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Religion and Psychoactive Sacraments:
An Entheogen Chrestomathy
Thomas B. Roberts, Ph.D. and Paula Jo Hruby, Ed.D.
Author Index | Title Index
The Master Game:
Pathways to Higher Consciousness Beyond the Drug Experience.
de Ropp, Robert S. (1968).
New York: Delacorte Press.
ISBN: None
Description: First edition,
252 pages, a Seymour Lawrence Book.
Contents: 10 chapters,
notes and bibliography (106 entries, some annotated), 4 appendices:
A. Physical Awareness and Exercise, B. Autogenic Training, C. Prayer of the Heart, D. Building
the Spiritual Edifice, index.
Note: Several paperback
editions exist.
Excerpt(s): This book
is concerned with games and aims. It has been stated by Thomas
Szasz that what people really need and demand from life is not
wealth, comfort or esteem but games worth playing. He who
cannot find a game worth playing is apt to fall prey to accidie,
defined by the Fathers of the Church as one of the Deadly Sins ,
but now regarded as a symptom of sickness. Accidie is a paralysis
of the will, a failure of the appetite, a condition of generalized
boredom, total disenchantment ... (page 11)
| TABLE I (page 13) |
|---|
| Meta-games and Object Games |
|---|
| GAME | AIM |
|---|
| Master Game | awakening |
| Religion Game | salvation |
| Science Game | knowledge |
| Art Game | beauty |
| Householder Game | raise family |
| No Game | no aim |
| Hog in Trough | wealth |
| Cock on Dunghill | fame |
| Moloch Game | glory or victory |
What games did these mystics play? Within the matrix
imposed by their religion, these players were attempting the most
difficult game of all, the Master Game, the aim of which is the
attainment of full consciousness or real awakening. It was natural
for these players to play their game within a religious matrix.
The basic idea underlying all the great religions is that man
is asleep, that he lives amid dreams and delusions, that he cuts
himself off from the universal consciousness (the only meaningful
definition of God) to crawl into the narrow shell of a personal
ego. To emerge from this narrow shell, to regain union with the
universal consciousness, to pass from the darkness of the ego-centered
illusion into the light of non-ego, this was the real aim of the
Religion Game as defined by the great teachers, Jesus, Gautama,
Krishna, Mahavira, Lao-tze and the Platonic Socrates.
(page 19)
When this writer states that the taking of psychedelics
is not a lawful way to play the Master Game, he speaks
from his personal experience. He does not expect anyone to believe
him without personally testing the correctness of the statement.
An enlightened legislature would make such testing possible for
people who feel this need to know more about their inner world.
Instead of enacting blanket prohibition s, they
would provide proper facilities under which the psychedelic experience
could be studied by any who wished to find out what it had to
offer in the way of insights and illuminations.
Such enlightened legislation would avoid the pitfall of making
psychedelics more attractive to the rebellious by endowing them
with the aura of the forbidden. It would prevent a lot of dangerous
experimentation with inferior black-market materials, taken without
proper supervision and under wrong conditions. It would be in
keeping with those guarantees of freedom of religion which figure
prominently in the Constitution, for it is clear that devotees
of the psychedelic cult regard the drugs as pathways to religious
experience. Even the poor persecuted American Indian has been
allowed by the all-powerful whites to use peyote for religious
purposes. If the Indian is allowed to use peyote, why forbid the
non-Indian to use LSD or hashish?
None of which alters the fact that the Master Game,
which involves the awakening of the powers latent in man, can
no more be played by swallowing a pill than can a difficult mountain
peak be ascended by sitting in an armchair drinking beer and indulging
in daydreams. If the spiritual heights could be ascended by taking
psychedelics, then both the Sufis of Islam and the
yogis of India would long ago have discovered the fact, for the
subtlest and most `spiritual' of all psychedelics (hashish) has
been available in the East for centuries. (pages 23-24)
Compilation copyright © 1995 – 2001 CSP
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