Collecting material for this book involved many long discussions with musicians and music lovers about their erotic musical experiences. One of the subjects that came up consistently was drug use, and the idea that hallucinogenic drugs enhance creativity.

      I was a teenager in the late seventies, a post-hippie era where drug use was an accepted thing. Many of my friends were heads. Being a student of human nature, I was always interested in their experiences. Since I didn't use drugs until I was seventeen, I got to spend several years observing stoned musicians while I was straight. Since then, I have continued to be interested in the use of drugs by musicians, and in particular, the reasons for their use.

      The most common claim I hear regarding drugs in relation to music is that they enhance creativity, and as a corollary, that many musicians play better while stoned.

      In my experience, the first statement is true only in a very limited sense. Creativity is intimately linked with Eros: when we feel joined to the universe around us, then we feel the urge to create. The erotic experience helps us to see the world intuitively - we see several perspectives at once, or at least a different perspective from our usual one. We see meaning in things we don't normally, and we make associations between things that ordinarily seem unrelated. These descriptions of the erotic experience in general correlate strongly with reports of positive drug experiences. Consider the following story, told me by a flutist:

      "I was playing in the woods, about halfway through an acid trip. I was feeling the notes flow out of the flute. Suddenly, I became aware of other people in the wood. They were a long way away, but I was connected to them through my playing. I knew that they heard me and that I was playing for them" (Paraphrased by the author).

      When I heard this story, I recognized the experience I intended to write about. Eros positively drips from this anecdote. I knew from experience, however, that drugs were not necessary to reach that level of openness.

      During the summer of my eighteenth year, I started smoking pot, to the amazement of my friends. My experiences that summer confirmed the suspicions I had always had that I had always been able to "get high" on my own, without drugs. The drug experience was the same as my mystical states, only tempered by a certain amount of physical limitation - the poisoning effect of the drug. Since then, I have looked for, and found, that experience in many places, among many people. The experience occurs during lovemaking, in religious ceremonies, during and after strenuous exercise, or while playing music, to name a few of the situations I identified. The connection is latent in the psyche at all times, but is neglected because our culture insists on the importance of Logos to the exclusion of all else.

      In the strongest erotic experiences, we feel the numen, or nod, that signifies the presence of God. We call these experiences numinous because we feel acknowledged by God for those few minutes or hours that we feel those particular set of connections. In this sense, Eros is a religious experience. How fitting that music in most cultures is born out of the church: it is a natural medium for the expression of the erotic connection.

      If we take the church - any church or religious form - as a paradigm for an erotic meeting-place, we discover an important link. The erotic experience is not allowed to happen in a void, but is contained within rituals. The rituals around the experience of God give it a proper container, and mark the threshold between human life and religious life. The church and its forms provide the Logos that balances the Eros.

      Many religious traditions use hallucinogenic substances to open the way to the religious experience. The Native American Church uses tobacco and peyote. South American tribes in various times and places have used yage, amanita muscaria, and psilocybin in their rituals: the Aztecs referred to the psilocybin mushroom as "God's flesh." There is some speculation that the substance "Soma" used and worshipped by the early Hindus was a psychotropic mushroom of some sort. Christians believe wine to be transmuted into the blood of Christ.

      People who lobby for the legalization of marijuana usually cite these examples as evidence supporting their case. In particular, the Native American Church is a sore spot for these people, who don't understand why peyote is considered okay for Native Americans, and not for them. What they don't realize is the importance of the container. The rituals around the use of peyote, and the cultural importance it carries, creates a vessel, a field of Logos, that protects and balances the numinosity, provides a safe and limited way for humans to meet with the gods without being destroyed.

      Without these rituals, psychotropic drugs break down logical processes and render them useless. Drugs promote Eros by destroying Logos, and unless the structure is imposed from the outside, as in religious ritual, the result is chaos.

      Drugs may have some value as an initiator or people who have never experienced Eros. A positive drug experience can help to pave the way to erotic or mystical experience for people who are too entrenched in the logical mode to find it for themselves. All it takes is one "trip" to give a taste of the experience. Once that freedom has been discovered, you are free to look for it in other things. The common mistake is to keep repeating the drug experiences thinking it is the only way to get there. If drugs provided your first Eros experience, this is a simple mistake. You have a connection in your logical mind between drugs and Eros. Chances are, someone in this mindset will feel some of the same effects from a placebo.

      "Primitive" cultures - cultures that do not worship logic the way we do - enjoy more of a balance between the two polarities in daily life. Gods and spirits are a part of life, as are tradition, law, and commerce. When the erotic and logical worlds are balanced, as they should be, there is no "drug problem." When Native Americans were divorced from their way of life, forced into a system that did not honor the erotic, many turned to the compulsive pursuit of this experience in the form of alcoholism, a distinctly Western disease. Since we have no rituals or containers for the experience, and since we fear and punish Eros, compulsive drug use becomes the only way to get there, simultaneously cutting us off from our own people by "exhibiting sociopathic behavior," becoming outlaws. Without the ritual, drug use becomes common, is unsatisfactory and unbalanced, and is eventually detrimental to musical ability.

      The fall of the year in which I had my drug awakening, I had an experience that made me stop cold. I was working on a piece of music for two guitars. I recorded one part, and played it back so that I could play the other part along with it. I was stunned by what came out of the speaker. The notes were correct, but the person on the tape had no sense of rhythm whatsoever. I found it impossible to play along with the guitar track I had laid. There was nothing wrong with the tape recorder. It was my own sense of rhythm that had suffered. I didn't touch pot again for two years. I was literally scared straight.

      The knowledge that my drug use was the cause of the problem was an intuitive leap, one that has been confirmed for me many times since in my observations of other musicians. The fact is that drugs do not make you play better. Once your mind has discovered Eros the first time, there is no other beneficial effect. Technical skills wither, due to the destruction of the logical process, while creativity enjoys minimal, if any, increase.

      I have worked with musicians in the recording studio who needed to smoke a joint every half an hour. I have watched their musicianship deteriorate as they did so, producing worse and worse takes the more they smoked.

      I have rehearsed with groups that have taken breaks in the rehearsal to get stoned. After the break, the music became imprecise and uninspired. At the same time, they seemed to enjoy it more. While the music was ordinary, their perception of it was ecstatic. That's fine if the whole audience is stoned as well. To the outside observer, the music becomes less and less interesting.

      My one experience with LSD confirms the observation that hallucinogens inhibit Logos functions. I decided to set myself the task of copying some music - a rote task that I thought might benefit from the well known "fixations" that LSD produces. I found it impossible to focus on the job. My concentration was completely fragmented.

      Each moment I would be distracted by associations that led me further and further from the work until I was either gleefully lost in a mental labyrinth, or physically restless, running from place to place. At one point, as I was sitting on my lawn trying to write, I felt compelled to jump up and run across the yard to a rosebush. "My God," I thought, "I'm actually stopping to smell the roses!" All in all, it was an experience rich in Eros, but lacking in Logos.

      I have since found the erotic experience in many other ways. Primarily, I have found it in music. There is nothing like the feeling of being lost in the music, feeling joined to the other musicians, to the audience. It is a giddy feeling that leaves an afterglow. After a good session, I love the whole universe. I feel good about myself and others. I can forgive hurts and be at peace. Furthermore, the other musicians feel the same way, as does the audience. The whole roomful of people is uplifted without the numbing effects of drugs, or the potential political misuse of religion. Music does this without destroying my logical faculties - after playing, my mind is clear and calm. I can think clearly and positively. I hear and understand musical structures, both from a logical and experiential standpoint. most important, I feel related to the world. I have a place where I belong, and for that moment in time I am settled there with no regrets. I am who I am, and that is how it should be.

This is music.