Why Are Drugs Important to Religion?

Drugs

Carl Hart makes the case in Drug Use for Grown-Ups that using drugs is a human right. But religious use asks for more.

Psychedelic culture has long hoped these substances were a shortcut to a better world: dissolve enough egos and cruelty gives way to empathy. The evidence has not kept pace with the hope. People have profound experiences, feel connected to everything, and go back to work on Monday largely unchanged. Perhaps observers mistook insight for the ability to act under pressure.

So what can a drug offer a religion? To answer, we need a little psychology.

Psychology Basics

These ideas come from Internal Family Systems (IFS), a form of therapy developed by Richard Schwartz and taught by the IFS Institute.

Parts. The mind is not one voice. We all have parts: an inner critic, a planner, a frightened child, a protector who stashes food. Each has its own feelings and goals, and each is trying to help. Beneath the parts is the Self, a calm, curious, compassionate presence that everyone has and nobody can lose.

Blending and unblending. When a part blends with you, you stop noticing it and start being it. You don’t think “a part of me is afraid.” You just are afraid, and the fear’s view of the world is the only view. Unblending is stepping back so the part is something you can notice and talk to.

Mental injury. When an experience feels too threatening for the whole mind to bear, the mind splits. The part that felt the experience is cut off from the rest. Other parts may work hard to keep it locked away. A child punished for anger may exile the anger. A boy teased for crying may exile his sadness.

The exiled feelings don’t vanish. They leak out as tension, sudden rage, anxiety, or a vague sense that something is missing. The parts guarding the exile are trapped too, unable to relax. Datura is a stark example. It brings terror, vivid hallucinations that feel completely real, and amnesia afterward.

Entheogens

A drug that causes mental injury has no place in the sanctuary. That is why we have no interest in datura or in sleep aids like zolpidem. A sacrament should bring you closer to your own mind and to the people around you.

Personal emotional healing and development. Drugs can assist in looking backward (processing old wounds and trauma) and forward (growth in openness, resilience, and purpose).

Social connection and cohesion. Shared rites bind people together.

An Uncheatable Test of Character

Knowing what’s right and doing it under duress are different things. Therapists feed their own need to be needed. Judges sentence from irritation. Police escalate because adrenaline is doing the thinking. Parents pass their unprocessed trauma to their children. What’s missing is emotional regulation: noticing what you feel and choosing your response instead of being swept away.

So the special opportunity is measurement, not awakening: a way to measure Self-leadership. Questionnaires capture vocabulary, not behavior. A trained observer’s judgment is slow, expensive, and varies between observers. Daily life provokes unpredictably.

A psychedelic session administers a measured dose of provocation. Rehearsed behavior is easy to perform, but the experience ambushes you with material you cannot rehearse. Fear, grandiosity, or greed may surge. Either you blend with it and get swept away, or you unblend and hold steady. Fail once and it might be the occasion. Fail consistently and it’s you.

A community that can see who stays steady under pressure can choose better leaders. See Incorruptible Institutions Need Incorruptible People First.

Mutual Dependency

Politics safeguards religious freedom: without laws and officials who protect the right to gather, worship, and use sacraments, no church survives. But politics is only as trustworthy as the people who hold power.

Leaders whose character has been tested in the rite are the ones worth trusting with that power. In turn, they protect the freedom that makes the rite possible.

Celebration

This is the solution the Second Church of the Kykeon celebrates.