This might seem like a story about LSD that crashes and burns within a very short time frame, but the real story here is instead the tremendous and long lasting impact this drug and its advocates had on American religious culture. LSD provided many with the descriptive language and cosmic orientation to talk openly about spiritual realities available to individuals discontent with traditional, familiar religions on the American landscape (varieties of Christianity and Judaism primarily at the time). These were realities designated by their expositors as outside the institutional and communal structures of their parents’ communities, structures that could no longer contain a deep rooted spiritual sensibility in American religious history that seeks mystical union over church teachings; consciousness expansion instead of a focus on a personal God; inner truth that leads to personal enlightenment rather than conformity with communal authorities. The messengers who experienced the new realities awakened by LSD contributed to the cultural legitimacy of a free floating but inner-directed spirituality as an alternative religious culture driven by personal strivings for cosmic illuminations and mystical revelation
Of course, some of these messengers may have been participating in antics and practices of self-promotion that could be taken as parody or prophecy. Alpert, whose own spiritual journey brought him to India, where he assumed the new identity of Ram Dass and contributed to the increasing popular interest in “eastern” religions; Weil, whose early rejection from the club did not stop him from experimentation with, and support of, various drugs and who ultimately became a leading figure in alternative, integrative medicine as much about the spirit as the body. Some messengers brought the gospel of LSD through music, including the Byrds, Jimi Hendrix, and the Beatles, to name only a few. And some, at least for a short time, very easily moved from LSD to the increasingly popular Human Potential Movement, a seminal cultural phenomenon associated with the birth of New Age spirituality and centrally located at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur.
And even though acid was criminalized, even though bad trips were publicized, even though psychiatry rejected LSD as a viable therapeutic treatment, and even though the promise of countercultural revolution petered out by the end of the decade, public representations and propaganda about acid trips legitimated a certain kind of new, and until that point marginalized, spiritual language for American consumers and seekers. The personal, mystical, consciousness expanding, ecstatic experiences associated with LSD contributed, in short, to a new brand of spirituality that struck a chord and reverberated in culture far beyond those relatively small numbers dropping acid and having first hand spiritual encounters.
LSD is one of many catalysts—or better, for some, sacraments—that transmute these latent spiritual tendencies and dispositions into viable, popular, and consumable religious cultures increasingly associated with the New Age spirituality flowering in the wake of 1960s. Within a very short time, and coincident with a variety of other social, cultural, and political forces transforming American society in that decade, a spiritualized view of psychedelics generally and LSD specifically as gateways to cosmic illumination and personal religious awakening, gained traction in and made an impact on the popular religious imagination like nothing before or since. Thanks in large part to LSD, it became possible, in other words, for large numbers of people to utter the phrase “spiritual, not religious” in public, and to have some personal phenomology for what, precisely, that means.
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