DRUGS CAN BRING ENLIGHTENMENT, BUT AT WHAT COST?

WHEN Lewis Carroll's Alice swallowed magical cake, she was ``delighted to
find that she began shrinking directly.'' So was Kate Chapman, 23, a
modern-day Alice on LSD.

``I became smaller and smaller and smaller until I felt the molecules,
subatomic particles, the quarks,'' says Chapman of a memorable LSD trip.
``Beyond that, there were light bodies all around, and I was a light body.
I felt I went into the great white light. . . . I definitely felt it was a
God-like consciousness.''

Chapman, a Seattle resident who studied neurobiology in college, says she
was ``no hard-core tripper.'' And she says she has never taken LSD or
psilocybin mushrooms just for the fun of it. For her, psychedelics are a
sacrament that can awaken mystical experiences in anyone open to the
adventure.

It's a dangerous adventure, warns the Rev. Arie L. Mangrum, pastor emeritus
of Peace Baptist Church in Washington, D.C. ``Many people,'' he says, are
``downright deceived into thinking they are in touch with God when it's the
enemy of their soul.'' And other critics question whether mystical talk is
a cover for meaningless fun.

But Chapman is among a surprising number of people -- ravers, aging
hippies, scholars and ministers among them -- who believe that, under the
right circumstances, psychedelics can reveal spiritual truths.

Best-selling author Andrew Weil, the doctor Good Housekeeping magazine
billed ``America's favorite healer,'' has written extensively on the
spiritual properties of ``magical mushrooms.''

And Berkeley resident Huston Smith, widely regarded as an authority on the
history of religion, has written that ``given the right set and setting,
the drugs can induce religious experiences indistinguishable from ones that
occur spontaneously.'' Still, he was careful to note in the 1992 edition of
``Forgotten Truth'' that ``psychedelic `theophanies' can abort a quest'' to
lead a religious life ``as readily, perhaps more readily, than they can
further it.''

How many people partake of the magic, religious or otherwise, is tough to
determine given the secrecy surrounding drug use. The 1995 National
Household Survey on Drug Abuse estimated that 9.5 percent of Americans
older than 12 had used hallucinogens at some point in their lifetime and
1.6 percent used them in the past year.

From researchers to ravers

Users tend to divide themselves into three categories: the original
researchers, such as Albert Hoffman, the 92-year-old inventor of LSD;
middle-aged hippies who never stopped using psychedelics; and young ravers,
primarily high school and college students, who take low doses of LSD, the
milder Ecstasy (MDMA) and other drugs at all-night parties.

Rick Doblin, president of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic
Studies (MAPS), estimates that less than a quarter of psychedelic
enthusiasts have spiritual aims; others put the number at closer to half.
And still others say even recreational users may unwittingly find
themselves communing with God.

Although proponents of psychedelics maintain that the drugs should be
distinguished from cocaine and heroin and sanctioned for religious use,
only Indians are legally allowed to use a hallucinogen, peyote, in
religious rituals.

Peyote rituals began thousands of years ago among aborigines living along
the Rio Grande and south into Mexico, notes Duncan Earle, director of the
Center for Inter-American and Border Studies at the University of Texas at
El Paso.

Shamanic role models

The shamanic cultures that flourished in hunting and gathering societies
worldwide prior to the development of agriculture also inspire today's
psychedelic travelers, as does the shamanism practiced today in the upper
Amazon, notes Earle. Shamans, he says, often use hallucinogens. Shamans
serve as a ``conduit between the ordinary and non-ordinary world,''
divining the future and healing the sick.

The first North American to study the use of hallucinogens in a modern
shamanic culture was a 55-year-old investment banker ``who looked like an
investment banker,'' says photographer Jeremy Bigwood of his late friend R.
Gordon Wasson. After retiring from J.P. Morgan in the mid-1950s, Wasson
traveled to southern Mexico, where a Mazatec shaman, Mar(acu)a Sabina,
introduced him to psychedelic mushrooms.

In a 1957 article in Life magazine, Wasson described the experience as a
``holy communion'' with ``divine mushrooms.'' Of a later trip he wrote:
``Our untrammeled souls were floating in the universe, stroked by divine
breezes, possessed of a divine mobility that would transport us anywhere on
the wings of a thought. . . . We were to find ourselves in the presence of
the Ultimate.'' Later he began using the term ``entheogen'' rather than
hallucinogen, to mean ``God generated within you.''

By the 1960s, hordes of young people descended on Mexico looking for a
spiritual high. Wasson lamented the visitors' lack of respect for the
culture, says Bigwood. Sabina was even harsher, according to Wasson's
writings, saying that ``from the moment the foreigners arrived, the holy
children (mushrooms) lost their . . . force.''

Stumbled upon LSD

Hoffman's accidental discovery of the chemical compound LSD while doing
pharmaceutical research led to a new wave of interest in the industrialized
West, as well as academic studies. Chapman recently completed an oral
history for MAPS of 47 people who took LSD between 1954 and 1962 as part of
a study by psychiatrist Oscar Janiger. Almost half of the group, which
included homemakers and police officers, described their experiences as
spiritual, she said.

``People who did not have a spiritual experience struck me as those who did
not have the inclination,'' she said. Still, she noted, ``a Unitarian
minister did not have a spiritual experience, and he badly wanted one. He
felt he couldn't pass through to the other side.''

When Harvard professor Timothy Leary urged everyone to cross to the other
side, Wasson and Hoffman urged caution. But few people were listening, and
casualties of high doses in unsafe settings abounded.

Today's ravers tend to be in the Leary camp, often dropping LSD, albeit in
much lower doses, and partying all night in gatherings publicized by word
of mouth. Terence McKenna, an ethno-botanist and author frequently billed
as the new Timothy Leary, says it is hardly an atmosphere conducive to
contemplation.

``Are there people so clueless they think the spiritual center of the rave
scene is the rave?'' he asks. ``The real introspective work goes on
afterward.''

All become one

But Torsten Klimmer, a 28-year-old from San Francisco who loves psychedelic
clothing and art, disagrees. ``Sometimes parties come to such a high point
that all become one being,'' he says.

Longtime users and more contemplative types prefer to be in quiet venues in
small groups or alone. Some join Indians in peyote rituals. And then there
are the wandering seekers who take spiritual adventure tours to Peru,
Ecuador and Brazil, where they drink ayahuasca, a mixture of two Amazonian
plants, in rituals led by shamans.

McKenna believes that tours combining knowledgeable guides and serious
seekers can ``result in . . . changed lives.'' He's less optimistic about
tours for ``trust fund'' travelers ``who are constantly drinking from one
amusement to another'' and wreaking havoc along the way.

Indigenous shamans, he says, are being ``destroyed by money, blond women
and invitations to Malibu.''

Ayahuasca, he believes ``can be made in the United States without busting
up people's lives and culture,'' though ayahuasca fans note it is tough to
find.

Whether chemically induced mystical experiences produce real transformation
depends on the person, says the Rev. John Burciaga, a Unitarian minister in
Bethesda, Md.

`The same two persons can have an experience where one comes away changed
and the other doesn't,'' says Burciaga, who doesn't use hallucinogens. And
that includes progressive clergy. ``There is a significant subculture in
the ministry,'' he says, who are interested in hallucinogens along with
other means of achieving ecstatic religious experience, such as fasting.

How one interprets the psychedelic experience theologically depends partly
on religious orientation. Buddhists typically talk about the possibilities
for enlightenment rather than getting closer to God, and of integrating the
psychedelic experience in ongoing meditative practice. Christians think
more in terms of holy communion. Then there are the freelance ``mystics''
like Klimmer who create their own cosmic world view.

After a powerful experience on mushrooms, Klimmer says he ``became a
mystic, and my personal identity just scrambled away.'' He says he spent
two months in India ``living naked in the jungle.'' But it was at a party
in Los Angeles that he experienced ``the oneness that is nothingness'' and
saw God in the form of little angelic beings who initiated him as a shaman.

`Playing Indian'

McKenna is skeptical of anyone in his 20s who calls himself a shaman.
``There's a lot of playing Indian,'' he says. But he appreciates youthful
audacity and admits to his own share of chutzpah in talking about mushrooms
as the missing link in human evolution, and about his faith in an alien
intelligence.

Jeremy Bigwood, who guesses he matched McKenna drug for drug in the '60s
and '70s, says he has yet to see an alien. But his experience with
psychedelics changed forever the way he sees himself in the world. It has
been 20 years since he ingested a hallucinogen, he says. He can't see
himself finding enough of a sanctuary in the city. Still, he speaks of
ayahuasca with the reverence of a man discussing a sacrament. He was
``mushroomed,'' to use his late friend Wasson's expression, and it's the
closest he's come to seeing God.