The Psychedelics And Religion
...Clark, (in The Ecstatic Adventure)
THERE ARE NOT too many men in their sixties, professional academics at that, who have preserved sufficient openness to experience and receptivity to new ideas to accept the idea of personal experimentation with psychedelic drugs. Old age is too often synonymous with rigidity rather than wisdom. Not so with Walter Houston Clark, Professor of Psychology of Religion at Andover Newton Theological School in Newton, Massachusetts, former dean and professor at the Hartford School of Religious Education, author of The Oxford Group (1951) and The Psychology of Religion (1958), and founder of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion.
In an article on "Mysticism as a Basic Concept in Defining the Religious Self," Professor Clark wrote that
The [psychedelic] drugs are simply an auxiliary which, used carefully within a religious structure, may assist in mediating an experience which, aside from the presence of the drug, cannot be distinguished psychologically from mysticism. Studies have indicated that, when the experience is interpreted transcendentally or religiously, chances are improved for the rehabilitation of hopeless alcoholics and hardened criminals. Even though observations like these mean that the psychologist can learn a little more of the religious life, in no sense does it ultimately become any less of a mystery. Though man may sow and till, winds may blow and the rains fall, nevertheless it is still God that gives the increase.
Today, amid the confusion of grave problems caused not so much by decades of "drug abuse" as by decades of increasingly futile attempts to legislate away the use of prohibited substances by pious decree, it is all too easily forgotten that the rediscovery of the psychedelic drugs mid-way through the present century was as promising a find as mankind has...
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