The Acid Diaries (Christopher Gray) / quote 60 of 125
Acid outflanking my defenses against religion
I think it must have been ten days or a fortnight after Anna’s cremation—it was an afternoon, I remember—when abruptly I understood what had been happening. In a flash I saw that all of it was an ongoing form of the opening to religion, to Christianity in particular, that I had been struggling to deny during my last acid trips. Several times already I had suspected there was more than the call of friendship involved in my desire to help Anna: an unconscious need to be exposed to the reality of death, which I, in common with our whole culture, had spent a lifetime denying. While I had been able to repress religious feeling during those last trips themselves, the acid had outflanked my defenses and started to operate directly on my daily life. A cappella was part and parcel of the same thing. First and foremost, it hadn’t been about music but about getting me to acknowledge the reality of prayer and devotion. Aesthetically I was open in ways that I was not intellectually. Sacred music allowed me to surrender to an inner melting—to an ecstatic thrust into disembodiment—that otherwise I would have continued to deny.