Drug Abuse

Varieties Of Consciousness

William James

One conclusion was forced upon my mind at that time, and my impression of its truth has ever since remained unshaken. It is that our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the flimsiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different. We may go through life without suspecting their existence, but apply the requisite stimulus, and at a touch they are there in all their completeness, definite types of mentality which probably somewhere have their field of application. No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded. How to regard them is the question—for they are so discontinuous with ordinary consciousness. Yet they may determine attitudes though they cannot furnish formulas, and open a region though they fail to give a map. At any rate, they forbid a premature closing of our accounts with reality.

Mysticism, Sacred And Profane

R. C. Zaehner

It is, of course, a well-known fact that certain drugs—and among them one may include alcohol—modify the normal human consciousness and produce what can literally be called ecstatic states—states in which the human ego has the impression that it escapes from itself and 'stands outside' itself. Indian hemp and hashish have long been used in the East to produce precisely such a result.

A Psychedelic Experience: Fact Or Fantasy

Alan Watts

What we know, positively and scientifically, about psychedelic chemicals is that they bring about certain alterations of sense perception, of emotional level and tone, of identity feeling, of the interpretation of sense data, and of the sensations of time and space. The nature of these alterations depends on three varieties: the chemical itself (type and dosage), the psycho-physiological state of the subject, and the social and aesthetic context of the experiment. Their physiological side effects are minimal, though there are conditions (e.g., disease of the liver) in which some of them may be harmful. They are not physiologically habit-forming in the same way as alcohol and tobacco, though some individuals may come to depend on them for other (i.e., 'neurotic') reasons. Their results are not easily predictable since they depend so largely upon such imponderables as the setting, and the attitudes and expectations of both the supervisor and the subject. The (enormous) scientific literature on the subject indicates that a majority of people have pleasant reactions, a largish minority have unpleasant but instructive and helpful reactions, while a very small minority have psychotic reactions lasting from hours to months. It has never been definitely established that they have led directly to a suicide. (I am referring specifically here to LSD-25, mescaline, the mushroom-derivative psilocybin, and the various forms of cannabis, such as hashish and marijuana.)

Psychometabolism

Sir Julian Huxley

Throughout evolution, the animal, with the aid of various bodily organs, utilizes the raw materials of its food, drink, and inspired air and transforms them into characteristic biochemical patterns which canalize and direct its physiological activities. This is metabolism. But with the aid of its brain, its organ of awareness or mind, it utilizes the raw materials of its subjective experience and transforms it into characteristic patterns of awareness which then canalize and help to direct its behavior. This I venture to call psychometabolism. During the latter stages of evolution, an increasingly efficient type of psychometabolism is superposed on and added to the universal physiological metabolism. Eventually, about 10 million years ago, purely biological evolution reached a limit, and the breakthrough to new advance was only brought about by the further elaboration of the psychometabolic apparatus of mind and brain. This gave rise to man: it endowed him with a second method of heredity based on the transmission of experience, and launched him on a new phase of evolution operating by cumulative tradition based on ideas and knowledge. Both novelties are of course superposed on the biological methods of transmission and evolution, which he also possesses.

In man, organizations of awareness become part of the evolutionary process by being incorporated in cultural tradition. Accordingly, in human evolution totally new kinds of organization are produced: organizations such as works of art, moral codes, scientific ideas, legal systems, and religions. We men are better able to evaluate, to comprehend, to grasp far more complex total patterns and situations than any other organism. We are capable of many things that no other animal is capable of: conscious reflection, the idea of self, of death, and of the future in general; we have the capacity of framing conscious purposes which can then be translated into action, and of constructing values as norms for our activities. The result is that evolution in the psychosocial phase is primarily cultural and only to a minor extent genetic.

Of course all these new types of organization evolve like everything else. The science of comparative religion shows how religions have evolved and are still evolving. The history of science studies the evolution of scientific ideas and how they become operative in the psychosocial process.

Our mental or psychometabolic organizations fall into two main categories: those for dealing with the outer world and establishing a relation with external objects; and those for dealing with our inner world and relating our perceptions and concepts and emotional drives to each other and integrating them into a more or less harmonious whole. The ultimate aim is to deal with all kinds of conflict and to reduce mental friction, so as to get the maximum flow of what is often called mental energy ...

A major job for all disciplines concerned with human affairs, whether biochemistry, psychology, psychiatry or social anthropology, is to investigate the extraordinary mechanisms underlying the organization and operation of awareness, so as to lay the foundation for and promote the realization of more meaningful and more effective possibilities in the psycho-social process of human evolution.

When we look at animal behavior, it is clear that differences in possibilities of awareness between different species are primarily genetic. One species of bird prefers blue, another does not: the sign-stimulus which will release adaptive patterns of action in one species of bird, will not do so in another. There is obviously a genetic basis for the difference.

Equally obviously, there is a genetic basis for the difference between the genetically exceptional individual and the bulk of the species. All great advances in human history are due to the thought or action of a few exceptional individuals, though they take effect through the mass of people and in relation to the general social background. We have seen how, already in birds and mammals, the exceptional individual can be of some importance in the life of the species. In man, the exceptional individual can be of decisive importance.

Today, many workers in psychology and psychiatry and other behavioral and social sciences resist or even deny the idea that genetic factors are important for behavior. I am sure that they are wrong. Of course environmental factors, including learning, are always operative, but so are genetic factors. To take an example, genetic differences in psychosomatic organization and somatotype are obviously correlated with differences in temperament, and these with different reactions to stress and proneness to different diseases.

Frequently, it is not so much complete genetic determination we have got to think about, but rather proneness to this or that reaction, a tendency to develop in this or that way. This comes out very clearly in regard to cancer: every different inbred strain of mice has a different degree of proneness for a different type of cancer—sometimes 40%, sometimes 80%, in a few cases 100%. Professor Roger Williams of Texas has coined a new word, propetology, to denote genetic proneness. A science of propetology is badly needed.

The old-fashioned behaviorists simply denied any influence to genetic factors. For them everything was due to learning; and I am afraid that a number of ethologists and students of behavior, especially in America, still stick to that point of view. They forget that even the capacity to learn, to learn at all, to learn at a definite time, to learn one kind of thing rather than another, to learn more or less quickly, must have some genetic basis.

One of the most curious discoveries of the past 30 or 40 years has been that of the sensory morphisms, where a considerable proportion of the population has a sensory awareness different from that of the 'normal' majority. The best known cause is a taste-morphism. Phenylthiocarbamide (Ptc) tastes very bitter to the majority of human beings, but a minority of about 25%, varying somewhat in different ethnic groups, cannot taste it at all except in exceedingly high concentrations. As R. A. Fisher pointed out in his great book, The Genetic Basis of Natural Selection, in 1930, two sharply contrasted genetic characters like this cannot coexist indefinitely in a population unless there is a balance of biological advantage and disadvantage between them. Thus whenever we find such balanced polymorphisms, or morphisms, as they are more simply called, we know that there must be some selective balance involved. Quite recently it has been shown that Ptc taste-morphism is correlated with thyroid function; here we begin to get some inkling of what advantage or disadvantage there may be.

Years ago. Fisher, Ford, and I tested all the captive chimpanzees in England for Ptc sensitivity. We found, to our delight, that within the limits of statistical error they had the same proportion of non-tasters as human beings. People asked, 'How did you find out~' Actually it was quite simple; we offered them a sugar solution containing Ptc. If they were non-tasters, they drank it up and put the cup out for more; if they were tasters, they spat it in our faces: it was an all-or-nothing reaction. The fact that both chimpanzees and man react alike means that this balanced morphism must have been in existence in the higher primates for at least 10 million years.

There are a number of these sensory morphisms in man. There is a sex-linked morphism with regard to the smell of hydrogen cyanide, Hcn; about 18'% of males are insensitive to it, which can be dangerous in a chemical works or laboratory. There is another smell-blindness with regard to the scent of Freesias. I personally am one of the considerable minority of human beings unable to smell Freesias; I can smell any other flower, but am absolutely insensitive to the particular smell of even the most fragrant Freesias. There are visual morphisms; the best known is red-green color-blindness, which is also sex-linked. Another appears to be myopia. I remember years ago discussing with Professor H. J. Muller the puzzling fact of the considerable incidence of apparently genetic myopia in modern populations. However, he pointed out that during a considerable period of human history, from the time when people began doing fine, close work and up to the period when spectacles were invented, myopia would confer certain advantages. The shortsighted man would not only be employed on well-paid work, but would usually not be sent to war, so that there was less likelihood of his being killed. This would balance the obvious disadvantage of myopia in other aspects of life.

There are some very interesting biological problems concerning sensitivity to pain. Some human mutants are apparently insensitive to pain altogether and may incur terrible injuries because damaging agencies do not hurt them; but these are very rare. On the other hand, giraffes have mouth-cavities and tongues which appear to be surprisingly insensitive to pain. I always thought that they used their long beautiful tongues to strip the leaves off the extremely thorny acacia trees on which they often feed without getting pricked; but apparently this is not so. Recently in the London Zoo, giraffes have been tested with spiny hawthorn branches: they accept them and chew them just as readily as soft foliage. This surprising fact is worth further investigation.

At the other end of the psychometabolic scale from sensation, we have problems like schizophrenia. Apparently this too must involve a balanced morphism. First, in all countries and races there are about r% of schizophrenic people; secondly, the disease appears to have a strong genetic basis; and thirdly, as already mentioned, genetic theory makes it plain that a clearly disadvantageous genetic character like this cannot persist in this frequency in a population unless it is balanced by some compensating advantage. In this case it appears that the advantage is that schizophrenic individuals are considerably less sensitive than normal persons to histamine, are much less prone to suffer from operative and wound shock, and do not suffer nearly so much from various allergies. Meanwhile, there are indications that some chemical substance, apparently something like adrenochrome or adrenolutin, is the genetically-determined basis for schizophrenia, and in any case there is a chromatographically detectable so-called 'mauve-factor' in the urine of schizophrenics.

This biochemical abnormality presumably causes the abnormality of perception found in schizophrenics. The way the schizophrenic psychometabolizes his sensory experience and relates his sensations to build meaningful perceptions, is disordered. Accordingly he is subject to disorders of sensation and of all sorts of perception, including disorders of perception of time and space, and of association. Apparently, schizophrenic individuals show much less consistency in association tests than do normal people. The schizophrenic's world is neither consistently meaningful nor stable: this naturally puts him out of joint with his fellow human beings and makes communication with them difficult and frustrating, so that he retires much more into his own private world.

Hallucinogens like mescaline, lysergic acid, and psilocybin (from a Mexican fungus) appear to exert similar dislocating effects on perception, even in incredibly low doses. In addition, they can produce totally new types of experience: some of their effects can elicit something quite new from the human mind. They may have unpleasant effects if the subject is in a wrong psychological state, and exceedingly pleasant and rewarding effects if he is in a right one. But in either case they may reveal possibilities of experience which the subject did not know existed at all. For this reason the term psychedelic, or mind-revealing, has been suggested for this type of psychotropic drug. In many ways their effect closely resembles a very brief but acute schizophrenia: perception is disordered in a way very like that seen in schizophrenic patients.

In psychedelic drugs we have a remarkable opportunity for interesting research. Nobody, so far as I know, has done any work on their effects on different types of psychologically normal people—people of high and low IQ, of different somatotypes, of different affective dispositions, on verbalizers and visualizers. This would be of extraordinary interest: we might find out not merely how to cure some defect, but how to promote creativity by enhancing the creative imagination.

Another problem is to discover whether psychedelics modify or enhance dreaming. The study of dreaming has received a great impetus since the recent discovery that dreaming is necessary for good mental health. If people are prevented from dreaming night after night, their mental health begins to suffer. Dreaming, it seems, provides a satisfactory way of psychometabolizing various facts and experiences that have proved resistant to the integrating efforts of our waking psychometabolic activity. Unconscious mechanisms take revenge and provide an outlet in dreams.

Early detection is another facet of the schizophrenia problem. Here too, study and research are obviously needed. Granted that there is a genetic proneness to schizophrenia, it should be possible in many cases to detect its symptoms in quite early stages of life. This could clearly best be done in the schools, so that it will be important to establish a close link between psychiatrists and school teachers. The teachers would pick out the children who are prone to schizophrenia; while the psychiatrists would then suggest appropriate methods of education and training to prevent the disease from developing.

Indeed, the subject of education in general clearly needs overhauling, in the light of the two views of the human organism that I have been advocating. Today, we have hardly begun to think of how to educate the organism as a whole—the mind-body, the joint psychophysiological mechanism which we call the human child. We confine ourselves almost entirely to mental education through verbal means, with the crude physical education of games and physical training added as something quite separate. As my brother Aldous has stressed, we need non-verbal education as well, and education of the entire mind-body instead of 'mind' and 'body' separately.

It is not only in regard to schizophrenia that we are confronted with situations which demand immediate remedial measures, but later find ourselves impelled to adopt a preventive or a constructive attitude. Medical history is largely the story of people trying to cope with disease, then attempting to prevent disease from arising, and finally turning their knowledge to good account in the promotion of positive health. The same is true of the psychological approach. The psychiatrist starts with the mentally diseased person, tries to cure him, or at least to prevent his disease developing further, but in the course of this remedial process, he acquires knowledge which can be of extreme importance in building up a more fruitful normal personality. However, to achieve this, a new approach is needed. Psychiatry usually attempts to analyze the causes of the diseased condition and discover its origins. The very term psycho-analysis commits the Freudian practitioner to this approach. This is important, but is certainly not sufficient. All important biological phenomena are irreversible processes, whose end-results are biologically more significant than their origins. Accordingly, we must study the whole process, its end-results as well as its origins, its total pattern as well as its elements.

In psychology, pure and applied, medical and educational, our main aim should be to discover how to regulate the processes of psychometabolism so that they integrate experience in a more effective and less wasteful way and produce a more fruitful end-organization. For instance, I am sure that a study of the origin and strengthening of emotional bonds will repay a great deal of effort. Let me take John Bowlby's work as an example. He studied the development of children who had been deprived of maternal care (including care by a mother substitute) during a critical period of early life, and therefore were unable to form the primary affectional bond between infant and parent. Such children proved incapable of forming further emotional bonds and of developing a normal affectional and moral organization. This whole problem of building up affectional bonds, whether between members of a family or a social group, is fundamental for family life.

The overriding psychometabolic problem, of course, is how the developing human being can integrate his interior life, whether by reconciling emotional or intellectual conflict in a higher synthesis, or by reconciling diversity in a more embracing unity. Let me take the creative arts as an example. Thus the poet must reconcile diverse and even conflicting meanings in a single work of art and, indeed, must employ multivalent or multi-significant words and phrases in the process. Good poems and paintings are among the highest products of man's psychometabolic activities. Milton's line, 'Then feed on thoughts that voluntary move harmonious numbers ...' beautifully expresses this psychometabolic concept of artistic creation, while Lowe's celebrated critical study. The Road to Xanadu, shows how Coleridge psychometabolized the raw materials of his personal experience, his reading and his conversations and discussions, and was able to integrate them into a single poem, 'Kubia Khan,' with amazing emotional impact.

As an example of the emotional impact exercised by great art, let me recall a story of Bertrand Russell. When he was an undergraduate at Cambridge, he and a friend were going up his staircase in college and the friend quoted Blake's famous poem, 'Tiger, Tiger, Burning Bright.' Bertrand Russell had never heard or read this before, and was so overcome that he had to lean against the wall to prevent himself falling.

On the other hand, we all know that many poems and works of art fail sadly to achieve this desirable result. The way in which an operatively effective unitary pattern of intellectual, emotional and moral elements can be built up, certainly deserves study, not merely in art, but also in morality, religion, and love.

Mysticism is another psychometabolic activity which needs much further research. A really scientific study of the great mystics of the past, of their modern successors, of Yoga and other similar movements, undoubtedly would be of great value. The scientist need not, indeed must not, accept at their face value the claims of mysticism, for instance, of achieving union with God or the Absolute. But some mystics have certainly obtained results of great value and importance: they have been able to achieve an interior state of peace and strength which combines profound tranquility and high psychological energy.

There is also the still much neglected subject of hypnotism and hypnosis, with all its implications. One of the darker chapters in the history of science and medicine is the way in which the pioneer hypnotists were attacked and often hounded out of the medical profession. Even today, there is still clearly a great deal to be discovered in this strange and exciting subject.

The field of the psychiatrist and the psychologist today is nothing less than the comprehensive study of hypnosis, drugs, education, mysticism, and the subconscious, of mental disease and mental health, of the relation between normal and abnormal or supernormal experience. Backed by the concept of psychometabolism and the fact of the increasing importance of psychological organization of experience during evolution, they will be working for a better integration of all the psychological forces operating in man's life— emotional, imaginative, intellectual and moral—in such a way as to minimize conflict and maximize creativity. In so doing, they will be in harmony with the only desirable direction that our scientific vision indicates for the future evolution of man—a direction making for increased fulfillment of individual human beings and fuller achievement by human societies.

Culture And The Individual

Aldous Huxley

Between culture and the individual the relationship is, and always has been, strangely ambivalent. We are at once the beneficiaries of our culture and its victims. Without culture, and without that precondition of all culture, language, man would be no more than another species of baboon. It is to language and culture that we owe our humanity. And 'What a piece of work is a man!' says Hamlet: 'How noble in reason! how infinite in faculties! ... in action how like an angel! in apprehension, how like a god!' But, alas, in the intervals of being noble, rational and potentially infinite,

man, proud man,
Dressed in a little brief authority,
Most ignorant of what he is most assured, His glassy essence, like an angry ape,
Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven As make the angels weep.

Genius and angry ape, player of fantastic tricks and godlike reasoner—in all these roles individuals are the products of a language and a culture. Working on the twelve or thirteen billion neurons of a human brain, language and culture have given us law, science, ethics, philosophy; have made possible all the achievements, of talent and of sanctity. They have also given us fanaticism, superstition and dogmatic bumptiousness; nationalistic idolatry and mass murder in the name of God; rabble-rousing propaganda and organized lying. And, along with the salt of the earth, they have given us, generation after generation, countless millions of hypnotized conformists, the predestined victims of power-hungry rulers who are themselves the victims of all that is most senseless and inhuman in their cultural tradition.

Thanks to language and culture, human behavior can be incomparably more intelligent, more original, creative and flexible than the behavior of animals, whose brains are too small to accommodate the number of neurons necessary for the invention of language and the transmission of accumulated knowledge. But, thanks again to language and culture, human beings often behave with a stupidity, a lack of realism, a total inappropriateness, of which animals are incapable.

Trobriand Islander or Bostonian, Sicilian Catholic or Japanese Buddhist, each of us is born into some culture and passes his life within its confines. Between every human consciousness and the rest of the world stands an invisible fence, a network of traditional thinking-and-feeling patterns, of secondhand notions that have turned into axioms, of ancient slogans revered as divine revelations. What we see through the meshes of this net is never, of course, the unknowable 'thing in itself. It is not even, in most cases, the thing as it impinges upon our senses and as our organism spontaneously reacts to it. What we ordinarily take in and respond to is a curious mixture of immediate experience with culturally conditioned symbol, of sense impressions with preconceived ideas about the nature of things. And by most people the symbolic elements in this cocktail of awareness are felt to be more important than the elements contributed by immediate experience. Inevitably so, for, to those who accept their culture totally and uncritically, words in the familiar language do not stand (however inadequately) for things. On the contrary, things stand for familiar words. Each unique event of their ongoing life is instantly and automatically classified as yet another concrete illustration of one of the verbalized, culture-hallowed abstractions drummed into their heads by childhood conditioning.

It goes without saying that many of the ideas handed down to us by the transmitters of culture are eminently sensible and realistic. (If they were not, the human species would now be extinct.) But, along with these useful concepts, every culture hands down a stock of unrealistic notions, some of which never made any sense, while others may once have possessed survival value, but have now, in the changed and changing circumstances of ongoing history, become completely irrelevant. Since human beings respond to symbols as promptly and unequivocally as they respond to the stimuli of unmediated experience, and since most of them naively believe that culture-hallowed words about things are as real as, or even realer than their perceptions of the things themselves, these outdated or intrinsically nonsensical notions do enormous harm. Thanks to the realistic ideas handed down by culture, mankind has survived and, in certain fields, progresses. But thanks to the pernicious nonsense drummed into every individual in the course of his acculturation, mankind, though surviving and progressing, has always been in trouble. History is the record, among other things, of the fantastic and generally fiendish tricks played upon itself by culture-maddened humanity. And the hideous game .goes on.

What can, and what should, the individual do to improve his ironically equivocal relationship with the culture in which he finds himself embedded? How can he continue to enjoy the benefits of culture without, at the same time, being stupefied or frenziedly intoxicated by its poisons? How can he become discriminatingly acculturated, rejecting what is silly or downright evil in his conditioning, and holding fast to that which makes for humane and intelligent behavior?

A culture cannot be discriminatingly accepted, much less be modified, except by persons who have seen through it—by persons who have cut holes in the confining stockade of verbalized symbols and so are able to look at the world and, by reflection, at themselves in a new and relatively unprejudiced way. Such persons are not merely born; they must also be made. But how?

In the field of formal education, what the would-be hole cutter needs is knowledge. Knowledge of the past and present history of cultures in all their fantastic variety, and knowledge about the nature and limitations, the uses and abuses, of language. A man who knows that there have been many cultures, and that each culture claims to be the best and truest of all, will find it hard to take too seriously the boastings and dogmatizings of his own tradition. Similarly, a man who knows how symbols are related to experience, and who practices the kind of linguistic self-control taught by the exponents of General Semantics, is unlikely to take too seriously the absurd or dangerous nonsense that, within every culture, passes for philosophy, practical wisdom and political argument.

As a preparation for hole cutting, this kind of intellectual education is certainly valuable, but no less certainly insufficient. Training on the verbal level needs to be supplemented by training in wordless experiencing. We must learn how to be mentally silent, must cultivate the art of pure receptivity.

To be silently receptive—how childishly simple that seems! But in fact, as we very soon discover, how difficult! The universe in which men pass their lives is the creation of what Indian philosophy calls Nama-Ruga, Name and Form. Reality is a continuum, a fathomlessly mysterious and infinite Something, whose outward aspect is what we call Matter and whose inwardness is what we call Mind. Language is a device for taking the mystery out of Reality and making it amenable to human comprehension and manipulation. Acculturated man breaks up the continuum, attaches labels to a few of the fragments, projects the labels into the outside world and thus creates for himself an all-too-human universe of separate objects, each of which is merely the embodiment of a name, a particular illustration of some traditional abstraction. What we perceive takes on the pattern of the conceptual lattice through which it has been filtered. Pure receptivity is difficult because man's normal waking consciousness is always culturally conditioned. But normal waking consciousness, as William James pointed out many years ago, 'is but one type of consciousness, while all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different. We may go through life without suspecting their existence; but apply the requisite stimulus, and at a touch they are there in all their completeness, definite types of mentality which probably somewhere have their field of application and adaptation. No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these forms of consciousness disregarded.'

Like the culture by which it is conditioned, normal waking consciousness is at once our best friend and a most dangerous enemy. It helps us to survive and make progress; but at the same time it prevents us from actualizing some of our most valuable potentialities and, on occasion, gets us into all kinds of trouble. To become fully human, man, proud man, the player of fantastic tricks, must learn to get out of his own way; only then will his infinite faculties and angelic apprehension get a chance of coming to the surface. In Blake's words, we must 'cleanse the doors of perception'; for when the doors of perception are cleansed, 'everything appears to man as it is—infinite.' To normal waking consciousness things are the strictly finite and insulated embodiments of verbal labels. How can we break the habit of automatically imposing our prejudices and the memory of culture-hallowed words upon immediate experience? Answer: by the practice of pure receptivity and mental silence. These will cleanse the doors of perception and, in the process, make possible the emergence of other than normal forms of consciousness—aesthetic consciousness, visionary consciousness, mystical consciousness. Thanks to culture we are the heirs to vast accumulations of knowledge, to a priceless treasure of logic and scientific method, to thousands upon thousands of useful pieces of technological and organizational know-how. But the human mind-body possesses other sources of information, makes use of other types of reasoning, is gifted with an intrinsic wisdom that is independent of cultural conditioning.

Wordsworth writes that 'our meddling intellect [that part of the mind which uses language to take the mystery out of Reality] misshapes the beauteous forms of things: we murder to dissect.' Needless to say, we cannot get along without our meddling intellect. Verbalized conceptual thinking is indispensable. But even when they are used well, verbalized concepts misshape 'the beauteous forms of things'. And when (as happens so often) they are used badly, they misshape our lives by rationalizing ancient stupidities, by instigating mass murder, persecution and the playing of all the other fantastically ugly tricks that make the angels weep. Wise nonverbal passiveness is an antidote to unwise verbal activity, and a necessary corrective to wise verbal activity. Verbalized concepts about experience need to be supplemented by direct, unmediated acquaintance with events as they present themselves to us.

It is the old story of the letter and the spirit. The letter is necessary, but must never be taken too seriously; for, divorced from the spirit, it cramps and finally kills. As for the spirit, it 'bloweth where it listeth' and, if we fail to consult the best cultural charts, we may be blown off our course and suffer shipwreck. At present most of us make the worst of both worlds. Ignoring the freely blowing winds of the spirit and relying on cultural maps which may be centuries out-of-date, we rush full speed ahead under the high-pressure steam of our own overweening self-confidence. The tickets we have sold ourselves assure us that our destination is some port in the Islands of the Blest. In fact it turns out, more often than not, to be Devil's Island.

Self-education on the nonverbal level is as old as civilization. 'Be still and know that I am God'—for the visionaries and mystics of every time and every place, this has been the first and greatest of the commandments. Poets listen to their Muse and in the same way the visionary and the mystic wait upon inspiration in a state of wise passiveness, of dynamic vacuity. In the Western tradition this state is called 'the prayer of simple regard'. At the other end of the world it is described in terms that are psychological rather than theistic. In mental silence we 'look into our own Self-Nature', we 'hold fast to the Not-Thought which lies in thought', we 'become that which essentially we have always been.' By wise activity we can acquire useful analytical knowledge about the world, knowledge that can be communicated by means of verbal symbols. In the state of wise passiveness we make possible the emergence of forms of consciousness other than the utilitarian consciousness of normal waking life. Useful analytical knowledge about the world is replaced by some kind of biologically inessential but spiritually enlightening acquaintance with the world. For example, there can be direct aesthetic acquaintance with the world as beauty. Or there can be direct acquaintance with the intrinsic strangeness of existence, its wild implausibility. And finally there can be direct acquaintance with the world's unity. This immediate mystical experience of being at one with the fundamental Oneness that manifests itself in the infinite diversity of things and minds, can never be adequately expressed in words. Like visionary experience, the experience of the mystic can be talked about only from the outside. Verbal symbols can never convey its inwardness.

It is through mental silence and the practice of wise passiveness that artists, visionaries and mystics have made themselves ready for the immediate experience of the world as beauty, as mystery and as unity. But silence and wise passiveness are not the only roads leading out of the all-too-human universe created by normal, culture-conditioned consciousness. In Expostulation and Reply, Wordsworth's bookish friend, Matthew, reproaches the poet because

You look round on your Mother Earth, As if she for no purpose bore you,
As if you were her first-born birth, And none had lived before you!

From the point of view of normal waking consciousness, this is sheer intellectual delinquency. But it is what the artist, the visionary and the mystic must do and, in fact, have always done. 'Look at a person, a landscape, any common object, as though you were seeing it for the first time.' This is one of the exercises in immediate, unverbalized awareness prescribed in the ancient texts of Tantric Buddhism. Artists, visionaries and mystics refuse to be enslaved to the culture-conditioned habits of feeling, thought and action which their society regards as right and natural. Whenever this seems desirable, they deliberately refrain from projecting upon reality those hallowed word patterns with which all human minds are so copiously stocked. They know as well as anyone else that culture and the language in which any given culture is rooted, are absolutely necessary and that, without them, the individual would not be human. But more vividly than the rest of mankind they also know that, to be fully human, the individual must learn to decondition himself, must be able to cut holes in the fence of verbalized symbols that hems him in.

In the exploration of the vast and mysterious world of human potentialities the great artists, visionaries and mystics have been trail-blazing pioneers. But where they have been, others can follow. Potentially, all of us are 'infinite in faculties and like gods in apprehension'. Modes of consciousness different from normal waking consciousness' are within the reach of anyone who knows how to apply the necessary, stimuli. The universe in which a human being lives can be transfigured into a new creation. We have only to cut a hole in the fence and look around us with what the philosopher, Plotinus, describes as 'that other kind of seeing, which everyone has but few make use of.

Within our current systems of education, training on the nonverbal level is meager in quantity and poor in quality. Moreover, its purpose, which is simply to help its recipients to be more 'like gods in apprehension' is neither clearly stated nor consistently pursued. We could and, most emphatically, we should do better in this very important field than we are doing now. The practical wisdom of earlier civilizations and the findings of adventurous spirits within our own tradition and in our own time are freely available. With their aid a curriculum and a methodology of nonverbal training could be worked out without much difficulty. Unhappily most persons in authority have a vested interest in the maintenance of cultural fences. They frown upon hole cutting as subversive and dismiss Plotinus' 'other kind of seeing' as a symptom of mental derangement. If an effective system of nonverbal education could be worked out, would the authorities allow" it to be widely applied? It is an open question.

From the nonverbal world of culturally uncontaminated consciousness we pass to the subverbal world of physiology and biochemistry. A human being is a temperament and a product of cultural conditioning: he is also, and primarily, an extremely complex and delicate biochemical system, whose inwardness, as the system changes from one state of equilibrium to another, is changing consciousness. It is because each one of us is a biochemical system that (according to Housman)

Malt does more than Milton can To justify God's ways to man.

Beer achieves its theological triumphs because in William James' words, 'Drunkenness is the great exciter of the Yes function in man.' And he adds that 'It is part of the deeper mystery and tragedy of life that whiffs and gleams of something that we immediately recognize as excellent should be vouchsafed to so many of us only in the fleeting earlier phases of what, in its totality, is so degrading a poisoning.' The tree is known by its fruits, and the fruits of too much reliance upon ethyl alcohol as an exciter of the Yes function are bitter indeed. No less bitter are the fruits of reliance upon such habit-forming sedatives, hallucinogens and mood elevators as opium and its derivatives, as cocaine (once so blithely recommended to his friends and patients by Dr Freud), as the barbiturates and amphetamine. But in recent years the pharmacologists have extracted or synthesized several compounds • that powerfully affect the mind without doing any harm to the body, either at the time of ingestion or, through addiction, later on. Through these new psychedelics, the subject's normal waking consciousness may be modified in many different ways. It is as though, for each individual, his deeper self decides which kind of experience will be most advantageous. Having decided, it makes use of the drug's mind-changing powers to give the person what he needs. Thus, if it would be good for him to have deeply buried memories uncovered, deeply buried memories will duly be uncovered. In cases where this is of no great importance, something else will happen. Normal waking consciousness may be replaced by aesthetic consciousness, and the world will be perceived in all its unimaginable beauty, all the blazing intensity of its 'thereness'. And aesthetic consciousness may modulate into visionary consciousness. Thanks to yet another kind of seeing, the world will now reveal itself as not only unimaginably beautiful, but also fathomlessly mysterious—as a multitudinous abyss of possibility for ever actualizing itself into unprecedented forms. New insights into a new, transfigured world of givenness, new combinations of thought and fantasy—the stream of novelty pours through the world in a torrent, whose every drop is charged with meaning. There are the symbols whose meaning lies outside themselves in the given facts of visionary experience, and there are these given facts which signify only themselves. But 'only themselves' is also 'no less than the divine ground of all being.' 'Nothing but this' is at the same time 'the Such-ness of all.' And now the aesthetic and the visionary consciousness deepen into mystical consciousness. The world is now seen as an infinite diversity that is yet a unity, and the beholder experiences himself as being at one with the infinite Oneness that manifests itself, totally present, at every point of space, at every instant in the flux of perpetual perishing and perpetual renewal. Our normal word-conditioned consciousness creates a universe of sharp distinctions, black and white, this and that, me and you and it. In the mystical consciousness of being at one with infinite Oneness, there is a reconciliation of opposites, a perception of the Not-Particular in particulars, a transcending of our ingrained subject-object relationships with things and persons; there is an immediate experience of our solidarity with all beings and a kind of organic conviction that in spite of the inscrutabilities of fate, in spite of our own dark stupidities and deliberate malevolence, yes, in spite of all that is so manifestly wrong with the ' world, it is yet, in some profound, paradoxical and entirely inexpressible way. All Right. For normal waking consciousness, the phrase, 'God is Love', is no more than a piece of wishful positive thinking. For the mystical consciousness, it is a self-evident truth.

Unprecedentedly rapid technological and demographic changes are steadily increasing the dangers by which we are surrounded, and at the same time are steadily diminishing the relevance of the traditional feeling-and-behavior patterns imposed upon all individuals, rulers and ruled alike, by their culture. Always desirable, widespread training in the art of cutting holes in cultural fences is now the most urgent of necessities. Can such a training be speeded up and made more effective by a judicious use of the physically harmless psychedelics now available? On the basis of personal experience and the published evidence, I believe that it can. In my Utopian fantasy, Island, I speculated in fictional terms about the ways in which a substance akin to psilocybin could be used to potentiate the nonverbal education of adolescents and to remind adults that the real world is very different from the misshapen universe they have created for themselves by means of their culture-conditioned prejudices. 'Having' Fun with Fungi'—that was how one waggish reviewer dismissed the matter. But which is better: to have Fun with Fungi or to have Idiocy with Ideology, to have Wars because of Words, to have Tomorrow's Misdeeds out of Yesterday's Miscreeds?

How should the psychedelics be administered? Under what circumstances, with what kind of preparation and follow-up? These are questions that must be answered empirically, by large-scale experiment. Man's collective mind has a high degree of viscosity and flows from one position to another with the reluctant deliberation of an ebbing tide of sludge. But in a world of explosive population increase, of headlong technological advance and of militant nationalism, the time at our disposal is strictly limited. We must discover, and discover very soon, new energy sources for overcoming our society's psychological inertia, better solvents for liquefying the sludgy stickiness of an anachronistic state of mind. On the verbal level an education in the nature and limitations, the uses and abuses of language; on the wordless level an education in mental silence and pure receptivity; and finally, through the use of harmless psychedelics, a course of chemically triggered conversion experiences or ecstasies—these, I believe, will provide all the sources of mental energy, all the solvents of conceptual sludge, that an individual requires. With their aid, he should be able to adapt himself selectively to his culture, rejecting its evils, stupidities and irrelevances, gratefully accepting all its treasures of accumulated knowledge, of rationality, human-heartedness and practical wisdom. If the number of such individuals is sufficiently great, if their quality is sufficiently high, they may be able to pass from discriminating acceptance of their culture to discriminating change and reform. Is this a hopefully Utopian dream? Experiment can give us the answer, for the dream is pragmatic; the Utopian hypotheses can be tested empirically. And in these oppressive times a little hope is surely no unwelcome visitant.

The Integration Of Human Knowledge

Oliver L. Reiser

Professor Reiser is Chairman of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh, and is also Chairman of the International Committee for Scientific Humanism.

That man ... literally does stand mid-way between the supra-universes and the infra-universes, that he is in a sense at the crossroads of the universe, is indicated by calculations which show that while about 1027 atoms make a man's body, 1028 human bodies constitute enough material to build a star. Man lives his life in a middle-scale universe, suspended between two infinities, and he appears to possess characteristics derived from both domains.

... evolution is not yet finished with the human organism, for still higher functions are in process of development. Furthermore, we surmise that Humanity is a god in embryo, a developing being with those psychic powers of omniscience and omnipotence which man hitherto has assigned to his god. Such a theory of the source of man's extrasensory powers would be in harmony with the view of E. Servadio that telepathic experience may be an original and archaic way of establishing understanding between individuals which, in the course of time, has been replaced by sign communication. Servadio does not believe that telepathic transference can be produced experimentally on a rational and conscious level. But this fact—if fact it be—that telepathy cannot be reproduced at the logical-rational level does not mean that it cannot be reproduced. According to our own three-level scheme of orientations, the coming superlogical level could reinstate a type of unity which would make it appear as a kind of regression to a more primitive mode of response, when in fact it is an adumbration' of a coming unity. In that event, Esp. and Psi phenomena generally are flickering and fitful anticipations of the integration of a -giant organism in which humans function as neuroblasts of the world sensorium—cells in the social cortex which the electromagnetic society is, beginning to proliferate.

If human organisms are embryonic cells in a superb-organism which is still on its way, individual human beings, as the neuroblasts of the emerging organism, are also not finished products. New functions may emerge as embryogenesis continues, and Psi-phenomena may provide the experimental basis for such developments. The Esp. faculties in those persons who possess it may be due to mutational changes in a few cells first, then more and more cells in successive generations, until the whole organ, the world sensorium, has perfected a new function in all individuals.

To explain Esp. (telepathy and clairvoyance) one may suppose that the perceptive centers can respond to sensory and non-sensory stimuli. Therefore, vision in man is splitting into sensory and extrasensory components. The evolutionary changes that are bringing this about would not appear in the size or weight of the brain but in the morphology of the neuron; accordingly the external appearance may bear no obvious relation to the chemical mutational changes within the neurons.

The Problem Of Consciousness

Oliver L. Reiser

Beyond doubt the problem of establishing the missing connections between the phenomena of consciousness and the rest of our scientific knowledge is the most important unsolved problem of philosophy. This is the one phenomenon for which there is no existing physicochemical model. Supposing—in an optimistic mood—that such a model does appear, will it come as a stroke of genius from one man—or will it come as a result of the gradual development of existing knowledge along established lines? At the moment we cannot say.

For the behaviorist, of course, there is no problem: he simply denies the existence of consciousness as a reality to be dealt with. But this is silly. I recall how one of my own teachers, Dr A. P. Weiss, a well-known behaviorist, once demanded of a philosopher (me) who used the term 'consciousness'—what do you mean by consciousness? The reply was: I mean by consciousness what you experience when you ask me that question: This silenced the behaviorist. One can define subjective terms—like 'redness', 'sweetness' etc.—only by denotative reference. In that manner, the term consciousness, for me, will refer to that complex of shifting patterns of present sensations, images, ideas and feelings, which all normal individuals experience. In the stream of time this is a fusion of past, present and future. In his classic treatise, Principles of Psychology, William James pictured the stream of consciousness as for ever flowing, never the same, with the stream as it flows leaving a record in the living brain.

Unfortunately the behaviorists (like B. F. Skinner) have had relatively slight interest in the human brain—it is the 'black box' into which one need not look too carefully in order to establish uniform and predictable connections (correlations) between stimuli and responses. But from the present viewpoint, the human brain is the master tissue of nature—the 'specific organ of civilization', as C. J. Herrick termed it. What goes on inside the skull of man is truly marvelous to consider, as Charles S. Sherrington has shown in his masterpiece, Man On His Nature. One of the more dramatic manifestations of the manner in which higher organizational factors may arise, in ways not directly related to sensory input or motor outgo, is provided by the delusional and hallucinatory phenomena induced by LSD (lysergic acid). Here, indeed, are 'intervening variables' with a vengeance.

Yoga

Ernest Wood

In the very extensive and varied yoga literature of India, both classical and modern, there is frequent reference to psychic powers, but not usually—somewhat to the surprise of the Western enquirer—enthusiasm about them. They are regarded as coming by the way, and are not treated as something to be sought for or especially prized. Indeed, the highest authority of all, Patanjali, speaks of the arising of higher senses of hearing, touch, taste, and smell, but immediately adds: 'These powers of the spreading (or outgoing) mind are injurious to contemplation (Samadhi).'

No objection to them is indicated otherwise than as temptations to linger by the wayside with these new enjoyments, and in fairness to the whole field of study Patanjali in about thirty aphorisms speaks of them and how they are produced. Some of these statements are somewhat obscure at our date, but Patanjali lists a variety of them as resulting from full meditation upon certain things. He also mentions that the '. powers arise also in other manners than by practice of yoga-meditation, listing them as sometimes occurring from birth, and sometimes produced by drugs, incantations (mantras), and austerities.

As examples of those produced by full meditation (i.e. concentration, meditation, and contemplation) may be mentioned: knowledge of past and future; understanding of the sounds made by all creatures; knowledge of past lives; knowing what others are thinking; prior knowledge of one's death; the attainment of various kinds of strength; perception of the small, the concealed, and the distant; knowledge of other inhabited regions; knowledge about the stars and their motions; knowledge of the interior of the body; control of hunger and thirst; steadiness; seeing the adepts in one's own interior light; general intuition; understanding of the mind; entering the bodies of others; lightness and levitation; brightness; control of material elements; control of the senses; perfection of the body; quickness of the body, and the well-known set of eight powers beginning with smallness.

Patanjali does not give a list of the eight powers, but it appears frequently and widely in yoga literature. They are:

Minuteness (anima). To be as small as an atom, at will.

Expansion (mahima). To increase in size, at will.

Lightness (laghima). Neutralization of gravity, at will.

Reaching (prapti). To obtain anything or to reach, any place, at will.

Acquirement (prakamya). To have the fulfillment of any wish, at will.

Lordship (ishatwa). Control of the energies of Nature, at will.

Self-control (vashitwa). Self-command and freedom from being influenced, at will.

Desire-control (kamavasayita). The stopping of all desires, at will.

These are interpreted in detail in various ways, subjective and objective, by various yogis, gurus, and writers.

Before leaving this topic, it seems desirable to point out that the raja-yogi is aiming at the experience of inward illumination beyond all sensation. He is aiming not to be governed by impulses of any kind from outside, however relatively superior. He aims at the mountain top (kutastha), not to 'rest' on any object (alambana).

Prayer Of The Heliotrope

Proclus

On earth one can see suns and moons in a terrestrial condition, and in the sky one can see all the different plants, stones, and animals living as spirits.

Treaty Of The Vision Of God

Nicolas de Cusa

This place which is surrounded by coinciding contradictions is no other than the wall of paradise, at the door of which the highest spirit of reason stands on guard, who one must force in order to enter.

Song Of Enlightenment

Yoka Daishi

Hini the herb grows on the Himalaya where no other grasses are found, And the crows feeding on it give the purest of milk, and this I always enjoy.

A Modern Myth

C. G. Jung

I feel myself compelled, as once before when events were brewing of fateful consequence for Europe, to sound a note of warning. I know that, just as before, my voice is much too weak to reach the ear of the multitude. It is not presumption that drives me, but my conscience as a psychiatrist that bids me fulfill my duty and prepare those few who will hear me for coming events which are in accord with the end of an era. As we know from ancient Egyptian history, they are symptoms of psychic changes that always appear at the end of one Platonic month and at the beginning of another. They are, it seems, changes in the constellation of psychic dominants, of the archetypes, or 'gods' as they used to be called, which bring about, or accompany, long-lasting transformations of the collective psyche. This transformation started within the historical tradition and left traces behind it, first in the transition from the age of Taurus to that of Aries, and then from Aries to Pisces, whose beginning coincides with the rise of Christianity. We' are now nearing that great change which may be expected when the spring-point enters Aquarius. It would be frivolous of me to conceal from the reader that reflections such as these are not only exceedingly. unpopular but come perilously close to those turbid fantasies which becloud the minds of world-improvers and other interpreters of 'signs and portents'. But I must take this risk, even if it means putting my hard-won reputation for truthfulness, trustworthiness, and scientific judgment in jeopardy. I can assure my readers that I do not do this with a light heart. I am, to be quite frank, concerned for all those who are caught unprepared by the events in question and disconcerted by their incomprehensible nature. Since, so far as I know, no one has yet felt moved to examine and set forth the possible psychic consequences of this foreseeable change, I deem it my duty to do what I can in this respect. I undertake this thankless task in the expectation that my chisel will make no impression on the hard stone it meets.

Utopian Speculations

Henry Miller

This paragraph was quoted in Norman O. Brown's Life Against Death and he comments on Miller's text as follows: Utopian speculations, such as these of Henry Miller, must come back into fashion. They are a way of affirming faith in the possibility of solving problems that seem at the moment insoluble. Today even the survival of humanity is a Utopian hope.

The cultural era is past. The new civilization, which may take centuries or a few thousand years to usher in, will not be another civilization—it will be the open stretch of realization which all the past civilizations have pointed to. The city, which was the birth-place of civilization, such as we know it to be, will exist no more. There will be nuclei of course, but they will be mobile and fluid. The peoples of the earth will no longer be shut off from one another within states but will flow freely over the surface of the earth and intermingle. There will be no fixed constellations of human aggregates. Governments will give way to management, using the word in a broad sense. The politician will become as superannuated as the dodo bird. The machine will never be dominated, as some imagine; it will be scrapped, eventually, but not before men have understood the nature of the mystery which binds them to their creation. The worship, investigation and subjugation of the machine will give way to the larger one of power—and of possession. Man will be forced to realize that power must be kept open, fluid and free. His aim will be not to possess power but to radiate it.

Ecstasy

Dr Julius de Boer

A spontaneous mental devotion or even exaltation that might reasonably be called an 'ecstasy' within the physiological sphere can raise a personality type along affective, volitive, and cognitive steps to heights nearing the optimum of mental qualities. Such a normal ecstasy may take a poetic, or a religious, and certainly also a philosophical direction, without losing touch with scientific reality. It has been suggested that philosophy can, or must, rise to the level of science, but the reverse seems, relatively speaking, more rational: science must become philosophy on a scientific foundation. The desirable unity (synthesis) should comprise an optimum of categories embracing both science and philosophy, which might be called wisdom. It is to be hoped that we can look behind the words that we use to define our concepts, which sometimes seem mere word-play, and that we shall not lose sight of the reality of knowing and understanding, even though we have no other or better means than words, or similar symbols, to attain or approach what we may call our highest goal. A worldwide significative science, serving as the highest terminological authority, would be, if not absolutely necessary, at least highly desirable.

Cannabis And Opiates

William Burroughs

It is unfortunate that cannabis (the Latin term for preparations made from the hemp plant, such as marihuana and hashish), which is certainly the safest of the hallucinogen drugs, should be subject to the heaviest legal sanctions. Unquestionably this drug is very useful to the artist, activating trains of association that would otherwise be inaccessible, and I owe many of the scenes in 'Naked Lunch' directly to the use of cannabis. Opiates, on the other hand, since they act to diminish awareness of surroundings and bodily processes, can only be a hindrance to the artist. Cannabis serves as a guide to psychic areas which can then be re-entered without it. I have now discontinued the use of cannabis for some years and find that I am able to achieve the same results by non-chemical means: flicker, music through head phones, cutups and foldins of my texts, and especially by training myself to think in association blocks instead of words, that is, cannabis, like all the hallucinogens, can be discontinued once the artist has familiarized himself with the areas opened up by the drug. Cannabis sometimes causes anxiety in large doses, and this anxiety is promptly relieved by apomorphine.

It would seem to me that cannabis and the other hallucinogens provide a key to the creative process, and that a systematic study of these drugs would open the way to non-chemical methods of expanding consciousness.

The Politics Of Consciousness Expansion

Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert

Timothy Leary was recently sentenced to thirty years imprisonment and a fine of thirty thousand dollars for being found in possession of three ounces of marijuana when crossing the border from Mexico into Texas (see also Part Five).

Expansion-Contraction. The tension between the flowing process and the fixed structure.

Inorganic processes: The expanding gaseous cloud whirls into temporary patterned structures. The structures always changing, hurtling towards eventual entropy.

Organic processes: Watery, electro-biochemical globules cluster into cells. Cells cluster into temporary hardened forms (vegetative or animal), themselves always changing, eventually returning to the entropic.

Social processes: The free expansive vision is molded into the institutional. Hardly has the institutional mortar set before there is a new cortical upheaval, an explosive, often ecstatic or prophetic revelation. The prophet is promptly jailed. A hundred years later his followers are jailing the next visionary.

One is led naively to exclaim: Will man never learn the lesson of cyclical process?

Naive question, which fails to appreciate the necessary tension of the expansion-contraction play. Membrane contracts. Life force bursts membrane. Establishment controls vision. Vision bursts establishment.

The expansion process in physics and biology is described in evolutionary terms. The expansion process in human affairs is defined in terms of the word 'freedom'.

We measure social evolution in terms of increased freedom—external or internal. Freedom to step out of the tribal game and move to construct a new social form. Freedom to move in space. Freedom to experience. Freedom to explore.

The administration always recognizes intuitively the next evolutionary step that will leave it behind. To cast this drama in terms of saints and pharisees is entertaining, but outmoded.

The drama is genetic. Neurophysiological.

Where, then, will the next evolutionary step occur? Within the human cortex. We know that science has produced methods for dramatically altering and expanding human awareness and potentialities. The uncharted realm lies behind your own forehead. Internal geography. Internal politics. Internal control. Internal freedom.

The nervous system can be changed, integrated, recircuited, expanded in its function. These possibilities naturally threaten every branch of the Establishment. The dangers of external change appear to frighten us less than the peril of internal change.

There are obvious avenues toward this next stage of human evolution.

Biochemical methods of increasing cortical efficiency. 'Biochemicals' in the human body, in plants, and in drugs. There exist in nature hundreds of botanical species with psychedelic ('mind-opening') powers. There exists around the indole circle a wide variety of psychedelic compounds. Cortical vitamins.

The existence of these substances has been known for thousands of years, but has been maintained as a well-guarded secret. The scarcity of botanical supply. Now, the mind-opening substances (e.g., mescaline, LSD, psilocybin) are available for the first time in limitless mass-produced quantities. What a threat! What a challenge!

The danger, of course, is not physical. A recent editorial in the Medical Tribune clearly recognizes the physiological safety of consciousness-expanding drugs. Nor is the danger psychological. In studies reported by Ditman, McGlothlin, Leary, Savage, up to 90 per cent of subjects taking these drugs in supportive environments testify enthusiastically.

The danger is not physical or psychological, but social-political, for the effect of consciousness-expanding drugs will be to transform our concepts of human nature, of human potentialities, of existence. Man is about to make use of that fabulous electrical network he carries around in his skull. Present social establishments had better be prepared for the change. Our favorite concepts are standing in the way of a floodtide, two billion years building up. The verbal dam is collapsing.

In totalitarian states, the use and control of instruments for external freedom—the automobile, the private aeroplane—are reserved for the government bureaucracy and the professional elite. Even in democracies, the traditional means for expanding or contracting consciousness (internal freedom) such as the printing press, the radio transmitter, the motion picture, are restricted by law and remain under government control.

Now consider consciousness-expanding drugs. No language. No trained operators. Lots of reactionaries whose monopoly is threatened. A few people who do see an inevitable development of a new language, a transfiguration of every one of our social forms. And these few, of course, the ones who have taken the internal voyage.

It is possible that in twenty years our psychological and experiential language (pitifully small in English) will have multiplied to cover realms of experience and forms- of thinking now unknown. In twenty years, every social institution will have been transformed by the new insights provided by consciousness-expanding experiences. Many new social institutions will have developed to handle the expressions of the potentiated nervous system.

The political issue involves control: 'automobile' means that the free citizen moves his own car in external space. Internal automobile. Auto-administration. The freedom and control of one's experiential machinery. Licensing will be necessary. You must be trained to operate. You must demonstrate your proficiency to handle consciousness-expanding drugs without danger to yourself or the public. The Fifth Freedom—the freedom to expand your own consciousness—cannot be denied without due cause.

The open cortex produces an ecstatic state. The nervous system operating free, of learned abstraction is a completely adequate, completely efficient, ecstatic organ. To deny this is to rank man's learned tribal concepts above two billion years' endowment. An irreverent act. Trust your inherent machinery. Be entertained by the social game you play. Remember, man's natural state is ecstatic wonder, ecstatic intuition, ecstatic accurate movement. Don't settle for less.

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