So now, this is the whole essence, you see, of seeing—if you really see into this secret—that the world doesn’t contain any serious threats in it, because it’s all the basic “you” running up behind itself and saying “boo!” to see if you can get yourself to jump out of your skin. If you see that, be cool. That’s the whole art of Zen, you know: is cool Hinduism. The Hindus come on a little strong. When someone like Sri Ramakrishna pretty much openly announces that he’s the godhead, it’s a little tough. And when Sri Ramana accepts the pūjā of all the followers, and Sri Aurobindo sits everyday for darśan—it’s coming on a little strong. Well, the Zen people feel that that’s just a bit too much. And the way they come on is: they’re ordinary. And they say: when two Zen masters meet each other on the road, they need no introduction. When thieves meet, they recognize each other instantly. So they don’t say anything, don’t make any claims. As a matter of fact, so far from making claims, all good Zen masters say they have not attained anything, they have nothing to teach, and that’s the truth. Because anybody who tells you that he is in some way leading you to spiritual enlightenment is just like somebody who picks your pocket and sells you your own watch. Of course, if you didn’t know you had a watch, that might be the only way of getting you to realize!

So then, if, though, the people who do—by one means or another, prepared or unprepared, undisciplined or undisciplined—get into this kind of interior secret about the nature of the universe, and they have hitherto been insecure about themselves, and they’re going to use this secret as some way of creating trouble, and of stirring things up, and of boosting their own inadequate character structure—which is a word I prefer to use instead of “ego”—then there’s trouble. Because those people who are out there on the tightrope are going to get pretty scared, and they’re going to call in the police and say: this has got to stop. So then, we have a situation right like that now. And I want to make a few comments about it.

First of all, the major group (it seems to me) that are crying panic about LSD are psychoanalysts. To them this sort of thing is extremely threatening, because psychoanalysis in its theory—whether it be Freudian or whether it be Jungian—has a theory of the unconscious which is not unrelated to the general philosophy of science of the nineteenth century, which is that the unconscious (called the libido by the Freudians) is totally uncivilized, blind lust. For the Jungians it may be something even more dangerous than that, because they have not settled for the idea that it’s a sexual unconscious. It may be much more sinister than that. Deep down there is the spider mother. There are the screaming meemies at the bottom of that pit. And Esther Harding, in her book Psychic Energy, says that civilization is a mere veneer over the abysmal depths of primeval slime, in which there are the great serpents and appalling influences just waiting for a chance to get up there and raise hell.

So if you are psychoanalytically oriented, you are necessarily terrified of the unconscious. But you’ve learned a trick as, say, the old-fashioned Christians: they disciplined the unconscious with a club. Bible and birch rod, see? And they knocked it down. The Freudians said: no, this is a very dangerous creature, but you’ve got to train him in a different way. Like, a good horse trainer doesn’t use the whip, but lumps of sugar. But it’s still the same animal. In other words, this whole philosophy of Western man—as it crystallized in the late eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries—is that what we call humanity, consciousness, spirituality, values, is simply a veneer. The real thing underneath, the gutsy thing, is this terrible monster. And watch out for that! So anything that happens that might let that creature loose is looked upon by psychoanalysis as terrible.

I’m not going to accuse them of worrying about LSD because they think they’re going to be put out of a job. I don’t think that LSD is an automatic psychotherapy at all. It needs—if you’re going to use it for that purpose—you need psychotherapy in the ordinary way along with it. LSD is simply an exploratory instrument, like a microscope or a telescope—except this one’s inside you instead of outside you. And according to your capacity and knowledge you can use a microscope or a telescope to advantage. So, in the same way, according to your capacity and your knowledge you can use an interior instrument to your advantage, or just for kicks. But when these people, you know, really feel threatened by this thing, they start sending around messages and public utterances which sound exactly as if they had taken LSD, had had a bad trip with it, and were coming on paranoid. And so they are spreading subtle rumors that this substance causes permanent brain damage and utter destruction of the superego.

There are people in New York, likewise, who are spreading around the idea that, you see, once this thing has touched you, you were as if you’ve had a prefrontal lobotomy. You are somebody who ought to be put in a concentration camp because you lost your conscience. You’re out of order, and nothing more can be done about it. Now, do you see how alarming that could be in our day and age? To think that your brother, your aunt, has got permanent brain damage, who took some LSD?

You see, the situation is exactly paral—you know, the thing that we learn from history is: nobody ever learns from history. Consider: just go back a few hundred years to the days of the inquisition, and realize that the theologians of the church were, in those days, accorded the same kind of respect that we now accord to the professor of pathology at the University of California Medical School, or to the professor of physics at CalTech. We think those people are real authorities. They know! It works! They’ve experimented. They have knowledge. They are the wisest people in our society. Alright. A few hundred years ago, so were the theologians. And they had the same sense of responsibility towards the community that our great scientists and physicians have today. And they knew there was a thing called heresy going around that was not only capable, once you caught heresy, of making you damned to hell for ever and ever and ever to the most unimaginable tortures that would go on without end, but that it was infectious. And one heretic would soon make other heretics. So those entirely humanitarian and merciful church fathers got together and said: what are we going to do to stop this? Well now, they knew there is an eternal life beyond the grave, and so perhaps—just in the same way as if you got a cancer, and that’s something terrible because it might spread and destroy the whole body… cut it out, even burn it out if you have to, and a little pain on the part of the patients and the several months on the end of tubes won’t be too bad if you get rid of it. So they said: we’ve got to torture these people. Because they might, in the middle of this extreme experience, recant. And if they won’t recant, we’ll burn them. Because there’s just the chance that, in the agony of burning at the stake, they will say at the end: oh god, forgive me for my sins—and it’ll be alright.

Now, realize the absolutely merciful intent behind the inquisitors; perfectly responsible, acting on the best knowledge that they had in their day—don’t you see how that can happen again anytime? Permanent brain damage. People lost their sense of social responsibility, utterly destroyed by taking the wrong kind of drug. Now, defense: there is absolutely no evidence for this kind of thing whatsoever. The only brain damage that—I’ve just checked this out with the most eminent authorities in this area on the subject—the only permanent damage that’s been perpetrated (and even that wasn’t permanent) was on some cats, who were given doses that would be equivalent to a human being to over 2,000 micrograms of LSD. The normal dosage for a human being being about 100–200. But give a cat the equivalent for a human being of 2,000 micrograms, there will be synaptic defects that are called acute as distinct from chronic, that means they will disappear after a little while. This has been worked out carefully, and there is no evidence whatsoever of any serious neurological damage to a human being, except in cases where (A) they may have taken an absurdly large dose, or (B) taken it in conjunction with some other form of drug—an amphetamine, a barbiturate, or something like methadone, a narcotic, which did indeed cut off the oxygen supply to the brain, and therefore caused some damage.

So this scare talk is simply without foundation. But nevertheless, there are certain reasons to be cautious and, for those who understand the operation of these chemicals, to issue certain clear warnings. And this I want to talk about quite seriously.

Now, this class of psychotropic chemicals—which includes LSD, mescaline, and its original form peyote, psilocybin, cannabis, and so on, which is a very mild psychotropic—these do not (in moderation and proper use) in any way harm the physical organism, nor form such habits that you can’t get rid of them without unpleasant withdrawal symptoms. But if you take them in absurdly large doses, you are in for trouble.

I knew a Methodist minister who was a very violent teetotalitarian and became extremely sick from drinking too much milk. So, after all, if you sit down and you buy a bottle of whiskey, which you can get at any store anywhere, perfectly legit, and you consume the one quart of whiskey in one hour, you can expect trouble. So, in the same way, if you got LSD or something of that kind, and you take 1,000 micrograms because some friend of yours took 500 and you want to one-up him, watch out! You’re being just stupid.

Furthermore, you’ll be rather stupid if you buy the kind of LSD that is currently being circulated in the black market. Because—for two reasons: you don’t know what else is in it, and you don’t know how much is in it. There are two sorts of producers of LSD on the black market. One is the enthusiastic graduate student in chemistry who wants to turn the whole world on. And his product is apt to be pretty good, but excessive in dosage, and what says 100 micrograms may well be 300. There is another kind of producer who wants to make a good thing out of it, who wants to give you a big jazz, but he’ll mix it with amphetamines. There’s another more sinister kind of producer, who’ll either cut the amount or mix it with heroin or anything—any other substance; maybe, again, amphetamines or whatever—they get you hooked on it. So there is no control of the quality of what is being circulated. None whatever. And you just don’t know what you’re getting.

Now, this situation is the result of the fact that the United States never learns from history. It is the same old story of prohibition: to think the naïve notion that you can control something that might turn into a social evil by handing it over to the police. Now, after all, who pays the police? You do. And if you can’t control yourself, the police won’t control you either. But in lieu of controlling you they can suppress you. Now, in all conscience, the police have enough to do. Not only to control the traffic, which just gets worse every day by virtue of Parkinson’s law, but also all the possibilities of robbery, violence, murder, and so on and so forth, which is a full time job. But to ask the police to go and look for people who have LSD or marijuana or heroin or opium or whatever, or who are living irregular sex lives, or who have a gambling joint or whore house, this is to ask the police to act as officers of the state in service of the church—uniformed ministers. And that’s not their job. And when the police are asked to do that, they are put by lawmakers into a position which brings them into public disrespect, as it did in the days of prohibition. It is not fair to the police. Because if you send the police to hunt out LSD, it is a far more tough job than looking for a needle in a haystack. LSD can be disguised as anything whatsoever. It can be mixed with gum and put on an envelope. It can be entirely absorbed—vast quantities of it—into a piece of kleenex. The alcoholic base is then allowed to evaporate, and nobody would know it from any other dirty piece of kleenex that somebody stuck away in his pocket. It can then be reactivated. It can be made into lacquer to coat pins with. Anything. It can be disguised as peanut butter, orange juice, aspirin, just sugar. Anything you want. And it’s very difficult indeed to detect.

So when you try to suppress that sort of thing by law, you leave the gates wide open for every kind of blackmail. You want to get rid of your wife or your unfortunate business competitor? Just slip them some, and then arrange by a roundabout way to tip off the cops. The senator you don’t like? Political rival? Pshht. You see, any law of this nature—any law which, in a way, tries to enforce by the power of the state private morals or your own business in looking after your own nervous system—is in fact an unenforceable law. And all unenforceable laws lead to blackmail and public demoralization.

The only way to handle a thing of this kind is to bring it all out into the open. Nothing can be controlled when it’s driven underground. It ought to be controlled—just in the same way as we have learned how to control automobiles: we license people to drive them. So, in the same way, we don’t sell liquor to minors, we expect them to have some kind of education and grownup responsibility before they go boozing around. So, in exactly the same way, society has got to face the fact that it’s going to have to license people for certain spiritual adventures, or perhaps just plain pleasures, if that’s what you want to call it. After all, you can’t even join some churches—can’t join the Catholic church without taking a course of instruction. That takes a few weeks, and then they put you through an initiation. And you may say when you get through that: “Well, what was all that preparation for? I didn’t feel anything.”

But so, in exactly the same way with this, it is completely urgent, in other words, that we prevent the occurrence of a very serious socially destructive criminal situation created by law. You’ve heard of iatrogenic diseases? That means diseases caused by physicians. There are [???] diseases, or shall we say [???] crimes. Like, somebody said the only serious side effect of marijuana is that you may go to jail. This is a [???] crime. In other words, it is a ritual crime in exactly the same way that, when the early Christians refused to burn incense in front of the Roman gods (in whom the Romans themselves didn’t believe), they were guilty of a crime. It was a ritual crime. And they refused. And a reasonable man like the emperor Marcus Aurelius said to the Christians: “Now come off it. Really, do you have to refuse to burn incense?” And they said, “Yes. We’re serious about it.” So these are ritual crimes.

And so, in the same way, various ritual crimes exist, and our police—poor devils—are supposed to enforce it. And if they don’t, they’re going to get it from the politicians. Because the politicians have made all the old ladies up in Glendale scared, and Pasadena, and so on. They’re all just terrified about this. And so the politician gets the votes of those old ladies. And the police have to do what the politician tells them to do. And, you know, the police—they’re just people. It’s a terrible thing to put the police in a position where they’re going to earn public disrespect by enforcing (or trying to enforce) unenforceable laws.

So I would say in general, to sum up: substances like LSD which give away a secret about the nature of the social game, the human game, and what underlies it, are potentially dangerous—of course. Like any good thing is: electricity is dangerous, fire is dangerous, cars are dangerous, planes are dangerous (but not so dangerous as driving on the freeway). The only way to handle danger is to face it. If you start getting frightened of it, then you make it worse. Because you project onto it all kinds of bogeys and threats which don’t exist in it at all. So this is also a rule. And please, anybody here who’s a psychotherapist, if he doesn’t know this already, take note. If you get someone thrown on your hands who, as a result of taking any psychotropic drug is in a psychotic state, don’t be frightened. Because the moment you’re afraid, your patient will pick up your fear by kind of osmosis and get worse. The rule about all terrors—going back to where I started from, the dweller on the threshold—the rule for all terrors is: head straight into them. When you are sailing in a storm, you don’t let a wave hit your boat on the side. You go bow into the wave and ride it. So, in the same way, old folklore says—this is an old wive’s tale with a lot of truth in it—whenever you meet a ghost, don’t run away. Because the ghost will capture the substance of your fear and materialize itself out of your own substance, and will kill you eventually because it will take over all your own vitality. So then: whenever confronted with a ghost, walk straight into it and it will disappear.

And so, in the same way, when people stir up the depths of the unconscious and are confronted with their own monsters, or with the terrors of discovering that they’re in a relativistic world where black implies white and white implies black, so who’s in charge? You know, grandfather’s dead, father’s dead, too. Just leaves me. Who? Who’s the authority? See? When you get that sense of terror, go right at it. Don’t run away. Explore, feel fear as completely as you can feel it. Head straight into it. And just it so happens that these things give you the property—the opportunity, let me put it that way—the opportunity to go into some of your very, very most closely kept skeletons. And the result of that is invariably beneficial.