The Age of Atheists: How We Have Sought to Live Since the Death of God

by Watson, Peter

  Marcuse also had an idea of transcendence, though by this he meant historical transcendence, not in any way religious, in that he thought domination, exploitation and repression transcended historical periods, so that we take the status quo for granted. And it was his aim to overcome this state of affairs by showing the basically political nature of existence, which could be overcome only by the Great Refusal, the rejection of social domination “in the name of joy and freedom”—the “Enormous Yes”—using the “transcendental wisdom” of poetry.7

  A second aspect to the psychological changes sought by the counterculture was, as Roszak put it, “the journey to the East.” This leads, he says, to such figures as Alan Watts, originally a British philosopher and theologian, who had studied at the School of Asian Studies in San Francisco after leaving his position as an Anglican counselor at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. Watts wrote books on Zen and Taoism, in an attempt to translate their insights into the language of Western science and technology, perhaps the best known being The Way of Zen, The Joyous Cosmology and Psychotherapy East and West. In the latter, Watts proposed that Buddhism could be thought of as a form of psychotherapy and not just as a religion. Neither Hinduism nor Buddhism, he says, can be classified as a religion, philosophy, science or mythology, or even as an amalgamation of all four, “because departmentalization is foreign to them, even in so basic a form as the separation of the spiritual and the material.”8

  What the counterculture offers us, then, “is a remarkable defection from the long-standing tradition of skeptical, secular intellectuality, which has served as the prime vehicle for three hundred years of scientific and technical work in the West. Almost overnight (and astonishingly, with no great debate on the point) a significant portion of the younger generation has opted out of that tradition.”9 Roszak acknowledged that there were “manifestations” around the edges of the counterculture that were “worrisomely unhealthy”—pornographic grotesquery, blood-curdling sadomasochism, mock-Dionysian frenzy—but held that the exploration of “non-intellective powers” was its greatest achievement.10

  Roszak asks if we can blame the young for getting involved in an “occult Jungian stew,” when the life of Reason has too obviously failed to bring us the agenda of civilized improvements “that Voltaire and Condorcet once foresaw” and shown itself to be merely a “Higher Superstition.” He says it is impossible any longer to ignore the fact that “our conception of intellect has been narrowed disastrously by the prevailing assumption” that the life of the spirit is “(1) a lunatic fringe best left to artists and marginal visionaries; (2) an historical bone yard for antiquarian scholarship; (3) a highly specialized adjunct of professional anthropology; (4) an antiquated vocabulary still used by the clergy, but intelligently soft-pedalled by its more enlightened members.” The end result, as Michael Novak has put it, is a “middle-class secular humanism which eschews the ‘mystic flights’ of metaphysicians, theologians and dreamers; it is cautious and remote in dealing with heightened and passionate experiences that are the stuff of great literature and philosophy, limiting itself to this world and its concerns, concerns which fortunately turn out to be largely subject to precise formulations, and hence have a limited but comforting certainty.”

  And just look at the new rituals of the young, he says. “They gather in gay costume on a high hill in the public park to salute the midsummer sun in its rising and setting. They dance, they sing, they make love as each feels moved, without order or plan. . . . All have equal access to the event; no one is misled or manipulated. Neither kingdom, nor power, nor glory is desperately at stake.”11

  THE RELIGION OF NO RELIGION

  This approach, these values, were reflected above all at Esalen. Jeffrey Kripal subtitled his book America and the Religion of No Religion because Esalen was designed, he said, as a utopian experiment “creatively suspended between the revelations of the religions and the democratic, pluralistic, and scientific revolutions of modernity.” It was a place where the therapeutic encounter was the core principle, “a spiritual space where almost any religious form can flourish, provided—and this is crucial—that it does not attempt to impose itself on the entire community or claim to speak for everyone. As an early Esalen motto put it, ‘No one captures the flag.’ At Esalen they hold their dogmas lightly, they describe themselves as “spiritual but not religious. . . . Mysticism here is not some transcendent abstraction without political or moral content. Another way of putting the Esalen ethic is that . . . the humanist is after the openness of wonder, whereas the scientist is after the closure of explanation.”12

  Esalen came out of the tradition of Aldous Huxley, who had explored ideas of utopia and dystopia, and the “precognitive” writings of Henry Miller, who had lived in Big Sur. The early figures at Esalen were Michael Murphy and Frederic Spiegelberg, the latter an exile from Germany, where he had been friendly with Paul Tillich and Carl Jung. Also influenced by Rilke, Spiegelberg was the one who conceived the phrase and wrote a book called The Religion of No Religion. For him, historical religions have made two major mistakes. They have consistently misread their own symbolic statements as literal truths, and they have traditionally devalued one side of reality (the natural world) for the sake of the other (the transcendent divine).

  Spiegelberg thought that the paradoxes at the heart of these two mistakes were what, for most people, made traditional religions unthinkable; and at the same time he adopted an essentially Heideggerian approach, a sense of the astonishment of being. This, he found, could be enhanced by Zen Buddhism, and Indian yoga, which recognizes, particularly in its Tantric form, that “the final temple of the divine is, again, the human body.”13 Moreover, he saw art and psychoanalysis as two Western ways of thinking by which the “higher gnosis” could be achieved.

  These ideas of Spiegelberg’s set the scene at Esalen, but were built on by many others—and this variety was key to the institute’s early success. Innovations included the Buddhism taught by Dick Price, with its idea of anatman, no-self, “no special status for anything,” in which the “unfolding” of life was regarded as the only divine force; physical movement and non-verbal experience, body awareness and sensory reawakening; J. B. Rhine’s notions of parapsychology and the nature of man; Alan Watts’s ideas as expounded in Joyous Cosmology; Timothy Leary and “psychedelic Orientalism”; and the “third force psychology” of Abraham Maslow with its “self-actualizing” “peak experiences.” Sex was never far away. In fact, Kripal says: “Central to Esalen’s enlightenment of the body is a kind of mystical psychoanalysis that is as comfortable with ‘sex’ as it is with ‘peak experience’ . . . that sees the peak spiritual experience as orgasmic and the orgasm as potentially spiritual.”14

  Abraham Maslow, the central figure in “third force” psychology, had been active in the field for some time before he went to Esalen: he had helped Alfred Kinsey with his sex research in New York while teaching at Brooklyn College. He invoked the orgasm as an appropriate metaphor or analogy for his concept of a “peak experience,” which for him was “an extraordinary state of personal history” that “fundamentally alters the individual’s worldview through an overwhelming explosion of meaning, creativity, love and Being.”15

  Maslow described peak experiences as very like orgasms: “the peak experience is temporary, essentially delightful, potentially creative, and imbued with profound metaphysical possibilities.” One cannot live on such peaks but, he insisted, a life without them is unhealthy, nihilistic and potentially violent. The peak experience sat at the summit of a pyramid built on a hierarchy of psychological and physiological needs. At the base of the pyramid was food, shelter, sleep; above that came sexuality, safety and security; above that, love, belonging, self-esteem; and finally, at the peak itself, self-actualization. This last state was regarded as spiritual but in no way religious. One of the achievements of a peak experience, Maslow thought, was that people became more democratic, more gene
rous, more open, less closed and selfish, achieving what he called a “transpersonal” or “transhuman” realm of consciousness. He had the idea of a “non-institutionalized personal religion” that “would obliterate the distinction between the sacred and the profane”—rather like the meditation exercises of Zen monks, whom he compared to humanistic psychologists. Maslow’s idols in this were William James and Walt Whitman.

  Encounter groups and “T-groups” were part of life at Esalen, drawing on the work of Carl Rogers (discussed in chapter 19). The aim was ultimate honesty: “Under the Encounter Contract I say how I feel about you. My obligation to be polite, kind or considerate is, for the time being, set aside.” And in another, more startling, innovation people were invited to expose their genitals and discuss the fears and desires aroused by such exposure in a world where those organs were so central. These encounters, obviously enough, could be very intense, creating “transcendent spaces,” new experiences in which people forgot who and where they were, and all feelings of time.16

  Arica Awareness Training, Rolfing, Orgone Therapy, full-body contemplative massage, biofeedback, hypnosis, the Spiritual Emergency Network, the Spiritual Tyranny Conference, the Tao of Physics, Sufism, the Spiritual Art and Intuitive Business of Managing Emptiness—all these therapies, experiences and events, and more, have characterized Esalen from the start. Some observers have dismissed it as a “spiritual supermarket.” It still exists, as a non-profit organization providing a “decent but quite humble” livelihood for 150 individuals who between them manage four hundred seminars a year. Their aim is to continue to imagine a new “spiritual” America, to embrace a “democratic mysticism, a religion of no religion,” a spiritual utopia that still embodies the values and aspirations of the counterculture.

  BETTER LIVING THROUGH CHEMISTRY

  The second core element of the counterculture was drugs. The fascination with hallucinogenics underlies much of post–Second World War counterculture. For many people through the ages, plants known as “entheogens” (generators of the divine or spirit within) have offered an “alternative spirituality.”17

  This aspect of the counterculture has been examined by Martin Torgoff in Can’t Find My Way Home: America in the Great Stoned Age, 1945–2000. Stating that roughly one in four Americans has used illegal drugs—so it is hardly a fringe activity—Torgoff made the point that getting high wasn’t just about fun—“it was about rebellion and bohemia and utopia and mysticism . . . [about] refusing to accept or even acknowledge limits of any kind.”18

  Dope was a whole way of life: “It was like living in a walled city with your own kind, where you could make up your own language and create your own set of rules, it was a badge which made people different from the rest of the world.” In one sense, jazz was about the profound isolation and pathos of the life around heroin—the cravings, the desolate loneliness of the search, the blissful relief of the shot. In theory, at least, a new kind of existence was available, an un-self-conscious “radiant burning,” living for kicks, tasting the pure ecstasy of life. The fact that it didn’t last didn’t matter: “All the philosophies tell us that nothing does, but while it did last everything was experienced as holy.” It was “the sacralization of the mundane.”19

  Many at the time saw parallels in what they were doing and in the ancient Indian shamans’ experience of “peyote vision.” Here, too, drugs brought salvation. In the Native American tradition known as the “vision quest,” people would be required to survive in the wilderness, procuring a guardian spirit, often by means of the New World “narcotic complex” comprising the Americas’ eighty to a hundred mind-altering plants (about which there is copious documentation), compared with the Old World’s half-dozen. These and other Native American traditions were introduced to mainstream America by Carlos Castaneda, who in 1968 published The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge. Originally a university-press book, this purported to be based on Castaneda’s field notes taken during his four years as a participant-observer researching Yaqui beliefs and practices. But his book became a phenomenal best seller and led to six titles in total, with A Separate Reality (1971) becoming most well known, the books selling in all some eight million copies. What Americans learned from Castaneda’s books was that Native American culture was intimately bound up with hallucinogenic drugs, used to gain “insight into a world not merely other than our own, but an entirely different order of reality.”20

  It was this that interested Timothy Leary, who in 1960 first ingested Psilocybe mexicana, the mysterious magical mushroom of Mexico, in a house he had rented in Cuernavaca. Torgoff tells us that “during the experience his mind had completely deliquesced, opening to the most enthralling visions: ‘Nile palaces, Hindu temples, Babylonian boudoirs, Bedouin pleasure tents.’” He slipped farther and farther back in time, “so far back that he became the first living being.” Leary came to the view that mushrooms could “revolutionize” psychology and carried with them the possibility of “instantaneous self-insight.”

  Leary felt that psychology had become too involved with the study of behavior and had neglected the phenomenon of consciousness. In the first experiment, to test “the potential of psilocybin for social re-engineering,” it was used in Concord State Prison in New Hampshire, where the changes brought about in the inmates were said to be dramatic: “[F]riction and tension were lowered, and there was talk in the sessions about ‘love’ and ‘God’ and ‘sharing.’” Leary thought he had discovered a method of “imprinting” new behavior patterns on adults: psychedelic imprinting, he claimed, would rank with DNA deciphering as “one of the most significant discoveries of the century.”

  Over about four years, Leary and his assistants managed, as they put it, to “arrange transcendental experiences” for more than one thousand persons, including Aldous Huxley, Allen Ginsberg and Alan Watts. Their studies showed that “when the setting was supportive but not explicitly spiritual, between 40 and 75 percent of their subjects . . . reported life-changing religious experiences. Yet when the set and setting emphasized spiritual themes, up to 90 percent reported having mystical or illuminating experiences.”21

  When the news leaked out that scientists at President Kennedy’s alma mater were using mind-altering drugs in a social-engineering project, there was an almighty fuss. But Leary himself was taking more interest in spiritual, religious and mystical matters, as was a Harvard doctoral candidate, Walter Pahnke, who sought to determine empirically whether the so-called transcendental component of psychedelic experience was truly the equal of those reported by saints and mystics. With the support of a university professor he gathered a score of divinity students from a seminary and divided them into two groups. The experiment took place on Good Friday, 1962, after a service in the chapel. Some of the students were given psilocybin, others a placebo of nicotinic acid, which should have produced only hot and cold flushes.

  After thirty minutes, “it was very apparent who had taken the psychedelic and who had not. The ten who had ingested the nicotinic acid were sitting there facing the altar; the others were lying on the floors and pews, wandering round in rapt wonderment, murmuring prayers as one of them played ‘weird, exciting, chords’ on the church’s pipe organ. Another . . . clambered across the pews and stood facing the crucifix, transfixed, arms outstretched as if somehow trying to identify physically with Christ and his suffering on the cross.”22 To Leary and his aides, the experiment proved that “spiritual ecstasy, religious revelation, and union with God were now directly accessible.”

  When Time got hold of the story, however, Harvard Divinity School took a very different view: follow-up studies were canceled, while a medical administrator from the FDA described the psychological benefits of the study as “pure bunk.”

  Leary, however, stuck to his guns and began to think of different ways to pursue his interests. Other observers were becoming interested in LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide), which now acquired some revea
lingly colorful names, such as Pearly Gates and Heavenly Blue. What Leary had in mind was what he called “a new frontier of expanded consciousness,” and in a speech to the Harvard Humanists (a group dedicated to ethical development based on reason, not religious dogma) he announced the formation of the International Foundation for Internal Freedom (IFIF)—freedom in particular, he said, from “the learned, cultural mind.” He even foresaw an amendment to the U.S. Constitution to guarantee an individual’s right to seek an expanded consciousness. But while he was in Mexico on IFIF business, Harvard officials found that he had given drugs to an undergraduate, and used this as a pretext to get rid of him.

  It was not the personal disaster it might have been, had it happened earlier in his career, because he was becoming less and less interested in Harvard. After a period of exile, therefore, he moved to the Hudson Valley and continued what was to become his next project. “Everything we did in the 1960s was designed to fission, to weaken faith and conformity to the 1950s social order. Our precise surgical target was the Judeo-Christian power monolith, which had imposed a guilty, inhibited, grim, anti-body, anti-life repression on Western civilization. Our assignment was to topple this prudish, judgmental civilization.” And, as he famously wrote, “The paradox must be stated as follows: it becomes necessary for us to go out of our minds in order to use our heads. . . . The game is about to change, ladies and gentlemen. . . . Drugs are the religion of the twenty-first century. . . . Turn on. Tune in. Drop out.”

  When R. E. Masters and Jean Houston wrote their much-quoted book, The Varieties of Psychedelic Experience, they took it for granted that “psychedelic (mind manifesting) drugs afforded the best access yet to the contents and processes of the human mind.” They argued that there are four distinct levels of psychedelic experience, each successively “deeper” than its predecessor. The first level is that of enhanced sensory awareness; the second is reflective-analytic; the third, attained by fewer subjects, they called the symbolic level, at which the subject “experiences primal, universal, and recurring themes of human experience” (in a Jungian archetypal sense); the fourth, and deepest, is the integral level. “The integral level is mystical in nature. It affords individuals a vivid sensation of being ‘one’ with the deeper level of reality.” Only 11 percent of subjects reached this level, but those that did reported a feeling of “oneness with God.” Masters and Houston note, however, that their subjects’ descriptions of God did not match conventional religious language. Rather than describing God in biblical terms, they said, they used words more reminiscent of Paul Tillich’s definition of God as “the Ground of being” (see above, p. 385).23