“In an age when individual liberty is prized above all achievements, the fast-increasing number of drug addicts form an appalling chain of self-sought bondage! Even as these drugs hold out an invitation to a fleeting sense of ecstasy, freedom or escape, they enslave the individual in greater binding. LSD, a highly potent 'mind-changing' drug differing from the opium derivatives and being used in the research of mental science, is said to `expand consciousness and alter one's personality for the better'. In America it has become tragically popular among the young, used indiscriminately by any and many. They must be persuaded to desist from taking drugs, for they are harmful — physically, mentally and spiritually.

"All so-called spiritual experiences generated by taking `mind-changing' drugs such as LSD, mescaline and psilocybin are superficial and add enormously to one's addiction to the deceptions of illusion which is but the shadow of Reality.

No drug, whatever its great promise, can help one to attain the spiritual goal. There is no short-cut to the goal except through the grace of the Perfect Master, and drugs, LSD more than others, give only a semblance of 'spiritual experience', a glimpse of a false reality.

"The user of L.S.D. can never reach subtle consciousness in this incarnation despite its repeated use. To experience real spiritual consciousness, surrenderance to a Perfect Master is necessary.

"It is human, and therefore necessarily wrong-sighted, to view the result of the drug by its immediate relative effects - to calculate its end result is beyond human knowledge, and only the true Guide can point the way."

Meher Baba makes a fundamental point in this last observation which deserves amplification. If something is to be measured, a measuring standard should be used. The varied experiences of daily life provide a small part of the yardstick, but the greater part — the ultimate spiritual experience — is not readily available to most. Thus the psychedelic experimentalist must use an incomplete standard of measurement. Beyond the psychedelic experience he has only a few hints to be found in books on religious and mystic disciplines.

The honest seeker will recognize from this the inadequacy of his basis for judging his experiences through psychedelic media. Meher Baba has given several comments on this troublesome aspect of trying to judge the profundity of psychedelic experience.

The experiences derived through the drugs are experiences by one in the gross world of the shadows of the subtle planes and are not continuous.