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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




We won't know how hard it is to get off drugs until we legalize all drugs that could help with the change. With knowledge and safety, there will be less unwanted use. And unwanted use can be combatted creatively with a wide variety of drugs.

If Americans cannot handle the truth about drugs, then there is something wrong with Americans, not with drugs.

My impression has been that the use of cocaine over a long time can bring about lasting improvement..." --Sigmund Freud, On Cocaine, 1884

Orchestras will eventually use psychedelics to train conductors. When the successful candidate directs mood-fests like Mahler's 2nd, THEY will be the stars, channeling every known -- and some unknown -- human emotions. Think Simon Rattle on... well, on psychedelics.

The drug war bans human progress by deciding that hundreds of drugs are trash without even trying to find positive uses for them. Yet scientists continue to research and write as if prohibition does not exist, that's how cowed they are by drug laws.

There is something wrong with a country that thinks it can decide what human beings around the world are allowed to ingest.

My approach to withdrawal: incrementally reduce daily doses over 6 months, or even a year, meanwhile using all the legal entheogens and psychedelics that you can find in a way likely to boost your endurance and "sense of purpose" to make withdrawal successful.

And we should not insist it's a problem if someone decides to use opium, for instance, daily. We certainly don't blame "patients" for using antidepressants daily. And getting off opium is easier than getting off many antidepressants -- see Julia Holland.

This is why the foes of suicide are doing absolutely nothing to get laughing gas into the hands of those who could benefit from it. Laughing is subjective after all. In the western tradition, we need a "REAL" cure to depression.

The war on drugs has destroyed America's faith in the power of education. In fact, it has made us think of education as WRONG in and of itself. It has made us prefer censorship and fear-filled ignorance to education!


Click here to see All Tweets against the hateful War on Us






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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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