When coming to speak of the deeply religious quality of the experience many of us have had through the use of psychedelic drugs, I balk before the conventional religious language. Members of the religious establishment have been too quick to say that any experience brought on by a drug is necessarily cheap. A graduate student at a Christian seminary describes the marijuana high as similar to his notion of grace. Authentic religion, when you sweep away all the extraneous stuff of politics and institutions, is about transcendence, heightened awareness, ecstasy, and goodness. Religion and marijuana both involve going beyond the rational, material, and normative concerns of existence.
Religion is the original altered state of consciousness.
In the community I belong to, we celebrate Shabbat, the Jewish sabbath, in a fairly traditional way. When I started smoking marijuana, it all felt somehow familiar, and I soon realized that the discipline of Shabbat was a good preparation for learning to use marijuana. I was able to learn from one altered states of consciousness state of consciousness how to appreciate another one, which turned out to be strikingly similar. In was Yom Kippur. Hey, they're getting high.