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Meister Eckhart and Drugs

how the drug war destroys religious liberty

by Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher





January 22, 2025

ccording 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, 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, in the same way that our forebears in Hollywood 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.







Religion






The Drug War violates religious freedom by putting bureaucrats in charge of deciding if a religion is 'sincere' or not. That is so absurd that one does not know whether to laugh or cry. No one in government is capable of determining whether the inner states that I achieve with psychoactive medicine are religious or not. This is why Milton Friedman was so wrong when he said in 1972 that there are good people on both sides of the drug war debate. WRONG! There are those who are more than ready to take away my religious liberty and those who are not. If the former wish to be called 'good,' they will first need a refresher course in American democracy and religious freedom. They need to renounce their Christian Science theocracy and let folks like myself worship using the kinds of substances that have inspired entire religions in the past. Until they do that, do not expect me to praise the very people who have launched an inquisition against my form of experiencing the divine.

The drug war is a meta-injustice. It does not just limit what you're allowed to think, it limits how and how much you are allowed to think.

  • Addicted to Christianity
  • America's Puritan Obsession with Sobriety
  • Drug Testing and the Christian Science Inquisition
  • Freedom of Religion and the War on Drugs
  • How the DEA determines if a religion is true
  • How the Drug War Banned my Religion
  • Introduction to the Drug War Philosopher Website at AbolishTheDEA.com
  • Libertarians as Closet Christian Scientists
  • Meister Eckhart and Drugs
  • Psychedelic Cults and Outlaw Churches: LSD, Cannabis, and Spiritual Sacraments in Underground America
  • The Christian Presuppositions of the Drug War and Why They're Important
  • The Church of the Most Holy and Righteous Drug War
  • The Drug War = Christian Science
  • The Drug War as Religion
  • Using Ecstasy in Church
  • Why the Drug War is Christian Science Sharia
  • Why the Drug War is Worse than a Religion




  • Notes:

    1 Meister Eckhart, (up)
    2 Huxley, Aldous, The Perennial Philosophy, Archive.org, (up)
    3 Perennialism, Perennialism.org, (up)
    4 Fadiman, James, The Psychedelic Explorer's Guide: Safe, Therapeutic, and Sacred Journeys , Park Street Press, New York, 2011 (up)
    5 Grof, Stanislav, The transpersonal vision: the healing potential of nonordinary states of consciousness, Sounds True, Boulder, Co., 1998 (up)
    6 Pollan, Michael, How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence, 2018 (up)
    7 Alison Gopnik, UC Berkeley Psychology, (up)


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    Some Tweets against the hateful war on drugs

    It's interesting that Jamaicans call the police 'Babylon,' given that Babylon denotes a society seeking materialist pleasures. Drug use is about transcending the material world and seeking spiritual states: states that the materialist derides as meaningless.
    Mariani Wine is the real McCoy, with Bolivian coca leaves (tho' not with cocaine, as Wikipedia says). I'll be writing more about my experience with it soon. I was impressed. It's the same drink "on which" HG Wells and Jules Verne wrote their stories.
    Someone tweeted that fears about a Christian Science theocracy are "baseless." Tell that to my uncle who was lobotomized because they outlawed meds that could cheer him up -- tell that to myself, a chronic depressive who could be cheered up in an instant with outlawed meds.
    Scientists are responsible for endless incarcerations in America. Why? Because they fail to denounce the DEA lie that psychoactive substances have no positive medical uses. This is so obviously wrong that only an academic in an Ivory Tower could disbelieve it.
    I might as well say that no one can ever be taught to ride a horse safely. I would argue as follows: "Look at Christopher Reeves. He was a responsible and knowledgeable equestrian. But he couldn't handle horses. The fact is, NO ONE can handle horses!"
    Talking about being in denial: drug warriors blame all of the problems that they cause on "drugs" and then insist that the entire WORLD accept their jaundiced view of the natural bounty that God himself told us was good.
    By reading "Drug Warriors and Their Prey," I begin to understand why I encounter a wall of silence when I write to authors and professors on the subject of "drugs." The mere fact that the drug war inspires such self-censorship should be grounds for its immediate termination.
    There are times when it is clearly WRONG to deny kids drugs (whatever the law may say). If your child is obsessed with school massacres, he or she is an excellent candidate for using empathogenic meds ASAP -- or do we prefer even school shootings to drug use???
    The Drug War brought guns to the "hoods," thereby incentivizing violence in the name of enormous profits. Any site featuring victims of gun violence should therefore be rebranded as a site featuring victims of the drug war. Otherwise, many people don't make the connection.
    Scientists are censored as to what they can study thanks to drug law. Instead of protesting that outrage, they lend a false scientific veneer to those laws via their materialist obsession with reductionism, which blinds them to the obvious godsend effects of outlawed substances.
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    You have been reading an article entitled, Meister Eckhart and Drugs: how the drug war destroys religious liberty, published on January 22, 2025 on AbolishTheDEA.com. For more information about America's disgraceful drug war, which is anti-patient, anti-minority, anti-scientific, anti-mother nature, imperialistic, the establishment of the Christian Science religion, a violation of the natural law upon which America was founded, and a childish and counterproductive way of looking at the world, one which causes all of the problems that it purports to solve, and then some, visit the drug war philosopher, at abolishTheDEA.com. (philosopher's bio; go to top of this page)