Cannabis, Spirituality and Religion

 

'They who know of no purer sources of truth, who have traced up its stream no higher, stand, and wisely stand, by the Bible and the Constitution and drink at it there with reverence and humility; but they who behold where it comes trickling into this lake or that pool gird up their loins once more and continue their pilgrimage toward its fountainhead.'

 - Civil Disobedience, Henry D Thoreau



Spirituality and religion are two different things. Spirituality is inward facing while religion is outward facing. There is nothing in common between spirituality and religion. Most people, however, confuse the two, practicing religion zealously thinking that they are spiritual.

To be spiritual is to recognize that all creation is divine, and that one is also divine. It is to realize that the eternal spirit that exists in the void and creates the universe using itself, is the same entity that all creation is composed of and, hence, humans too. It is the understanding that there is unity in all things, including form and void. In the beginning was the word and the word was with god and the word was god. The word was aum, the pranav, the bridge between the formless and form as we know it. The word said I am, I exist as being, consciousness, bliss..The recognition of one's divine nature, and the divinity of all creation, is a very simple step to spirituality. It is amazing to see how few people recognize this simple fact and become truly spiritual. One would think that this most elementary of thought processes should form the basis of all human thinking. I believe that when consciousness dawns on the individual, soon after conception in the mother's womb, this is the first thoughts that enters the empty mind. This is similar to the first thought - I Am, or Aum - that enters the eternal spirit's consciousness in the void, and triggers the next cycle of creation. The individual retains this thought till such time as it is not dislodged by the avalanche of subsequent thoughts that the flood of new experiences brings. There are few who retain this ultimate knowledge subsequently through their lives. Some have flashes of insight that brings the thought back, only to forget it once again when other experiences and thoughts push it aside. Most others probably never ever have this thought again in their lives, till it comes again as the last thought - revealing absolute reality - before one encounters death and the void. There are very few who get firmly rooted in this thought when it occurs at some point in their lives. If the thought finds fertile soil in the mind,  it takes hold, and grows until it possesses the individual. Such persons then become truly spiritual. This change brings about a revolution in the life of the individual, and quite often in the lives of those who come into contact with the individual. The individual is said to have awakened, or been born again into a new life. Many such individuals get elevated to the status of god by the surrounding society of slumbering humans. The Buddha, Jesus, Muhammed, Krishna, Guru Gobind Singh,  etc., can be counted as some of these spiritual individuals. To become spiritual is to reach full maturity in one's life - to grow completely and to become complete as the eternal spirit in the form of nature intended a human to be. Reiterating the inward nature of the spiritual journey, William James says in his Principles of Psychology 'Whichever represented objects give us sensations, especially interesting ones, or incite our motor impulses, or arouse our hate, desire, or fear, are real enough for us. Our requirements in the way of reality terminate in our own acts and emotions, our own pleasures and pains. These are the ultimate fixities from which, as we formerly observed, the whole chain of our beliefs depends, object hanging to object, as the bees, in swarming, hang to each other until, de proche en proche, the supporting branch, the Self, is reached and held.'

For every awakened spiritual individual, we find a whole coterie of hangers-on who, through close association with the spiritual individual or familiarity with the words of the spiritual individual, start to imitate and speak for the awakened individual. None of these hangers-on have had the truly spiritual experience. They do not believe in their own divinity, and rarely even believe in the divinity of the individual who they call their master. They, however, see the spiritual power that the awakened one holds and the way that people everywhere bow in reverence to it. These hangers-on then proceed to see how they can further their own selfish interests through their association with the spiritual being. They form organizations, give it a name, and set rules for admission into the newly formed organization. One of the first things they do is to deceive those seeking association with the spiritual person by saying that only the spiritual individual is divine, i.e. is god. All else who claim to be divine are labelled as imposters, thus making spirituality the exclusive domain of their master and membership to their organization as the closest that anybody else can come to the divine. They go further to state that all other such organizations that already exist around other spiritual individuals are false, that only their god speaks the truth. This is aimed at increasing the attractiveness of their own organization, so that they can recruit more and more persons into it. These so-called 'disciples' create rules for admission, rules of conduct, and laws to punish those who do not follow these rules. As the organization grows with new recruits, its power increases. This is not an increase in spiritual power, but an increase in material power. The organization grows in terms of wealth and influence, drawing in more and more members based on the magnetic power of the spiritual individual at the center. Thus, the majority of humans end up becoming members of one or another such organization, deeply believing the delusion that they are not divine, and can never become complete. Membership can be either by default - where one is born into a family that are members of a particular religious organization - or by individually discovering that a particular religious organization appeals to one's own concept of life or furthers one's selfish interests best. Once a person is a member of a particular organization, he or she rarely leaves it. This is because being affiliated to the religious organization brings in a whole raft of benefits. Birth services, coming of age services, marriage services, funeral services, consecration of one's possessions to give it a stamp of divine approval, etc., are some of the services that the organization provides to its members for service related fees, an annual contribution and subscription to its membership. One of the key services a religious organization provides is the periodic cleansing of one's sins - through the performance or rites and rituals presided over by the priest - like a regular car wash, so that one can go back once again into the world with a light conscience and do whatever it was that one was doing in the first place that disturbed one's conscience. Other benefits include access to jobs, financial support, social relationships, and so on. Thus, a religion is born. As a religion grows in numbers and power, it aims to supplant other religions so as to establish its own superiority. The ultimate aim of any religion is to have the entire human race as its members who bow down to the master, and who contribute to increasing the power of those who form the higher rungs of the organization. Wars are fought to establish the superiority of one's religion, thereby masking the real intent of looting and amassing wealth and subjugating the conquered to the roles of slaves. Religions are, thus, nothing more than social clubs offering certain services and benefits, that can be turned when required into the private armies of those who control it - provided, of course, that the individual is sufficiently enslaved and controlled mentally and physically. A religious organization is thus no different from a political party, or a tribal group.   

One religion is no different from another, even though each claims to be something distinct - better than all the other religions that exist or have ever existed - and the sole possessor of truth. The spiritual individual who is the seed of the religion gradually starts to become mythical. All the normal imperfections, which exist in every individual and also in the religious person, are slowly glossed over. Ordinary acts of the spiritual person are amplified into miracles and wonders as each person transmits information about the individual to others. The legend of the spiritual individual becomes far removed from reality. The spiritual person becomes portrayed as all-pure-good with no evil - an existential impossibility that no other human can ever achieve. New stories and myths are created regarding the individual. Often, existing myths and miracles from other religions are assimilated and credited to the spiritual individual as the originator. Emerson says 'Religious literature, the psalms and liturgies of churches, are of course of this slow growth - a fagot of selections gathered through the ages, leaving the worse and saving the better, until it is at last the work of the whole communion of worshippers. The Bible itself is like the old Cremona; it has been played upon by the devotion of thousands of years until every word and particle is public and tunable. And whatever undue reverence may have been claimed for it by the prestige of philonic inspiration, the stronger tendency we are describing is likely to undo. What divines had assumed as the distinctive revelations of Christianity, theologic criticism has matched by exact parallelisms from the Stoics and poets of Greece and Rome. Later, when Confucius and the Indian scriptures were made known, no claim to the monopoly of ethical wisdom could be thought of; and the surprising results of the new researches into the history of Egypt have opened to us the deep debt of the churches of Rome and England to the Egyptian heirology.' The fact that religions across the world share the same myths, and emerge from the one source which is the truth, is clearly evident when we consider the association of the holy mountain with god. Thus, we have Jove residing on Mt. Olympus, Jehovah residing on Mt. Zion, and Siva residing on Mt. Kailash. This, obviously, adds further weight to the argument that all three entities - Jove, Jehovah and Siva - are one and the same, with their actions being customized to the local cultures of the ancient Greeks, Hebrews and Hindus. Another myth - the defeat of death by the god - can also be seen to be part of a number of religions. Conquering death is considered the ultimate sign that a man is god. So we have Osiris, Dionysus, Attis and Jesus coming back victorious after spending some time in the world of the dead. Again, all these gods, barring Jesus, point to a possible single entity who was given different names in different cultures. Jesus, however, was considered the son of Jehovah, even though he surely considered himself as Jehovah after he reached the zenith of spiritual evolution. For the Hebrews, who had by then become totally enslaved to religion, the acknowledgement of the truth that Jesus was Jehovah was a bit too much a stretch of their minds rendered rigid and inflexible through centuries of practicing religion and servility to the religious orthodoxy and the rulers of the land. To accept Jesus as Jehovah would mean acknowledging that he, indeed, was the messiah that the old scriptures foretold would come and liberate the people. Acknowledging Jesus as Jehovah would have meant that Semitism and Christianity would not be two different religions in conflict with each other, but one single community. Hence the stress on Jesus as the son of god, rather than god himself that his spirituality had revealed to him. Speaking about the degradation of spirituality into religion, Aldous Huxley says, in The Doors of Perception, 'What wonder, then, if human beings in their search for the divine have generally preferred to look within! Generally, but not always. In their art no less than in their religion, the Taoists and the Zen Buddhists looked beyond visions to the Void, and through the Void at 'the ten thousand things' of objective reality. Because of their doctrine of the Word made flesh, Christians should have been able, from the first, to adopt a similar attitude towards the universe around them. But because of the doctrine of the Fall, they found it very hard to do so. As recently as three hundred years ago an expression of thorough-going world denial and even world condemnation was both orthodox and comprehensible. 'We should feel wonder at nothing at all in Nature, except only the Incarnation of Christ.' In the seventeenth century, Lallemant's phrase seemed to make sense. Today it has a ring of madness.'  

The aim of religion, as stated earlier, is to consolidate material wealth and power, to subjugate more and more people by denying their divinity, and getting as many as possible to enroll with the religious organization. Religious organizations have hierarchical structures where the topmost echelons enjoy vast wealth, power and luxuries that have been paid for by the millions who toil and contribute their meager earnings to strengthen the organization. Religious organizations work hand in hand with the kings and political leaders of nations because they share the common aim of maintaining the rigid class hierarchy where the rich upper classes and castes maintain a stranglehold over the vast majority of the people, convincing the people to remain in abject suffering even as they labour to provide more for the upper classes and castes. So we see kings and priests embarking on so-called religious conquests across the world to loot and enslave the spiritual people of the world who were part of the indigenous communities world wide. The conquered races become slotted in the religious hierarchy at the lowest levels, thus ensuring that they work for the benefit of the kings, priests and businessmen. Classic examples of this abound the world over from the time that the king, businessman and priest assumed control over human activity. So we have the conquest of Africa and the Americas by so-called Christian nations who killed hundreds of millions of indigenous communities, besides plundering and looting their possessions and land. The conquerors pushed these native communities to the brink of survival, forcing many to sign up for membership to the conquering entity's religion just to save themselves from starvation. This meant that they got the basic necessities of food and shelter, but it chained them and their descendants forever to the hierarchy in which they occupied the lowest rungs and worked for the classes above them. We see this in the Islamic invasions of the Middle Ages. We see this in India in the way that the Vedic religions, Vaishnavism, Jainism, Buddhism and Sikhism, and finally Christianity and Islam converted the largely spiritual populations of India - who believed in their individual spirituality and divinity - into members of the conquering religions. India, before the advent of these religions, was a largely spiritual nation with diverse spiritual practices that strengthened the connection, and unity, between humans and nature or god. The spiritual mendicants of India were a significant section of Indian society, and the pursuit of spirituality was regarded as the highest of ideals for a human. With the advent of the religions, the individual was taught that it was blasphemy to consider oneself as no different from the divine. The people were told that they had to engage the services of the priest to communicate with god, as the priest was the only one with the necessary skills and virtue to be able to talk to god and communicate his wishes to the people.

Most people are born into their nations, religions and cultures. It is not something that they attain through studying all the religions, nations or cultures of the world and choosing the one that suits them best. Neither is religion some special privilege bestowed on a select few, and denied to others, as some would like to think. If someone truly spent time thinking about it, the realization would come that all religions are oceans with different names ultimately connected through the same essence, not a piece of loincloth that one wears which someone can rip off, leaving them naked. The shallow understanding of all this is most evident when some troublemaker comes along, saying that the nation, religion or culture is under threat. Superficial supporters of religion, culture and nation willingly do the troublemaker's bidding for fear of losing these things. Is all this so easily lost? It takes thousands of years and generations to build a nation, religion or culture by staying in one place and practicing certain things that become a way of life and identity. The longer this happens, the more stable it becomes, like oceans filled with rivers of refined thought. If you think that it can be destroyed, then your concept of religion, culture or nation is that of a puddle, not an ocean. For one who truly understands, these things are inherent and can only be destroyed from within. Fools pretending to protect what is indestructible only continue to demonstrate their stupidity.

Most persons attach more importance to the superficial rituals and trappings of organized religion than to the teachings of its spiritual leader. So, today, most of society is occupied with triflings when it comes to religion. Spirituality is nowhere in the picture. The controversies we see world wide - where people are discriminated against for the attire they wear because of its religious connotations that go against the rules of the persons in power - are examples of this. In some places wearing a hijab is considered illegal, while in others not wearing one is. Sikhs are murdered in the US for wearing turbans that are part of their religious and social attire, most often being mistaken for Muslims whom the attacker wishes to eliminate. Similarly, in India, the color saffron or ochre is considered religious and anyone attired in these colors is considered a spiritual person. It is interesting to note that the first documented instance of the wearing of a saffron robe by a spiritual person is that of the Buddha when he renounced the world and headed for the forest. It is said that he shed his royal clothes and ornaments, and donned the saffron robe of a criminal who had been hanged for some crime and whose dead body was lying in a pit outside the city. Until this point, saffron was associated with criminals. From this point on, it became associated with spirituality, and finally religion. Today, however, we find that we have come full circle with persons wearing saffron  - and pretending to be spiritual - committing the worst crimes against society. Society, however, continues to elevate these charlatans based on appearances. A person in India is immune to legal action by law enforcement if he consumes ganja wearing a saffron robe, whereas a person in any other attire will find himself behind bars - especially if he belongs to the poorer communities or the lower castes. Are turbans part of essential religious practices of Sikhs? What about the bracelets, amulets and pendants that many students of all religions wear? Should we try to take uniforms out of schools - uniforms that aim to out do each other in being more upper class British than the British - or should we try to cloth religion in uniforms? Are we producing a nation of uniforms for the government and the ruling classes or a nation of individuals, proud of their uniformity in diversity, free to be who they choose to be? To me the only requirements for essential religious practices appears to be the presence of the self in body form, not anything else that adorns the body. Should we do away with clothing altogether since none of it is part of essential religious practice? I would like to see the day when every child is free to wear what he or she wants to while going to school, when he or she can do so without feeling inferior to anybody else. I would like to see children dressed in the colors of their personality and cultures - be it turbans, adornments, tattoos, long hair or bald heads - with everybody focusing on the right education of the child, and respecting the child's wishes, individuality and uniqueness, rather than focusing on bringing up children of one color, one religion, one language. Unity in diversity is still one of the strongest pillars in this country, just like biodiversity is one of the strongest pillars in nature, isn't it? Or have we now become a mono-culture representing somebody's warped view of reality? What we say about attire and colors also extends to many other traits that are considered personal to the individual - the food consumed, the use of intoxicants, the language spoken, the literature read, the modes of transport, etc. Religion intrudes into all these domains that are considered personal to the individual, thus ultimately showing the superficial - and external facing - nature of its focus.

When spirituality was widely prevalent, there was no differentiation between men and women on its basis. God is as female as male. Spirituality reveals to us the nature of the eternal spirit that goes beyond gender. However, with religion - especially the prominent religions of the world today - we see that the female is treated as inferior to the male. Even among the lowest classes and castes, the man is considered the master of the woman. 'Woman is the nigger of the world', said John Lennon. All the major religions of the world today have a male god. The female goddesses have been relegated to the background. Hence Jehovah, Jesus, Allah, Buddha are all single males who are portrayed as superior to females. Religious organizations enforce patriarchy, treating the woman as an object that one must only use along prescribed lines. The woman must not be allowed any kind of freedom beyond her narrowly defined role as servant and sex object for the male. Thus, we rarely find women in the higher echelons of religious organizations. The only women who are admitted into official positions of a religious organization are those who will serve with complete obedience. Even then they occupy only low-level administrative positions within the religious organization, rarely positions of power and influence. When spirituality was strong, there were equal numbers of men and women, and even proportionate numbers of transgenders, who followed the path of spirituality. The ancient Greek, Hindu, Egyptian and Hebrew religions had as many goddesses as they had gods. As Leafly reports, 'There was a time when those who could tap into otherworldly energies were precious to rulers and royalty, and village peasants equally prized a local seer to resolve their everyday matters. Mystics throughout the ages have been any gender, but typically men took up organized religion while women were pushed to religion’s outer fringe: the occult. Rightly or wrongly, today’s fortune tellers, clairvoyants, and psychics are the heirs of a long female-led tradition. And, for many women of history at least, this tradition used the mind-bending powers of cannabis to access the supernatural.' Religion is, therefore, also the suppression of half of humankind, i.e. the women, besides the suppression of all the indigenous communities of the world that constituted the world's majority. This is how power came to be concentrated in the hands of a few people, mostly all men.

For the spiritual person, there is no need for affiliation to anybody or anything, and no need to possess anybody or anything, since the spiritual being recognizes all things as cast from the same essence as the individual. The whole world is the body of the spiritual individual, and everything that exists is part of the spiritual individual, thus negating the need to acquire and possess affiliations and material power. In his essay Civil Disobedience, Henry D Thoreau states that 'Some years ago, the State met me in behalf of the Church, and commanded me to pay a certain sum toward the support of a clergyman whose preaching my father attended, but never I myself. "Pay," it said, "or be locked up in jail." I declined to pay, but, unfortunately, another man saw fit to pay it. I did not see why the schoolmaster should be taxed to support the priest, and not the priest the schoolmaster; for I was not the State's schoolmaster, but I supported myself by voluntary subscription. I did not see why the lyceum should not present its tax bill and have the State to back its demand, as well as the Church. However, at the request of the selectmen, I condescended to make such a statement as this in writing:- "Know all men by these presents, that I, Henry Thoreau, do not wish to be regarded as a member of any incorporated society which I have not joined." This I gave to the town clerk, and he has it. The State, having thus learned that I did not wish to be regarded as a member of that church, has never made a like demand on me since; though it said that it must adhere to its original presumption that time. If I had known how to name them, I would then have signed off in detail from all the societies which I never signed on to; but I did not know where to find a complete list.' The spiritual person also recognizes that just as a thought is transient, so to is the nature of the world. Inevitably one must surrender everything that one possesses - including one's own body - and merge back into the void at one's death, just as creation is inevitably followed by destruction of that which is created.

There are infinite paths to spirituality. Reading, different life experiences, the arts, sciences, labour, meditation, solitude, communing with spiritual persons, living in nature, intoxication, sex, self control, yoga, excesses, deprivations, etc., all can lead a person to spirituality. Anything that causes us to detach from the external world of the senses that we are so completely immersed in leads to spirituality. The sight of the sick, the old and the dead were sufficient to awaken the Buddha's latent spirituality. When we give sufficient space in our minds for the spiritual flower to bloom, we become spiritual. William James wrote in the Principles of Psychology that 'Truly enough, a man cannot believe at will abruptly. Nature sometimes, and indeed not very infrequently, produces instantaneous conversions for us. She suddenly puts us in an active connection with objects of which she had till then left us cold. " I realize for the first time," we then say, "what that means!" This happens often with moral propositions. We have often heard them; but now they shoot into our lives; they move us; we feel their living force. Such instantaneous beliefs are truly enough not to be achieved by will. But gradually our will can lead us to same results by a very simple method: we need only in cold blood ACT as if the thing in question were real, and keep acting as if it were real, and it infallibly end by growing into such a connection with our life that it will become real. It will become so knit with habit and emotion that our interests in it will be those which characterize belief. Those to whom 'God' and 'Duty' are now mere names can make them much more than that, if they make a little sacrifice to them every day. But all this is so well known in moral and religious education that I need say no more.' When we see the present moment as it is, and live in it, rather than living in the memories of the past and the plans and worries for the future, we become spiritual. One's position in space determines the directions one can see. Positioned at the center, one can see in all directions. What is the center of infinite space or zero space? The center of infinite space or zero space is Here. Similarly, one's position in time determines the events that one can see. Positioned at the center of time, one can see all events. What is the center of infinite time or zero time? The center of infinite time or zero time is Now...Ralph Waldo Emerson says 'When we live by principles instead of tradition, by obedience to the law of the mind instead of by passion, the Great Mind will come into us, not as in fragments and detached thoughts, but the light of today will shine forward and backward. Memory is a presumption of a possession of the future. Now we are halves, we see the past but not the future, but in that day will the hemisphere complete itself and foresight be as perfect as aftersight.' Emerson writes in his essay, The Over-soul, that 'The soul gives itself, alone, original and pure, to the Lonely, Original and Pure, who, on that condition, gladly inhabits, leads and speaks through it. Then is it glad, young and nimble. It is not wise, but it sees through all things. It is not religious but it is innocent. It calls the light its own, and feels that the grass grows and the stone falls by a law inferior to, and dependent on, its nature. Behold, it saith, I am born into the great, the universal mind. I, the imperfect, adore my own Perfect. I am somehow receptive of the great soul, and thereby I do overlook the sun and the stars which change and pass. More and more the surges of everlasting nature enter into me, and I become public and human in my regards and actions. So come I to live in thoughts and act with energies which are immortal. Thus revering the soul, and learning, as the ancients said, that "it's beauty is immense," man will come to see that the world is the perennial miracle which the soul worketh, and be less astonished at particular wonders; he will learn that there is no profane history; that all history is sacred; that the universe is represented in an atom, in a moment of time. He will weave no longer a spotted life of shreds and patches, but he will live with a divine unity. He will cease from what is base and frivolous in his own life and be content with all places and any service he can render. He will calmly front the morrow in the negligency of that trust which carries God with it and so hath already the whole future in the bottom of the heart'.

Speaking of the role of solitude in developing spiritual maturity, Herman Hesse writes in If the War Goes On 'My friends, let me sing you the song of solitude. Without solitude there is no suffering, without solitude there is no heroism. But the solitude I have in mind is not the solitude of the blithe poets or of the theatre, where the fountain bubbles so sweetly at the mouth of the hermit's cave. From childhood to manhood is only one step, one single step. In taking that step you break away from father and mother, you become yourself; it is a step into solitude. No one takes it completely. Even the holiest hermit, the grumpiest old bear in the bleakest of mountains, takes with him, or draws after him, a thread that binds him to his father and mother, to the loving warmth of kinship and friendship. My friends, when you speak so fervently of people and fatherland, I see the thread dangling from you, and I smile. When your great men speak of their 'task' and responsibility, that thread hands out of their mouths. Your great men, your leaders and orators, never speak of tasks directed against themselves, they never speak of responsibility to destiny! They hang by a thread that leads them back to mother and to all the cozy warmth that the poets recall when they sing of childhood and its pure joys. No one severs the thread entirely, except in death and then only if he succeeds in dying his own death.' Further, he says 'Ah, my friends, I don't know whether I ought to tell you any more about solitude. I should gladly tempt you to take that path, I should gladly sing you a song of the icy raptures of cosmic space. But I know that few men can travel that path without injury. It is hard, my dear friends, to live without a mother; it is hard to live without home and people, without fatherland or fame, without the pleasures of life in a community. It is hard to live in the cold, and most of those who have started on the path have fallen. A man must be indifferent to the possibility of falling, if he wants to taste of solitude and to face up to his own destiny. It is easier and more comforting to devote oneself to the 'tasks' of the day, the tasks meted out by the collectivity. See how happy the people are in their crowded streets! Shots are being fired, their lives are in danger, yet every one of them would rather die with the masses than walk alone in the cold outer night. But how, my young friends, could I tempt you or lead you? Solitude is not chosen, any more than destiny is chosen. Solitude comes to us if we have within us the magic stone that attracts destiny. Many, far too many, have gone out into the desert and led the lives of herd men in a pretty hermitage beside a lovely spring. While others stand in the thick of the crowd, and yet the air of the stars blows round their heads. But blessed be he who has found his solitude, not the solitude pictured in painting or poetry, but his own, unique, predestined solitude. Blessed be he who knows how to suffer! Blessed be he who bears the magic stone in his heart. To him comes destiny, from him comes authentic action.' The very sight of a truly spiritual solitary person is likely to evoke fear and hatred in society today. The spiritual person holds up a mirror against society showing how far it has strayed from the path of the divine. As Herman Hesse says, 'Most men, the herd, have never tasted solitude. They leave father and mother, but only to crawl to a wife and quietly succumb to new warmth and new ties. They are never alone, they never commune with themselves. And when a solitary man crosses their path, they fear him and hate him like the plague; they fling stones at him and find no peace until they are far away from him. The air around him smells of stars, of cold stellar spaces; he lacks the soft warm fragrance of the home and hatchery. Zarathustra has something of this starry smell, this forbidding coldness. Zarathustra has gone a long way on the path of solitude. He has attended the school of suffering. He has seen the forge of destiny and been wrought in it.'

Intoxication is one of the paths to spirituality. When one becomes intoxicated, one forgets one's sufferings, sorrows and grief. With good intoxication, all the baggage that a person has accumulated over time - in terms of social and economic status, self-centeredness, greed and ego - are shed, at least for a few moments. Stripped of all the layers of human-made delusions that hide the divinity of oneself and of nature, the intoxicated person stands naked in full contact with individual divinity and the divinity of everything. The use of psychotropics and psychedelics by humans as entheogens - aids to spirituality -  goes far back in time. Intoxication through psychedelics and psychotropics is the original holy communion between a human and the eternal spirit. Aldous Huxley writes, in The Doors of Perception, 'In the Poisons Sacres, Ivresses Divines Philippe de Felice has written at length and with a wealth of documentation on the immemorial connection between religion and the taking of drugs. Here, in summary, or in direct quotation, are his conclusions. The employment for religious purposes of toxic substances is 'extraordinarily widespread...The practices studied in this volume can be observed in every region of the earth, among primitives no less than among those who have reached a high pitch of civilization. We are dealing therefore with not just exceptional facts, which might justifiably be overlooked, but with a general and, in the widest sense of the word, a human phenomenon, the kind of phenomenon which cannot be disregarded by anyone who is trying to discover what religion is, and what are the deep needs which it must satisfy.' Huxley further says, 'Most men and women lead lives at the worst so painful, at the best so monotonous, poor and limited that the urge to escape, the longing to transcend themselves if only for a few minutes, is and has always been one of the principal appetites of the soul. Art and religion, carnivals and saturnalia, dancing and listening to oratory - all these haves served, in H.G. Wells' phrase, as Doors in the Wall. And for private, for everyday use there have always been chemical intoxicants. All the vegetable sedatives and narcotics, all the euphorics that grow on trees, the hallucinogens that ripen in berries or can be squeezed from roots - all, without exception have been known and systematically used by human beings from time immemorial. And to these natural modifiers of consciousness modern science has added its quota of synthetics - chloral, for example, and benzedrine, the bromides and the barbiturates.' Spirituality was most likely discovered by humans through the use of psychedelics and psychotropics. One can say that humans became gods through the intoxication provided by psychedelics and psychotropics. This, by itself, is a great reason for religious organizations to seek a ban on psychedelics and psychotropics, as the primary intent is to build dependency in the individual on the religious organization, rather than to establish direct contact with the divinity within oneself. It is only after spirituality had evolved to a great extent that religion came. It is interesting to note that hardly any person belonging to the higher classes of religious organizations ever gets intoxicated with psychotropics or psychedelics. If they do so, it is in private and in hiding, as a violation of the religious rules that ban all forms of intoxication. Religious leaders consuming entheogens will make them question the very basis of the religious organization that they work for, hence it is strictly prohibited and avoided. The true entheogens have thus been banned from this world, at the behest of religious organizations. So we see among the first steps taken by religious organizations was to forbid intoxication, especially the use of psychotropics and psychedelics. For hundreds of years, religious organizations have labelled psychedelics and psychotropics as sinful and evil. Cannabis goes by the name of the 'Devil's Weed'.

Cannabis was at one time widely acknowledged as the supreme entheogen of the world. One of the primary attributes of those who followed the path of Siva, the god of ganja, was the use of ganja as an entheogen in imitation of him. At one point of time, all the gods in India were Siva called by different names, and the majority of his followers consumed ganja. This is the case in other parts of the world as well, considering that Jehovah, Jove, Jah, Dionysus and Osiris are other names by which the god of ganja was called. Cannabis was used widely across the world, especially by the poorest persons as their aid to spirituality. It is not that many of these poor persons were poor because of circumstances, but they were poor because they wanted to be so. They wanted to shun the paths of material wealth and power, and lead simple lives focused on their spirituality. Speaking of  the use of cannabis as entheogen in India in the 19th century,  the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission says in its report of 1894-95 that 'It is chiefly in connection with the worship of Siva, the Mahadeo or great god of the Hindu trinity, that the hemp plant, and more especially perhaps ganja, is associated. The hemp plant is popularly believed to have been a great favourite of Siva, and there is a great deal of evidence before the Commission to show that the drug in some form or other is now extensively used in the exercise of the religious practices connected with this form of worship. Reference to the almost universal use of hemp drugs by fakirs, jogis, sanyasis, and ascetics of all classes, and more particularly of those devoted to the worship of Siva, will be found in the paragraphs of this report dealing with the classes of the people who consume the drugs. These religious ascetics, who are regarded with great veneration by the people at large, believe that the hemp plant is a special attribute of the god Siva, and this belief is largely shared by the people. Hence the origin of many fond epithets ascribing to ganja the significance of a divine property, and the common practice of invoking the deity in terms of adoration before placing the chillum or pipe of ganja to the lips.' The Hemp Commission report further says 'Ganja or charas is chiefly used by (I) "religious" persons, such as fakirs and wandering mendicants, sadhus and pandahs, the followers of Trinath, and other sects'. Numerous witnesses to the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission reiterated the importance of ganja as entheogen for the followers of Siva. For example, K.G Gupta, Commissioner of Excise, Bengal, stated that 'Hindu mendicants (sadhus, sanyasis, etc.) use it to a man, as do the priests and attendants of Hindu temples, especially of those that are dedicated to Siva.'  

It is not just cannabis that functioned as an entheogen. There are a number of other psychotropic and psychedelic plants and fungi that work as entheogens. Peyote, ayahuasca, psilocybin, dathura, opium, etc., have also been powerful natural entheogens used since ancient times by various cultures. Science Magazine reports that 'The site of the discovery is Pinwheel Cave in Southern California, about 80 kilometers northeast of Santa Barbara. The cave gets its name for a large, red, pinwheel-shaped drawing on its ceiling; some archaeologists have hypothesized it represents a genus of the psychoactive flower Datura. The flower contains the alkaloids scopolamine and atropine, which are considered an entheogen—a psychoactive compound used in a spiritual context. The Chumash people of Southern California called the experiences triggered by ingesting Datura “sacred dreams,” according to Jim Adams, a pharmacologist at the University of Southern California who spent 14 years studying sacred Chumash Datura ceremonies.' None of these however come even close to the significance of cannabis as entheogen. For one thing, many of these other entheogens are toxic and dangerous, like datura for example, where the margins between safe usage and overdose leading to death are very slender. Then there is the addictive properties of opium which eventually take the mind of all spirituality, and one needs to consume opium just to stay alive. Entheogens like peyote, ayahuasca and psilocybin are endemic to only a few places in the world and cannot be found anywhere else. It is only cannabis that can be consumed in large amounts frequently that does not lead to death or addiction, and only cannabis that can be grown or found in nearly all parts of the world making it accessible to the most number of persons in the world, especially the poorest persons in the world who suffer the most and need it the most. This is why cannabis is the foremost entheogen in nature, the beloved herb of Siva. 

Alcohol has been permitted to a certain extent by religion, because alcohol is not an entheogen in the true sense. Besides, it serves the purposes of priests, kings and businessmen as it weakens the mind and increases dependency on the existing hierarchical system. Aldous Huxley writes in The Doors of Perception 'The modern Churches, with some exceptions among the Protestant denominations, tolerate alcohol; but, even the most tolerant have made no attempt to convert the drug to Christianity, or to sacrementalize its use. The pious drinker is forced to take his religion in one compartment, his religion-surrogate in another. And perhaps this is inevitable. Drinking cannot be sacrementalized except in religions which set no store on decorum. The worship of Dionysos or the Celtic god of beer was a loud and disorderly affair. The rites of Christianity are incompatible with even religious drunkenness. This does no harm to the distillers, but is very bad for Christianity.' Now, now, if you feed the eternal spirit alcohol - or payee thanni (demon water) as the Tamils call it or fire water (as the Native Americans call it) - instead of ganja, then the form that will manifest is that of Bhairava, the fearsome one, and not Siva, the peaceful one. It does not make any difference either way to the eternal spirit, but if you - who see yourself as separate from the eternal spirit - happen to be around, it could mean the difference between hell and heaven for you...Speaking of the addictive nature of alcohol, Huxley writes 'Countless persons desire self-transcendence and would be glad to find it in church. But, alas, 'the hungry sheep look up and are not fed.' They take part in rites, they listen to sermons, they repeat prayers; but their thirst remains unassuaged. Disappointed, they turn to the bottle. For a time at least and in a kind of way, it works. Church may still be attended; but it is no more than the Musical Bank of Butler's Erewhon. God may still be acknowledged; but he is God only on a verbal level, only in a strict Pickwickian sense. The effective object of worship is the bottle and the sole religious experience is that state of uninhibited and belligerent euphoria which follows the ingestion of the third cocktail.'

Describing the ineffectiveness of alcohol, as compared to the natural entheogen, peyote, used by the Native Americans, Huxley says in The Doors of Perception, 'We see, then, that Christianity and alcohol do not and cannot mix. Christianity and mescalin seem to be much more compatible. This has been demonstrated by many tribes of Indians, from Texas to as far north  as Wisconsin. Among these tribes are to be found groups affiliated with the Native American Church, a sect whose principal rite is a kind of Early Christian Agape, or Love-Feast, where slices of peyote take the place of the sacremental bread and wine. These Native Americans regard the cactus as God's special gift to the Indians, and equate its effects with the workings of the divine Spirit.' Speaking further about this, Huxley says 'Professor J.S. Slotkin - one of the very few white men ever to have participated in the rites of a Peyotist congregation - says of his fellow worshippers that they are 'certainly not stupefied or drunk...They never get out of rhythm or fumble their words, as a drunken or stupified man would do...They are all quiet, courteous and considerate of one another. I have never been in any white man's house of worship where there is either so much religious feeling or decorum.' And what, we may ask, are these devout and well-behaved Peyotists experiencing? Not the mild sense of virtue which sustains the average Sunday churchgoer through ninety minutes of boredom. Not even those high feelings, inspired by thoughts of the Creator and the Redeemer, the Judge and the Comforter which animate the pious.' He says 'For these Native Americans, religious experience is something more direct and illuminating, more spontaneous, less the home-made product of the superficial, self-conscious mind. Sometimes (according to the reports collected by Dr. Slotkin) they see visions which may be of Christ Himself. Sometimes they hear the voice of the Great Spirit. Sometimes they become aware of the presence of God and of those personal shortcomings which must be corrected if they are to do His will. The practical consequences of these chemical openings of doors into the Other World seem to be wholly good. Dr. Slotkin reports that habitual Peyotists are on the whole more industrious, more temperate (many of them abstain altogether from alcohol), more peaceable than non-Peyotists. A tree with such satisfactory fruits cannot be condemned out of hand as evil.' The Native Americans have integrated their use of the entheogen peyote in their customized form of Christianity. On the integration of peyote usage by the Native American Church, Huxley writes 'In sacrementalizing the use of peyote, the Indians of the Native American Church have done something which is at once psychologically sound and historically respectable. In the early centuries of Christianity many pagan rites and festivals were baptized, so to say, and made to serve the purposes of the Church. These jollifications were not particularly edifying; but they assuaged a certain psychological hunger and, instead of trying to suppress them, the earlier missionaries had the sense to accept them for what they were, soul-satisfying expressions of fundamental urges, and to incorporate them into the fabric of the new religion. What the Native Americans have done is essentially similar. They have taken a pagan custom (a custom, incidentally, far more elevating and enlightening than most of the rather brutish carousals and mummeries adopted from European paganism) and given it a Christian significance.' He says 'Though but recently introduced into the northern United States, peyote-eating and the religion based upon it have become important symbols of the Red Man's right to spiritual independence. Some Indians have reacted to white supremacy by becoming Americanized, others by retreating into traditional Indianism. But some have tried to make the best of both worlds, indeed of all the worlds - the best of Indianism, the best of Christianity, and the best of those Other Worlds of transcendental experience, where the soul knows itself as unconditioned and of like nature with the divine. Hence the Native American Church. In it two great appetites of the soul - the urge to independence and self-determination and the urge to self-transcendence - were fused with, and interpreted in the light of, a third - the urge to worship, to justify the ways of God to man, to explain the universe by means of a coherent theology.' Speaking about the role of mescalin - the active psychedelic and psychotropic principle in peyote as an entheogen - Aldous Huxley writes in the Doors of Perception 'Most takers of mescalin experience only the heavenly part of schizophrenia. The drug brings hell and purgatory only to those who have had a recent case of jaundice, or who suffer from periodical depressions or a chronic anxiety. If, like the other drugs of remotely comparable power, mescalin were notoriously toxic, the taking of it would be enough, of itself, to cause anxiety. But the reasonably healthy person knows in advance that, so far as he is concerned, mescalin is completely innocuous, that its effects will pass off after eight or ten hours, leaving no hangover and consequently no craving for a renewal of the dose. Fortified by this knowledge, he embarks upon the experiment without fear - in other words, without any pre-disposition to convert an unprecedentedly strange and other than human experience into something appalling, something actually diabolical.'

In India, even though religion goes by various names, for those who assumed the roles of the ruling classes and upper castes in the last 3000 years or so it is essentially the exploitation of everybody and everything for money and power, while establishing their own superiority. Over the centuries, the religious orthodoxy, kings and businessmen have vilified cannabis so much that today most users do not see it as anything more than an intoxicant or, at best, medicine. Shaivite writings chose to reconcile the opposing views of Vaishnavism and Shaivism with regard to cannabis, as this statement from the Siva Purana translated by Ramesh Menon shows, 'The apsaras danced for us, the gandharvas sang and we drank and smoked ganja from earthern chillums. For two days, we revelled without pause, when Vishnu declared, "It is time to leave. We must be early for the celebrations in Aushadipura"'. Most practitioners of Vaishnavism, on the other hand, expound that cannabis is against their religion. They actively labelled the cannabis consuming Shaivite community as outsiders to the caste-based systems, and sought, through the prohibition of cannabis, to take away a key spiritual practice of the Shaivites. Speaking about the opposition of Vaishnavism to cannabis, Mr. W.H. Grimley, Commissioner of Chota Nagpur, among many others, gave the following evidence to the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission of 1894-95 - 'People who worship Siva and Rama are addicted to the use of ganja and bhang, asserting that they are enabled thereby to divert their mind from worldly affairs to the meditation on the gods whom they worship. The religious mendicants who use it do so not only as a devotional exercise, but also to render themselves fit to undergo the hardships of their ascetic life, and the inclemency of climate incidental to their prolonged pilgrimages to distant places. It may be here remarked that while the classes above noted are allowed by the Hindu religion to use ganja, the "Shaktahs," or followers of the goddess "Shakti," are only permitted to use liquor for devotional purposes, while the Voistabs, or worshippers of Vishnu, are not allowed liquor or ganja.' Gandhi brought into focus the untouchability that existed in society with regard to humans, calling the social and economic outcasts Harijan or people of god. What was not spoken about at all - probably because Gandhi was a devout Vaishnavite - was the fact that one of the greatest atrocities committed against the lowest classes and castes of India was the taking away from them of the most important entheogen, medicine and intoxicant cannabis. 150 years ago society did the unthinkable and made a plant an untouchable. It was cast out of society and still remains so. The plant is called Shivapatre, Shivji ka buti and Siddi among other names. When will society remove this discrimination against the plant, a creation of nature that came into existence 28 million years ago when man was a primate living in the trees? Today's Hindutva brigade - who rule the country currently - still attempts to convert all to this stunted and corrupt idea of religion. The one religion that the Hindutva brigade propagates is essentially the class and caste system in which: it forms the upper castes and classes; it works with the religious orthodoxy to rule over all others; where ganja, toddy and the consumption of cattle meat is illegal. In that sense it is identical with orthodox Islam and Christianity world wide, only the type of banned meat varies. It is not the true Hinduism of India, which is essentially so diverse that it covers all possible religious and philosophical ways of thought imaginable, and goes by all names. One of the main reasons why the Hindutva brigade is such a staunch opponent of ganja is because it is the herb of spirituality, the path to god realization no matter which direction you come from...the herb that makes one realize that all beings are essentially god in various manifestations...the herb that destroys the delusional world of money and power. Therefore, we see that even though the ruling dispensation claims to be ardent devotees of Lord Rama, rebuilding a temple at his birthplace Ayodhya and blowing the trumpet everywhere to show their allegiance to Rama, they have done nothing to legalize the prohibited cannabis, which was purported to be a favorite of Rama's - going by the name of Ramarasa. Instead, their true allegiance lies with the elites who run the petrochemical and fossil fuel industries and allied industries - construction, non-biodegradable plastics, synthetic fabrics, chemical fertilizers and pesticides -, the synthetic pharmaceutical companies, the medical industry, etc.

Along with the vilification of cannabis, also came the vilification of the cannabis user. The cannabis user was labelled a criminal, the dregs of society, the lowest caste or class possible, an insane, and a debauchee even though all sections of society consumed cannabis, and most people consumed cannabis moderately. This happened not just in India, but wherever cannabis was consumed, though India was where it all started. Cannabis, and the spiritual person who used it, were linked to insanity in 19th century India as one of the most significant steps taken to sway public opinion in favor of cannabis prohibition. This was later mirrored in many parts of the west, where reefer madness was used as the most important argument to bring about cannabis prohibition.

While the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission of 1894-95 showed the importance of cannabis as an entheogen in India, today, both in India and across the world, there is almost total ignorance of this fact, and this is evident in the latest research findings. Springer Publications reports that 'The majority of cannabis users in this study regarded cannabis as a recreational drug devoid of entheogenic features. A minority of the sample endorsed having a spiritual motivation for cannabis use and regarded it as an important entheogen, although not necessarily as efficacious in this regard as the classical psychedelics. Such spiritual users differed from recreational users both in their mode of engagement with cannabis and in the type of experiences obtained. Recent research has not given much attention to spiritual aspects of cannabis use, but the study indicates that spiritually motivated use remains prevalent and deserves further study.' Leafly reports that 'Does cannabis have any ties to religion? What we found may surprise you. Cannabis has not only been used in religious ceremonies, it has a long-standing tradition in numerous world faiths.' Tand Offline reports that 'Like many mind-altering plants, cannabis has been part of spiritual practices for thousands of years. It has deep roots in Hinduism, Islam, Rastafarianism, and indigenous traditions in Asia, Africa, and elsewhere. Yet almost no attention has been given to how contemporary adults employ it spiritually. A sample of 1087 participants (mean age = 38.9) completed an online survey assessing their use of cannabis and other substances, as well as spiritual and psychological characteristics. Spiritual benefit from cannabis was reported by 66.1% of the sample, and 5.5% reported it had sometimes been a spiritual hindrance. A MANOVA showed that those who reported spiritual benefit differed significantly from those who did not on several outcome variables, and a post hoc descriptive discriminant analysis revealed that expansiveness motivation, non-theistic daily spiritual experience, meditation frequency, and two mindfulness facets contributed most to differentiating the two groups. The majority of the sample (63%) was free of cannabis use disorder. Compared to disordered groups, the non-disordered group was significantly older and scored lower on experiential avoidance, psychological distress, and several motives for use. Results suggest that spiritual motives for cannabis use may be widespread. Implications for future research on spiritual use of cannabis are discussed.' Leafly reports that 'Weiss points out that rather than debating whether or not cannabis could be understood as a psychedelic, it could be more useful to identify both as entheogens. “[Entheogens are] defined as promoting life-altering experiences, profound insights, and spiritual connectedness, or ‘generating the God within,’” said Weiss. “Like psychedelics, the use of Cannabis sativa has been widely documented as a powerful shamanic medicine for thousands of years all over our planet—many people across the world view cannabis as a master plant or teacher.”' Ganja smoking is in the world of spirituality the equivalent of playing football in the world of sports. Football, the beautiful game, played and loved by hundreds of millions of people world wide, irrespective of economic, ethnic, social or religious background, requires just a ball to play. Ganja smoking, the divine meditation, practiced and loved by hundreds of millions of people world wide, irrespective of economic, ethnic, social or religious background, requires just a plant to meditate. Banning ganja is, in the world of spirituality, the equivalent of banning football in the world of sports. To the infantile mind cannabis appears harmful. To the adolescent mind cannabis is a play thing. To the youthful mind cannabis is a source of strength and vigor. To the adult mind cannabis is a companion and aid to spirituality. To the mature mind, cannabis is divinity in plant form that clears the muddied perception and intellect, and aids one to recognize one's own divinity. Research is showing today how cannabis works as an entheogen on the human brain. As Leafly reports, 'Home of both CB1 and CB2 receptors, the amygdala is responsible for our coordination, endocrine functions, and sensory perception. Whenever we meditate or take a toke of herb, we begin to alter the way chemicals (like dopamine, serotonin, norepinephrine, and GABA, to name a few) stimulate our brain and body. One molecule in particular highlights the similarities between consuming cannabis and meditation: anandamide. The root of the word comes from ananda, the name of one of Buddha’s disciples and the Hindu (Sanskrit) word for ‘perfect bliss’. In cannabis, it’s known as the bliss molecule. As a cannabinoid, anandamide brings us full circle with the mind and body connection that can be accessed through both cannabis and meditation- revealing that cultures that practice both activities have more in common than you might think.'

Most organized religious institutions oppose ganja. These institutions thrive on memberships, annual subscriptions and donations. They play mediator between the individual and the divine to sustain themselves. The ganja plant takes away the role of the mediator, enabling direct communication between the individual and the divine, or most importantly, in aiding the individual to recognize the divinity within, thus rendering these religious institutions in many ways redundant. Lifeway Research reports that 'Cultural stigmas around smoking a joint have diminished, but most pastors still say it crosses a moral line,” said McConnell. “While some may connect this prohibition to state laws that still forbid this use, it is clear from their views on legalization that pastors see moral problems with getting high beyond simply disobeying government authorities.” Evangelical pastors are almost twice as likely as mainline pastors to see smoking marijuana to get high as morally wrong (89% to 47%). Denominationally, Pentecostals (97%) and Baptists (92%) are more likely to see it as immoral than Restorationist movement (74%), Methodist (66%), Lutheran (63%) and Presbyterian/Reformed pastors (57%).' Thus we find that the countries most opposed to cannabis legalization have strong religious orthodoxies who work closely with authoritarian leaders, as is the case in India, Russia, Iran, Israel, Afghanistan, Japan, etc. Ironically, almost all these countries are the homes of ancient cannabis cultures that formed a key part of their religions in the past. Most religious institutions conveniently forget - for purely selfish reasons - that the recognition of universal divinity was the most important truth that the spiritual founders whom they profess to follow wished to share. Often, the reason given for opposing ganja is that the plant is pagan, an intoxicant, or not approved of by one's own scriptures, thereby showing a clear lack of understanding of the plant and the essence of all religions. The truth is that followers of all religions use ganja, especially individuals who seek a more direct and personal experience of divinity. Such individuality was a common trait of the founding fathers, worshiped as gods now by these very religious institutions. Acknowledging that ganja is one of the most effective and universal aids to spirituality and working for its legalization is real spiritual work...The American upper class hypocrites - who think that Christianity means get rich at all costs - would do well to understand that ganja is Jehovah's herb, and in its complete legalization - with free and total access for the Blacks, Hispanics and Native Americans - lies at least some redemption for the Native Indian genocide and Black slavery, among many other things...All those who claim to be the religious orthodoxy world wide, but who are in fact nothing more than the calcified modern forms of the Pharisees oppressing the poor, the sick and the minorities using religion to chain the world's masses and to assist authoritarian rulers and their businessmen friends to plunder the earth and its living beings, would do well to understand that ganja is Jehovah's herb, Siva's herb, Allah's herb - three perspectives of one and the same eternal spirit...

There are very few nations where the cannabis smoking spiritual communities have managed to exercised their fundamental right to practice religion, which the prohibition of cannabis is opposed to. Jamaica is one of the few countries. The Rastafarian community - who use cannabis as an entheogen in the worship of Jah (one and the same as Jehovah and hence Jove, Siva, Dionysus and Osiris) - have been vocal in their efforts to get governments to recognize their fundamental right to practice religion using cannabis. Besides Jamaica -  the land of the Rastafarian legend Bob Marley - the Rastafarian community, in other nations where they have a significant presence, have also started to demand restoration of their fundamental rights. In Kenya, for example, the Rastafarian community has moved the courts. Tuko reports that 'The outfit further argued that their members were forced to live in fear as a minority religious group in Kenya as the current legislative framework was inimical to their religious practices as it failed to reasonably accommodate the Rastafari use of marijuana as a manifestation of their faith and for their connectedness with "Jah". "That the impugned law which was enacted in the year, 1994 is hostile and intolerant to people professing the Rastafari faith yet we are in a new constitutional framework following the promulgation of the constitution of Kenya 2010 that is progressive and accommodative of diversity and protective of the marginalised group who include members of the 1st petitioner and the 2nd Petitioner/Applicants," reads the application.' Further, The Star, reports in Kenya that 'The Rastas, through lawyer Shaddrack Wambui, are seeking to suspend implementation of certain sections of the Narcotics Drugs and Psychotropic Substances Act in regard to the arrest, prosecution and conviction of their people and the private growth and use of cannabis in their private homes or designated places of worship. “The impugned provision is an invasion to Rastas privacy rights under Article 31, a contravention of Rastas freedom to manifest his religion under Article 32 of the Constitution,” they say. They also seek to have their case referred to Chief Justice Martha Koome to appoint a bench of uneven judges. They claim that their case raises substantial questions of law. According to the court documents, Rastas outwardly manifest their beliefs and dedication to God through the growing of ‘rastas’ or ‘dreadlocks’ and the associated sacramental communion achieved through the use of the holy herb, which is crushed by the total prohibition of cannabis.' While Jamaica has introduced special legislation to protect its Rastafarian community and their spiritual communion with the cannabis plant, what has India - the land whose cannabis usage for spiritual purposes led to the Rastafarian community's association with the herb and inspired countries like Canada to legalize cannabis - done to protect its ganja smoking communities of sadhus, yogis and mendicants that form the core of its eternal spirituality? This section of the country, spanning across all religions, consists of individuals who have voluntarily given up all pursuits of material wealth to focus on the highest pursuit possible in human life, the pursuit of spirituality. They have only seen oppression by successive governments for the last 150 years. The cannabis plant, which provides succor from the harshest conditions, fatigue, hunger and which is a key aid to spiritual focus, has been prohibited. Association with the plant has led to widespread harassment from the ruling and upper classes, the same classes that now seek the label of Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes for the purely selfish reason of increasing their already bloated economic status. There is an unstated rule that seems to suggest that if one wears saffron, the official colors of Indian state religion, then one is free to partake of the herb. When will ganja - the spiritual herb of millions of India's sadhus of all religions, the herb that was medicine and healthy intoxicant for the tens of millions of India's working classes, indigenous communities and poor - become free? The herb was imprisoned 150 years ago by India's British rulers with the help of India's ruling and upper classes. The British left, but the ruling and upper classes who today make up a minority of the Indian population, continue to keep the herb illegal, destroying it wherever it is found, and imprisoning all those who believe in it, while promoting all the harmful substitutes that were left in its place - alcohol, tobacco, opium, synthetic pharma drugs, methamphetamine, etc. Today, as I look around me, I see hordes of Indians contributing to the coffers of the petrochemical companies that have laid the nation's environment to waste, and to the coffers of the corrupt and authoritarian ruling and upper classes who keep India's herb banned and its users chained. Today, even the khadi that Gandhi advocated is not sustainable anymore. Its creation damages the land. The bhang fibre is a more appropriate material for the fabric of India, healing the land and the people wherever it can be grown and used...We, the people, do not even think about what goes into the making of our flag, blindly following the ruling class's grandstanding for its own benefit...what chance then of understanding what ganja is to India and the freedoms we have lost? You say that Siva, the eternal spirit, is Mahadeva - the great god, and you acknowledge that ganja is his favorite herb, and you know that his people have used the herb as a means of holy communion with the divine spirit from time immemorial...So, are you trying to test what the eternal spirit, the great god, is capable of by banning and destroying his herb wherever you find it and locking up the people who grow and use the herb? Or is it that you yourself, in fact, do not truly believe the things you say, or say the things you truly believe in? For prohibiting ganja, now, in addition to the violations against the right to practice one's religion, the right to equality, and the right to life by choosing one's preferred entheogen, medicine and intoxicant, the country's lawmakers must also be booked under the new Religious Anti-Conversion law for forcing those who wish to have spiritual communion with their chosen god through ganja to follow the rituals and practices of other sects and religions...

The law makers in most nations continue to ignore the right to religious freedom of the individual. They focus more on getting rich and protecting the rich in their countries. The judiciary in these nations - who are meant to be the protectors of the constitutional rights of the people - conveniently wash their hands of the problem, passing the buck to the legislature often citing lack of evidence that cannabis is an entheogen that has been used for religious purposes for thousands of years. As an example of this we see Eye Witness News reporting in the Bahamas that 'Indian hemp is classified as a dangerous drug under the Dangerous Drugs Act 2000 with its possession being banned, except for very limited scientific and medical purposes by authorized personnel.Stubbs however contended that the drug is a ‘sacred herb’, used as a sacrament in manifesting his faith as a Rastafarian and that he has a constitutional right to possess and use it. Stubbs also contended that to the extent that the DDA does not contain an exemption for religious use, its blanket criminal sanctions on the possession of cannabis infringe on his right to practice his faith freely. In the 40-page decision, Justice Klein differentiated between Indian hemp and marijuana, stating that while they belong to the same cannabis genus, they are of different varieties of the hemp family. He also highlighted that hemp has been used lawfully for medicinal and other purposes in India and China for thousands of years until its international criminalization following the International Opium Conference in 1925. In his judgment, Klein said that he found nothing anti-democratic or anti-rights in Parliament’s decision not to make allowances for the religious or recreational use of marijuana....The judge accepted that the failure to make provision for the religious use of marijuana amounted to an interference with Stubbs’ rights to observe and manifest his religion. “I also find that there is sufficient evidence and other material before the court to establish that the impugned provisions of the Dangerous Drugs Act (DDA) are reasonably required to attain public policy objectives, whether for public health or safety.“Furthermore, in my judgment, the applicant has not provided any evidence or other material to satisfy the court that the failure to make an exemption for religious use is not justifiable in a democratic society, or that the legislative measures in the DDA are disproportionate to their objectives,” the judge noted.'

William James wrote in Principles of Psychology, 'The perfect object of belief would be a God or 'Soul of the World,' represented both optimistically and moralistically (if such a combination could be), and withal so definitely conceived as to show us why our phenomenal experiences should be sent to us by Him in just the very way in which they come. All Science and all History would thus be accounted for in the deepest and simplest fashion.The very room in which I sit, its sensible walls and floor, and the feeling the air and area within it give me, no less than the 'scientific' conceptions which I am urged to frame concerning the mode of existence of all these phenomena when my back is turned, would then all be corroborated, not de-realized, by the ultimate principle of my belief. The World-soul sends me just those phenomena in order that I may react upon them; and among the reactions is the intellectual one of spinning these conceptions. What is beyond the crude experiences is not an alternative to them, but something that means them for me here and now. It is safe to say that, if ever such a system is satisfactorily excogitated, mankind will drop all other systems and cling to that one alone as real. Meanwhile the other systems coexist with the attempts at that one, and, all being alike fragmentary, each has its little audience and day.'

It is only recently that we are seeing a renewed interest in psychedelics and psychotropics as entheogens. This is, however, mostly restricted to areas of cutting edge research in technologically advanced nations, where researchers seek to understand the mind better.  As Marijuana Moment reports '“Psychedelic medicines can open a doorway to seeing one’s psyche and connection with the world in new and helpful ways,” Presti said. “That’s been appreciated by shamanic traditions for thousands of years. Science is now exploring new ways to investigate this.” Journalism professor Michael Pollan, author of “How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression and Transcendence,” will also be involved.' What these researchers are rediscovering is the knowledge that was widespread among the indigenous communities of the world a few hundred years ago. The researchers, belonging to the ruling and upper classes, are however only concerned with how to monetize the entheogen, i.e. to use it as medicine to treat the illnesses of the elites who will pay big bucks to get a dose. This the elites do anyway. With their wealth, they are the ones with unrestricted access to the entheogens that have been prohibited. They however use these entheogens not for the pursuit of spirituality, but as a way to keep themselves in shape to continue their procurement and amassing of wealth and power.  

Commenting on the state of the world today, Leo Tolstoy writes in his book The Kingdom of God and Peace Essays 'A terrible weight of evil hangs over the people of the world and presses them down. And men standing beneath that weight, and more and more oppressed by it, seek means of release. They know that by their collective strength they could lift that weight and throw it off, but they cannot agree to do so, and each of them bends lower and lower, letting it lie on other shoulders. And the weight presses on people more and more and would long ago have crushed them had there not been some men among them who were guided in their actions not by the consideration of external consequences but by a desire to make them agree with the voice of conscience. There have been and are such people - Christians, for the essence of Christianity lies in substituting an inward aim (to attain which no one else's consent is necessary) in place of external aims (to attain which everyone's agreement is necessary). And therefore salvation from the slavery men are enduring - impossible for men of the social life-perception - has been and is achieved by Christianity - simply by substituting the Christian in place of the social conception of life.  The aim of universal life cannot be fully known to you, says the Christian teaching to each man, and presents itself to you only as a nearer and nearer approach to the infinite welfare of the world - to the establishment of the Kingdom of God. But the aim of the personal life is certainly known to you, and consists in realizing in yourself the infinite perfecting of love, essential for the realization of the Kingdom of God. And that aim is always known to you and always attainable.' He says 'The Kingdom of God can only be reached by effort, and only those who make such effort reach it. And it is just by this violent effort to rise above external conditions and reach the acknowledgement and announcement of the truth, that the Kingdom of God is taken. And this effort can and should be made in our time. Men need only understand this, they need only cease to be troubled by general and external affairs in which they are not free, and devote even a one-hundredth part of the energy they now expend on those material affairs, to the affair in which they are free - that is, to the recognition and the realization of the truth that is before them and to liberating themselves and others from the lies and hypocrisy which hide that truth - and without violence and conflict there would at once be an end to the false organization of life which makes men miserable and threatens them with still greater calamities. Then the Kingdom of God - or at least that first stage of it for which men are now ready in their consciousness - would be realized.' Tolstoy further says 'And therefore the transformation of human life (through which those in power will renounce power and there will be none anxious to seize it) will not come about solely by all men consciously and separately assimilating a Christian conception of life, but will come when a Christian public opinion so definite and comprehensive as to reach everybody has arisen and subdued the whole inert mass which is not able to attain the truth by its own intuition and is therefore always swayed by public opinion.  Such public opinion does not need hundreds and thousands of years for its formation and growth, for it possesses an infectious quality of acting on people and attracting collective masses with great rapidity.' Where we are now as the human race in the journey of evolution is highlighted by Herman Hesse when he says 'The taming of man, his development from gorilla to civilized being, is a long, slow process. The advances thus far embodied in law and custom are fragile; time and again what seemed to be definitive achievements are negated by an atavistic gnashing of teeth. If we see our provisional goal is the fulfilment of the spiritual imperatives put forth by the spiritual leaders of mankind from Zoroaster and Lao-tzu down, we are compelled to say that present-day mankind is still far closer to the gorilla than to man. We are not yet human, we are on the way to humanity. A few thousand years ago the religious law of a superior people handed down the fundamental maxim: 'Thou shalt not kill.' In the spring of 1919 Baron Wrangel, addressing a small international gathering of idealists in Bern, put forward the demand that in future no man must be compelled to kill another man - 'not even in the service of his country'. And this was felt to be a significant step forward. That is how far we have come. Some thousands of years after Moses formulated the commandment on Mount Sinai, it is restated very cautiously and with restrictions by a small group of well-intended men. Not a single civilized people has embodied it without restriction in its legal code. Everywhere men are still timidly discussing this simplest and soundest of all imperatives. Every student of Lao-tzu, every disciple of Jesus, every follower of Francis of Assisi was centuries in advance of the law and reason of the present-day civilized world.'  

It is said that the greatest revolution that humans will undergo is yet to come. This is the spiritual revolution that will usher in the kingdom of god, the paradise on earth. Not just for humans, but for all living beings. We may have been close to achieving it about 200 years ago. But, by banning the natural entheogens, we have taken away the fuel needed for spiritual evolution, thus creating the world of human-made synthetics and destruction of nature. Aldous Huxley says in the Doors of Perception 'In the Western world visionaries and mystics are a good deal less common than they used to be. There are two principal reasons for this state of affairs - a philosophical reason and a chemical reason. In the currently fashionable picture of the universe there is no place for valid transcendental experience. Consequently those who have had what they regard as valid transcendental experiences are looked upon with suspicion, as being either lunatics or swindlers. To be a mystic or a visionary is no longer credible. But it is not only our mental climate that is unfavourable to the visionary and the mystic, it is also our chemical environment - an environment profoundly different from that in which our forefathers passed their lives.'  Huxley says, 'Contemplatives are not likely to become gamblers, or procurers, or drunkards; they do not as a rule preach intolerance, or make war; do not find it necessary to rob, swindle or grind the faces of the poor. And to these enormous negative virtues we may add another which, though hard to define, is both positive and important. The arhat and the quietist may not practice contemplation in its fullness; but if they practise it at all, they may bring back enlightening reports of another, a transcendent country of the mind; and if they practise it in the height, they will become conduits through which some beneficient influence can flow out of that other country into a world of darkened selves, chronically dying from lack of it.' Maybe 200 years ago was not the right time for the spiritual revolution. The world was not at the brink of a human made catastrophe then, as it is now. 200 years ago the Industrial Revolution was yet to take off. Today, it has taken off, flown its course and crash landed, with the creations of our modern human society altering the entire climate of the earth - a climate that remained stable for the last 12,000 years enabling the human race to exist in relative security. Our actions - since the banning of the natural entheogens - have not only altered the earth's climate (possibly irreversibly), but also caused such pollution to land, water and air that millions of species have gone extinct as a result of it. The leaders and nations that took us down this path now throw up their hands in the air, saying they do not know what to do other than continue down this catastrophic path. The only way that this global spiritual revolution can come about - where humanity as a species can collectively reach the zenith of its evolution - is through the global legalization and usage of cannabis by the people of the world in numbers similar to that before cannabis was prohibited. I see only cannabis as the fuel capable of making this greatest of all revolutions that humans will undergo possible. It is the drug that Aldous Huxley seeks in the Doors of Perception, when he says 'What is needed is a new drug which will relieve and console our suffering species without doing more harm in the long run than it does good in the short. Such a drug must be potent in minute doses and synthesizable. If it does not possess these qualities, its production, like that of wine, beer, spirits and tobacco will interfere with the raising of indispensible food and fibres. It must be less toxic than opium or cocaine, less likely to produce undesirable social consequences than alcohol or the barbiturates, less inimical to the heart and lungs than the tars and nicotine of cigarettes. And, on the positive side, it should produce changes in consciousness more interesting, more intrinsically valuable than mere sedation or dreaminess, delusions of impotence or release from inhibition.'

One of the key attributes of god - and therefore of spirituality - is love. Everybody has heard the maxim 'God is love'. To truly love, one must bring down the barriers between oneself and everything else. To truly love, one must recognize the unity of all things. To truly love, one must learn to see oneself for what one is. Before we learn to love another, we must learn to love ourselves. To love oneself, one must see oneself in clear, stark reality. To hide our imperfections, and amplify what we perceive as our strengths is unbalanced love. To direct thought and action to only the benefit of oneself at the cost of all others is not love, it is selfishness. The individual exists only because the other elements in the web of life exist. If one strives to consolidate oneself at the expense of all the other elements, the web of life will collapse and I with it. Hence spirituality is the development of love within ourselves, not just for ourselves but for all of creation and also the void. As Alan Watts says 'The further truth that the undivided mind is aware of experience as a unity, of the world as itself, and that the whole nature of mind and awareness is to be one with what it knows, suggests a state that would usually be called love… Love is the organizing and unifying principle which makes the world a universe and the disintegrated mass a community. It is the very essence and character of mind, and becomes manifest in action when the mind is whole… This, rather than any mere emotion, is the power and principle of free action.' Herman Hesse, writing during the First World War in the book If the War Goes On, says 'Before we celebrate another Christmas, before we try once again to appease our one eternal and truly important yearning with mass-produced imitation sentiment, let us face up to our wretched situation. No idea or principle is to blame for all our wretchedness, for the nullity, the coarseness, the barrenness of our lives, for war and hunger and everything that is evil and dismal; we ourselves are to blame. And it is only through ourselves, through our insight and our will, that a change can come about. It makes no difference whether we go back to the teachings of Jesus and make them our own again, or whether we seek new forms. Where they will strike the eternal core of humanity, the teachings of Jesus and of Lao-tsu, or the Vedas and of Goethe are the same. There is only one doctrine. There is only one religion. There are a thousand forms, a thousand heralds, but only one voice, our voice. The voice of God does not come from Mount Sinai, it does not come from the Bible. The essence of love, beauty, and holiness does not reside in Christianity or in antiquity or in Goethe or Tolstoy - it resides in you, in you and me, in each one of us. This is the one eternal and forever identical doctrine, our one eternal truth. It is the doctrine of the 'Kingdom of Heaven' that we bear within ourselves.' Further, he says 'What then can give rise to a true spirit of peace on earth? Not commandments and not practical experience. Like all human progress, the love of peace must come from knowledge. All living knowledge as opposed to academic knowledge can have but one object. This knowledge may be seen and formulated in a thousand different ways, but it must always embody one truth. It is the knowledge of the living substance in us, in each of us, in you and me, of the secret magic, the secret godliness that each of us bears within him. It is the knowledge that, starting from this innermost point, we can at all times transcend all pairs of opposites, transforming white into black, evil into good, night into day. The Indians call it 'Atman', the Chinese 'Tao'; Christians call it 'grace'. Where that supreme knowledge is present (as in Jesus, Buddha, Plato, or Lao-tzu), a threshold is crossed beyond which miracles begin. There war and enmity cease. We can read of it in the New Testament and in the discourse of Gautama. Anyone who is so inclined can laugh at it and call it 'introverted rubbish', but in one who has experienced it his enemy becomes a brother, death becomes birth, disgrace honour, calamity good fortune. Each thing on earth discloses itself twofold, as 'of this world' and 'not of this world'. But 'this world' means what is 'outside us'. Everything that is outside us can become enemy, danger, fear and death. The light dawns with the experience that this entire 'outward' world is not only an object of our perception, but at the same time the creation of our soul, with the transformation of all outward into inward things, of the world into the self. What I am saying is self evident. But just as every soldier shot to death is the eternal repetition of an error, so the truth must be repeated for ever and ever in a thousand forms.' When I become aware that my body and the planet I live in, with its changing seasons, are interlinked, and that the transition from one season to the next produces effects on not just the planet, but my body as well, I come to better understand that these are the causes of aches and pains, bloating, indigestion, infections, fevers and colds in my body and these are the wonderful ways in which natural evolution has programmed my body to respond to its environment. I also realize that, during these phases of transition, all I need to do is simply not tax or over strain my body with excesses of any kind, be it food, exertion or sleep, but to let it do its work. There is no need for me to attack my body with cocktails of chemical synthetics that only disrupt my body's capability, leading to its ever increasing inability to adapt to the constantly changing environment. Similarly, if I try to disrupt the natural cycles of the planet with synthetic chemical cocktails, it will only lead to an increasing inability for the planet to handle its normal indigestion, infections, fevers and colds. There is no need to intervene in these natural cycles of body and planet with ill-conceived and vastly harmful man-made synthetics created by entities - claiming to be experts with incomplete knowledge and complete disregard for the body and the planet - looking to make a fast buck out of everything that exists. One of the key feelings that cannabis as an entheogen induces is the feeling of love. This feeling of love is not just limited to oneself, but encompasses the entire world. It is the One Love that Bob Marley spoke about. Instead of you and me, us and them, we become I and I.

Work hard in the day for the things that you are passionate about and sleep well in the night knowing that you have done the best you could. Live your life fiercely for the sustenance of the living and rest in the peace of death knowing that yours was a life well lived. In all these states, light and darkness, work and rest, matter and void, know the ultimate truth of who you are...the eternal spirit...sat-chit-anandam...

Related articles

Listed below are articles taken from various media related to the above subject. Words in italics are the thoughts of your truly at the time of reading the article.  

'Indian hemp is classified as a dangerous drug under the Dangerous Drugs Act 2000 with its possession being banned, except for very limited scientific and medical purposes by authorized personnel.

Stubbs however contended that the drug is a ‘sacred herb’, used as a sacrament in manifesting his faith as a Rastafarian and that he has a constitutional right to possess and use it.

Stubbs also contended that to the extent that the DDA does not contain an exemption for religious use, its blanket criminal sanctions on the possession of cannabis infringe on his right to practice his faith freely.

In the 40-page decision, Justice Klein differentiated between Indian hemp and marijuana, stating that while they belong to the same cannabis genus, they are of different varieties of the hemp family. He also highlighted that hemp has been used lawfully for medicinal and other purposes in India and China for thousands of years until its international criminalization following the International Opium Conference in 1925.

In his judgment, Klein said that he found nothing anti-democratic or anti-rights in Parliament’s decision not to make allowances for the religious or recreational use of marijuana.

....

The judge accepted that the failure to make provision for the religious use of marijuana amounted to an interference with Stubbs’ rights to observe and manifest his religion.

“I also find that there is sufficient evidence and other material before the court to establish that the impugned provisions of the Dangerous Drugs Act (DDA) are reasonably required to attain public policy objectives, whether for public health or safety.

“Furthermore, in my judgment, the applicant has not provided any evidence or other material to satisfy the court that the failure to make an exemption for religious use is not justifiable in a democratic society, or that the legislative measures in the DDA are disproportionate to their objectives,” the judge noted.'

https://ewnews.com/judge-marijuana-religious-exemption-for-parliament-to-decide
 

'There was a time when those who could tap into otherworldly energies were precious to rulers and royalty, and village peasants equally prized a local seer to resolve their everyday matters. Mystics throughout the ages have been any gender, but typically men took up organized religion while women were pushed to religion’s outer fringe: the occult.

Rightly or wrongly, today’s fortune tellers, clairvoyants, and psychics are the heirs of a long female-led tradition. And, for many women of history at least, this tradition used the mind-bending powers of cannabis to access the supernatural.

Here are just a few women of renown who got high and channeled the divine.'

https://www.leafly.com/news/lifestyle/women-in-history-cannabis-mysticism



'“Psychedelic medicines can open a doorway to seeing one’s psyche and connection with the world in new and helpful ways,” Presti said. “That’s been appreciated by shamanic traditions for thousands of years. Science is now exploring new ways to investigate this.”

Journalism professor Michael Pollan, author of “How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression and Transcendence,” will also be involved.'

https://www.marijuanamoment.net/new-psychedelics-research-and-education-center-launched-at-uc-berkeley-as-reform-movement-grows/


'The majority of cannabis users in this study regarded cannabis as a recreational drug devoid of entheogenic features. A minority of the sample endorsed having a spiritual motivation for cannabis use and regarded it as an important entheogen, although not necessarily as efficacious in this regard as the classical psychedelics. Such spiritual users differed from recreational users both in their mode of engagement with cannabis and in the type of experiences obtained.

Recent research has not given much attention to spiritual aspects of cannabis use, but the study indicates that spiritually motivated use remains prevalent and deserves further study.'

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s42238-020-00032-2


'Home of both CB1 and CB2 receptors, the amygdala is responsible for our coordination, endocrine functions, and sensory perception. Whenever we meditate or take a toke of herb, we begin to alter the way chemicals (like dopamine, serotonin, norepinephrine, and GABA, to name a few) stimulate our brain and body.

One molecule in particular highlights the similarities between consuming cannabis and meditation: anandamide. The root of the word comes from ananda, the name of one of Buddha’s disciples and the Hindu (Sanskrit) word for ‘perfect bliss’. In cannabis, it’s known as the bliss molecule.

As a cannabinoid, anandamide brings us full circle with the mind and body connection that can be accessed through both cannabis and meditation- revealing that cultures that practice both activities have more in common than you might think.'

https://www.leafly.com/news/lifestyle/weed-rituals-cross-cultural-connection


'The site of the discovery is Pinwheel Cave in Southern California, about 80 kilometers northeast of Santa Barbara. The cave gets its name for a large, red, pinwheel-shaped drawing on its ceiling; some archaeologists have hypothesized it represents a genus of the psychoactive flower Datura. The flower contains the alkaloids scopolamine and atropine, which are considered an entheogen—a psychoactive compound used in a spiritual context. The Chumash people of Southern California called the experiences triggered by ingesting Datura “sacred dreams,” according to Jim Adams, a pharmacologist at the University of Southern California who spent 14 years studying sacred Chumash Datura ceremonies.'

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/11/californian-cave-artists-may-have-used-hallucinogens-find-reveals


'Does cannabis have any ties to religion? What we found may surprise you.

Cannabis has not only been used in religious ceremonies, it has a long-standing tradition in numerous world faiths.'

https://www.leafly.com/news/cannabis-101/cannabis-a-gift-from-the-ancient-gods


The sense of not being free comes from trying to do things which are impossible and even meaningless. You are not “free” to draw a square circle, to live without a head, or to stop certain reflex actions. These are not obstacles to freedom; they are the conditions of freedom. I am not free to draw a circle if perchance it should turn out to be a square circle. I am not, thank heaven, free to walk out of doors and leave my head at home. Likewise I am not free to live in any moment but this one, or to separate myself from my feelings.

https://www.brainpickings.org/2021/03/16/alan-watts-freedom-fear-love/



'Cultural stigmas around smoking a joint have diminished, but most pastors still say it crosses a moral line,” said McConnell. “While some may connect this prohibition to state laws that still forbid this use, it is clear from their views on legalization that pastors see moral problems with getting high beyond simply disobeying government authorities.”

Evangelical pastors are almost twice as likely as mainline pastors to see smoking marijuana to get high as morally wrong (89% to 47%). Denominationally, Pentecostals (97%) and Baptists (92%) are more likely to see it as immoral than Restorationist movement (74%), Methodist (66%), Lutheran (63%) and Presbyterian/Reformed pastors (57%).'

https://lifewayresearch.com/2021/05/11/most-pastors-oppose-marijuana-use-legalization/


'The outfit further argued that their members were forced to live in fear as a minority religious group in Kenya as the current legislative framework was inimical to their religious practices as it failed to reasonably accommodate the Rastafari use of marijuana as a manifestation of their faith and for their connectedness with "Jah". "That the impugned law which was enacted in the year, 1994 is hostile and intolerant to people professing the Rastafari faith yet we are in a new constitutional framework following the promulgation of the constitution of Kenya 2010 that is progressive and accommodative of diversity and protective of the marginalised group who include members of the 1st petitioner and the 2nd Petitioner/Applicants," reads the application.'

https://www.tuko.co.ke/412272-rastafarians-petition-court-allow-them-smoke-marijuana-way-connecting-their-maker.html


'Like many mind-altering plants, cannabis has been part of spiritual practices for thousands of years. It has deep roots in Hinduism, Islam, Rastafarianism, and indigenous traditions in Asia, Africa, and elsewhere. Yet almost no attention has been given to how contemporary adults employ it spiritually. A sample of 1087 participants (mean age = 38.9) completed an online survey assessing their use of cannabis and other substances, as well as spiritual and psychological characteristics. Spiritual benefit from cannabis was reported by 66.1% of the sample, and 5.5% reported it had sometimes been a spiritual hindrance. A MANOVA showed that those who reported spiritual benefit differed significantly from those who did not on several outcome variables, and a post hoc descriptive discriminant analysis revealed that expansiveness motivation, non-theistic daily spiritual experience, meditation frequency, and two mindfulness facets contributed most to differentiating the two groups. The majority of the sample (63%) was free of cannabis use disorder. Compared to disordered groups, the non-disordered group was significantly older and scored lower on experiential avoidance, psychological distress, and several motives for use. Results suggest that spiritual motives for cannabis use may be widespread. Implications for future research on spiritual use of cannabis are discussed.'

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/02791072.2021.1941443?journalCode=ujpd20


'Weiss points out that rather than debating whether or not cannabis could be understood as a psychedelic, it could be more useful to identify both as entheogens.

“[Entheogens are] defined as promoting life-altering experiences, profound insights, and spiritual connectedness, or ‘generating the God within,’” said Weiss. “Like psychedelics, the use of Cannabis sativa has been widely documented as a powerful shamanic medicine for thousands of years all over our planet—many people across the world view cannabis as a master plant or teacher.”'

https://www.leafly.com/learn/psychedelics/is-weed-a-psychedelic


'The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy has, in what we laughingly call the past, had a great deal to say on the subject of parallel universes. Very little of this is, however, at all comprehensible to anyone below the level of Advanced God, and since it in now well-established that all known gods came into existence a good three-millionths of a second after the Universe began rather than, as they usually claimed, the previous week, they already have a great deal of explaining to do as it is, and are therefore not available for comment on matters of deep physics at this time.'

- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, The Complete Trilogy of Five, Douglas Adams


''It says in the brochure,' said Arthur, pulling it out of his pocket and looking at it again, 'that I can have a special prayer, individually tailored to me and my special needs.'

'Oh, all right,' said the old man. 'Here's a prayer for you. Got a pencil?'

'Yes,' said Arthur.

'It goes like this. Let's see now: "Protect me from knowing what I don't need to know. Protect me from even knowing that there are things to know that I don't know. Protect me from knowing that I decided not to know about the things that I decided not to know about. Amen." That's it. It's what you pray silently inside yourself anyway, so you may as well have it out in the open.'

'Hmmm,' said Arthur. 'Well, thank you-'

'There's another prayer that goes with it that's very important,' continued the old man, 'so you'd better jot this down, too.'

'OK.'

'It goes, "Lord, lord, lord..." It's best to put that bit in, just in case. You can never be too sure. "Lord, lord, lord. Protect me from the consequences of the above prayer. Amen." And that's it. Most of the trouble people get into in life from missing out that last part.''

- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, The Complete Trilogy of Five, Douglas Adams



'The Rastas, through lawyer Shaddrack Wambui, are seeking to suspend implementation of certain sections of the Narcotics Drugs and Psychotropic Substances Act in regard to the arrest, prosecution and conviction of their people and the private growth and use of cannabis in their private homes or designated places of worship.

“The impugned provision is an invasion to Rastas privacy rights under Article 31, a contravention of Rastas freedom to manifest his religion under Article 32 of the Constitution,” they say.

They also seek to have their case referred to Chief Justice Martha Koome to appoint a bench of uneven judges. They claim that their case raises substantial questions of law.

According to the court documents, Rastas outwardly manifest their beliefs and dedication to God through the growing of ‘rastas’ or ‘dreadlocks’ and the associated sacramental communion achieved through the use of the holy herb, which is crushed by the total prohibition of cannabis.'

https://www.the-star.co.ke/news/2021-09-21-ag-has-until-october-18-to-respond-to-rasta-marijuana-case/


A man endowed with 'self-will' I have in mind does not seek money or power. He despises them, but not because he is a paragon of virtue or a resigned altruist. Far from it! The truth is simply that money, power, and all the possessions for which men torment and ultimately shoot each other mean little to one who has come to himself, to a self-willed man. He values only one thing, the mysterious power in himself which bids him live and helps him to grow. This power can neither be preserved nor increased nor deepened by money and power, because money and power are the inventions of distrust. Those who distrust the life-giving force within them, or who have none, are driven to compensate through such substitutes as money. When a man has confidence in himself, when all he wants in the world is to live out his destiny in freedom and purity, he comes to regard all those vastly overestimated and far too costly possessions as mere accessories, pleasant perhaps to have and make use of, but never essential.

- Self-will, 1919, If The War Goes On, Herman Hesse


'Hear me, my children,' he said earnestly, addressing himself to the youngest. 'If you wish to hear a bell tone, you must not strike upon tin. And if you wish to play the flute, you must not set your lips to a wineskin. Do you understand me, my friends? Think back, my dear friends, think back and remember: what was it that you learned from your Zarathustra in those hours of enthusiasm? What was it? Was it wisdom for the counting house, or for the street, or for the battlefield? Did I give you advice for kings, did I speak to you like a king, or a citizen, or a politician, or a merchant? No, if you recall, I spoke like Zarathustra, I spoke my language, I stood before you like a mirror, in which you see yourselves. Did you ever "learn something" from me? Was I ever a language teacher or a teacher of any other subject? No, Zarathustra is not a teacher, you cannot ask him questions and learn from him, and jot down big and little formulas to use as the need arises. Zarathustra is a man, he is you and I. Zarathustra is the man for whom you are searching in yourselves, the forthright, unseduced man - how could he wish to seduce you? Zarathustra has seen much and suffered much, he has cracked many nuts and been bitten by many snakes. But he has learned only one thing, he prides himself ony on one bit of wisdom. He has learned to be Zarathustra. And that is what you want to learn from him, yet so often lack the courage to learn. You must learn to be yourselves, just as I have learned to be Zarathustra. You must unlearn the habit of being someone else or nothing at all, of imitating the voices of others and mistaking the faces of others for your own. - Therefore, my friends, when Zarathustra speaks to you, look for no wisdom, no arts, no formulas, no Pied Piper's tricks in hs words; look for the man himself. From a stone you can learn what hardness is, from a bird what it is to sing. And from me you can learn what man and destiny are.'

- Zarathustra's Return, A Word to German Youth, 1919, If The War Goes On, Herman Hesse


So spoke Zarathustra to us:

One thing is given to man which makes him into a god, which reminds him that he is a god: to know destiny.

What makes me Zarathustra is that I have come to know Zarathustra's destiny. That I have lived his life. Few men know their destiny. Few men live their lives. Learn to live your lives! Learn to know your destiny!

You have been lamenting so much over the destiny of your people. But a destiny we lament over is not yet ours; it is an alien, hostile destiny, an alien god and evil idol, a destiny flung at us like a poisoned arrow out of the darkness.

Learn that destiny does not come from idol; then at last you will know that there are no idols or gods! As a child grows in a woman's womb, so destiny grows in each man's body, or if you will you may say: in his mind or soul. They are the same thing.

And just as the woman is one with her child and loves it beyond all else in the world - so must you learn to love your destiny beyond all else in the world. It must be your god, for you yourselves must be your gods.

When destiny comes to a man from outside, it lays him low, just as an arrow lays a deer low. When destiny comes to a man from within, from his innermost being, it makes him strong, it makes him into a god. It made Zarathustra into Zarathustra - it must make you into yourself!

- Zarathustra's Return, A Word to German Youth, 1919, If The War Goes On, Herman Hesse


A man who has recognized his destiny never tries to change it. The endeavour to change destiny is a childish pursuit that makes men quarrel and kill one another. Your emperor and generals tried to change destiny, and so did you. Now that you have failed to change destiny, it has a bitter taste and you look upon it as a poison. If you had not tried to change it, if you had taken it to heart as your child, if you had made it into your very own selves, how sweet it would taste! All sorrow, poison, and death are alien, imposed destiny. But every true act, everything that is good and joyful and fruitful on earth, is lived destiny, destiny that has become self.

Before your long war, you were too rich, my friends, you and your fathers were too rich and fat and glutted, and when there was pain in your bellies, you ought to have recognized destiny in your pain and harkened at its good voice. But, children that you were, the pain in your bellies made you angry and you contrived to think that hunger and want were the source of your pain. And so you struck out: to conquer, to gain more space on earth, to acquire more food for your bellies. And now that you have returned home and have not gained what you were after, you have started to moan again, you are beset by all manner of aches and pains; once again you are looking for the wicked, wicked enemy who is responsible for your pain, and you are prepared to shoot him even if he is your brother.

- Zarathustra's Return, A Word to German Youth, 1919, If The War Goes On, Herman Hesse


My young friends, you ask after the school of suffering, the forge of destiny. Don't you know? No, you who are forever talking of the people and dealing with the masses, who wish to suffer only with them and for them, you do not know. I am speaking of solitude.

Solitude is the path over which destiny endeavours to lead man to himself. Solitude is the path that men most fear. A path fraught with terrors, where snakes and toads like in wait. The men who have walked alone, those who have explored the deserts of solitude: is it not said that they went astray, that they were evil or sick? And heroic deeds: do men not speak of them as though they had been the work of criminals - because they think it best to discourage themselves from taking the path of such deeds?

And Zarathustra himself - is it not said that he died in madness and that at bottom everything he said and did was madness? And when you heard such talk, didn't you feel the blood rushing to your cheeks? As though it might have been nobler and worthier of you to become one of those madmen, as though you were ashamed of your lack of courage?

- Zarathustra's Return, A Word to German Youth, 1919, If The War Goes On, Herman Hesse


My friends, let me sing you the song of solitude. Without solitude there is no suffering, without solitude there is no heroism. But the solitude I have in mind is not the solitude of the blithe poets or of the theatre, where the fountain bubbles so sweetly at the mouth of the hermit's cave.

From childhood to manhood is only one step, one single step. In taking that step you break away from father and mother, you become yourself; it is a step into solitude. No one takes it completely. Even the holiest hermit, the grumpiest old bear in the bleakest of mountains, takes with him, or draws after him, a thread that binds him to his father and mother, to the loving warmth of kinship and friendship. My friends, when you speak so fervently of people and fatherland, I see the thread dangling from you, and I smile. When your great men speak of their 'task' and responsibility, that thread hands out of their mouths. Your great men, your leaders and orators, never speak of tasks directed against themselves, they never speak of responsibility to destiny! They hang by a thread that leads them back to mother and to all the cosy warmth that the poets recall when they sing of childhood and its pure joys. No one severs the thread entirely, except in death and then only if he succeeds in dying his own death.

- Zarathustra's Return, A Word to German Youth, 1919, If The War Goes On, Herman Hesse


But this I do know: if the world has ever been bettered, if it has ever been made richer, more alive, happier, more dangerous, more amusing, this has not been the work of reformers, of betterers, but of true self-seekers, among whom I should so like to count you. Those earnestly and truly self-seeking men who have no goal and no purposes, who are content to live and be themselves. They suffer much, but they suffer willingly. They are willing to be sick, provided they are privileged to die their own death, the death that they themselves have come by, their very own!

By such men the world has perhaps been bettered now and then - just as an autumn day is made better by a little cloud, a little brown shadow, a swift flight of birds. There is no reason to believe that the world needs more betterment than it can obtain from the presence of a few men - not cattle, not a herd, but a few men, a few of the rare beings who rejoice us as a flight of birds or a tree by the seashore rejoices us - by the mere fact that they exist, that there are such men. If you are ambitious, my young friends, if you want to strive after honour, then strive after this honour! But such striving is dangerous, and it can easily cost you your lives.

- Zarathustra's Return, A Word to German Youth, 1919, If The War Goes On, Herman Hesse


You must not worship Zarathustra. You must not try to become Zarathustra. In each one of you there is a hidden being, still in the deep sleep of childhood. Bring it to life! In each one of you there is a call, a will, an impulse of nature, an impulse towards the future, the new, the higher. Let it mature, let is resound, nurture it! Your future is not this or that; it is not money or power, it is not wisdom or success in your trade - your future, your hard dangerous path is this: to mature and to find God in yourselves. Nothing, O young men of Germany, has been made harder for you. You have always looked for God, but never in yourselves. He is nowhere else. There is no other God than the God within you.

- Zarathustra's Return, A Word to German Youth, 1919, If The War Goes On, Herman Hesse


You write to me that you are in despair and do not know what to believe, what to hope. You do not know whether or not there is a God. You do not know whether or not life has any meaning, whether or not love of country has a meaning, whether, in the wretched state of condition of the world, it is better to strive for spiritual goods or merely to fill your belly.

I believe your state of mind and soul to be the right one. Not to know whether there is a God, not to know whether there is good and evil, is far better than to know for sure. Five years ago, if you remember, I should say you were pretty well convinced there was a God, and above all you had no doubt as to what was good and what was evil. Naturally you did what you thought was good and marched off to war. For five years now, the best years of your youth, you have kept on doing 'good': you have fired a gun, gone over the top, lounged about in barracks and mud holes, buried comrades or bandaged their wounds. And little by little you began to doubt the good, to suspect the good and glorious occupation you were engaged in was fundamentally evil, or at the least very stupid and absurd.

- Letter to a Young German, 1919, If The War Goes On, Herman Hesse


And so it was. Evidently the good you were so sure of at the time was not the right good, the good that is indestructible and timeless; and evidently the God you knew in those days was not the right God. Presumably he was the national God of our consistories and war poets, the awesome God whose props and footstool are cannon and whose favourite colours are black, white and red. A God he assuredly was, a might, gigantic God, greater than any Jehovah; hundreds of thousands of bloody sacrifices were offered up to him, and in his honour hundreds of thousands of bellies were slit open, hundreds of thousands of lungs torn to pieces; he was more bloodthirsty and brutal than any idol, and during the bloody sacrifice the priests at home, our theologians, intoned their well-paid paens of praise to him. The last vestige of religion we possessed in our impoverished souls and so impoverished, soul-less churches was lost. Has anyone stopped to consider, and to wonder at the fact, that in those four years of war our theologians buried their own religion, their own Christianity? Committed to the service of mankind, they mistook for mankind the authorities who paid them. They prayed (not all of course, but the spokesmen) with guile and many words that war and Christianity were perfectly compatible, that a man could be the best of Christians and yet shoot and stab to perfection. But that is not true, and if our national Churches had not been national Churches in the service of Throne and Army, but Churches of God, they would have given us during the war what we so bitterly lacked: a haven of humanity, a sanctuary for the orphaned soul, a perpetual admonition to moderation, wisdom, and brotherly love; in short, they would have offered divine services.

- Letter to a Young German, 1919, If The War Goes On, Herman Hesse



If you are now wondering where to look for consolation, where to seek a new and better God, a new and better faith, you will surely realize, in your present loneliness and despair, that this time you must not look to external, official sources, to Bibles, pulpits, or thrones, for enlightenment. Nor to me. You can find it only in yourself. And there it is, there dwells the God who is higher and more selfless that the patriots' God of 1914. The sages of all time have proclaimed him, but he does not come to us from books, he lives within us, and all our knowledge of him is worthless unless he opens our inner eye. This God is in you too. He is particularly in you, the dejected and despairing. It is not the inferior man who sickens with the affliction of the times, or who becomes dissatisfied with the gods and idols of the past.

But search where you may, no prophet or teacher can relieve you of the need to look within. Today the entire German people, all of us, are in your situation. Our world has collapsed, our pride has been humbled, our money is gone, our friends are dead. And now, persisting in our deplorable old habit, we are all - nearly all - looking for the villain who was to blame for it all. We call him America, we call him Clemenceau, we call him Kaiser Wilhelm or heaven knows what else, and with all our accusations we are running around in a circle that gets us nowhere. It is childish and stupid to ask whether this one or that one is guilty. I propose that for one short hour we ask ourselves instead: 'What about myself? What has been my share of the guilt? When have I been too loud-mouthed, too arrogant, too credulous, too boastful? What is there in me that may have helped foster the rabble-rousing press, the degenerate religion of the national Jehovah, and all the illusions that have so suddenly collapsed?'

- Letter to a Young German, 1919, If The War Goes On, Herman Hesse


Most men, the herd, have never tasted solitude. They leave father and mother, but only to crawl to a wife and quietly succumb to new warmth and new ties. They are never alone, they never commune with themselves. And when a solitary man crosses their path, they fear him and hate him like the plague; they fling stones at him and find no peace until they are far away from him. The air around him smells of stars, of cold stellar spaces; he lacks the soft warm fragrance of the home and hatchery.

Zarathustra has something of this starry smell, this forbidding coldness. Zarathustra has gone a long way on the path of solitude. He has attended the school of suffering. He has seen the forge of destiny and been wrought in it.

- Zarathustra's Return, A Word to German Youth, 1919, If The War Goes On, Herman Hesse


Ah, my friends, I don't know whether I ought to tell you any more about solitude. I should gladly tempt you to take that path, I should gladly sing you a song of the icy raptures of cosmic space. But I know that few men can travel that path without injury. It is hard, my dear friends, to live without a mother; it is hard to live without home and people, without fatherland or fame, without the pleasures of life in a community. It is hard to live in the cold, and most of those who have started on the path have fallen. A man must be indifferent to the possibility of falling, if he wants to taste of solitude and to face up to his own destiny. It is easier and more comforting to devote oneself to the 'tasks' of the day, the tasks meted out by the collectivity. See how happy the people are in their crowded streets! Shots are being fired, their lives are in danger, yet every one of them would rather die with the masses than walk alone in the cold outer night.

But how, my young friends, could I tempt you or lead you? Solitude is not chosen, any more than destiny is chosen. Solitude comes to us if we have within us the magic stone that attracts destiny. Many, far too many, have gone out into the desert and led the lives of herd men in a pretty hermitage beside a lovely spring. While others stand in the thick of the crowd, and yet the air of the stars blows round their heads.

But blessed be he who has found his solitude, not the solitude pictured in painting or poetry, but his own, unique, predestined solitude. Blessed be he who knows how to suffer! Blessed be he who bears the magic stone in his heart. To him comes destiny, from him comes authentic action.

- Zarathustra's Return, A Word to German Youth, 1919, If The War Goes On, Herman Hesse


The taming of man, his development from gorilla to civilized being, is a long, slow process. The advances thus far embodied in law and custom are fragile; time and again what seemed to be definitive achievements are negated by an atavistic gnashing of teeth. If we see our provisional goal is the fulfilment of the spiritual imperatives put forth by the spiritual leaders of mankind from Zoroaster and Lao-tzu down, we are compelled to say that present-day mankind is still far closer to the gorilla than to man. We are not yet human, we are on the way to humanity.

A few thousand years ago the religious law of a superior people handed down the fundamental maxim: 'Thou shalt not kill.' In the spring of 1919 Baron Wrangel, addressing a small international gathering of idealists in Bern, put forward the demand that in future no man must be compelled to kill another man - 'not even in the service of his country'. And this was felt to be a significant step forward. That is how far we have come. Some thousands of years after Moses formulated the commandment on Mount Sinai, it is restated very cautiously and with restrictions by a small group of well-intended men. Not a single civilized people has embodied it without restriction in its legal code. Everywhere men are still timidly discussing this simplest and soundest of all imperatives. Every student of Lao-tzu, every disciple of Jesus, every follower of Francis of Assisi was centuries in advance of the law and reason of the present-day civilized world.

- Thou Shalt Not Kill, 1919, If The War Goes On, Herman Hesse


After the Old Testament came a New Testament; Christ was possible, the partial emancipation of the Jews was possible, mankind produced Goethe, Mozart, and Dostoevsky. At all times there has been a minority of men of good will, who believed in the future and obeyed laws that are inscribed in no secular legal code. And during the horrible war, thousands of men acted in accordance with unwritten laws; soldiers treated enemies with mercy and respect, while others suffered imprisonment and torture because they staunchly rejected the duty of murdering and hating.

In order to esteem such men and deeds at their full worth, in order to overcome our doubts in the progress of man from animal to human being, we must live in faith. We must learn to value ideas as highly as bullets or gold pieces, to love possibilities and cultivate them in ourselves; we must gain intimations of the future and of the future in our own hearts.

The 'practical' man, who is always right in committee meetings, is invariably wrong outside his committees. Ideals and faith in the future are always right. They are the one source from which the world draws strength. And anyone who disposes of humanitarian ideas as idle talk and fuzzy thinking or of strivings for the future as literature is still a gorilla and has a long way to go before becoming a man.

- Thou Shalt Not Kill, 1919, If The War Goes On, Herman Hesse


Shall we say then that our life is happiest when least is happening, that the world is best off when it has no history but only an existence? Such a notion repels us, it seems so trivial and commonplace; no, we cannot accept it. And from long unvisited chambers of memory there rise to our minds certain verses and maxims of wisdom, such as Goethe's observation that nothing is so hard to bear as a sequence of good days. But Goethe was right: man yearns for happiness but cannot endure too much of it. So it is in the life of the individual: happiness makes him tired and lazy, after a certain time, it ceases to be happiness. Happiness is a lovely flower, but it fades quickly. Perhaps that is also true in history, perhaps the few brief epochs that strike us as well-tempered and enviable must be paid for with the more prevalent misery, blood, and tears.

What then should we wish for if the only choice is between the hell of heroic life and the banality of a life without history?

What should we wish for? That is a question we can ponder a long while without finding an answer. But then it occurs to us that the question is ill-formulated or, rather, that it is a futile, childish question. The long tumult of war seems to have reduced us to a primitive childishness; we have long forgotten what the great teachers of mankind discovered and taught. For thousands of years they have all taught the same thing, and any theologian or humanist can tell us in plain words what it is, regardless of whether he inclines towards Socrates or towards Lao-tzu, towards the smiling unsuffering Buddha or the Saviour with the crown of thorns. All of them, and indeed every man of insight, every awakened and enlightened one, every true knower and teacher of mankind, has taught this one thing; namely, that man should not wish for greatness or happiness, for heroism or sweet peace, that he should wish for nothing at all but the pure and wakeful mind, the brave heart and faithful, knowing patience that will enable him to endure happiness as well as suffering, tumult as well as silence.

- Speech after Midnight, 1946, If The War Goes On, Herman Hesse


Let us wish for these good gifts. They all have the same source. They come from God, they are nothing other than the divine spark in each one of us. We do not perceive the spark every day; often we go a long time without perceiving it, we forget it, but a single moment can bring it back to us, a moment of terror and despair, or a moment of blissful quietness: a glance into the mystery of a flower, or into the trusting eyes of a child, the sound of a few measures of music. At such moments, moments of extreme affliction or of quiet openness, each one of us knows, even if he cannot say it in words, the secret of all knowledge and all happiness, the secret of unity. The one God lives in us all, every parcel of earth is our home, every man is our kinsman and brother; that is the knowledge to which we return when dire affliction or sweet rapture opens our ears and makes our hearts capable of love. And this knowledge of divine unity exposes all separation into races, nations, rich and poor, religions and parties as a delusion and a snare.

May this inner peace come to us and to all men: to those who at this hour are going to bed in a secure home and to those who live in misery without home or bed. We wish it to the victors lest their victory make them proud and blind, and to the vanquished lest they inveigh against the suffering that has befallen them and call it down upon the heads of others, in order that they may learn to endure it and to hear the voice of God in it.

- Speech after Midnight, 1946, If The War Goes On, Herman Hesse


Only the handful of saints among men are capable of living for long in this peace and in this good, simple insight; the rest of us are not. This we all know and we have often felt ashamed of it. But once we become aware that the only way to a higher and nobler humanity leads through this forever-repeated experience of unity, through the forever-renewed insight that we men are brothers and of divine origin, once we are truly wounded and awakened by this lightning flash, we shall never be able to fall wholly back to sleep again, and above all we shall not relapse into the nightmarish state of mind which give rise to wars, racial persecution, and fratricidal strife among men.

Year after year now we have witnessed well-nigh unendurable horror, and others less favoured than ourselves have suffered, some here and there are still suffering, every torment of body and soul. Amid blood and tears many have cast off the opinions and classifications by which the average man orders his world in comfortable times. Many have awakened, many have been smitten by conscience, many have sworn: if I live through this, I shall become a different and better man. Today as always these are the homines bonae voluntatis, the men of good will; to them a fragment of the world mystery has been disclosed, they alone and not any nations, classes, leagues, or organizations are the repositories of the future, they alone have the secret power of faith.

- Speech after Midnight, 1946, If The War Goes On, Herman Hesse


Our kingdom, my dear Max Brod, is simply 'not of this world'. Our business is not to preach or to command or to plead but to stand fast amid hells and devils. We cannot expect to exert the least influence through our fame or through the concerted action of the greatest possible number of our fellows. In the long view, to be sure, we shall always be the winners, something of us will remain when all the ministers and generals of today have been forgotten. But in the short view, in the here and now, we are poor devils, and the world wouldn't dream of letting us join in its game. If we poets and thinkers are of any importance, it is solely because we are human beings, because for all our failings we have hearts and minds and a brotherly understanding of everything that is natural and organic. The power of the ministers and other policy-makers is not based on the heart or mind but on the masses whose 'representatives' they are. They operate with something that we neither can nor should operate with., with number, with quantity, and that is a field we must leave to them. They too have no easy time of it, we must not forget that, actually they are worse off than we are, because they have not an intelligence, a rest and unrest, an equilibrium of their own, but are carried along, buffeted, and in the end wiped away by the millions of their electorate. Nor are they unmoved by the hideous things that go on under their eyes and partly as a result of their mistakes; they are very much bewildered. They have their house rules that cover them and perhaps make their responsibility more bearable. We guardians of the spiritual substance, we servants of the word and of truth, watch them with as much pity as horror. But our house rules, we believe, are more than house rules, they are true commandments, eternal and divine laws. Our mission is to safeguard them, and we endanger it every time we agree, even with the noblest intentions, to play by their 'rules'.

- An Attempt at Justification, May 1948, If The War Goes On, Herman Hesse


'Ah...but wait! Why are we talking about gamblers here? Or thousands of hookers and sportswriters jammed together in a seething mob in the lobby of a Houston hotel?

And what kind of a sick and twisted impulse would cause a professional sportswriter to deliver a sermon from the book of Revelations off his hotel balcony on the dawn of Super Sunday?

I had not planned a sermon for that morning. I had not even planned to be in Houston, for that matter...But now, looking back on that outburst, I see a certain inevitability about it. Perhaps it was a crazed and futile effort to somehow explain the extremely twisted nature of my relationship with God, Nixon, and the National Football League: the three had long since become inseparable in my mind, a sort of unholy trinity that had caused me more trouble and personal anguish than Ron Ziegler, Hubert Humphrey and Peter Sheridan all together had caused me in a year on the campaign trail.'

- Fear and Loathing at the Super Bowl, February 28, 1974, Fear and Loathing at the Rolling Stone, The Essential Writing of Hunter S. Thompson


'I howled at the top of my lungs for almost thirty minutes, raving and screeching about all those who would be cast into the lake of fire for a variety of low crimes, demeanors, and general ugliness that amounted to a sweeping indictment of almost everybody in the hotel at that hour.

Most of them were asleep when I began speaking, but as a Doctor of Divinity and an ordained minister in the Church of the New Truth, I knew in my heart that I was merely a vessel - a tool, as it were - of some higher and more powerful voice.

For eight long and degrading days I had skulked around Houston with all the other professionals, doing our jobs - which was actually to do nothing at all except drink all the free booze we could pour into our bodies, courtesy of the National Football League, and listen to an endless barrage of some of the lamest and silliest swill ever uttered by man or beast...and finally, on Sunday morning about six hours before the opening kickoff, I was racked to the point of hysteria by a hellish interior conflict.'

- Fear and Loathing at the Super Bowl, February 28, 1974, Fear and Loathing at the Rolling Stone, The Essential Writing of Hunter S. Thompson


'The jangling of the telephone caused me to interrupt my work. I jerked it off the hook, saying nothing to whoever was on the other end, and began flashing the hotel operator. When she finally cut in, I spoke very calmly. "Look," I said, " I'm a very friendly person and a minister of the gospel, to boot - but I thought I left instructions down there to put no calls - No calls, goddamn it! - through to this room, and especially not now in the middle of this orgy...I've been here eight days and nobody's called me yet. Why in hell would they start now?...What? Well, I simply can't accept that kind of flimsy reasoning, operator. Do you believe in hell? Are you ready to speak with Saint Peter?...Wait a minute now, calm down...I want to be sure you understand one thing before I go back to my business; I have some people here who need help...But I want you to know that God is Holy! He will not allow sin in his presence! The Bible says: "There is none righteous. No, not one...For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God.' That's from the book of Romans, young lady..."

The silence at the other end of the line was beginning to make me nervous. But I could feel the sap rising, so I decided to continue the sermon from the balcony...and I suddenly realized that somebody was beating on my door. Jesus God, I thought, it's the manager; they've come for me at last.'

- Fear and Loathing at the Super Bowl, February 28, 1974, Fear and Loathing at the Rolling Stone, The Essential Writing of Hunter S. Thompson


'He shrugged and dialed "O" while I hurried out to the balcony, clearing my throat for an opening run at James 2:19:

"Beware!" I shouted. "For the devils also believe, and tremble!"

I waited for a moment, but there was no reply from the lobby, twenty floors down - so I tried Ephesians 6:12 which seemed more appropriate.

"For we wrestle not," I screamed, "against flesh and blood - but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world - and, yes - against spiritual wickedness in high places!"

Still there was no response except the booming echoes of my own voice...but the thing on my spine was moving with new vigor now, and I sensed there was not much time. All the movement in the lobby had ceased. They were all standing still down there - maybe twenty or thirty people...but were they listening? Could they hear?

I couldn't be sure. The acoustics of these massive lobbies are not predictable. I knew, for instance, that person sitting in a room on the seventh floor, with the door open, could hear - with unnerving clarity - a cocktail glass shattering on the floor of the lobby. It was also true that every word of Gregg Allman's "Multi-Colored Lady" played at top volume on a dual-speaker Sony TC-126 in an open-door room on the twentieth floor could be heard in the NFL pressrooms on the hotel mezzanine...but it was hard to be sure of the timbre and carrying power of my own voice in this cavern; it sounded, to me, like the deep screaming of a bull elk in rut...but there was no way to know, for sure, if I was really getting through.'

- Fear and Loathing at the Super Bowl, February 28, 1974, Fear and Loathing at the Rolling Stone, The Essential Writing of Hunter S. Thompson


"Discipline!" I bellowed. "Remember Vince Lombardi." I paused to let that one sink in - waiting for applause, but none came. "Remember George Metesky!" I shouted. "He had discipline!"

Nobody down in the lobby seemed to catch that one, although I sensed the first stirrings of action on the balconies just below me. It was almost time for the Free Breakfast in the Imperial Ballroom downstairs, and some of the early rising sportswriters seemed to be up and about. Somewhere behind me a phone was ringing, but I paid no attention. It was time, I felt, to bring it all together...my voice was giving out, but despite the occasional dead spots and bursts of high-pitched wavering, I grasped the railing of the balcony and got braced for some flat-out raving:

"Revelations, Twenty-fifteen!" I screamed. "Say Hallelujah! Yes! Say Hallelujah!"

People were definitely responding now. I could hear their voices, full of excitement - but the acoustics of the place made it impossible to get a good fix on the cries that were bounding back and forth across the lobby. Were they saying "Hallelujah"?

"Four more years!" I shouted. "My friend General Haig has told us that the Forces of Darkness are now in control of the Nation - and they will rule for four more years!" I paused to sip my drink, then I hit it again: "And Al Davis has told us that whosoever was not found written in the book of life was cast into the lake of fire!"

I reached around behind me with my free hand, slapping at a spot between my shoulder blades to slow the thing down.'

- Fear and Loathing at the Super Bowl, February 28, 1974, Fear and Loathing at the Rolling Stone, The Essential Writing of Hunter S. Thompson


'Those were the salad days of early summer, before the fateful Supreme Court decision, when Nixon's Goebbels - ex-White House "communications director" Ken Clawson - was creating a false dawn over the White House by momentarily halting Nixon's yearlong slide in the public opinion polls with a daily drumbeat of heavy, headline-grabbing attacks on "professional Nixon haters" in the press, and "unprincipled, knee-jerk liberals in Congress." At that point in time, most of Nixon's traditional allies were beginning to hear the death shrieks of the banshee floating over the White House lawns at night, and even Billy Graham had deserted him. So Clawson, in a stroke of cheap genius, put a sybaritic Jesuit priest and a mentally retarded rabbi on the payroll and sent them forth to do battle with the forces of Evil.

Father John McLaughlin, the Jesuit, reveled joyfully in his role as "Nixon's priest" for a month or so, but his star faded fast when it was learned he was pulling down more than $25,000 a year for his efforts and living in a luxury apartment at the Watergate. His superiors in the church were horrified, but Father John McLaughlin gave them the back of his hand and, instead, merely cranked up his speechmaking act. In the end, however, not even Clawson could live with the insistent rumor that the Good Jesuit Father was planning to marry his girlfriend. This was too much, they say, for the rigid sensibilities of General Haig, the White House Chief of Staff, whose brother was a legitimate priest in Baltimore. McLaughlin disappeared very suddenly, after six giddy weeks on the national stage, and nothing has been heard of him since.

But Clawson was ready for that. No sooner had the priest been deep-sixed than he unveiled another holy man - the Rabbi Baruch Korff, a genuine dingbat with barely enough sense to tie his own shoes, but who eagerly lent his name and his flakey presence to anything Clawson aimes him at. Under the banner of something called the "National Citizens Committee for Fairness to the Presidency," he organized "rallies, dinner parties, and press conferences all over the country. One of his main backers was Hamilton Fish Sr., a notorious fascist and the father of New York Congressman Hamilton Fish Jr., one of the Republican swing votes on the House Judiciary Committee who quietly voted for impeachment.'

- Fear and Loathing in Limbo: The Scum Also Rises, October 10, 1974, Fear and Loathing at the Rolling Stone, The Essential Writing of Hunter S. Thompson


'Sandy likes Mo Uddal, and so do I, for that matter...I also like Jerry Jeff Walker, the Scofflaw King of New Orleans and a lot of other people I don't necessarily believe should be president of the United States. The immense concentration of power in that office is just too goddamn heavy for anybody with good sense to turn his back on. On her back. Or its back...At least not as long as whatever lives in the White House has the power to fill vacancies in the U.S. Supreme Court, because anybody with that kind of power can use it - like Nixon did - to pack-crown the Court of Final Appeal in this country with the same kind of lame, vindictive yo-yos who recently voted to sustain the commonwealth of Virginia's antisodomy statutes...And anybody who thinks that a 6-3 vote against "sodomy" is some kind of abstract legal gibberish that doesn't affect them had better hope they never get busted for anything the Bible or any local vice-squad cop calls an "unnatural sex act." Because "unnatural" is defined by the laws of almost every state in the Union as anything but a quick and dutiful hump in the classic missionary position, for purposes of procreation only. Anything else is a felony crime, and people who commit felony crimes go to prison.

Which won't make much difference to me. I took that fatal dive off the straight and narrow path so long ago that I can't remember when I first became a felon - but I have been one ever since, and it's way too late to change now. In the eyes of The Law, my whole life has been one long and sinful felony. I have sinned repeatedly, as often as possible, and just as soon as I can get away from this goddamn Calvinist typewriter I am going to get right after it again...God knows, I hate it, but I can't help myself after all these criminal years. Like Waylon Jennings says, "The devil made me do it the first time. The second time, I done it on my own."

Right. And the third time I did it because of brain damage...And after that: well, I figured that anybody who was already doomed to a life of crime and sin might as well learn to love it.'

- Fear & Loathing on the Campaign Trail '76: Third-Rate Romance, Low Rent Rendezvous, June 3, 1976, Fear and Loathing at the Rolling Stone, The Essential Writing of Hunter S. Thompson


'I was with him one night in L.A. when he decided that the only way to meaningfully communicate with a judge who'd been leaning on him in the courtroom was to drive out to the man's home in Santa Monica and set his whole front lawn on fire after soaking it down with ten gallons of gasoline...and then, instead of fleeing into the night like some common lunatic vandal, Oscar stood in the street and howled through the flames at a face peering out from a shattered upstairs window, delivering one of his Billy Sunday-style sermons on morality and justice.

The nut of his flame-enraged text, as I recall, was this mind-bending chunk of eternal damnation from Luke 11:46 - a direct quote from Jesus Christ:

"And he said, Woe unto you also, ye lawyers, for ye lade men with burdens grievous to be borne, and ye yourselves touch not the burdens with one of your fingers."

The Lawn of Fire was Oscar's answer to the Ku Klux Klan's burning cross, and he derived the same demonic satisfaction from doing it.

'Did you see his face?" he shouted as we screeched off at top speed toward Hollywood. "That corrupt old fool! I know he recognized me, but he'll never admit it! No officer of the court would set a judge's front yard on fire - the whole system would break down if lawyers would get away with crazy shit like this."

I agreed. It is not my wont to disagree with even a criminally insane attorney on questions of basic law. But in truth it never occurred to me that Oscar was either insane or a criminal, given the generally fascist, Nixonian context of those angry years.'

- Fear & Loathing in the Graveyard of the Weird: The Banshee Screams for Buffalo Meat, December 15, 1977, Fear and Loathing at the Rolling Stone, The Essential Writing of Hunter S. Thompson


'When he came booming into a bar called the Daisy Duck in Aspen and announced he was the trouble we'd all been waiting for, he was definitely into the politics of confrontation - and on all fronts: in the bars or the courts or the streets, if necessary.

Oscar was not into serious street fighting, but he was hell on wheels in a bar brawl. Any combination of a two-hundred-fifty- pound Mexican and LSD-25 is a potentially terminal menace for anything it can reach - but when the alleged Mexican is in fact a profoundly angry Chicano lawyer with no fear at all of anything that walks on less than three legs and a de-facto suicidal conviction that we will die at the age of thirty-three - just like Jesus Christ - you have a serious piece of work on your hands. Especially if the bastard is already thirty-three and a half years old with a head full of Sandoz acid, a loaded .357 Magnum in his belt, a hatchet-wielding Chicano bodyguard at his elbow at all times, and a disconcerting habit of projectile-vomiting geysers of pure red blood off the front porch every thirty or forty minutes, or whenever his malignant ulcer can't handle any more raw tequila.

This was the Brown Buffalo in the full crazed flower of his prime - a man, indeed, for all seasons. And it was somewhere in the middle of his thirty-third year, in fact, when he came out to Colorado - with his faithful bodyguard, Frank - to rest for a while after his grueling campaign for sheriff of Los Angeles County, which he lost by a million or so votes. But in defeat, Oscar had managed to create an instant political base for himself in the vast Chicano barrio of East Los Angeles - where even the most conservative of the old-line "Mexican-Americans" were suddenly calling themselves "Chicanos" and getting their first taste of tear gas at "La Raza" demonstrations, which Oscar was quickly learning to use as a fire-and-brimstone forum to feature himself as the main spokesman for a mushrooming "Brown Power" movement that the LAPD called more dangerous than the Black Panthers.

Which was probably true, at that time - but in retrospect it sounds a bit different than it did back in 1969 when the sheriff was sending out fifteen or twenty helicopter sorties a night to scan the rooftops and backyards of the barrio with huge sweeping searchlights that drove Oscar and his people into fits of blind rage every time they got nailed in a pool of blazing white light with a joint in one hand and a machete in the other'

- Fear & Loathing in the Graveyard of the Weird: The Banshee Screams for Buffalo Meat, December 15, 1977, Fear and Loathing at the Rolling Stone, The Essential Writing of Hunter S. Thompson


'Bundini and Conrad were two of these. They have been around for so long that they had once called the boss "Cassius," or even "Cash' - while Patterson had never addressed him as anything but "Muhammad" or "Champ." He had come aboard at high tide, as it were, and even though he was not in charge of everything from carrying Ali's money - in a big roll of $100 bills - to protecting his life with an ever-present chrome-plated revolver and the lethal fists and feet of a black belt with a license to kill, it had always galled him a bit to know that Muhammad's capricious instincts and occasionally perverse sense of humor made it certifiably impossible for any one bodyguard, or even four, to protect him from danger in public. His moods were too unpredictable: one moment he would be in an almost catatonic funk, crouched in the backseat of a black Cadillac limousine with an overcoat over his head - and then, with no warning at all, he would be suddenly out of the car at a redlight somewhere in the Bronx, playing stickball in the street with a gang of teenage junkies. Patterson had learned to deal with The Champ's moods, but he also knew that in a crowd around The Greatest, there would be at least a few who felt the same way about Ali as they had about Malcolm X or Martin Luther King.

There was a time, shortly after his conversion to the Black Muslim religion in the mid-Sixties, when Ali seemed to emerge as main spokesman for what the Muslims were then perfecting as the State of the Art in racial paranoia - which seemed a bit heavy and not a little naive at the time, but which the White Devils moved quickly to justify...

Yes. But that is a very long story and we will get to it later. The only point we need to deal with right now is that Muhammad Ali somehow emerged from one of the meanest and most shameful ordeals any prominent American has ever endured as one of the few real martyrs of that goddamn wretched war in Vietnam and a sort of instant folk hero all over the world, except in the U.S.A.

That would come later...'

- Last Tango in Vegas: Fear and Loathing in the Near Room and the Far Room, May 4 and May 18, 1978, Fear and Loathing at the Rolling Stone, The Essential Writing of Hunter S. Thompson


"What?" I almost shouted. " A bum? A hippie?" I lit another cigarette or maybe two, not realizing or even thinking about the gross transgressions I was committing by smoking and drinking in the presence of The Champ. (Conrad told me later that nobody smokes or drinks in the same room with Muhammad Ali - and Jesus Christ! Not - of all places - in the sacred privacy of his own bedroom at midnight, where I had no business being in the first place)...But I was mercifully and obviously ignorant of what I was doing. Smoking and drinking and tossing off crude bursts of language are not second nature to me, but first - and my mood, at that point, was still so mean and jangled that it took me about ten minutes of foul-mouthed raving before I began to get a grip on myself.

Everybody else in the room was obviously relaxed and getting a wonderful boot out of this bizarre spectacle - which was me, and when the adrenaline finally burned off, I realized that I'd backed so far away from the bed and into the bureau that I was actually sitting on the goddamn thing, with my legs crossed in front of me like some kind of wild-eyed, dope-addled budda (Bhuddah? Buddah? Budda?...Ah, fuck these wretched idols with unspellable names - let's use Budda, and to hell with Edwin Newman)...and suddenly I felt just fine.

And why not?

I was, after all, the undisputed heavyweight Gonzo champion of the world - and this giggling yoyo in the bed across the room from me was no longer champion of anything, or at least nothing he could get a notary public to vouch for...So I sat back on the bureau with my head against the mirror and I thought, Well, shit - here I am, and it's definitely a weird place to be; but not really, and not half as weird as a lot of other places I've been...Nice view, decent company, and no real worries at all in this tight group of friends who were obviously having a good time with each other as the conversation recovered from my flakey entrance and got back on the fast-break, bump-and-run track they were used to...'

- Last Tango in Vegas: Fear and Loathing in the Near Room and the Far Room, May 4 and May 18, 1978, Fear and Loathing at the Rolling Stone, The Essential Writing of Hunter S. Thompson