I looked at the light and said, "Yes, I'll go," and
then I went faster toward the light (or perhaps it was the other way around) until I was in the light, I was the light, the light was me. I felt I had seen God, or found God, or was God. I remember gasping, and then I experienced what I can only describe as an orgasm without any movement, a mental or emotional orgasm. It felt as if a giant hand reached over me and pulled my soul right out of my body through my feet. Then I began sobbing, the most body-wrenching sobs which went on for some unknown period of time, until finally I felt the greatest peace I had ever known.
Such experiences, it must be said, are highly unusual on
marijuana, although, evidently, they are not unknown. More typical of a
religious experience on marijuana is a report of a young woman who went into a
field to meditate after smoking. In other words, she smoked for the explicit
purpose of having a religious experience, which she describes in these terms:
I
sat down and looked slowly around in appreciation. Everything hushed, except
the many huge tall trees, which were stirred by breezes. As I looked more and
more at them, I seemed to see each leaf, and saw each one sway, and I felt it was
the presence of the Holy Spirit breathing on them, making them move so apart,
so together, so perfectly.
And there was no more me, no conscious self observing; there
existed only leafness, and then there was the dark, rushing feeling I have when
I meditate, when I am pulled into something I can't explain or remember.
And then I awoke, or regained consciousness slowly. I looked
around and saw the leaves, apart and together and fresh, and I marveled at them
softly and felt awe in the peacefulness and beauty of everything. I was reborn.
Then I remembered, little by little, me, and looked at my feet and hands and
felt my face, and all this with the serenity of quiet peace. Then I remembered
how to stand up, and did so, and went home.[4]
A graduate student at a Christian seminary describes the
marijuana high as similar to his notion of grace. "Marijuana can provide a
coloring," he explains, "illuminating and separating out the
specialness of ordinary experience, making visible some of the things we
normally take for granted." Some fundamentalist Christians who use
marijuana wrote to say that its use is sanctioned by various Biblical verses,
in Genesis and elsewhere, which describe how God "brought forth grass, and
herb yielding seed after its kind."[5]
There are those, as well, who use marijuana in connection with
meditation, although more commonly, meditators regard cannabis as a preliminary
tool along the path toward spiritual enlightenment, which must be discarded in
favor of more natural, and therefore better, methods. But one meditator who
enjoys smoking has little patience for his colleagues' prejudice against its
use:
Getting high is a spiritual thing, involving humility. It's not by accident that all religious writings teach humility. Getting high is a matter of letting go, of dissolving the ego. What you have to do is to take society's negative attitude and turn it to your own advantage, getting off by being humble, by saying, in effect, "Well, I must really be a low person, because I have to use grass." I try to be careful of the spiritual chauvinists, those people who get up there—and who bring their ego right along with them.
Some smokers maintain that drugs themselves constitute a form of
religious experience. Rabbi Zalman Schachter tells the following story:
When
the Holy One, Blessed be He, saw that mankind in its extremity no longer looked
to Him for help, but turned instead to the medicine cabinet, He decided to make
Himself available there.
But Satan objected. "What will become of me and my task?
You're running me out of business!"
God replied: "That is your problem. I did what I had to do,
now do what you have to do."[6]