An excerpt from Thomas Riedlinger's forthcoming book, Edible Light, an account of how the author used entheogens as part of a long quest to learn why God, if assumed to be powerful and good, either willfully made or tolerates evil and suffering

Thomas J. Riedlinger, M.T.S., F.L.S., is a former associate in ethnomycology at Harvard Botanical Museum and a fellow of the Linnean Society in London. He earned his bachelor's degree in psychology from Northwestern University, and a master's degree in world religions from Harvard Divinity School. His published works include The Sacred Mushroom Seeker, a book of essays on ethnomycologist R. Gordon Wasson, as well as articles in Gnosis, the Journal of Humanistic Psychology, the Journal of Psychoactive Drugs, the Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, Medical Hypotheses, Psychedelic Illuminations, Psychedelic Monographs & Essays, and Shaman's Drum.

The turning point for me was a life-changing vision I experienced on LSD in 1968, at the age of nineteen. I was then in the U.S. Air Force and training to work as a North Vietnamese language specialist. When I confessed to taking LSD my case was referred to the Air Force's Office of Special Investigations (OSI), which directed that I should be classified as "human unreliable" for four years. One consequence of this was that I could not go to Vietnam. Instead, I was reassigned as an administrative clerk to Wurtsmith Air Force Base, located about two hundred miles north of Detroit in the town of Oscoda, Michigan. From 1969 through the end of my four-year enlistment in 1972, I lived there happily with my then-wife June and our new daughter Jenni. The only significant dark cloud during that period was the death of a close friend, Mike Collins, who had given me the LSD I took in 1968 - my first psychedelic session.

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Though I had told the OSI that I planned never again to take LSD or other psychedelics, my resolve not to do so was merely expedient. In addition to wanting to stay in the Air Force, I did not know anyone other than Mike who had access to these substances; it therefore seemed unlikely that I would be tempted. But in the months immediately following Mike's death, I began making friends with a number of airmen and civilian neighbors my own age, many of whom had access to a smorgasbord of recreational drugs being brought to Oscoda from sources all over the world by way of Detroit. Included were lots of low-potency marijuana, "blond Lebanese hash," psychoactive mushrooms, synthetic psilocybin, peyote buttons, synthetic mescaline, and various forms of LSD, including purple haze, orange barrels, blotter acid, windowpane, and sugar cubes. My interest in trying psychedelics soon returned and I began to sample all of them. If heroin, cocaine, and other "hard drugs" also were available, I was not aware of it; they did not appeal to me or my friends in Oscoda. What we sought from psychedelics was essentially the opposite of what those other drugs provide. We did not wish to feel numb, sedated or delirious. Rather than escaping from reality, we wanted to perceive it fresh and new again - "appareled in celestial light," to borrow Wordsworth's phrase - the way it looks to all of us in childhood before habituation dulls our senses. Psychedelics have the power to restore that faded vision to its former full intensity for several hours, and by doing so remind us that the world is suffused with miraculous beauty in addition to the violence, brutality and ugliness it harbors.

Between the winter of 1970-71 and January 1972, when I was honorably discharged from the Air Force, I ingested psychedelics about thirty times, almost always on Friday or Saturday evenings and usually accompanied by three to ten fellow travelers. The general mood of these gatherings was festive yet decorous. Everyone treated each other respectfully, talking or listening quietly or with joyful animation, often laughing, sometimes weeping, at other times sitting alone with eyes closed, enraptured by marvelous, colorful visions. Only rarely did anyone have a bad trip, and the antidote administered to those who did never failed to work: we talked them down with expressions of honest concern and uncritical love. It has been said that psychedelics are community-building substances, in contrast to drugs such as heroin and cocaine that encourage acquisitive self-absorption. Based on what I have experienced and seen there is some truth to this. Psychedelicists who are not also alcohol or polydrug abusers just seem to be more genuinely open to appreciating other human beings. They also commonly report increased respect for life in general and greater ecological awareness.

As for spiritual enlightenment, my psychedelic sessions in Oscoda did not delve as deep as what I had experienced the first time I took LSD. This was mainly due to differences in dosage, set and setting. I discovered that I like my psychedelics in low doses, seldom greater than the functional equivalent of 100 to 125 micrograms of LSD; often I only took half that amount. Additionally, my mindset toward religion had been compromised by Mike's untimely death. While this did not convince me that I should abandon my spiritual quest, I now see that it made me defiant toward God and less open, therefore, to spiritual ideas. Finally, the psychedelic sessions in Oscoda had a focus best described as recreational rather than specifically religious. Consequently, few of us reported having mystical experiences. We did, however, find that over time we identified less with mainstream organized religions and more with what we vaguely called "spirituality" - a pantheistic worldview inspired by our use of psychedelics. Every leaf on every tree, each blade of grass, all birds and insects, every mammal, every fish, all people everywhere, it seemed to us, were sacred; life is holy. Our cathedral was the living world. Why then go to church? From this perspective I considered Christianity to be a kind of death cult. "They believe that Christ was crucified, died and was buried; on the third day he rose again from the dead," I reminded my friends. "His resurrection is supposed to matter most. But then they symbolize their faith with little images of Jesus dead and nailed to the cross! That's pretty morbid, don't you think?" My friends agreed. It would be years - a quarter century, in fact - before I recognized a fundamental error in my criticism. Until then I remained antagonistic toward my former faith tradition.

Upon leaving the Air Force in January 1972, I moved my family 125 miles southwest to the city of Mt. Pleasant, where June and I enrolled as full-time students at Central Michigan University. Though I proved to be a somewhat more disciplined student than I had been during high school, I still lacked motivation and earned only average grades. Part of the problem was that there were many distractions on campus, in particular an active counterculture. After four long years of self-imposed repression in the Air Force, I welcomed this greedily, joining the antiwar movement and drawing cartoons for the underground newspaper, Mountainrush. I also continued ingesting psychedelics at least weekly, under circumstances similar to those in Oscoda and with similar results.

In the final days of 1972, we moved again, to DeKalb, Illinois, a small city surrounded by farmland about fifty miles due west of Chicago, where I took a job as a gas meter reader while June continued pursuing a bachelor's degree in biology at Northern Illinois University. The energy that I had been investing in my college studies needed a creative outlet. At first I took to reading Sartre and other existentialist philosophers more earnestly than ever. This did not make me smarter but I did become pretentious, even naming our new German Shepherd puppy "Sartre" over June's understandable protests...

For most of the two years we lived in DeKalb, I experienced a subtle but very significant change in the quality of my psychedelic sessions. I became more introspective for increasingly long periods while tripping, even with friends, and simultaneously started sketching pictures. My technique was to confront a large sheet of blank drawing paper during the peak of a session. With no preconceived notion of what I intended to draw, I first made random, sweeping marks with a well-sharpened No. 2 pencil. Eventually a pattern or conceptual theme emerged, often linked to some quote I remembered from literature. After that I just filled in the details during the rest of the session and for days or sometimes weeks afterward. Most of these pictures, I realize now, express unconscious psychodynamic material: sexual guilt and repression in The Puritan Ethic [page 54, top]; defiance and rage in Invictus [page 54, bottom]; and alienation in Convolution [page 11]. The last drawing in the series and the only one rendered in color was Reincarnation [page 53], completed in the fall of 1975. When Stanislav Grof later asked my permission to publish it, anonymously, in his book Beyond the Brain (1985), I provided the following background information in a letter to him:

The model for the little girl was my daughter Jenni, then five years old... [The] general concept was inspired by two stanzas from Edward Fitzgerald's translation of "The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam," an old Persian poem:

I sometimes think that never blows so red
The Rose as where some buried Caesar bled;
That every Hyacinth the Garden wears
Dropt in her Lap from some once lovely Head.
And this reviving Herb whose tender Green
Fledges the River-Lip on which we lean—
Ah, lean upon it lightly! for who knows
From what once lovely Lip it springs unseen!

However, the Rubaiyat's tone is nihilistic, and I feel that Reincarnation makes a positive statement.... The drawings that preceded Reincarnation were all black and white. They dealt with images and themes that I now recognize as manifestations of unconscious negative feelings. If I remember correctly, Reincarnation began in this mold; it was intended to illustrate faithfully the concept and mood of the Rubaiyat – i.e., a nihilistic statement. But during the 100 hours it took me to finish the drawing, my attitude changed, possibly due to the fact that I used psychedelics at least twice in that period and worked on the picture while under their influence. At any rate, I altered my original bleak conception to include vivid colors, the girl, the numinous aura surrounding the head of the corpse, and a visual pun (the flower that springs from the grave is a carnation).... I think it represents my hope of someday finding some transcendent value that will vindicate my death.... The flower is the symbol of that hope. Perhaps it also represents the transmission of values from one generation to another, or the joining together of opposite realms - the conscious and unconscious, Eros and Thanatos, matter and energy - in a dynamic relationship. All those possibilities ring true to me.

Grof had asked me to explain the picture's meaning, but I did not know myself what it actually meant and so offered the foregoing possible interpretations. In truth, I now believe, the transformation that the picture underwent between conception and completion was a signal of my readiness to move beyond psychodynamic concerns to deeper levels of the unconscious. This is not to suggest that my psychodynamic concerns had been totally resolved. I still was haunted, and still am today, by painful memories of my childhood. But my consistent use of low-dose psychedelics over time in DeKalb and Oscoba, among friends and in comfortable settings, encouraged me not to repress these recollections. By acknowledging them I was able, at least, to reduce their invidious power to compel my behavior unconsciously.

For example, late one evening during this period, I took a standard dose of LSD and stayed up by myself until dawn in the living room of our apartment. June and Jenni both were sleeping, unperturbed, in their respective bedrooms; I could hear the gentle cadence of their breathing. At daybreak, it seemed that the room did not brighten with inflowing sunlight so much as the air color changed, from charcoal gray to pale yellow with a warming saffron tint. Seldom have I felt so contented and comfortable. I closed my eyes. A little boy was waiting in the darkness, sitting cross-legged with his shoulders slumped: myself, about seven years old. How tired he looked; how hopeless and sad. Then he turned his eyes toward me and brightened. "Thank you, Tom!" he said, enthusiastically. I thought of June and Jenni sleeping peacefully nearby. That is what he was thanking me for: his broken family had been repaired. "You're welcome, Tommy," I replied, feeling very self-satisfied. It seemed that I had reached some kind of closure regarding my family issues. And to some degree I had. My daughter's home environment was different from mine as a child. I did not physically intimidate nor verbally abuse her. I encouraged her to be expressive rather than subdued, and took an active role in educating her. She never doubted that I loved her. To that extent I had gone far toward transcending my childhood woes. But I failed to recognize one major issue still lurking, unnoticed, within my unconscious: a deep-rooted fear of abandonment. It was this that informed my initial conception of Reincarnation. The roots reaching down and away from the world of light represent my abandonment fear. They are entangled, deeper down, with fear of death. And death itself - the casket containing a skeletal corpse - is embedded in earth that resembles a cosmos. I was poised, but did not know it, on the verge of a descent through all these stages that would prove to be my personal experience of hell.