Appendix VI

 

Many schizophrenics pass most of their time neither on earth, nor in heaven, nor even in hell, but in a grey, shadowy world of phantoms and unrealities.  What is true of these psychotics is true, to a lesser extent, of certain neurotics afflicted by a milder form of mental illness.  Recently it has been found possible to induce this state of ghostly existence by administering a small quantity of one of the derivatives of adrenalin.  For the living, the doors of heaven, hell, and limbo are opened not by 'massy keys of metals twain', but by the presence in the blood of one set of chemical compounds and the absence of another set.  The shadow-world inhabited by some schizophrenics and neurotics closely resembles the world of the dead, as described in some of the earlier religious traditions.  Like the wraiths in Sheol and in Homer's Hades, these mentally disturbed persons have lost touch with matter, language, and their fellow beings.  They have no purchase on life and are condemned to ineffectiveness, solitude, and a silence broken only by the senseless squeak and gibber of ghosts.

      The history of eschatological ideas marks a genuine progress - a progress which can be described in theological terms as the passage from Hades to Heaven, in chemical terms as the substitution of mescalin and lysergic acid [diethylamide] for adrenolutin, and in psychological terms as the advance from catatonia and feelings of unreality to a sense of heightened reality in vision and, finally, in mystical experience.