Religion and Psychoactive Sacraments:
An Entheogen Chrestomathy
Thomas B. Roberts, Ph.D. and Paula Jo Hruby, Ed.D.
Author Index | Title Index

LSD The Problem-Solving Drug.

Stafford, P. G., and Golightly, B. H. (1967).
New York: Award Books.


ISBN: None


Description: Paperback, x + 11-288 pages.


Contents: Preface by Humphry Osmond, introduction by Duncan B. Blewett, 9 chapters, afterword by Stanley Krippner, other literature in the field, index.


Excerpt(s): Innovators, however, are impatient creatures and do not wish to hasten slowly. Even when innovation has been successfully repressed, such success has often had bitter consequences. The elimination of the Albigensians by fire and sword is not now seen as a particularly credible episode in European Church history, even though it was considered to be a crusade at the time. Galileo's forced recantation is now seen as being an unnecessary blunder by Pope Urban VII and his advisors. It did not achieve its goal; however, even the Vatican did not attempt to prevent people from grinding telescope and other lenses, and astronomers continued to look at the stars. Today it is possible to make reasonably efficient and not very dangerous psychedelics more easily and more inconspicuously than it was to grind even moderately efficient lenses in the seventeenth century. (Humphry Osmond, preface, page 13)


The discovery of LSD marked one of the three major scientific breakthroughs of the twentieth century. In physics, the splitting of the atom provided access to undreamed-of energy. The biologists are on the threshold of learning how to manipulate genetic structures and bringing the process of evolution under human control. In psychology, the psychedelics have provided the key to the unimaginable vastness of the unconscious mind. For, as Suzuki stated, "our consciousness is nothing but an insignificant floating piece of island in the ocean encircling the earth. But it is through this little fragment of land that we can look out to the immense expanse of the unconscious itself."

In the last of these discoveries lies the key to survival. For if man is to cope with his newfound physical and biological power and responsibility, there must be an abrupt and decisive revision of human psychology. The motives that have made human history a chronicle of bloodshed and brutality will otherwise certainly and shortly lead to the annihilation of the species.

The psychedelics offer the hope that we are on the threshold of a new renaissance in which man's view of himself will undergo dramatic change. Alienated and encapsulated, he has become trapped by his history in outmoded institutions which disfigure him with the creed of original sin; corrupt him with fear of economic insecurity; dement him with the delusion that mass murder is an inevitable outcome of his nature; debase him to believe that butchery in the name of the state is a sacred duty, and leave him so crippled that he is afraid to seek self-understanding or to love and trust himself, his neighbor, or his God. (Duncan B. Blewett, introduction, pages 18-19)

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