Word: psychedelicized
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"Deep Within Myself." Most experiences of mystical consciousness have come only after hard work - spartan prayers, meditation, fasting, mortification of the flesh. Now it is possible, through the use of LSD and other psychedelic drugs, to induce something like mystical consciousness in a controlled laboratory environment. Such experimentation should be...
"The use of psychedelic drugs is an energy-sapping addiction...and is inappropriate as a method for spiritual growth," writes Cohen. He indicts both LSD and marijuana.
The condemnation stems somewhat from the anti-drug pronouncement of one particularly well-thought-of Indian religious ascetic, Avatar Meher Baba. American psychedelists had appealed to this guru for spiritual advice even some journeying to India "forever," for "the Truth," as part of a widespread LSD-nick Orientalism. But it...
Though the guru's disapproval might have been predicted, it seems to have shocked many people in psychedelic cirles, and may even, according to Cohen, "augur the eventual destruction of the psychedelic myth."
In a moving passage that obviously reflects much subconscious-searching on Cohen's part, he writes of the hypocrisy generated by psychedelic mysticism, of "love" turning into annoyance with trifles, of the temptatoin to conclude that the "games" of ordinary life are not worth playing.