For most of these premies, personal consciousness evolved not from the power of the pulpit, nor from the communion of saints, but from an unexpected source - psychedelics. As Walt says: "In past ages, people weren't that far from God. But now, to get back to God, you have to practically put dynamite into your consciousness and blow it apart. And that's what LSD does."

All eighteen of these young people experimented with psychedelic drugs before their spiritual conversions. Mescaline, LSD, psilocybin, and other hallucinogens were employed to alter consciousness. But contrary to the popular belief that the use of psychedelics naturally leads to. the use of harder drugs, only one premie had tried heroin.

While eighteen experimented with psychedelics, the number of "trips" varied widely from person to person. Seven tripped from 4 to 15 times; four tripped between 15 and 30 times; three from 50 to 75 times; and four over 100 times, one estimating as high as 500.

Whether a person had a mystical experience on psychedelics depended on the nature of each experience, what was revealed to the person, and whether he or she was ready to grasp the spiritual significance of it. For example, Helen's realization that "we are all one" occurred after her second psychedelic experience, while others failed to have a similar insight until they had tripped many more times. In fact, some did not have what they regarded as spiritual experiences on psychedelics at all. Instead, hallucinogenic drugs simply altered their personal and social awareness.

Apparently there is no way of knowing when spiritual understanding will unfold through hallucinogens or whether encounters with the spirit will occur at all. There is no way to predict if the person will hear or feel God, that primordial vibration premies call the "Word." See, the whole world has been created out of vibrations, and the source, the primordial vibration, is the Word. If you clearly listen, if you can, sometimes when there is no sound at all, not any sound and you listen very attentively to the air which is blowing, you will hear the Word. Very attentively, if you listen to the air, you will hear this Word (Guru Maharaj Ji, 1972).1

Slipping into the Drug World

Smoking marijuana or hashish was the first experience with unconventional drugs for all but one of these people (Matthew tried LSD before smoking marijuana). Marijuana was known to be a mild drug, unlikely to produce a "bad trip." Thus, its gentle nature made it an easy transition into the psychedelic world. Having experienced the new ways of seeing and exploring life "stoned," the individual was more likely to try hallucinogenic drugs. That is the way it happened to most of these eighteen premies. They arrived at the point where psychedelic drugs could be seen as just another step along the path to self-awareness, not something to be feared, but something to be anticipated.

The initial step they took into the counterculture was partly the result of a social trend: the "hippies" took on a collective identity in opposition to American institutions. During the 1960s, when awareness of drugs first began on a large scale, a social myth was developing that LSD could revolutionize the culture. The social climate in some cases encouraged drug use; and the Haight-Ashbury district in San Francisco was the national trend-setter. It was a symbol of the emerging lifestyle, of drugs, love, and flower power. Joining the counterculture became the fashion, spreading from the East and West coasts into the Rocky Mountain region.

It is not surprising that almost all of these premies were introduced to drugs and led into the counterculture by a friend or relative. Social pressure to take drugs was often intense, as in the case of one premie whose friends insisted she try psychedelics after she had just begun to smoke marijuana. For others, pressure was much more subtle, expressed in the feeling that if one's friends and many other people were smoking pot and enjoying it, then why not try it?

For those who were guided into the drug world by friends and relatives, trust was a key factor convincing them that drugs were okay, as we see in Mary Anne's story. "They didn't keep me in the mental hospital very long, but during that time I smoked a lot of marijuana. One of my friends brought me a lid of grass, and I shared it with all of my friends in the hospital, and we got stoned together. Then, the next week, somebody else would get a lid, or some hash, cocaine, or just about anything imaginable. That was the first time I had experience being with someone who was tripping on a heavy psychedelic drug. This one young man took some STP when I was there. When he tripped, he always came to talk to me, and to hold my hand. We would stay up all night and just be together. I was getting pretty mellow smoking all that grass, mellow enough to where I could kind of play the game and say, 'Now I know it's cool, and I'll never do that suicide trip again.' So I got out of the hospital that way."

Upon her release, Mary Anne fell back in with her old friends, who were already using psychedelics. "I just kind of flowed right into the drug scene. I heard from my college friends that they were all taking LSD and mescaline, so I thought to myself, 'If they can do it then I can do it too.' So I started doing psychedelics. The first time I did acid I didn't hallucinate, but I just totally flowed out of my ego into a really mellow place. After that experience, I wanted to do psychedelics a lot because it was so far out. It was a group consciousness thing. We'd all been together for a really long time, so we just all flowed together into taking drugs. If one person took a particular drug, we all figured it was cool for the rest of us to do it. It wasn't like we had a leader or anything. It was just that we were very sensitive to one another. We could see the effect of the drug on the other person. If someone took acid, we could see where it was taking that person, and we figured that since we'd like to be in the same place, we'd go that route too. It was very much a group thing."

Tina also entered the drug scene through influence of a friend. When she left high school, she had never even heard of marijuana or LSD. For her first day of college she was wearing short hair, a dress, nylons, high heels, and earrings. She was just beginning to smoke cigarettes. Her roommate was different. "She had been one of those girls in high school I really never associated with, who was doing a lot of drinking, a lot of dating, a lot of smoking, shoplifting, that whole trip."

So that year Tina began drinking beer at one of the local hangouts, and every Friday afternoon she got drunk with her roommate and some other friends. School was becoming secondary to her social life.

Tina met Bob during her second semester. He was already smoking marijuana and had just begun to experiment with mescaline and LSD. 'The hippie movement was getting underway and Bob was among the first wave of young people who were "turning on." Still, Tina's close friends were not yet taking drugs, so by the end of her second semester she was still innocent of the drug scene. That lasted only until she returned from summer vacation. The first day back she and some of her friends got together and Bob was among them. He pulled out a pipe and casually asked if they wanted to smoke some grass. "So I smoked some and nothing happened, but the people I was with were all stoned and having a good time, so that was the start."

After her first experience smoking marijuana, Tina began moving slowly into the hippie counterculture. "My roommate wanted more than anything to be a hippie. She dressed like a hippie and did all the hippie things. And she was smoking dope. At that time I wasn't even wearing jeans. I thought they were silly. But somehow I started getting into that a little bit, and before I knew it, I was into the whole trip. I just slipped into being a hippie."

"Tina eventually met and became close with many others who were taking drugs."We'd get together in David's room and sit around, smoke dope, and watch 'Dark Shadows' every day. We just watched T. V. all day and all night. There was a constant flow in and out of that room all day long."

Secure in her new life-style, it was not long before Tina decided to try psychedelics. Her first experience was with her roommate and they took mescaline. "We dropped the drug and I thought, 'Oh, my God, what did I do?' We went to see the movie '2001,' and we were sitting there waiting for something to happen. We were thinking, 'What is this? We can get a lot more stoned on grass. What is the big attraction of this stuff?' About halfway through the movie, the mescaline came on and we could feel it charging up. We looked at each other and started laughing. It was so far out because we were so close, and here we were in this incredible state together. My roommate was into watching the movie, but I was just sitting back watching hallucinations, watching everything change. That first trip on mescaline really revolutionized my life because, although smoking dope was far out, it never gave you a big enough jolt to really show you beauty and freedom. Mescaline did that for me."

With her new friends, Tina began taking acid two to three times a week, while she smoked marijuana every day. According to her, it was not just her group of friends which influenced her to use drugs: the drug experience itself opened her up to new ways of seeing and knowing.

While most of these premies were led into drugs through friends and relatives, a few were given their first drug experiences by strangers. John was one. While he was listening to a Three Dog Night Concert, a joint was passed to him through the crowd and he took a drag on it. "That's how I got started. A lot of people I was hanging around with were always talking about dope. They asked me it I had smoked dope and I told them I had, but I hadn't really. I didn't have anything against it, that's for sure. It was just that it was never presented to me. So the first time I tried it, I just figured I was getting into it whether I wanted to or not."

John's drag on that marijuana cigarette did not produce much of an effect, but it did help him break the ice. "It wound up that I was getting stoned practically every night. There was just the excitement of getting stoned, then tripping out on music, and just the feeling of being stoned. I remember several times I was lying down stoned and couldn't move. I couldn't feel my feet."

Not having "anything against it" is an important phrase in John's story. All of these young people reached a point where they were willing to use marijuana. In an atmosphere where their friends and relatives were using it, and people were asking them if they smoked grass, only a strong moral prohibition against drug use could have had a counterbalancing influence. Without that moral opposition, there was receptivity, a feeling of curiosity to know and to experience the altered state of consciousness others were so highly recommending.

John smoked grass steadily for two months before he experimented with LSD. "Somebody offered me some and I said, 'Sure, why not?' I'd hardly talked to anyone who had done acid, so I really didn't know what it was all about. But my first trip was really a good one. I was really mellow. I got into watching Road Runner cartoons and things like that. It was a totally different feeling in My mind. For the next two or three weekends, I dropped acid."

Having no feelings of moral opposition to drugs, John was able to slip into the world of psychedelics feeling socially accepted and free of guilt. So it was for most of these people, with the exception of Helen, who had moral misgivings about drugs but who gave way to social pressure when she first tried marijuana and LSD.

The Psychedelic Experience

Premies saw Marijuana as a warm-up for the main event--tripping on psychedelics. For all but possibly Alan, psychedelics were viewed as an education. Those who tried acid for the first time described an excitement and beauty which made them want to take more. And there was apparently an expanded sense of freedom and openness to people and nature, sometimes accompanied by spiritual insights which opened their eyes to the perfection of everything, and to the sense of order in the universe. Also, psychedelics showed them an alternative to American materialism. As one premie said, "In tripping, you notice the intricacies of everything. You notice how each flower is so perfect, each insect is beautiful and perfect. When you're tripping, things seem like they just flow along in a series of events that are leading up to something. And everything is just like God planned. So you really have this sense of a higher order of existence. All of nature, each season, is beautiful. You see the beauty of the snowflakes in the winter, the leaves in the fall, the new bud in the spring. At other times, when you're not tripping, you just go through life and take things for granted; they're nothing. You're too busy with material things. But when you're tripping, it takes you into true things and material things don't mean a thing."

In their early lives, these people had not experienced a feeling of closeness with nature which, apparently, can be revealed through psychedelics. Some had discovered the mystery of nature, but they had never felt a sense of spiritual unity with every living thing, often referred to as "cosmic consciousness." Drugs seemed to reveal that connection, as we hear from Mary Anne. "I remember one time I was smoking a lot of hash and I was up in the Mountains. I was looking at this tree and I experienced my first taste of cosmic consciousness. I became totally one with that tree. It was so beautiful. I could feel that tree. I could be it. I realized that the same essence which was in that tree was in me. I became one with that essence. I became one with the tree, one with the forest, one with the whole universe. I was outside of my ego enough to feel that essential vibration that's part of everything, that's keeping the whole universe together." The soul is actually an energy, a part of that energy which is vibrating within, inside of us. You see, everything is a vibration. My hand is a vibration of something. Everything is a vibration. And then there is a primordial vibration, which is, of course, the highest and the most beautiful vibration of all. One vibration is vibrating, that's why all the vibrations are vibrating (Guru Maharaj Ji, 1972).2

For Mary Anne and Walt, psychedelics were a form of therapy because then were forced to look at the negative aspects of themselves which they had been able to repress in normal consciousness. Although facing up to their personal shortcomings was emotionally painful, both came to the point where they could more easily accept their weaknesses, thereby overcoming their earlier tendencies toward self-hatred.

Psychedelics apparently helped them deal with their feelings of personal inadequacy to the point where they were able to relate more fully to others. On the other hand, LSD only aggravated Alan's feelings of estrangement and self-hatred. However, he was the exception, for most premies spoke of hallucinogenic drugs as having had a very positive effect on their personal growth, even Helen, whose experiences were full of terror.

Although Mary Anne apparently benefited a great deal from mind-altering drugs, the going was a hit rough in the beginning. "I had a lot of bad trips at first, where I'd get really depressed and cry a lot because I was having to look at ugly things inside. LSD opens up the mind so you can see things you're holding back in your unconscious and not really wanting to confront. I had maybe forty or fifty bad, crying trips before I started having all really good ones. But even when I was having bad trips, I would get so high it was worth it to go through an awful bummer to reach the higher places. During those bummer trips, a lot of self-doubt was coming out of me-kind of like hating myself in a way, because I didn't know who I was. I had identified so much with my ego that I had really bad feelings about myself. If you have really bad feelings about yourself, you can't look through that to other people. I began to get a taste of who I really was when I got high. Then I'd come down and try to identify with that high place as much as I could. And I'd look at what I'd tried to do to myself before, trying to kill myself, and going to a mental hospital. After I'd experienced that high place, I'd come down and just look at those things I'd done and feel disgusted with myself."

Mary Anne was able to suffer through the depressions and crying of her first fifty psychedelic trips, while John had only to face one encounter with his weaknesses to know that LSD was not for him. After that, he took no more.

Walt was the only one of the eighteen who started taking drugs in junior high school. He first tripped on LSD during the ninth grade with two of his friends. As the drug peaked, he began to see the weaknesses of his personality. Before, when he had become conscious of aspects of himself he did not care to see, he could avoid looking at them. But acid brought his repressed side to life and he hated it. "I tried to force myself to think of other things, but I couldn't do it because I just kept seeing how my whole personality was totally phony; how I was a thousand different people. The pain got so bad at times that I threw myself through hedges and chased little kids with rocks. I even tried to run into some lady's car when she stopped at a stop sign. I took money out of my pocket and threw it away, and I punched my friend in the mouth twice."

Although Walt was trying hard to escape what the LSD was forcing him to see about himself, he could not stop the drug from its guiding role. The acid revealed his hidden problems each time he tripped, until he reached the point where it became much easier to accept his weaknesses.

There was a general feeling among these young people that psychedelic drugs had modified their values, beliefs, attitudes, and perceptions of the world. According to one premie, "Drugs open up many new doors and avenues for exploration. Life becomes pliable, bendable. The realities one may have sheltered so long suddenly bend and you see the illusion of this life. All our trips don't mean a thing and one begins to realize something far beyond our limited perspectives. So you begin opening up to yourself and to others. You begin to express yourself in a different way through dress, speech, action. Once one begins to see that mankind has no true limits, only self-defined limits, then the search for reality and unity begins."

Matthew characterized his pre-drug state as one of sleep. He had been a reflective person all of his life, but had not really considered the meaning of existence or the nature of his own being, questions which he says drugs brought into focus. Other premies talked about how psychedelics get people back to where they were before social conditioning or how they forced them to see through their many social roles to their real identities.

Most premies spoke of social barriers being broken down while tripping, which drew people closer together. The fact that Mary Anne and Walt could be pulled out of their isolation during their LSD experiences may be testimony to the power psychedelics could yield against the shadowy fears which had kept them hiding from others.

We know that Mary Anne had been socially withdraws in her early years. She had not been given much love as a child and was somewhat reluctant to give it. Yet psychedelics began to change that. "When I tripped, my heart just opened up and all the love poured out through me. It made me feel good and I could see that it had a really profound effect on other people. It was experiencing love while tripping that I really got into. It was so beautiful I just wanted to stay there forever. But I always had to come down, 'cause I was taking drugs to get there, and I didn't realize there was another way to do it." Meditation is the only medium through which you can increase your love and love will again spring forth, will make you one, and finally everything will be organized (Guru Maharaj Ji, 1975).3

Walt also experienced love and brotherhood while tripping. And, like Mary Anne, lie had a difficult time preserving that feeling when he came down into the "straight world." On drugs, loving others seemed easy, while, in his normal state, he felt alienated.

It is important to realize that hallucinogenic drugs were regarded as the chemical agents of a new, ideal for our society. One premie spoke in this vein when she said that psychedelics showed her what the world could be like if people loved one another. Especially for those who experienced love while tripping, there was a desire to recapture that feeling in normal consciousness. Even though Mary Anne and Walt could not completely carry over their drug-induced love into everyday life, they did have an experience which made them aware of a better way in which people could relate to one another. Their loving feelings in a psychedelic state because a yardstick for measuring their capacity to show affection for others on a day-to-day basis.

Having to come down from the loving sensations of a psychedelic experience eventually came to be viewed as a limitation of drugs. They could take you up high, but they could not keep you high. As that fact became known by the individual and shared collectively, the idea of a spiritual search became more appealing as a means of getting and staying high, of loving others without chemical assistance.

Shattering the Religious Frame of Reference

What was the religious viewpoint of these eighteen premies concerning God before their introduction to drugs? God was personified. He was seen as an old man with a grey heard who could be loving or wrathful, depending on His mood. God listened to prayers, so conversations were possible with Him. We were made in His image, which is to say that He has a nose, eyes, a mouth, a body, and all the rest. That was the standard view. The world thinks, people think, God is a man. People think God has ears, nose, teeth, and he rises early in the morning, brushes His teeth, washes out His mouth, and He is an old man, so he brushes out His beard also. But no, God is energy. God is perfect and pure energy, and that is why scientists say that energy cannot be destroyed and cannot be created. This is Knowledge. This is the Word of God (Guru Maharaj Ji, 1971).4

Psychedelics undermined the Judeo-Christian image of a personalized God. The drug experiences of many premies acquainted them with a view of God which was quite compatible with eastern spiritualism. They came to see God as the force holding the universe together and animating all living things. How easy it was, then, to accept the view of God conveyed by Guru Maharaj ji, as the energy in the universe which can neither be created nor destroyed.

Once one senses God, a commitment to start a spiritual search may begin. This is what happened to Tina: "My roommate and I dropped some acid, about a half of a tab. We had heard that that night was to be the beginning of the Aquarian Age, and we wanted to see what would happen. That night I realized that the only reason I was alive was to realize God. I was going to do anything to realize God. Before I knew there was a God and I was feeling good, but it was never, 'This is what you have to do and nothing else.' The spiritual thing was kind of a very hip thing to get into. But that night it just hit me that I knew that I had to find God, that was all I was here for, and every moment from that time on, I would search for God. I said, 'Okay, God, I know I have to be one with you, and I know I have to find you, so where do I start?' "

Mary Anne had a similarly powerful spiritual awakening on drugs. "There was one LSD trip when I guess I experienced samadhi. I merged with everything. I had taken this really heavy dose of STP, LSD, and cocaine. My friend and I were going on a Greyhound bus to Chicago, and we decided to take some drugs and really make it into a trip. At one point I felt that my body blew up in the air. It was like an atomic explosion. I didn't have a body anymore. I didn't have a mind anymore. It was like being in total bliss, total light, total silence. I had no ego, no personal identification. As far as I can see, that's where I'm aimed right now. That's the highest thing I've ever experienced. That one experience was a taste. I have no idea whether it lasted two seconds or eight hours, because it was totally timeless, and completely blissful and perfect. After that experience I didn't take LSD much anymore. I felt I didn't have to. I knew if I took it again, it would never be that good, so I didn't take any for a really long time. I didn't come down from that trip totally, 'cause I really broke through something at that point."

Not all of these premies were spiritually awakened through their use of psychedelics. Walt felt drugs were taking him somewhere "far out," but not toward spirituality. John found drugs opened him up socially, but he did not experience it as a spiritual event. One premie put it in the following way: "I guess drugs started me on a search for unity, but I did not realize at the time that unity springs from Cod. I experienced living, not the great white flash of God. I was very heavily into people, not spirituality. Drugs just made me want to relax and flow with life."

Thirteen premies spoke openly about drugs stimulating their spiritual curiosity and belief in God. "I've been involved with Christian things my whole life. I was active in the choir and church group. I liked it. Right before I got into drugs, I was reading the Bible and conscientiously trying to figure it out, but I couldn't relate to it. I read that all you had to do to be saved was believe in Jesus and have faith, but I couldn't really feel that faith. So I just forgot about religion until I freaked out on dope. From then on, God started becoming a reality for me, something I could really feel."

Psychedelics and Spiritual Awakening

There is little doubt that psychedelics were an aid in the spiritual awakening of these premies, for they changed their religious outlook, replacing their Judeo-Christian conception of a personal God with an organic view of God as energy. Against a background of disillusionment with the mainstream churches, this new insight produced a dramatic change because it awakened a new respect in them for the supernatural.

Furthermore, the drug-use pattern of the eighteen was very similar to that of premies from the midwest and south, suggesting that psychedelics may have been an influential factor in the spiritual awakening of a much larger number. In fact, the most striking differences between the premies and the nonpremie college students centered on drug use, according to the statistical analysis of the questionnaires. Premies were much more likely to have taken psychedelics than the college students: 95 percent of the total premie group had used them, as compared to 67 percent of the college students. More important, perhaps, is the fact that more premies (65 percent) than college students (25 percent) who used psychedelics had spiritual experiences while tripping.

Premies also used psychedelics more frequently. The average estimated number of psychedelic experiences for the premie was about 60 to the college student's 20. There was also a difference in the duration of use between the two groups. Premies had experimented with psychedelics over a two-and-one-half-year period on the average, while the average duration of use for college students was one year.

The followers of Krishna reported drug-use patterns almost identical to premies. About the same proportion had used psychedelics (89 percent), and about as many had spiritual experiences while tripping (45 percent). Furthermore, the average number of trips on psychedelics (59) and the average time span of their drug experiences (two and one-half years) were nearly identical to premies. These findings suggest that psychedelic drugs have had an impact on the development of the new spiritual movements considerably beyond that of Divine Light Mission. This view is supported in two works on the Hare Krishna movement. In separate studies, Francine Daner and J. Stillson Judah indicate that psychedelic drugs were instrumental in the spiritual awakening of the followers of Krishna, although disillusionment with drugs set in prior to their conversion. 5

My findings are contradicted, however, by Armand Nicholi II, whose study of seventeen Christian converts was mentioned earlier. He stated: "Some investigators have implied that drug use itself has led to a preoccupation with the supernatural. My findings in this and other studies do not bear this out. Drugs do not precipitate interest in the spiritual; the opposite holds true. Students turn to drugs because of an interest in the spiritual and because of a hope that drugs will meet their spiritual needs." 6

At most, only two premies I interviewed could be regarded as having been on a spiritual search before they tried psychedelics, a fact completely at odds with Nicholi's findings. As a rule, premies made no reference to having taken psychedelic drugs initially for spiritual reasons. Instead, they mentioned social influences and curiosity as the two main reasons they tried psychedelics for the first time. Although the vast majority did not have spiritual interests before they first took hallucinogens, thirteen said that psychedelic drugs had awakened them spiritually.

Those who received word of the magical power of psychedelics as an avenue into religious experience began to expand their conceptions of tripping. For example, one premie had initially begun to experiment with psychedelics as a lark. "There was no fasting the day before, no meditating, no praying to God before taking the drug. It wasn't a sacrament. It was hell-raising." Yet, after staying on the physical plane with psychedelics for some time, he heard that psilocybin could put him in contact with God. With the expectation that it was possible to enter the spiritual realm while tripping, it was not long before he had his first mystical experience.

Contact with people who had already reached spiritual awareness through drugs simply reinforced the notion that tripping should have spiritual meaning. Premies who failed to report spiritual experiences with drugs tended either to be socially isolated or living with people who had little interest in the spiritual value of drugs. Yet, for premies whose friends had discovered the mystical potential of drugs, it was only a matter of time before some spiritual awakening would draw them more fully into the group.

This turning toward spirituality can also be partially explained by the tendency to extend the imagination once the most obvious aspects of an experience have lost their novelty. Premies first explored the most immediately accessible features of psychedelic experience - the intensification of colors, hallucinations, the beauty of simple things, the feelings and sensations which they said rushed through them like waves of electrical energy. As these experiences became mundane, they began exploring more subtle levels of psychedelic reality. One reason premies may have had many more spiritual experiences on psychedelics than college students is that they explored the drugs more deeply.

Notes

1. Guru Maharaj Ji : Reflections on an Indian Sunrise (a short collection of Guru Maharaj Ji's satsang, 1973), p. 25. Dates noted in the text next to Guru Maharaj ji's name are the years when his satsang was given.
2. And It Is Divine (the U.S. Mission's main publication) ( January 1973), p. 45.
3. Ibid. (March 1975), p. 39.
4. Guru Maharaj Ji. Reflections on in Indian Sunrise (1973), p. 4.
5. Francine J. Daner, "Conversion to Krishna Consciosnness: The Transformation from Hippie to Religious Ascetic," in Ros Wallis (ed.), Sectarianism: Analysis of Religious and NonReligious Sects (New York: John Wiley,and Sons, 1975), pp. 56-57. J. Stillson Judah, Hare Krishna and the Counterculture (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1974), p. 135.
6. Armand M. Nicholi II, "A New Dimension of the Youth Culture," American Journal of Psychiatry 131 (April 1974), p. 397.