Prabhupada Teaches How to Stay High Forever

Probably the most famous experiments with LSD in those days were by Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert, Harvard psychology instructors who studied the effects of the drug, published their findings in professional journals, and advocated the use of LSD for self-realization and fulfillment.  After being fired from Harvard, Timothy Leary went on to become a national priest of LSD, and for some time ran an LSD commune in Millbrook, New York.

When the members of the Millbrook commune heard about the swami on the Lower East Side who led his followers in a chant that got you high, they began visiting the storefront.  One night, a group of about ten hippies from Millbrook came to Swamiji’s kirtana.  They all chanted (not so much in worship of Krishna as to see what kind of high the chanting could produce).  After the lecture, a Millbrook leader asked about drugs.  Prabhupada replied that drugs were not necessary for spiritual life, that they could not produce spiritual consciousness, and that all drug-induced religious visions were simply hallucinations.  To realize God, was not so easy or cheap that one could do it just by taking a pill or smoking.  Chanting Hare Krishna, he explained, was a purifying process to uncover one’s pure consciousness.  Taking drugs would increase the covering and bar one from self-realization.

“But have you ever taken LSD?”  The question now became a challenge.

“No,” Prabhupada replied.  “I have never taken any of these things, not even cigarettes or tea.”

“If you haven’t taken it, then how can you say what it is?”  The Millbrookers looked around, smiling.  Two or three even burst out with laughter and snapped their fingers, thinking the Swami had been checkmated.

“I have not taken,” Prabhupada replied regally from his dais.  “But my disciples have taken all these things—marijuana, LSD—many times, and they have given them all up.  You can hear from them.  Hayagriva, you can speak.”  And Hayagriva sat up a little taller and spoke out in his best stentorian voice.

“Well, no matter how high you go on LSD, you eventually reach a peak and then you have to come back down.  Just like traveling into outer space in a rocket ship.  [He gave one of Swamiji’s familiar examples.]  Your spacecraft can travel very far away from the earth for thousands of miles, day after day, but it cannot simply go on traveling and traveling.  Eventually it must land.  On LSD, we experience going up, but we always have to come down again.  That’s not spiritual consciousness.  When you actually attain spiritual or Krishna consciousness, you stay high.  Because you go to Krishna, you don’t have to come down.  You can stay high forever.”