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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




How would we even KNOW that outlawed drugs have no positive uses? We first have to incorporate them in a sane, empathic and creative way to find that out, and the drug war makes such a sensible approach absolutely impossible.

All drugs have positive uses at some dose, for some reason, at some time -- but prohibitionists have the absurd idea that drugs can be voted up or down. This anti-scientific notion deprives the modern world of countless godsends.

If psychoactive drugs had never been criminalized, science would never have had any reason or excuse for creating SSRIs that muck about unpredictably with brain chemistry. Chewing the coca leaf daily would be one of many readily available "miracle treatments" for depression.

A generally educated person meets new ideas with curiosity and fascination. An illiberally educated person meets new ideas with fear. --James B. Stockade.

Aleister Crowley actually TRIED to get addicted to drugs and found he could not. These things are not inevitable. The fact that there are town drunkards does not mean that we should outlaw alcohol.

The "scheduling" system is completely anti-scientific and anti-patient. It tells us we can make a one-size-fits-all decision about psychoactive substances without regard for dosage, context of use, reason for use, etc. That's superstitious tyranny.

We need a Controlled Prohibitionists Act, to get psychiatric help for those who think that prohibition makes sense despite its appalling record of causing civil wars overseas and devastating inner cities.

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.

The drug war has created a whole film genre with the same tired plots: drug-dealing scumbags and their dupes being put in their place by the white Anglo-Saxon establishment, which has nothing but contempt for altered states.

I'm looking for a United Healthcare doctor now that I'm 66 years old. When I searched my zip code and typed "alternative medicine," I got one single solitary return... for a chiropractor, no less. Some choice. Guess everyone else wants me to "keep taking my meds."


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Book Cover

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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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Copyright 2026, Brian Ballard Quass Contact: quass@quass.com

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