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Soma and the Anesthetic Revelation

How William James failed to connect the dots

by Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher



March 31, 2025



mazing! The drug-leery censorship algorithms at the Internet Archive actually allowed me to post the following review of "The Varieties of Religious Experience" by William James1. I was initially irked by their requirement that I limit my effusions to 1,000 words, but then I reflected that this was probably for the best. It obliges me to pounce straight for the jugular in attacking the great psychologist's failure to connect the dots between Hinduism and the anesthetic revelation. I still give the book four out of five stars, however, insofar as James actually acknowledged the power of altered states -- and just in time, too -- for had he done so in modern times, he would have been kicked out of academia for such Drug War heresy.


William James discusses how the use of anesthetic compounds such as laughing gas can provide one with a tantalizing glimpse of new realities. "Our normal waking consciousness," quoth James, "is but one special type of consciousness." He fails to realize, however, that such "anesthetic revelations," as he calls them, comprise but a subset of the transcendent experiences that have been invoked purposefully for millennia by indigenous religious seekers with the use of psychoactive substances. Although James makes half a dozen references to Hinduism in this book, he never mentions the fact that the Hindu religion was inspired by the use of a psychoactive substance called Soma. Had he made the connection, America's demagogue politicians would have had a harder time convincing us that drugs were evil. Instead, they have succeeded so well that even James's alma mater, Harvard University, does not mention either laughing gas or the anesthetic revelation in their online biography of James2.




Notes:

1 James, William, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study In Human Nature, The Internet Archive, (up)
2 Quass, Brian, How Harvard University Censored the Biography of William James, 2025 (up)



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You have been reading an article entitled, Soma and the Anesthetic Revelation: How William James failed to connect the dots, published on March 31, 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)