Modern men and women have grown up in a fake reality.  Or worse, we were sold a fake concept of God by most of the world’s religions.  Harsh words, but true.

External vs. internal.  Behavior vs. consciousness.  We have all been led to divorce what “is” from what “can be.”  In the last two thousand years, since the birth of Jesus Christ, Western monotheistic religions have expanded with astonishing efficiency.  But now the new consciousness-expanding drugs expose the imbalance between the artificial structures of the outer world and the reality of the inner spiritual experience.

Unbeknownst to most of us, we have been “educated” to abhor the loss of identity in “herd-consciousness” that has been confused with the organic social group of Man.  While churches have become nothing more than huge corporate entities where participants sit in rows looking at each other’s backs and communicating only with the preacher, priest or leader, cannabis facilitates communication with the God within each of us.

This radical separation between controlling and being controlled has changed Man from being self-controlling to a self-frustrating organism.  This split serves the controllers to the detriment of the organic social group of Man.  The churches that this split has produced are now self-destructive and operate against the instinct of every one of their members.

The whole concept of discovery, of love and of God, has been lost.  Most people lack the nerve to express their affection but fear that if they step outside the bounds of formal friendships, they may slide into a sexual relationship.  The spirit of brotherly love, a la the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, is lacking.  The greatest part of love is genuine care for an individual.  That is rarely risked or allowed by churches that talk of love generically, not specifically.

The universe is an interrelated whole.  Man is a very small part of it.  Do we dare become aware of the universe within ourselves and search out the joyous consciousness within our own minds?  To do so we must overthrow our own cognitive thinking mind.  We must open the mind to the God within.  This is possible with consciousness awareness drugs.  The Cannabis Spiritual Center advocates the use of cannabis – an organic, safe, legal sacrament – to open your mind to a whole new dimension of God consciousness.  The God that dwells peacefully within each of us.

Look… You cannot see it.

Listen…  You cannot hear it.

We see it everywhere but never see its face.

We follow it everywhere but never see its back.

What is it?

The truth.

The simple truth is that we are all part of one spiritual being that existed before we materialized on Earth and will exist after we leave this physical sphere.

The simple truth is that organized religion is the problem that has led to most of the strife on Earth.  It simply need not be so.

Quite simply, as part of the universal spiritual being, we are drawn, driven and motivated to seek some form of outward magnification of our inner spiritual being.

Regretfully, our ego-driven spirituality has organized religions that have created the worst physical experiences, the most inhumane conditions, mass suffering, wars and death on a global scale.

The simple truth is that life need not be so.  There is no need for dogma, commandments, sermons or any of the trappings of an “organized” religion.  Today’s democratic society welcomes a decentralized and individual God/Man relationship.

Religion need not be organized.  Religious holidays need not be observed.  Ceremonies may be enjoyed but are not required.  Nothing needs to be done to be spiritual.  Each of us is a spiritual being.

When you stop being religious, spirituality begins.

Spirituality is personal.  It need not be expressed in groups.  In fact, your personal spirituality is best expressed individually and when you are alone.

God is within all of us, regardless of our religious upbringing, brainwashing or personal shortcomings.  It is simple to rise above your physical being and discover your own spiritual being without going to any religious church.

Your personal God/Man relationship is easily achieved.  It is simple to open the door to your spiritual being that dwells within.  Just take one toke of cannabis, the sacred sacrament, lie down in a darkened room, and relax. God is within you.  God is within us all.

In sanctifying DNA as no mere molecule but as a potentially awesome experience and relating it to the Tao, Timothy Leary ascends far beyond simple analogy-making. In Psychedelic Prayers, as in all his works, he champions the sparkle of awe as its own most worthy research discovery; without its wondrous quiverings during any research, we are truly without a prayer.

For prayers are nothing other than jaw-dropping, mind-silencing responses of grateful awe to each stunning detail of creation. Otherwise, as Leary says, we are “dead men walking among dead symbols.” Water sinks to being a mere flushable effluent, no longer the wonder wine, the delicious Tao-God of Perfect Flow. DNA becomes merely a patentable, laboratory commodity instead of the most intimate experiential step on that carnal stairway to heaven that the human organism is.
Thus imagine, Learyesque, parallel to the Human Genome Project, an equally well-funded endeavor for ferreting out the awesome thrill of universal, immortal DNA-TAO, directly jacking us into its primordial information banks. Imagine this project’s joyous methods (chemo-nutritional, artistic-ritualistic, cyberspatial, or simply yogic) becoming part of every high school and college education.

And if Lao Tse is correct, this effort would be more important than the Human Genome Project, sponsoring massive cultural contact with the Tao, and thereby initiating a harmonious, wise, and highly creative planetary society – or, at least, loft of friends. We might even learn how to love troubled genomes into healthier expressions, while also learning from them about their more enigmatic and humbling secrets.

But Psychedelic Prayers was written in 1965, in the context of awakenings inspired by contact with LSD and ancient Eastern wisdom-teachings. Now and hereafter we must be open to the development of an ever more refined variety of psychoactive methods (such as VR meditative simulations, artistic and various celebrative-altruistic endeavors, and as yet little-known yogic practices) and substances, some more akin to foods than drugs, perhaps among the class of molecules known as “smart drug” nutritional supplements and herbs. Such were also of utmost interest to Dr. Leary.

Although more gradual in effect than LSD, these more accessible neuroendocrinal foods/activities would nourish and strengthen, more than launch, the imbiber. In such gradual, moment-to-moment subtlety, “One does not even know that there is a molecular guide,” indicating “{the greatest [of] sessions…/ When the greatest session [of life] is over/ and the people will say: It all happened naturally.” “It was so simple, we did it all ourselves.” (p. 47, Psychedelic Prayers).
And if texts such as the Tao Te Ching and the lives of their authors are reliable, the ongoing high resulting from years of contact with the DNA-TAO essence initiates a series of profound transformations of bodily tissues, substances, and organs on par with adolescent puberty, yet more as “post genital puberties.” The Leary-Alpert claim that the brain and not the genitals is “the most powerful sexual organ in the universe” points toward such cerebrospinal puberties, with kundalini awakening being merely the first to enter Western parlance.

Here, what we call “DNA” breaks out of its present identity as the molecular vehicle of reproduction, whose ultimate task can be executed when the body has finished carrying out its genetic instructions for achieving the only bodily puberty we know of in the West, that of the progenitive fertility. It is here that the elaborate and vast bodily “immortality” yogas of tantra, kundalini, and Taoism arise, conjunct, and climax with another of Dr. Leary’s visionary interests: life extension. For during advanced stages of the kundalini process, certain cerebrospinal structures (pineal, pituitary, hypothalamus, and hypoglossas) become uniquely “orgasmic” and an increasingly potent psychoactive rejuvenating secretion known as amrita (the “immortality” hormone) fructifies.

The traverse from the progenitive to these later puberties of spine (kundalini), tongue and hypothalamus (khechari mudra), eyes (sambhavi mudra, the Taoist “golden flower”), and cerebrum (unmani mudra or the unnamed Tao) are barely accounted for in Western religions. Metaphors of a wily, serpentine eroto-intelligence living in a tree, or a semi-mad speaking-in-tongues supra-language, reflect a rudimentary grasp of the spiritualized body. And the culture-bound psychosexual lore of Freud, Masters and Johnson, et al., stops far too short. Thus, regarding Eros, spirituality, and the body, we in the West are sorely in need of more information.

Whether the data on the further reaches of human possibility are gathered in the laboratories of science, the spare lab of zafu and bell, or the tie-dyed lab of a summer day “experienced,” may they sparkle with the Learyian eye of a trip well-taken. May Psychedelic Prayers and its similars grow into a detailed literature on the ways to ever more wondrous marriages of luminous molecules and the golden spirit. Paraphrasing Nietzsche’s Zarathustra:

Verily, Dr. Leary had a goal: “Now you, my friends, are the heirs of my goal; to you I throw my golden ball. More than anything, I like to see you, my friends, throwing the golden ball. And so I lingered a little on this earth; forgive me for that.”

Stuart Sovatsky, Ph.D. has a degree in Religion from Princeton University, and the recipient of the 40 year Most Outstanding Alumni Award from the California Institute of Integral Studies.  A therapist since 1974, he directed the first-ever “spiritual emergence” service specializing in romantic relationship.  He was also cofounder of the $34M Bay Area Green Project to bring yoga and meditation to incarcerated juveniles in 1975 and the convener of a 40-country World Family Conference where Lama Santem represented the Dalai Lama.  He is the author of Advanced Spiritual Intimacy, Your Perfect Lips and Words From the Soul.  He is a worldwide chantmaster in South Africa, India, Russia, Europe and an Elder in the Pashupata Shaktipat lineage at www.amrityoga.org in Ocala National Forest, Florida.

The dome is interesting not only aesthetically or mathematically, but also philosophically and spiritually.  Everything that man does is, in a sense, a statement of his outlook on life.  A stiff mind will generally be attracted to straight, not curved, lines.  A materialistic person, attached as his is to solid matter, will be inclined to construct firm, heavy buildings – reflections of his own vision of a world that will endure forever.* Insular people, fancying reality to be no larger than their own definitions of it, like their homes to box them in cozily, shutting out their minds from the vast universe outside.

We have come, in this Twentieth Century, to a time of increasing mental fluidity, and of decreasing reliance upon solid matter as the ultimate and abiding reality.  We have come to any age, finally, when our metal concepts are seen, not as realities in themselves, but only as our humble efforts to reach out and touch the hem of a much greater reality that we can only dimly comprehend.

The dome is expressive of our new approach to the universe.  It is in harmony with the scientific concept that space itself is curved.   In its roundness it represents our modern desire for continuous metal expansion, for reaching out to the universe instead of boxing ourselves in protectively against its immensity.

The dome seems in some way to be more conductive to the metal and spiritual harmony of the dome dweller, perhaps because its more natural shape helps to attune him with nature instead of alienating him from it.  Boxed houses belonged to an age when men stood in opposition to the world around them, in competition, as it were, with nature and the universe.

Dome structures belong better to this age of growing awareness of man’s need to cooperate with nature if he is to progress further, or even to survive the destructive forces that his competitive spirit has unleased.

*From the beginning of man, the Scythians, Indians, Eskimos, Africans and Mongols have all built domes with available local materials rather than abstract ideas, computers, geodesics, or math. Their domes are beautiful and organic.  Natural architecture endures forever.