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Meister Eckhart and Drugs

how the drug war destroys religious liberty

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

January 22, 2025



According to German mystic Meister Eckhart: "Theologians may quarrel, but the mystics of the world speak the same language.1" They speak the language of universal oneness. They speak the language of the eternal now. They speak the language of love. They speak, in short, the religious language of the perennial philosophy, of a truth that transcends space and time2 3.

He might have added, however, that certain psychonauts speak that language as well, especially after returning from breakthrough trips on so-called "heroic doses" of psychedelics such as LSD and psilocybin4 5. They too speak the language of universal oneness. They too speak the language of the eternal now. They too speak the language of love. Anyone who has read both the sermons of Meister Eckhart and the trip reports of such drug users knows this to be true. Both speak of the same things and in the same way.

Nor should this come as a surprise. In order to obtain grace and transcendence, Meister Eckhart tells us that we must "be willing to be a beginner every single morning." And psychedelics are well-known to empower the user to see the world in a new way, as a beginner, like a young child who has not yet learned that a tree is "nothing but a tree" and that a dog or cat is "nothing but a pet." This is why psychologist Alison Gopnik tells us that "Babies and children are basically tripping all the time.6 7" They are always seeing a vast array of things for the first time, like a beginner, like a psychedelic drug user on a breakthrough dose, and so the mundane world is full of miracles for them.

This is one of the many reasons why drug prohibition is a hateful evil. It is even worse than the outlawing of a religion - it is the outlawing of the religious impulse itself.

Drug prohibition requires us to live our lives in a psychological rut by denying us the capacity to see the world afresh. This is not to say that transcendent states cannot be achieved through means other than so-called "drug use," but the Meister Eckharts of the world are few and far between. Not everyone is lucky enough to have been born into a world in which nature and nurture are so aligned as to facilitate transcendental experiences on the fly. Most of us have to work for a lifetime to achieve such a spiritual state, and few achieve it even then. Nor can we be sure that Meister Eckhart said no to all substances that we call "drugs" today. He may not have mentioned such use because he did not deem it important, just as Marcus Aurelius saw no need to tell his readers that he was a fan of opium 8 , just as most tippling authors today see no need to mention the fact that they were inebriated while writing.

It is the Drug War which turned psychoactive "drugs" into the whipping boy for social problems and so encouraged us to deny their power for doing good out of hand. We have been taught to fear drugs in a truly childish and superstitious way. Hence the latest raft of movies featuring crack-crazed coons and meth-powered bears. The film producers have correctly identified the new modern boogieman as "drugs" and have produced horror movies to profit from that twisted outlook. Such movies might actually be funny in a world in which drugs were legal and viewed with shamanic understanding, but those same movies are pure propaganda in the age of the Drug War, in the context of a society that strategically bars us from seeing, hearing or reading anything positive about drugs. In such a world, such movies serve an evil purpose: they flatter us that our Drug War hysteria makes sense, that drugs are truly evil, and that it is our duty to fight them, even in the movies 9 10 , in the same way that our forebears in Hollywood 11 once fought Godzilla and King Kong, in a battle to the death, in a clear-cut moral struggle between good and evil. Such films provide aid and comfort to the prohibitionists, those who outlaw drugs that could help everyday human mortals attain the kinds of advanced spiritual states that were achieved by the great mystics of yore.

Author's Follow-up: January 22, 2025

picture of clock metaphorically suggesting a follow-up


Those who write such articles today are expected to post a huge disclaimer stating that they are not promoting drug use, but this is just the way that Drug Warriors shut down free speech. If I had written above praising the joys of horse racing, I would not be required to post a disclaimer saying that horse riding can be dangerous -- this despite the fact that 100,000 Americans are injured every year in horse-related accidents. In fact, horseback riding is the leading cause of sports-related traumatic brain injuries.

But no one would expect me to write a disclaimer about horse dangers because we all take it for granted that the best way to ride a horse is to learn how to ride it, not just to hop on and then trust to luck. As with most risky activities, we all recognize that education matters, that it's good to be informed about what you are doing.

Somehow when it comes to drugs alone, we assume that our readers are babies and need careful warnings. If this is true today, it is only because the Drug War is all about enforcing ignorance when it comes to drugs. The Drug Warrior's job is to make us fear psychoactive substances, not to understand them.

















Notes for essay entitled Meister Eckhart and Drugs: how the drug war destroys religious liberty:

1: Meister Eckhart The Internet Archive (up)
2: The Perennial Philosophy Huxley, Aldous, Archive.org (up)
3: Perennialism Perennialism.org (up)
4: Fadiman, James. Psychedelicexplorersguide.com. 2011. https://www.psychedelicexplorersguide.com/. (up)
5: “The Transpersonal Vision : The Healing Potential of Nonordinary States of Consciousness : Grof, Stanislav, 1931- : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive.” 2022. Internet Archive. 2022. https://archive.org/details/transpersonalvis0000gro (up)
6: How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence Pollan, Michael, 2018 (up)
7: Alison Gopnik UC Berkeley Psychology (up)
8: The Truth About Opium by William H. Brereton DWP (up)
9: Glenn Close but no cigar DWP (up)
10: Running with the torture loving DEA DWP (up)
11: Blast-off for Planet Hypocrisy! DWP (up)




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Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US




The existence of a handful of bad outcomes of drug use does not justify substance prohibition... any more than the existence of drunkards justifies a call for liquor prohibition.

At best, antidepressants make depression bearable. We need not settle for such drugs, especially when they are notorious for causing dependence. There are many drugs that elate and inspire. It is both cruel and criminal to outlaw them.

In an article about Mazatec mushroom use, the author says: "Mushrooms should not be considered a drug." True. But then NOTHING should be considered a drug: every substance has potential good uses.

The goal of rehab should not be to get people off of all drugs, it should be to teach them to be in control of their drug use and to use drugs wisely for beneficial purposes.

I'm told that science is completely unbiased today. I guess I'll have to go back and reassess my doubts about Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy.

In the Atomic Age Declassified, they tell us that we needed hundreds of thermonuclear tests so that scientists could understand the effects. That's science gone mad. Just like today's scientists who need more tests before they can say that laughing gas will help the depressed. Science today is all about ignoring the obvious.

The Drug War is one big entrapment scheme for poor minorities. Prohibition creates an economy that hugely incentivizes drug dealing, and when the poor fall for the bait, the prohibitionists rush in to arrest them and remove them from the voting rolls.

America takes away the citizen's right to manage their own depression by making opium and cocaine illegal. Then psychiatrists treat the resulting epidemic of depression and anxiety by damaging the patient's brain with shock therapy.

Being a lifetime patient is not the issue: that could make perfect sense in certain cases. But if I am to be "using" for life, I demand the drug of MY CHOICE, not that of Big Pharma and mainstream psychiatry, who are dogmatically deaf to the benefits of hated substances.

I don't have a problem with CBD. But I find that many people like it for the wrong reasons: they assume there is something slightly "dirty" about getting high and that all "cures" should be effected via direct materialist causes, not holistically a la time-honored tribal use.


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Unless otherwise indicated, no AI is used in the creation of site content. These essays represent the original ideas of their author and not the ideas that the author SHOULD have based on an algorithmic parsing of existing data. For more on this subject, consider the AI-related viewpoints to which the author subscribes as delineated in the New York Times opinion piece entitled "What 370,000 College Essays Tell Us About A.I.’s Effects on Creativity" by Rebecca Winthrop of the Brookings Institution.

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