Alan Watts: Drugs: Turning the Head or Turning On

• Psychedelic experiences reveal a form of cosmic consciousness aligned with scientific understanding of organism-environment unity.
• Context and preparation (“set and setting”) are critical to the quality and safety of psychedelic experiences.
• Psychedelics are non-addictive, non-compulsive, but potentially psychologically risky without guidance.
• The mystical experience challenges Western cultural models of isolated ego and guilt-based conformity.
• Legislation should not criminalize personal moral choices that do not harm others; drug use is better treated as a public health issue.
• Young people’s interest in psychedelics stems from genuine existential inquiry, not mere hedonism.
• Responsible scientific, psychological, and spiritual frameworks are essential for integrating psychedelic experiences safely.
• Society must openly address the risks and benefits rather than resort to repression that drives underground use.

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[Music] thank you [Music] welcome to the Alan Watts podcast I'm your host Mark watts and today we're going to listen to an amazing recording it was made in 1966 at San Jose State at a talk on drugs turning the head or turning on and to put this in perspective there was a lot going on at that time the youth was in full Revolt there was a lot of civil unrest and the use of Mind expanding substance is generally called psychedelics was in Broad use in the counterculture it was quite a Time and my father was an early Pioneer a few


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years earlier in the mid and late 50s researchers had approached my father all this tuxley and a few others asking them to try these substances to see what their reactions would be I think they figured that a philosopher or an author would have a better ability to communicate and relay the experiences that people were having with these substances so at first he tried mescaline with one doctor and got what he described as aesthetically pleasing results but it was not the full-blown experience that


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he'd heard about however another researcher gave him lsd25 and that produced what he later described as a religious experience however by the mid 60s it was obvious that the street acid that was going around was not quite the same thing as what he had experienced in the labs and he was cooling off a bit on this a few years later he would come to say that they could be useful tools but once you got the message it was good to hang up the phone [Music] and a lot of this had to do with not just the chemicals themselves but


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people's preparation and approach to them what was called a set and setting as many of these people were taking them for primarily recreational purposes and they were very powerful psychoactive chemicals and that wasn't always the best approach so in this talk he really gets into the whole concept of drugs and why we call such a wide variety of substances drugs and it's a very interesting revelatory talk with a bit of biographic content but also very valuable and wide-ranging social commentary on what was going on


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at the time I think you'll enjoy this it's Alan Watts in drugs turning the head or turning on I suppose that next to the question of racial disturbance there is no more controversial problem about the domestic affairs of this country at the present time than drugs the word drugs has a very funny semantic problem you have a place called a drugstore which is perfectly quickly and a regular part of the scene of life in these United States but at the same time you have a word drug as when we say a


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person is drugged which means that he is happy but incompetent under the influence of the heavy medical sedation we also have another word that should be drugged I suppose if we use it in that way which is called drunk because the person uh even pleasantly inebriated with alcohol is just as much drugged as a person might be under the influence of morphine he is rendered insensitive and vaguely sleepy now I should explain how I came to be interested in the problem which has now become so controversial


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of the influence of chemicals on the human mind for many many years more than 30 years I've been interested in the psychology of religion pretty much as a disciple of William James who was really the first outstanding psychologist of religion try to understand what is going on when people have religious experiences and he concentrated finally and rather particularly on a certain class of religious experience there are experiences of visions which people have Revelations they see Jesus Christ the Virgin Mary Krishna


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Buddha or who have you but these are in a certain way less interesting than the experiences in which the individual has a sudden transformation of his sense of being alive these experiences occur sometimes quite spontaneously to children to adolescence or to anyone at almost any time of life sometimes they occur as the result of a of the apparent result of a discipline as if you practiced yoga Zen meditation or Catholic content contemplative prayer and sometimes they occur as a result of certain


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ingestions of chemicals the interesting type of this experience is when the individual is brought to realize that something that we'll have to describe from a number of different points of view The Experience itself is extremely simple the only thing that is complicated is when we start to try to describe it in language The Experience itself in its utmost simplicity was once written down by somebody who took nitrous oxide and had a sense of total clarity about all the problems of life and as he came


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to our experience he had his pencil poised over sheet of paper to write down what was the real nitty-gritty about this and he wrote it down you really got the point then when he returned to normal Consciousness he looked at what he had written and he saw that what he had written was everything in this universe as the smell of burnt almonds foreign over which the academic Community had a good laugh and said well obviously this was a perfectly frivolous Enterprise but um upon mature consideration everything in


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this universe is the smell of burned almonds that is to say take any particular experience such as the smell of burnt almonds or uh looking into the eyes of the person you love or eating a steak flying an airplane lying on the beach in the sun any experience there is a way in which that experience implies everything else in the universe the word implies is probably better than the word is is to say you experience there are certain States Of Consciousness in which you experience that everything is


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interconnected everything goes with everything else I knew a woman who got in an accident in an elevator she hadn't taken any drugs but in this accident she was pinned with her leg caught in the mechanism and she was there for half an hour before anybody could get to her rescue she was having agonies but she knew that she simply had to wait there was nothing to do about it so she completely accepted her situation and she said that in that time she realized as to put it under her own words there is not a single grain of dust in


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this whole universe that is out of place in other words that peculiar painful unwanted situation was somehow made acceptable and all right because it fitted in to a harmonious arrangement which involved everything that was happening that had happened or that ever would happen and whether you approve of this kind of experience or not whether you think it's rational or not it keeps happening spontaneously through discipline or as a consequence of chemical agencies to thousands of people and it is of course one of the


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generating forces in the things we call the great religions of the world obviously Jesus Christ uh had an experience of this kind which uh brought him to the feeling that he as a living organism was an expression of what he called in the language available to him God the Father I and the father are one he who has seen me has seen the father that was an absolutely unacceptable pronouncement to his contemporaries and so he got crucified we are I hope a more tolerant age and we are I think really in need


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of experiencing the relationship of the individual to the physical world in a way that is more positive more constructive more friendly more close than that which expresses itself in a hostile technology bent on the domination and the conquest of nature considered as something alien to the human spirit mechanical Thoughtless and stupid that surrounds us as the mere featureless energy behind the galaxies if indeed it were possible for many of us to have a sensation of not just merely belonging in this world but


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being it if we could feel that our separate individuality is a coming and going expression of what it is that is happening through all the cycles of time and generations of cosmoses we'd be able to cool it a bit and not be so frantic in our pursuit of survival it might be a very good thing and that's simply giving an explanation of why I personally have been interested in exploring the psychology and the conditions of this kind of experience for so many years foreign in the middle 1950s


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a British psychiatrist by the name of Humphrey Osmond persuaded a British novelist by the name of Aldous Huxley to take a dose of masculine and in the thought that at the time this was a drug which in new States Of Consciousness similar to schizophrenia marvelous master of words and therefore it might be a good idea to see if this experience were given to a man who could describe things in a wonderfully accurate and Vivid way we might learn something about what it does all this Huxley didn't simply deliver a


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private report to the doctors he rushed into print and published a book called The Doors of perception in which he said in effect that he felt from his point of view that having taken mescaline gave him an experience which he could not but identify with the great mystical experience of man's integration with the universe which of course had been known through all history when I read this as a student of the psychology of religion I was naturally fascinated but unbelieving I thought you know all this sometimes


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goes off the deep end I knew him very well and I know he had a kind of enthusiasm for all kinds of novelty he had foreseen in his novel Brave New World that there might be a way of drugging human beings into sort of Perpetual contentment and happiness so that they would give no further trouble to each other and of course everybody had put this down and said uh that would be the end of the human spirit and so I felt maybe this is another of all this is weird things and uh slightly dismissed it but then the psychiatrists who had


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involved him in this I finally got in touch with me because they said you're supposed to be an authority on the psychology of religion and we'd like to know what you think about uh drug induced mysticism so I was foolish enough at the time to accept an invitation to stand in for all this Huxley at a meeting of the American Psychiatric association in Los Angeles he couldn't be present and they asked me to talk about this in this place I had not at that time experienced any of these drugs


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and I simply gave a theoretical talk on the subject and said if indeed they do produce something like the deepest religious experience I would imagine that it would be like the sensation of swimming with water wings that uh you're kept up by so-called artificial means you get a notion of how it is to float but as yet you haven't actually learned how to swim and you know that magical moment because almost everybody in this room Art Museum knows how to swim and you remember the magical moment when you suddenly found


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you could trust yourself to the water and keep afloat and it was something a little bit beyond a little bit different than being kept up by a life jacket or water wings well in a way I still preserve this point of view with regard to the relation of psychedelic chemicals to mysticism but let me go on with the story of what actually happened somewhat later one of the doctors who had been associated with all this Huxley said to me will you actually try this out and give us your views on it and it's very nice to be flattered as an


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authority and uh also I was just plain curious and I'm the sort of person who'll try anything once and so I submitted to being dosed with 100 micrograms of lysergic acid diethylamide number 25. which baby is not what you call acid it's a very specific and particular chemical and I had an extraordinarily interesting experience but I felt that it was an aesthetic experience not a mystical experience and so reported it was just fascinating the changes of one sense perception it was as if you know a gadget called a


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kaleidoscope which is a combination of a kaleidoscope and a telescope you look through this thing and it models everything you look at in fascinating patterns according to its own inner structure and I felt that this drug did exactly the same thing as that that it modified your nervous system in a certain way like looking through a kaleidoscope telescope instead of a telescope telescope and it just jazzed everything up and that was very interesting and so what then later on another psychiatrist


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approached me he was in San Francisco at Langley Porter and said I don't think you've really gone into this deeply enough uh I think I could point out certain things to you that uh would be interesting because you see uh this drug is something that you have to learn how to use just as you would learn how a certain technique to it supposing you're a biologist or a bacteriologist uh you've got to learn the art of using the the instrument so I said okay okay okay let's try it again


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I was very skeptical of the whole thing and uh lo and behold I had what I simply could not deny being a an experience of cosmic Consciousness the sense of complete fundamental total Unity forever and ever with the whole universe and not only that but that what this thing was fundamentally despite everything and every kind of appearance in ordinary life to the contrary that the energy behind the world was ecstatic Bliss and love well I was very embarrassed by this because I thought gee you can't get


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mysticism out of a bottle uh that's degrading everything but yet I couldn't deny the fact that it had happened so then by this time Aldous Huxley had rushed into print and it let the cat out of the bag that this kind of experience was possible through chemicals at that time neither he nor I knew that this would become a tremendous popular rage but I felt that I had a certain responsibility as somebody who knew something about the psychology of religion and since he had come out in print


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and the idea was getting around that this was possible I ought to say a few things about it in addition that would induce wisdom caution and uh responsibility about the whole thing and so I recorded my own experiences of this kind of thing in a book called The joyous cosmology to which I appended not only since the center part of the book was a description of the experiences that I'd actually had and then there was a prologue and an epilogue which were concerned with the social problems psychological problems that might attend


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this kind of practice and of course these are things that have assumed almost catastrophic dimensions so suddenly in other words the whole world of young people caught on to this thing and said let's turn on let's have this experience and then when Timothy Leary got in the act uh all caution was thrown to the winds and he felt that this is something that everybody really owed to himself everybody ought to be turned on well I wasn't so sure about that because I wouldn't say everybody


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ought to sail around the world in an open sailboat it's a great thing if you can do it but I wouldn't sort of recommend it to anyone I wouldn't say that everybody ought to spend three weeks absolutely alone in a forest to find out who you are if you could take it it's a great experience but I wouldn't want to shove it down your throat and incidentally that's the reason I ceased being a minister of religion I was born for a while but I found myself in the awkward position of


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supporting missionaries of people who say this Christianity is so great that you've all got to have it and I don't believe that however good a thing there may be in the world that you should force it on people you should offer it yes you should make it available but don't shove it down the throat and always observe the saying of Jesus which is ought to be very embarrassing to the missionaries of Jesus give not that which is wholly unto dogs neither cast you your Pearls Before Swine foreign


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so I don't want to Define in advance who are swine and who are not but I do think there is to be observed a very great caution in handing out anything good after all you don't serve Oysters Rockefeller to your children because what they want is hot dogs or hamburgers nice cream you have to have a certain taste and a certain palate to appreciate things like that and this is even more true when something you're going to do involves a certain element of danger and we all saw right away


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that the use of psychedelic chemicals could be dangerous as well as Illuminating why for a very simple reason that the mystical experience is something rather badly handled in western western culture because we're not used to it it's not something which our standard brands of religion have done anything much about they preach morals they don't help people to find Cosmic consciousness and therefore in the context of Western culture a person who has the mystical experience is very liable to get up and


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announce that he's God the Father Almighty and that he's impersonally in charge of the whole universe and that this is at the same time a terrible responsibility so much so that a boy down in Los Angeles who took uh some black market LSD and had a very Troublesome experience turned himself into the police with a little note saying please help me signed Jehovah other people have imagined that they are perfectly weightless and can walk out of a window and fly other people have imagined that they


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understand everything completely that they can predict the future and remember all the paths that they can understand the meaning of any foreign language spoken to them instantly and all sorts of marvelous things like that and this is because of their traditional idea of becoming God and being omniscient and omnipotent thank you and because they feel that very basic sense of being one with everything that's happening they misinterpret this through uh the screen through the conditioning of their Western Christian Jewish


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culture to mean I am personally in charge of everything that's going on therefore they get megalomania delusions of grandeur and all that kind of thing and so uh an unsupervised experience with this kind of thing can sometimes be quite disastrous now then we have therefore various things to consider is the experience induced by such chemicals LSD masculine psilocybin or the humble cannabis uh is it valuable socially or is it simply a hallucination if we might begin with the peculiar State of Mind induced by alcohol


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let's first of all consider that is the feeling of comfort and ease and relaxation which you experience through alcohol a real relaxation a real Comfort or is it a hallucination well we can say that alcohol does have a valuable service to mankind to a certain extent mild quantities of this chemical make people less uptight make them socialize easily relax them to have a good appetite before dinner but only in very strict moderation more than enough of this chemical is deleterious to the whole human organism


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and therefore it should be taken only in slight quantities and is best handled as the French have handled uh The Cult of Fine Wines where you drink for the taste rather than the kick and the cult of French wines lies behind the whole Cult of French cooking and is a highly civilizing influence hooray for that but it's strictly in moderation beyond that point it's really not so good [Music] but what about these other things we find that all of these strictly speaking psychedelic chemicals


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to be specific again lysergic acid masculine psilocybin cannabis and uh to a lesser extent the tryptamine drugs which have not been so fully explored these chemicals are not addictive as is alcohol as is heroin morphine and things of that order in that they do not if a person stops using them he does not suffer from withdrawal symptoms and also he does not have to keep increasing the dosage in order to produce the peculiar effects which they induce but the question remains is the change of Consciousness which


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they produce a socially valuable and B anything which gives us a better view of reality or is it just a hallucination now let me take the second Point first the basic transformation of Consciousness which comes about through the use of psychedelic chemicals is probably best described as one of polar feelings you feel that everything outside is not the opposite of or contradiction of the inside but it just goes with it you feel that the figure always goes with its background and therefore you see in a funny way


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that all human behavior goes together in such a way that you cannot have saints without sinners you cannot have cops without rubbers you cannot have failures without successes and vice versa you cannot have uh the good and the valuable in life without the background contrast of the failure and the evil and also you cannot have life without death that's a rather shocking realization because you see our culture is geared to the idealism of having the good without the evil of using medicine to bring us to the


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point where we don't need to die so that we can have life without death and of reforming and psychotherapizing people so that we can have all good law-abiding citizens and no criminals all same people and nobody in the asylums and yet and yet and yet and yet from another point of view you can see that were there no sick people there would be no incentive for the study of Medicine were there no crazy people there would be no incentive to the study of psychology finding out about the human mind


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and were there no Wicked people there would be no puzzle and thinking about the problems of ethics so that you arrive sometimes at this funny point of view where you see that everybody however bad has an essential contribution to the totality of life and um you don't know quite what to do with that kind of insight you're one point you're in time to say it's completely subversive and yet from another point of view you say but it isn't subversive because it shows that everything is


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somehow in its proper place but at any rate that is a point of view which is very largely brought about by the use of these chemicals and therefore you can very easily see why any kind of government would be uneasy about it because they would feel it undermines conscience that is to say it enables people to feel not so guilty about themselves and every government manages people by exploiting and working on their sense of guilt because everybody in this room has a private Secret there's something about yourself that


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you're not going to talk about publicly something you're frightened of or ashamed of and any good psychologist can worm it out of you [Applause] and brainwash you and exploit your peculiar temptation or your peculiar psychosis and make you hate yourself because of it and therefore expiate for your sins by going along with his particular designs and his particular form of punishment to relieve you of your guilt so exploitation of guilt is the primary method of dictatorships of waggling you into obeying the


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directives of an authoritarian government watch it because the idea that all men are equal in the sight of God becomes under the administration of dictators the idea that all men are equally inferior you're all criminals and therefore the police can be rude to all of you everyone's a crook and to approved innocent but the basis of course of our Notions of common law is that everybody is innocent until proved guilty a principle that is observed more in the breach than otherwise so there is then a kind of a threat in


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this sort of experience but now let's go on consider is it a fantasy or is it in any way true let's suppose I experience that my own individual existence is completely continuous with the existence of everything else that I'm a part of nature not merely a part but an expression of the whole activity of the universe is that of hallucination how am I to judge uh the criteria by which we judge today are the ideas of our scientists and if I go to the biologist the physicist the chemist I find out that his description of me as


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a human being fits better with this so-called hallucination than does my normal state of consciousness in my normal State of Consciousness in which I am a product of a certain culture which believes that every individual is a separate Soul or Freudian ego inhabiting a physical vehicle I feel myself alienated from and separate from everything else that goes on but if I'm described by a biologist I'm nothing of a kind a biologist describes me as an organism environment not an organism in an environment


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but an organism hyphen environment the way that he describes my behavior he describes my behavior as the same thing as the behavior of my environment you'll go further than that you'll describe the behavior of my environment as the same thing as my behavior we are a single field of process or what is sometimes called a transaction in other words the fact that the sun is light is the result of my nervous system my nervous system turns the sun into light and the sun would not be light unless my


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nervous system and your nervous system made it so so in a way you make the world at the same time your nervous system is in the same physical world as the sun and likewise sometimes under the influence of psychedelic chemicals you feel that everything that's going on is simply inside your head the next moment you feel that your head is inside everything that's going on and then you feel that everything is going on inside your head it sort of caps itself like this like a game that children's face of both points of view


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are true thank you but what I'm going to say is the feeling of my being continuous with everything that's happening in the physical world fits the facts as described by science more accurately than the normal subjective feeling of my being something merely in the world being pushed around by it to some extent and being able on my own part to push it around to some extent but basically a stranger in the Earth so upon that sort of Criterion I feel that the change of Consciousness induced by such a chemical fits the


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facts of scientific observation better than the normal kind of Consciousness which I've been taught in my family and my schooling where I've been given a feeling of my own existence that is simply the mythology of a particular culture and also I go on to feel that it may be quite important that my state of consciousness be changed for our general survival because if I feel myself alien from and against my natural environment the likelihood is that I shall pick a fight with it and that I shall use technological power


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to destroy it and not to cooperate with it this I can see is what our culture is already doing and therefore it impresses itself upon me that there is a certain urgency for human beings Minds being changed so that they can cooperate with their environment and not fight it so then the idea occurs to me is it perhaps providential that at this time in history a chemical agent makes itself available which will enable us to treat the disease of alienated consciousness of hostility to the world could it be as providential that this is


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found in the 20th century as Jenna found smallpox vaccine in the 19th century thank you that's not inconceivable Arthur Kessler who is a very sober gentleman and with whom I've had considerably bitter arguments about his estimation of Oriental philosophy as in this book The Ghost and the Machine come out with an ocean that may be the only thing that can save technological man from destroying himself is to treat his neurology directly to alter it and some neurologists are seriously beginning to talk about the necessity


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for peace technology we might call it chemical peacefire but there is among so many of us a resentment to this whole idea because we say it means then that you are reducing the human Spirit to Mere chemicals and that we cannot tolerate I remember being at a meeting of psychiatrists and someone was talking about The Marvelous uses of things like Thorazine and reservine in uh treating mental disturbance and this man said if I ever thought that my profession of Psychiatry would be reduced to giving pills


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I would become a used automobile salesman thank you the feeling in other words this is a great put down on human beings if all that you are is chemicals so what but but but our experience again and again and again in the use of these chemicals does not go along with that view we have found that uh and this has been pretty much statistically verified by people working at Silver Springs Maryland which is the official United States Center for research with psychedelics that there is no necessary connection between


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taking say LSD and having a mystical experience it may happen and it may not happen because it defends depends on factors beyond the drug itself it depends on to whom it is given and under what circumstances it is given and by whom it is given in other words the function of the chemical is purely instrumental here you've got a gorgeous piano made by Steinway company beautiful crazy and anybody who knows nothing about playing the piano can flitter his fingers around on the Steinway and it produces sounds that are


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essentially in themselves excellent because the piano is a fine instrument but they are not ordered in any kind of musical coherence give the same instrument to an expert and he uses it marvelously and it's exactly the same thing with psychedelic chemicals anybody can have a ball with them just like anybody can have a ball looking through a microscope or a telescope but not everyone can use them to produce Relentless experience or profound aesthetic experience or as in many cases scientific inventiveness


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it depends on what you bring to it what you get out of it so we must regard these things as very strictly instrumental they do not do for you anything which you yourself in a way don't bring to it but there always is naturally the temptation to feel that salvation lies in the bottle salvation lies in the pill and if we only could take this thing we should somehow be transported and that this is not the case it's proved by the increasing number of people who have taken what I'll call Street acid


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under the worst sort of circumstances not knowing what it's even made of what the dosage is and having no regard to the conditions in which it is taken and have had the so-called famous bad trips of course and I must underline the fact don't use Street acid you don't know what it is of course if you're willing to play Russian Roulette and you're willing to take all sorts of gambles I suppose it's a free country but it really isn't very sensible you can take risks which are not under


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your control you don't know what to do with it on the other hand when we consider from a social point of view what we're going to do about this it isn't simply that there is lysergic acid of some sort running around on the streets in the black market and mescaline psalocybin dimethyltryptamine but also of course our old friend marijuana which here there's no particular question about whether it's uh bad marijuana it's just it's just a vegetable and what should be public policy with


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regard to these things I feel very strongly that in a country where we value freedom we must not attempt to legislate morality especially morality that is simply the concern of the individual towards himself in other words go going back to even the basic religious ideas about moral Behavior it's fundamental to both Jewish and Christian thinking that an action is not significantly moral if it's done under compulsion in other words if you stay faithful to your wife merely because you are afraid


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of the consequences of adultery you are not a truly faithful husband if you give arms to the poor merely in order to get yourself a place in heaven or you know on the roster of donors to the synagogue uh you are not truly charitable so it is of the essence of moral Behavior according to Jewish and Christian theology that it be voluntary so that any moral Behavior which is enforced is not moral Behavior as a result of enforcement and the only reason for enforcing any moral behavior is that immoral Behavior


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May in certain circumstances cause grave inconvenience to others as murdering people as robbing them as mugging them on the streets that we are I think agreed ought to be prevented by the police but when it comes to whether you will Gamble whether you will have uh irregular sexual games whether you will change your state of consciousness by alcohol by tobacco by uh sleeping pills by aspirin by caffeine by a lysergic acid you have a certain responsibility to judge for yourself because if you're deprived of that


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responsibility of what other responsibilities might you also be deprived for your own good what you read ought you to read The Works of Karl Marx Mr Rafferty didn't think so and yet how would you know what do you to do about a communist enemy if you didn't understand the philosophy of Marx how do you know how to deal with China unless you've read everything written by Mao Zedong you've got to understand your enemy if enemy he must be so responsibility implies a certain freedom to take risks and to make Adventures


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it's very dangerous it could have been said to go up in the air in the machine the Wright brothers took a grave risk why if they had crashed what would have happened to their wives and children would they have been a carer of the state therefore the Wright brothers should not have been allowed to fly that airplane so in the same way you might go mad and your wives and children no longer have your support if you took certain adventures in consciousness it's the same problem so does the state have the right to tell


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you that there are certain risks you mustn't take if the state does assume that responsibility it can't be helped that the state is also saying at the same time that we must not make experiments which could possibly result in great benefits to mankind we don't know whether they will result in this or not the knowledge about this whole thing is not as yet certain but we at least have the right to make the attempt but I suggest that we don't make that attempt in absolutely undisciplined and


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uncontrolled situations but the opposition to the use of these chemicals by politicians who are simply collecting votes and arousing all the little old ladies terrified by Sensational stories in the Press that's all that is but the fact remains the hardcore of the fact is that if we are going to take dangerous Adventures of this kind it should be done absolutely out in the open with the assistance of the best scientific and psychological and religious wisdom that is available if we send people out into space and uh


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our astronauts we have the whole scientific faculty of the country behind them likewise if we're going to send people into Inner Space instead of being something that is done some Rosa in a paranoid guilty atmosphere it should be something in which we openly cooperate with the feeling uh we are holding your hand and we're with you all the way foreign but it isn't being done like that and we are going through the same problem that we have been going through in this country for years and you may be


00:56:04 - 00:57:16
as I am very anxious that there be Law and Order in this country that there be respect for our policemen but respect for our policemen in this country ceased when prohibition came into effect because the offices of the law were asked to enforce things that the citizen really simply were not going to observe they became hypocrites therefore armed preachers and all preaching creates hypocrisy when you put guns into the hands of clergyman you've got real trouble at one Fell Swoop we could restore


00:56:51 - 00:58:09
respect for the police in this country by taking all matters of private morals out of their hands question needing no answer who would volunteer to serve on a vice squad what kind of personality [Music] who would volunteer to peek through holes into men's toilets to see what they're doing what kind you know a lot of say we can't retrain the whole police we can't recruit a new police force with college educations and anything you might demand it just can't be done it's not practical there isn't enough


00:57:43 - 00:59:08
budget as if that really mattered but the practice logarithm but at one simple stroke of the pen if we remove the drug questions the sex questions the uh gambling questions and all those sort of things out of police control and regard them simply as public health problems uh respect for the police would go up like that and we need it we've got to have it foreign because you can't be schizophrenic about your law enforcement officers and say to them it's your responsibility to control


00:58:28 - 00:59:42
Us in ways that we don't want to be controlled they don't know what to do no wonder they're confused now one of their start acting crazy if you've got to get behind these people and help them and that's it really [Applause] so then in basically young people have become interested in these so-called drugs because young people it's not that they're just out for kicks it's so easy to dismiss the adventures of the Young by saying they're out for kicks they're just goofing off


00:59:11 - 01:00:27
all right if young people are just the kind of people who are irresponsible and they're just goofing off and are out for kicks why assign them with a terrifying responsibility of fighting with the Armed Forces if you can say they are responsible enough to do that you must not dismiss them as immature uh little kids if you think they are as adults you fight your own battles so the position is not that young people today are just looking for kids they are out for trying to find out what the hell


00:59:56 - 01:01:05
this universe is about and they are very confused because the answers of the old standard brand religions while they are in a way respected they're not plausible the answers of science also aren't plausible because they're sort of uh lacking in the sense of wonder you know as all this is all mechanism stuff and you've got to study that and you've got to go through all these statistics and let's make it all as dull as possible so that we'll know you're a sound scientist because you're a real


01:00:32 - 01:01:38
dull the children don't see that they know this universe is amazing but the idea of God the father in The Old sense isn't amazing enough and the idea of blind energy isn't amazing enough either they just they're full of wonder and their excitement they want to find out what this is so when they get the whisper of a suggestion that if you change your Consciousness in a certain way you might find out what this is about the reason why they go into that is not because they're just out for an idol


01:01:08 - 01:02:23
kick it's because they're willing take the risk of going crazy in order perhaps to get an insight into the meaning of things but you can't put down people like that people are taking who know they're taking the risk of going crazy it's just the same as the people who are taking the risk of crashing we'll learn to fly planes of being uh I don't know what kind of asphyxiation or astronauts of catching all sorts of infectious diseases if they wanted to treat lepers the same old thing


01:01:56 - 01:03:08
people who are willing to take that Adventure need public support and the full exercise of wisdom and guidance in their Enterprise and if that is given they won't undertake these adventures in an idol and stupid way but if you disallow the whole thing it'll just go ahead in a completely undisciplined and crazy fashion and very naturally there will be all kinds of disasters and bad trips grasp this nettle Danger and don't pretend it isn't there today's podcast was made possible


01:02:42 - 01:04:42
through the help of the rumdus be here Now podcast Network our theme music is by Zakir Hussein courtesy of moment records and is from his rhythm experience LP for further information about the spoken works of Alan Watts please visit us at Alan watts.org thank you for listening and we'll see you for the next episode [Music] [Applause] [Music] thank you [Music] foreign [Music]