Religious Experience
Rastas experience spiritual states through smoking ganja, drumming, and chanting. Religious experience is a way of testing whatever they hear to discern its truth. There is an avoidance of dogma and an emphasis on intelligence, as in reasoning sessions. Individual experience is central to this. It is a rejection of the racist denigration of black intellect as inferior, and the history of persecution in Jamaica in which authorities sentenced Rastafari to mental institutions for their beliefs. Rastafari interpret world events in a religious framework, especially events concerning Africa.