Social and Intellectual Attitudes Toward Drug-Induced Religious Experience

Abstract

This article is a comment on the ambiguity of the psychedelic experience itself and the peculiarities of the modern social response to it. I discuss three kinds of attitudes toward psychedelic religious experience and compare them with three attitudes toward religious tradition described by Peter Berger. These are, roughly, materialist reductionism, defense of the purity of an orthodox faith, and religion as personal experiences given form and meaning by traditional interpretation. The effects of psychedelic drugs are used by some to discredit both drugs and religion, by others to discredit drugs while justifying a certain definition of religion, and by still others to accept drug-taking as one mode of religious experience broadly conceived. This last attitude is the one usually taken by psychedelic drug users themselves, but it raises the difficult question of what is definably religious about personal experiences before they are given form by a doctrine, ritual, and community. In this connection I discuss the common view of psychedelic experience as a foretaste or preliminary to a more serious religious regimen.