
Entheogens are illegal in most countries, but the same societies that
condemn entheogens actively promote the use of alcohol, a drug that
according to a study by the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health
may be responsible for 1 in 25 deaths worldwide. Plant medicines are
incredibly safe by comparison and inspire peaceful and productive
behaviour, which suggests that drug laws are based more on cultural
conditioning and preconceptions than on reason.
The legality of alcohol and cigarettes indicates that the danger of a
drug is not the primary factor in deciding its legality. What matters
is that the drug does not interfere with the dominant cultural
ideology of a society. Entheogens destroy an individual's cultural
conditioning, freeing them from a fixed perceptual framework and
encouraging them to think independently. Western cultures cannot
incorporate experiences like this into their cultural framework
because to do so would be to risk a serious transformation of culture
itself. One only has to look at the effect that mass use of LSD had
in undermining the moral assumptions of the US in the late 1960s to
see why governments are terrified of these substances.
The tragedy of prohibition is that entheogens have the potential to
be the most successful psychiatric medicines known to man.
Fortunately, the medical community and some governments are beginning
to recognise this, and there has been a resurgence in psychedelic
research in the last five years. Organisations like the
Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies in the US have
studied the use of MDMA, psilocybin and other psychedelics for a
range of illnesses and conditions, including post-traumatic stress
disorder and drug addiction.
As someone who uses psychedelics as a spiritual technology, I am not
surprised by the very promising results of these studies. My first
psychedelic experience completely changed my life and convinced me
that the use of hallucinogenic plants is a human birthright. To find
spiritual peace in this way and be told by your society that you were
wrong for seeking it is saddening and frustrating. No one has the
right to tell another person how they can experience the divine.
Freedom of religion is an inalienable right, and until this right is
extended to the oldest form of spiritual practice, our ability to
explore who we truly are will be severely limited.
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