The Acid Diaries (Christopher Gray) / quote 62 of 125
Religious experiences versus religious lives
Religious Import?” The text was well known and had been one of the most widely reprinted of all papers on psychedelics in the ’60s. Despite being in many ways unusually positive for an academic, Houston Smith had felt bound to draw a line under psychedelics, and his tentative conclusion had become all but axiomatic in psychedelic studies. Drugs appear to be able to induce religious experiences; it is less evident that they can produce religious lives. While I was still tripping I would, however ruefully, have agreed. But since I’d stopped tripping I had observed, as I just mentioned, a process of self-analysis at work, which was continuing without any further doses of the drug. Acid appeared to have kick-started a process that in itself was spontaneous. Trips were not “just a drug” at all. Aldous Huxley’s original image of mescaline bypassing a reducing valve in the brain, however simplistic in terms of brain chemistry, was substantially correct.