The Acid Diaries (Christopher Gray) / quote 92 of 125
Being in the world but not of it
Toynbee’s analyses of the various forms such resistance takes are too complex to do more than touch upon here—initially workers tend to be conservative and merely want to return to an earlier, less dehumanized stage of society; only as such Utopianism proves impossible do they turn to violent insurrection—and only after repeated failures on both fronts do a substantial number begin to see that there is only one way in which they can effectively secede: by what Toynbee, and I think he was one of the first Westerners to use the phrase, calls “being in the world, but not of it.”*8 This process—which he further characterizes as being one of detachment and transfiguration—forms the matrix of a new “higher” or universal religion. Such a religion is predicated on the equality of all beings, spiritual brother- and sisterhood eclipsing the concern for personal salvation, which dominated the same civilization’s earlier and less successful attempts at renewing spiritual awareness. Toynbee points to early Christianity or Mahayana Buddhism as being prime examples of such religions produced by vast civilizations in their agony. This is the only way the parent civilization can redeem and preserve any true values it may still possess; and, in my reading of him, at any rate, Toynbee is inferring that this is the process in which we are all involved today. Obviously what I was wondering at the time was: Could Ecstasy play the role of sacrament in such a process? I don’t think there can be much doubt about the drug’s quality of being a sacrament in search of a religion. Not that the religious issues reflected