If you look back into history, it’s clear that man has always had a hankering after mind-changing chemicals. He has always desired to take holidays from himself.
A number of these new mind-changing substances can produce enormous revolutions within the mental side of our being, and yet do almost nothing to the physiological side. I mean, you can have an enormous revolution—for example, with LSD-25, or with the newly synthesized drug psilocybin, which is the active principle of the Mexican sacred mushroom—you can have this enormous mental revolution with no more physiological revolution than you would get from drinking two cocktails. And this is a really most extraordinary effect.
Experience sadly shows that if we are tempted long enough and strongly enough, we almost invariably succumb. And the whole process of setting up a decent society is essentially setting up a society in which temptations to abuse power shall be reduced to a minimum.
We still don’t know very much about the relation of mind and body. We know clearly that they’re related to one another very closely, but exactly how electrochemical events in the central nervous system turn into the G Minor Quartet of Mozart, we really haven’t the faintest idea.
