Gradually, I started to shift my values. I started to enjoy

    Some smokers claim that marijuana has opened them up to religious awareness and expression, although this tendency is obviously more common in those who were religiously inclined to begin with. One woman who wasn't at all religious describes the effects of smoking in these terms:

There have been times at night when under the influence of marijuana I have looked up in the sky and seen not a God, but a kind of Godliness up there in the heavens. I never heard "voices" or saw "visions" while smoking, but I was led to transcend my normal consciousness, and to become aware of and appreciate the vastness of the universe.
    I'll probably be a smoker all my life. I notice that many people don't believe there's any point to searching, don't believe there's any place to get to—with marijuana or anything else. I believe there is, and I believe I've been there.

    At the other end of the spectrum is a religious mystic, a teacher of theology whose religious growth and awareness have come from traditional teachings, texts, and institutions. He has found marijuana and LSD to be enormously useful in leading him to deeper religious experience, and he takes strong issue with the automatic skepticism on the part of institutional religion toward drug-inspired religious awakening:

From the modern mystic's point of view, the most problematic of all are the words associated with religion. "God," "Holy," "Love"—and all the rest. The words have become prisoners of synagogues and churches where their overpowering reality is unknown. So long have they been read responsively that they evoke no response. Even the more sophisticated words now used in their stead suffer from guilt by association; "Numinous" and "Sacred" are too respectable—they turn no one on.
    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 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. I rather tend to fear the opposite: to speak of psychedelic/mystical experience in terms familiar to religion might indeed cheapen that experience.[3]

    Most smokers find it difficult to speak to others about the details of their religious experience. An Arkansas woman describes an unusually intense reaction to marijuana, which has all the characteristics of a psychedelic experience. She had been stoned with some friends and was feeling funny, with the strong sensation that something important was happening, or was about to happen She lay on her bed and stared at the ceiling:

There was a light overhead, and I seemed to be moving toward it. Or perhaps it was moving toward me. I wasn't sure, but we were certainly going toward each other.
    As it came closer, the light was so intensely bright that it encompassed everything my eyes could see, and there seemed to be the need for some kind of decision. It was as though a voice were asking me if I were afraid, because if so, I wouldn't "get through." But if I had the courage to get through (through the light, evidently), there was a promise of something—or perhaps a threat, I couldn't be sure.