Drug Abuse

Eight: Psyche and Symbol

Few of the drug-state phenomena are more perplexing, fascinating and potentially valuable than is the subject's participation in mythic and ritualistic dramas which represent to him in terms both universal and particular the essentials of his own situation in the world. 'These ana-logic and symbolic dramas occur most characteristically on the third or symbolic level of our functional model of the drug-state psyche. They often are sequentially preceded on this level by the subject's experienc-ing of historical events and evolutionary processes—usually of less value, but not less likely to perplex and fascinate.

When the historical events are experienced the subject may observe these as spectator only or he may have the sense of being a participant in the event. These battles, coronations, witch trials, crusades, or what-ever, enter into consciousness and may be eidetically imaged in intricate and voluminous detail. The historical materials may seem to have no empirical antecedents for the subject, and concerning this apparently groundless knowledge it is only possible to speculate more or less plaus-ibly. Similarly, the subject may observe or feel himself to be a part of evolutionary process, seemingly becoming aware of the whole or a part of the pattern of emerging life on this earth and its progression towards the present point in time. Again, the subject may display a knowledge that remains inexplicable should we insist upon discovering its source in what he is aware of having read, seen, or heard about.

The psychedelic drug "world" of myth and ritual, which is also a world of legendary and fairy tale themes and figures, of archetypes, and of other timeless symbols and essences, is of a more profound and meaningful order than that of the historical and evolutionary sequences. Here, where the symbolic dramas unfold, the individual finds facets of his own odstence revealed in the person of Prometheus or Parsifal, Lucifer or Oedipus, Faust or Don Juan, and plays out his personal drama on these allegorical and analogic terms. Or he finds the means of attaining to new levels of maturity through his participation in rites of passage and other ceremonies and initiations.

In the case of the analogic mythical and ritual dramas, these very often are shaped of the stuff of the raw personal-historic data and insights now seemingly viable and plastic to the un- or pre-conscious myth-making process as a result of the subjeces evocation and examina-tion of them on the recollective-analytic level. Now, on the level of the symbolic, these memory and psychodynamic materials may emerge re-structured in a purposive pattern of undisguised symbols cast in a flowing dramatic form that illumines the subject's life and may even transform it.

As we have noted elsewhere, the eidetic images become of major importance on this level and especially where the symbolic dramas are concerned. Ideally, the subject's participation in these dramas will be total—i.e., a participation by image, ideation, affect, sensation, and kinesthetic involvement, all coalescing as integrated dynamic constit-uents of the unfolding dramatic experience. The drama, it is true, may unfold on a verbal-ideational plane and without the images, but then the chances of effecting the kinesthetic, affective, and sensory coalescence are diminished; and, in the case of this theater of symbols, the chief purposive function of the eidetic images appears to be the enhancement of imaginary events by drawing into the image-ideation complex the additional factors of affect, sensation, and kinesthetic involvement re-quired to charge the experience with its full richness and transformative potency.

Also of major importance on this level is the work of the guide who here, more than elsewhere, must assume the Virgilian mantle and em-ploy all his art in leading the subject through ever more complex and more personally significant realms of symbolic experience until the subject is able to participate directly and wholly in those dramas that will be most beneficial to him.

While it often occurs that the subject spontaneously reaches the level of possible participation in the personal allegory, it also frequently occurs that he does not participate but only observes, remaining no more than an appreciative spectator as the aesthetic images of curious flora, fauna, and architecture characteristic of this psychical region pass before him, signifying nothing. 'These are the scenes and figures which Aldous Huxley has told us are not symbolic, "do not stand for some-thing else, do not mean anything except themselves. The significance of each thing is identical with its being. ... Through these landscapes and among these living architectures wander strange figures, sometimes of human beings (or even of what seem to be superhuman beings), some-times of animals or fabulous monsters. Giving a straightforward prose description of what he used to see in his spontaneous visions, William Blake reports that he frequently saw beings, to whom he gave the name of Cherubim. 'These beings were a hundred and twenty feet high and were engaged (this is characteristic of the personages seen in vi-sion) in doing nothing that could be thought of as being symbolic or dramatic. In this respect the inhabitants of the mind's Antipodes differ from the figures inhabiting Jung's archetypal world; for they have noth-ing to do either with the personal history of the visionary, or even with the age-old problems of the human race. Quite literally, they are the inhabitants of 'the Other World.' "1

But what Huxley evidently was unable to tell us is that this "Other World" is one whose surface has been but barely touched by the sort of passive, aesthetic observation he describes without mentioning other possibilities. And these figures "doing nothing symbolic or dramatic" are precisely the unemployed actors who await recruitment as players in the subject's personal drama. The eliciting and formulation of data on the recollective-analytic level increases the likelihood that the players will be recruited and the drama staged; but, as suggested, there is still no guarantee that this will occur, and collaboration of subject and guide yet may be required if archetype and symbol are to arise out of their latency and if the subject is to be participant rather than entertained spectator only.

The historical and evolutionary sequences may be seen as having the function of moving the subject toward increasing dramatic involvement, and thus the guide may fruitfully induce the historical and evolutionary experiences. Here, even rather sketchy suggestions may suffice, and the guide need do little more than invite the subject to walk along the Piraeus with Socrates, to witness a battle in the 'Thirty Years' War, to participate in the bull-leaping at Knossos, or to help with the building of the pyramid of Khufu. The subject may be asked to gaze over the shoulder of that Cro-Magnon man who painted the great bison in the cave at Altamira. He may join in the violent thrust westward of the army of Genghis Kahn. He may have a front row seat at the Battle of Hastings or mingle with those present at the court of Louis XIV.

The subject, whose eyes are closed, then is asked to describe as fully as he can the background, action and dramatis personae of the histori-cal events he now is imaging (or perhaps is imagining vividly but with-out eidetic images). This, as some forthcoming examples soon will demonstrate, he often does with not only a wealth of detail but also, in some cases, with a rather uncanny measure of accuracy not to be ex-plained in terms of the information to which he normally has access or to which he remembers ever having been exposed. Whether one will attribute this rich "reporting," with its impressive note of immediacy, to recall of previously learned but long since forgotten materials or to the subject's having gained access to materials from some other source, will depend upon theoretical commitment to scientific or philosophical postulates. Needless to say, most persons will consider probability to lie with the former attribution; and Freud, for one, has shown us how "completely forgotten" materials may emerge years later as ideas and images which will seem mysterious in origin since apparently lacking the usual empirical ground.

As an effective next step in leading the subject toward symbolization and dramatic engagement, the guide may assist him to "recapture" and participate in evolutionary events. In many case,s the subject at this point will begin to discard the spectator role maintained throughout his experiencing of history and will find himself entering into an identifica-tion with the evolutionary process that may involve at least some mea-sure of sensory, emotional, and kinesthetic as well as ideational and imagistic participation. For example, the guide may suggest that the subject might want to "become that primordial piece of protoplasm floating in an early ocean"—described by several subjects as a very restful state. 'Then, perhaps through additional suggestions by the guide, but more often without any further suggestions, the subject may experi-ence a reliving of the evolutionary transitions from gill stage up through "hominization." The experiencing of evolutionary phenomena already has been sufficiently exemplified in the fourth case presented in Chapter One.

Again, the explanation for these vivid experiences probably is to be found in the application of imagination to knowledge collected by the subject during the course of his life and which may or may not be accessible to him under other, non-psychedelic conditions. Alterna-tively, it might be proposed that what we encounter here is an activation of the phylogenetic inheritance.

The extent to which the factual and directional content of symbolic level and some other drug experiences may have been supplied and determined by the guide, through nonverbal communication as well as spoken hints, is yet another factor to be considered. For it is clear that just as an analyst of Freudian, Jungian, existentialist, or other orienta-tion will elicit from patients dream and other materials appropriate to the analyst's orientation, so does the psychedelic guide elicit materials appropriate to his orientation and interests and to some extent this will occur no matter how stringent and well-planned the precautions taken by the guide. The importance of this factor increases as we move into the area of the potentially transformative symbolic and analogic dramas.

Ritual. Throughout most of the history of man the importance of ritual has been clearly recognized, for it is through the ritual acts that man establishes his identity with the restorative powers of nature or marks and helps effect his passage onto higher stages of personal development and experience. Ritual is the province of renewal and emergence and without its authority man tends to lose sight of purpose and meaning. Man without ritual is man without sanctions, and this, as we know, results in a condition in which the energies of life remain abstractions and man becomes alienated from nature, from other persons, and from himself.

It has been theorized that many of the problems of modem man stem from the fact that he has few if any effective rituals by means of which he is able to experience catharsis and rebirth. Western civilization since the Renaissance is one of the few social orders that does not provide for emotionally powerful rites of renewal and emergence. An anomalous situation thus has been created in which the accumulated ritual requirements of the millennia have been ignored vvith consequent repression and deflection. It is thus of extreme interest to observe the frequency with which subjects in psychedelic sessions seek relief from tensions and a way out of alienation precisely through participation in ritual dramas.

The most frequently occurring ritual theme experienced on the sym-bolic level is that of the eternal return. The subject usually experiences this theme in terms of the redemption of the vegetation cycle leading to a redemption of human consciousness. In many cases the theme unfolds through a drama replete with such a richness of historical and anthro-pological detail that again the source of the knowledge displayed arises as a problem confounding 'both subject and researcher. A striking case in point is the unfolding of interwoven mythic and ritual elements in the experience of a twenty-seven-year-old bookkeeper. This subject, S-1 (100 micrograms LSD), was a high-school graduate whose reading matter rarely extended beyond the daily newspapers and an occasional popular magazine.

The guide initiated the ritual process by suggesting to the subject that he was attending the rites of Dionysus and was carrying a thyrsus in his hand. When he asked for some details the subject was told only that the thyrsus was a staff wreathed with ivy and vine leaves, terminat-ing at the top in a pine cone, and was carried by the priests and attendants of Dionysus, a god of the ancient Greeks. To this S nodded, sat back in his chair with eyes closed, and then remained silent for several minutes. Then he began to stamp the floor, as if obeying some strange internal rhythm. He next proceeded to describe a phantasma-goria consisting of snakes and ivy, streaming hair, dappled fawn skins, and dances going faster and faster to the shrill high notes of the flute and accelerating drums. The frenzy mounted and culminated in the tearing apart of living animals.

The scene changed and S found himself in a large amphitheater witnessing some figures performing a rite or play. This changed into a scene of white-robed figures moving in the night towards an open cav-ern. In spite of her intention not to give further clues, the guide found herself asking the subject at this point: "Are you at Eleusis?" S seemed to nod "yes," whereupon the guide suggested that he go into the great hall and witness the mystery. He responded: "I can't. It is forbidden. . . . I must confess . . . I must confess . . ." ('The candidate at Eleusis was rejected if he came with sinful hands to seek enlightenment. He must first confess, make reparation, and be absolved. Then he received his instruction and then finally had his experience of enlightenment and was allowed to witness the mystery. How it happened that this subject was aware of the stages of the mystery seemed itself to be a mystery.) 2 S then began to go through the motions of kneading and washing his hands and appeared to be in deep conversation with someone. Later, he told the guide that he had seemed to 'be standing before a priestly figure and had made a confession. The guide now urged the subject to go into the hall and witness the drama. This he did, and described seeing a "story" performed about a mother who looks the world over for her lost daugh-ter and finally finds her in the world of the underground (the Demeter-Kore story which, in all likelihood, was performed at Eleusis).

This sequence dissolved and the subject spoke of seeing a kaleido-scopic pattern of many rites of the death and resurrection of a god who appeared to be bound up in some way with the processes of nature. S described several of the rites he was viewing, and from his descriptions the guide was able to recognize remarkable similarities to rites of Osiris, Attis, and Adonis. S was uncertain as to whether these rites occurred in a rapid succession or all at the same time. The rites disappeared and were replaced by the celebration of the Roman Catholic Mass. Seeking to restore the original setting, the guide again suggested the image of the thyrsus. S imaged the thyrsus, but almost immediately it "turned into" a man on a tree (the Christ archetype). The guide then said: "You are the thyrsus," to which S responded: "I am the thyrsus. . . . I am the thyrsus. . . . I have labored in the vineyard of the world, have suffered, have died, and have been reborn for your sake and shall be exalted forevermore." These are the mystic words that with variations have been ritually spoken by all the great gods of resurrection—the great prototypes who embody in themselves the eternal return of nature and who, in a deeper sense, are identified with the promise of eternal life to righteous man.

The extraordinary aspect of this case lay not so much in the surface details, but rather in the manner, the meaning, and the sequence in which this material was evoked. We notice, for example, how the theme of eternal return, death, and resurrection, moves in the subject's mind from its initial confrontation in primitive rites to highly sophisticated and universal expressions. The sequence began with the Dionysian rites, an early Greek form of the celebration of the vegetation god's struggle, death, and rebirth, linked to the yearly triumph of spring over winter. There next appeared the ancient Greek drama which had in fact evolved out of the form of the Dionysian sacrificial ritual. (In the artistic trans-formation of this ritual in tragedy the audience no longer consumed the body and blood of the god, but instead experienced a spiritual a'nd psychological ingestion of the body of the tragic hero and, in so doing, found new community and solidarity within itself.) The sequence then found a sublimation in the Eleusinian Mystery, the great ritual of catharsis and spiritual rebirth which itself grew out of the Dionysian rites. After this there followed a proliferation of many myths and rituals bearing upon the themes of the eternal return and culminating in the sophisticated expression of this theme in the Roman Catholic Mass. Finally, the subject himself indentified with the god-thyrsus and invoked the mystic words of renewal. The entire sequence told the same story—the drama of redemption seen on all levels at once; the redemption of the vegetation cycle and the redemption of the human consciousness—each seen through the prism of the tree-man dying to live and yielding, by death and resurrection, lffe to those of his cult or his cultivators.

Among the ritual materials most frequently encountered in the psy-chedelic sessions are the rites of initiation and rites of passage. The subject in the following example, S-2, was a twenty-four-year-old Jew-ish college graduate. At the time of his LSD experience he was working in a law office. (Dose: 100 micrograms)

The guide began the particular sequence by drurnming on the table and suggesting that S envision an African rite of initiation—possibly a puberty rite. S then almost immediately began to describe a night scene involving many young boys who appeared to be moving around a fire on hands and knees and who were at the same time being flagellated by older men. 'The guide asked the subject if he minded the beating, to which the reply was: "No, it is quite necessary if I am to be reborn." He then described himself as being wrapped up in some kind of animal skins. The guide asked him if he knew what kind of skins they were, and was told: "Sheep . . . goat . . . I remain three days and am then reborn . .." (The foregoing is especially noteworthy in that it confirms the schemas of initiation in which the symbolism of birth is almost always found alongside that of death.) S then discovered himself to be a baby floating in fluid (presumably in amniotic fluid) and moving down the birth canal, pushed along by the contraction of muscles. He next burst into uproarious laughter, for he had not emerged onto a hospital table as expected but, rather, into his own Bar Mitzvah (the Jewish rite of puberty). The guide asked S to attempt an explanation of the entire sequence. S said words to the effect that man is bom of woman incom-plete. 'Thus, there must be a second birth of a spiritual character in order for man to pass beyond his prolonged foetal condition. Man becomes completed by engaging in some significant event or rite of passage in which he is obliged to divest himself of his embryonic or pre-human nature and assume that condition in which he becomes fully Man.a

As the experience of many drug subjects suggests, and much histori-cal and anthropological evidence demonstrates, the mystery of initiation (whether culturally staged or psychedelically induced) can deliver the young man from shallow adolescent understanding and render his life dimensional. Chastened by the vision of aspects of reality which include the sacred (or extended reality), he must be similarly extended and take upon himself the obligations of the adult state. He must die to his shallow nature and rise to his deepened one. This is a fact of existence about which we still seem to know, even while "officially" regarding it as a tenet properly belonging to archaic societies: that the process by which one attains to spiritual awareness or to a greater sense of reality finds expression in the thematics of death and rebirth. In its psychedelic expression as otherwise, the initiation has a profound and frequently transformative effect upon the participant. At the end of the session we have just described, S declared himself "reborn." Later, he stated that his experience had brought first deliverance and then meaning into his life, linking his personal destiny to that of mankind and liberating him from narrow and selfish purposes.

Specific Symbols. Among the devices employed to facilitate the sub-ject's participation in allegorical dramas are specific, usually traditional symbols, which the subject is encouraged to contemplate, and historic, legendary and mythic figures, with whom the subject is encouraged to identify. The symbols and figures then serve both to trigger and flexibly configure the experience that follows. However, these ensuing experi-ences do not always take just the form intended, and we will briefly digress to examine several of the forms the deviations may assume.

Here, the guide either verbally suggests a symbol or presents an actual symbolic object—cross, star of David, religious statue—to the subject and proposes that he consider it.4 In the psychedelic state, however, the symbol does not remain for long in its static configuration, but quickly dissolves and points beyond itself to the dramatic events from which it was condensed, or leads analogically inward to some personal struggle of the subject which it may effectively symbolize. Thus, a traditional symbol like the cross may open outwards upon such historical pageants as those of the crucifixion, the crusades, the inquisi-tion, and so on, or open inward upon some personal drama of guilt and redemption.

S-3, a thirty-one-year-old male (LSD: 100 micrograms), was an attorney and former divinity student who had left the seminary because of religious doubts. For him, to move from religion to law had been to move from chaos to order. Concerning his experience arising out of contemplation of the cross, he writes:

"The guide handed me a heavy cross to hold. At first I didn't want to take it because of bad associations, but finally did so. It was a golden glinting thing, and soon absorbed my entire attention. I found myself observing its every facet with fascination and a kind of awe because every facet, every glinting particle became—when I focused my attention—some historical episode in the story of the cross.

"I saw Jesus crucified and Peter martyred. I watched the early Christians die in the arena while others moved hurriedly through the Roman back streets, spreading Christ's doctrine. I stood by when Con-stantine gaped at the vision of the cross in the sky. I saw Rome fall and the Dark Ages begin and observed as little crossed twigs were tacked up as the only hope in ten thousand wretched hovels. I watched peasants trample it under their feet in some obscene forest rite, while, across the sea in Byzantium, they glorified it in jeweled mosaics and great domed cathedrals. My hand trembled, the cross glimmered, and history became confused.5 Martin Luther walked arm in arm with Billy Graham, followed by Thomas Aquinas and the armies of the Crusades. Inquisito-rial figures leveled bony fingers at demented witches and a great gout of blood poured forth to congeal in a huge, clotted cross. Pope John XXIII called out "good cheer" to a burning, grinning Joan of Arc, and Savonarola saluted a red-necked hell-fire and brimstone Texas preacher. Bombers flew in cross formation and St. Francis preached to the birds. A hundred thousand episodes erupted from the glinting facets of that cross and I knew that a hundred thousand more were waiting for their turn. But then, and I don't know when or how it happened, I was immersed in it; my substance—physical, mental, and spiritual—was totally absorbed in the substance of the cross. My life became the glinting, sparkling episodes of the history of the cross, and the hundred thousand remaining events were those of my own life's history. The shame and victory of the cross was endlessly repeated in the minutiae of my own life. Mine was the shame and mine was the victory. I had been inquisitor and saint, had falsely damned and sublimely reasoned. And, like the cross, I, too, had died, and lived, and died, and lived and died to live again and again. And perhaps once more I would die. But now I knew (and now I know) that redemption is a constant thing and guilt is only transitory.

"Probably the most important thing that happened to me in that session was that I leamed that life mirrors its greatest symbols and the cross was the mirror image of mine. That is why I left the seminary and why I had been so antagonistic to the cross. I had expected it to be a thing of constant triumph and had found that its course was as wayward as my own. I am no longer antagonistic. In fact, and I re,alize this sounds corny (but then, invariably, the corniest things are the truest), I have found that I serve myself best when I serve the cross, when I become, in the words of the old hymn, a Soldier of the Cross. So here I am, back in bondage to an impossible ideal, and damned glad of it1"

Subjects reaching the symbolic level of the psychedelic experience do not concem themselves exclusively with traditional or essential sytn-bolisms. In a number of cases symbols hitherto unrecognized as "sym-bolic" have emerged spontaneously, pregnant with personal meaning, and have provided the subject with a living reality and a directional frame of reference previously unknown. These symbols, novel at least to the subject, would seem to be as effective as their better-known counterparts and like them provide psychic energy for the formation of new attitudes and for the development of more extended and mature states of consciousness. Examples of such emerging symbols have in-cluded a personal totemic animal (eagle, tiger, lion), whose idealized symbolic characteristics the subject seeks to realize in himself; geomet-ric configurations (spirals, circles within circles); microcosm-macrocosm analogies; organic growth processes (especially as they occur in trees and flowers); and mandalas.

As an example of another variety of symbolic experience, the sub-ject may wish to feel himself invested with the personality of some archetypal persona famous for sagacity and depth of understanding. Subjects often spontaneously display an inclination to assume the per-sona of the Wise Old Man in his ideal state or in some of his various historical and mythological disguises—Socrates, Chuang-tzu, Merlin, Winston Churchill. This phenomenon is especially intriguing to the ob-server in that the face of the subject frequently assumes an antique aspect, his body adjusts to an attitude appropriate to the patriarch, and he intones the weighty sentiments of an ultimate sage. Alas, however, the platitudinous pontifications of such psychedelic pundits rarely attest to any real increment of wisdom. Much more rewarding are the insights which appear to accrue to those few subjects who have succeeded in "putting on the persona" of the Wise Fool or King's Jester. With the assumption of this persona comes the tragicomic revelation into the nature of paradox as the essential construct of reality. The either/or insistence of the Western mind is abandoned in favor of a both/and approach to life and dualistic formulas are seen as an evil which one conquers by satiric laughter. One subject extemporized a verse to de-scribe the understanding he felt he had gained through identification with the persona of the Jester:

"I see behind the duality blind,

And for this sight I rise in kind

To King's own Jester—Fool Sublime,

Immortal Idiot, Godly Mime."

Mythologies. In the psychedelic drug-state mythologies abound. 'The guide often may feel that he is bearing witness to a multi-layered com-plex of mythological systems as they arise out of their latency in the mind of the subject. If they are not produced spontaneously, the guide can elicit a remarkable exfoliation of diverse mythic images and archetypal settings. Lest the subject be inundated by this, the guide must help him to select the most personally meaningful and potentially valuable symbolic possibility out of the dozens that may present them-selves, then giving further support and advice as the subject attempts to follow the chosen mythic structure through to its conclusion. As we have noted, the choice of the mythic structure very often will be deter-mined by the preceding recollective-analytic level materials.

One constant of these mythological systems, in both their universal and particular aspects, is that as they emerge in the psychedelic session what they express is something that never was but is always happening. They usually relate to occurrences that cannot be specified in space and time but which nevertheless exert a powerful influence on culture and consciousness. The frequency with which they spontaneously appear in the experiences of the psychedelic subjects attests to their continuing potency and relevance to the human condition.

Mythic patterns frequently recurring in the drug-state fall within the following broad areas:

Myths of the Child-Hero

Myths of Creation

Myths of the Etemal Retum (Cycles of Nature)

Myths of Paradise and the Fall

Hero Myths

Goddess Myths

Myths of Incest and Parricide (Oedipus, Electra, etc.)

Myths of Polarity (Light and Darkness, Order and Chaos)

Myths of the Androgyne (Male-Female Synthesis)

Myths of the Sacred Quest

Prometheus-Faust Myths° (Myths of the Tricicster).

The myth of the child-hero is one that occurs in the psychedelic experience with considerable frequency. This motif is often relived in terms of historical and mythological analogues—Jesus, Moses, Heracles —and then is taken up by the subject in a more personal manner to suggest his rebirth experienced in terms of a newborn divine child emer-ging from the darkness of the womb and undergoing extraordinary dan-gers in order to begin a life of great promise. The figure of the child-hero becomes for the psychedelic subject a personification of the most profound aspects of his striving towards self-realization.7 We do not have here, we believe, just a simple regression to an infantile state which presents the subject with an opportunity to "begin all over again." Rather, this appe,ars to be a phenomenon of profound engage-ment in a potent and potentiating universal drama from which the person emerges with a sense of having been redeemed, transformed, and as some subjects have put it, "transfigured." In the following case we have an example of the child-hero motif as "lived out" during the course of a psychedelic session.

S-4, a businessman in his early forties (LSD: 100 micrograms), came to his session feeling that his very considerable business success had been purchased at the expense of an atrophied inner life, so that now he experienced himself as hollow and exhausted and had, for the past year, been strenuously attempting to remedy this condition. Neither a flirtation with Eastern mysticism nor a period of psychoanalysis had proved effective and he was left with serious doubts concerning his "spiritual worth."

S spent the first few hours of his session enjoying a variety of sensory phenomena and especially his experience of the range and in-tensity of light and color perception. He spoke frequently and with great enthusiasm about the "luminous quality" of objects and repeatedly marveled at the "aura" which he saw as emanating from his hands. About three hours into the drug experience (start of recollective-analytic materials), he began to speak compulsively of the "wasteland" of his life, enumerating the many lost opportunities for personal devel-opment he felt had marked the last twenty years of his life and bitterly condemning himself for his one-sided dedication to materialistic pur-suits.

S described himself as having been a spiritually precocious child and adolescent, much given to prayer and meditation as well as to theologi-cal reflection. The death of his father when S was twenty-one years old left him the sole support of his mother and six brothers and sisters all much younger than himself. 'Thus, instead of being able to pursue the career in literature and philosophy that he had planned, S was forced to take over his father's business interests and at this he showed himself surprisingly adept. 'The praise and material rewards that came to him worked to increase the industry with which he applied himself to the business and by the time he had reached the age of forty he found himself wealthy and respected. But he also found himself with enor-mous material responsibilities and the feeling that the rich inner life he once had prized so highly was shrunken and virtually extinguished. This description of his present inner state profoundly distressed the subject, who repeatedly declared that: "I'm all dried up inside . . . dried up like a desert . . . dried up .. . dried up ... "

S now obviously stood at a forking of the psychedelic road, with breakthrough one possibility, the other a circular self-reinforcing de-pression that would be both unrewarding and painful. To avoid this latter possibility, S was urged to lie back and dose his eyes and was told (note dose surface relation of images) : "Perhaps instead of thinking of a desert, you will find it possible to think of a void. Think now of a void, a black, silent void. A void beyond life, beyond existence, beyond you, beyond me, beyond everything. Now there is a light coming faintly into this void. A light that is beginning to dimly illuminate the landscape. Tell me what you see there." What follows is the record of the subject's utterances as they were recorded by the guide. The story is told in terse sentences comprising a polyglot mythology of the child-hero with whom - the subject identified. The actual (symbolic level) "incamational" se-quence took about forty minutes to unfold:

"Yes, the light is coming up. I see a woman lying on top of a moun-tain. . . . She is struck by a thunderbolt . . . and out of this union . . . I am born. A race of ugly dwarfs seek to destroy my mother and me . . . so she hurries down the mountain . . . hides me in a swamp . . . A serpent with great jaws flicks out his tongue . . . draws me into his mouth. . . . I am swallowed. . . . I am passing down inside the snake. This is horrible. Incredible demons line the shores of the snake's in-sides. Each tries to destroy me as I float by. . . . I reach the end of the tail and kick my way out . . . raining very hard in the swamp . . . I am drowning. . . . No. . . . I am caught in a net . . . being pulled out of the water. . . . An old fisherman has caught me in his net. . . . The serpent rises out of the water . . . grown into a huge sea monster . . . opens its jaws and snaps them shut on half of the fisherman's boat. With the next bite it will swallow both of us. A thunderbolt comes out of the sky and smashes the boat in two, leaving half of it stuck in the monster's gullet. The fisherman takes me in his arms and swims with me towards shore... . The sea monster pursues us. . . . Just as we reach the shore it snaps off the fisherman's leg. The fisherman continues to hold me and crawls with me in his arms to a nearby hut. His wife is there. She nurses her husband and puts me into a cradle. I am raised by this couple as their own son. They are very kind to me . . . tell me I must be very special seeing as how I was drawn from the water. . . . They call me Aquarion. The years pass. I am now four years old but already I am tremendously strong and powerful. . . . Also, I know the language of birds and flowers . . . talk to the animals and plants and learn many strange things. They tell me I must avenge myself on the sea monster who tried to destroy me and bit off my fisher-father's leg. I dive into the water to go and find the sea monster. . . . For many hours I swim around and finally I find it. It is swimming towards me at tremendous speed. It has grown gargan-tuan and horrible ugly . . . opens its jaws to consume me but I evade them and get a strangle hold on its throat. For many days we battle together. . . . 'The sea is crimson with our blood. . . . Great waves are created by our combat... . I am the conqueror . .. tear open its belly . . . I slay the internal demons. . . . In its stomach I find the leg of my fisher-father. I take the leg back to land and fit it onto his stump. It instantly joins and he is whole again. My parents take me to the temple to give thanks for my victory. . . . We approach the high priestess with a thanks offering . . . tell her my story. When she hears of it she swoons. . . . She comes to and says to me, 'My womb was quickened by the thunderbolt. You are the son of promise whom I hid so long ago.' She raises her hands to the heavens and . . . she says . . . 'Speak, 0 Lord, to this your son. Speak to his strength and his glory. He hath prevailed over the Evil One. He hath delivered the deep of its Enemy. Set your purpose upon him Lord.' A great thunderbolt shatters the air. . . . A thunderous voice speaks: Aquarion, my son, you are now your own man. Go forth into the Wasteland and bring forth fruit. Know that I shall be with you always and where once there had been drought . . . wherever you pass . .. there shall spring up a Green Land.' "

S recounted this classic and fully developed scenario of the child-hero in a hushed monotone, as if he were reciting the forbidden liturgy of a mystery rite. He seemed to be speaking from far away, or from so deep inside of himself that one had the general impression that his was a disembodied voice. His body and face remained impassive, almost death-like during the recital, giving one the eerie feeling that the subject was living in another time and place while his body and its vocal cords served as the feeble link from one world to another. It took him almost an hour to "rejoin the living," during which time he lay with his eyes open, speaking not a word and apparently reacting to nothing. He said almost nothing else for the rest of the session, except at the very end when he bowed slightly to the guide, smiled, and said "Thank you." Several days later he felt more like talking and said that the session had been the most important, most profound and most intense experience of his life. His "inner state," he reported, was burgeoning "like a spring garden" and he felt that his life had been "transfigured" by the "new being" which had emerged out of the depths of his psyche. He felt that his experience had been so transparent an allegory that interpretation would be ridiculous.

This frequently occurring phenomenon of the "transparent alle-gory" is one of the most important and most curious met with in the psychedelic drug sessions. Psychodynamic materials which in the con-text of the dream would emerge as ambiguous or inscrutable events and (presumed) opaque symbols, represent themselves on the symbolic level of the drug-state as unveiled mysteries in which the drama of the self is played out within a lucid series of sequential stages bearing the subject along to a moment of powerful resolution. So continually ex-planatory is the symbolic process on this level that it sometimes hap-pens that the subject, should he "miss the point," is immediately "pro-vided" with an eidetically imaged diagram or illustrative cartoon. He may even receive a series of such clarifying images and keep on receiv-ing them until he fully understands, when the main sequence will re-sume just where it left off.

The fact that S's symbolic drama was rooted in the thematics of a great number of child-hero legends served to enhance the emotional power and meaningfulness of the experience. The student of compara-tive mythology will recognize in this subject's experience patterns common to the legends of Sargon, Gilgamesh, Marduk, Moses, Heracles, Perseus, Dionysus, Cyrus, Jesus, Krishna, Parsifal, and a host of Year-Daimons, as well as important themes in the poetry of T.S. Eliot (whose poems, especially "The Wasteland," S greatly admired).8 Each of these legends as well as the subject's own symbolic creation reflects the allegory of the self in its search for wholeness. As Jung has observed, the various child-heroe,s "may be regarded as illustrating the kind of psychic events that occur in the entelechy or genesis of the 'self.' The 'miraculous birth' tries to depict the way in which this genesis is experienced. Since it is a psychic genesis, everything must happen non-empirically—e.g., by means of a virgin birth, or by miraculous concep-tion, or by birth from unnatural organs. The motifs of 'insignificance,' exposure, abandonment, danger, try to show how precarious is the psychic possibility of wholeness, that is, the enorrnous difficulties to be met with in attaining this 'highest good.' They also signify the power-lessness and helplessness of the life-urge which subjects every growing thing to the law of maximum self-fulfillment, while at the same time the environmental influences place all sorts of insuperable obstacles in the way of individuation. More especially the threat to one's inmost self from dragons and serpents points to the danger of the newly acquired consciousness being swallowed up again by the instinctive psyche, the unconscious." 9

Several years now have passed since this subject's session and the divine child, he says, "continues within" him. He feels that the need no longer exists to maintain a dichotomy between his inner spiritual and his outer professional life—since the "Green Land" is continuous and compatible with both. The child-hero remains effective as his "activat-ing symbolic agent," helping him to preserve the "whole man" he has become. Thus again, in this case, we encounter the impressive but little understood phenomenon of timeless, universal symbols and themes emerging into consciousness in a particular dramatic form adapted to the requirements of the psychedelic drug subject who becomes the drama's protagonist and thereby is transformed.

The Forest in the Psychedelic Allegory. One of the more frequently occurring settings for the symbolic drug-state dramas is that of the forest. This, of course, is not surprising since, as Zimmer has put it, "All that is dark and tempting in the world is to be found again in the enchanted forest, where it springs from our deepest wishes and the soul's most ancient dreams?'" In the context of the psychedelic state, the meanings of the forest are various and complex; but for many subjects it would seem to indicate the realm of the soul itself wherein the self may find its deepest meaning.

Those mythic dramas occurring in the forest setting are mostly European in type and largely Celtic—abounding in princes, maidens, castles, executioners, dragons, dungeons, secret words, talking horses and birds, enchanted frogs and the like.11 The subject confronts these familiar figures from the Celtic mythology with a shock of recognition —seeing in the figures now revealed as inhabitants of his own deep psyche enigmatic bearers of ancient answers to the riddle of existence.

In the following case we have an example of a subject whose sym-bolic drama takes the form of the Celtic-type myth or fairy tale. In the course of its elaboration the subject develops elements relevant to her own life situation and finally arrives at insights providing a basis for important changes in her outlook and behavior. The subject, S-5, was a newspaperwoman in her late tvventies (peyote).

After a period of several hours during which she did little more than remark that her images and perceptual changes were aesthetically not at all up to what she had expected, S closed her eyes, grimaced, and began to describe at length a sequence of images in which she became increasingly involved. She now found herself, she said, in the courtyard of an old and evil-looking castle which lay just at the edge of what seemed a vast forest. The atmosphere was medieval and the castle was complete with moats and turrets and towers from which blue and red pennants were flying. The courtyard in which she stood was crowded with a holiday throng of extremely ugly people who she likened to figures in paintings intended to portray the character- and physiognomy-destroying effects of gluttony, drunkenness, etc. Like herself, these fig-ures were dressed in costumes which she described as belonging to the Middle Ages.

The crowd's attention was focused upon a young woman who stood on a platform just behind a large block of wood, and at whose side was standing a masked executioner holding a huge ax. Next to S was stand-ing an immensely fat woman with brightly rouged cheeks, or cheeks reddened by the wind, and S asked her what was going on, receiving the half-chortled response: "Why, it's heads-off day!"

No sooner had S received this answer than the young woman fell to her knees, placed her head on the block, and the executioner lifted up his ax, then severed the head with a single blow. The head fell to the ground and lay face upward, and S recognized the face as her own. However, she had no time to think about this since the young woman's body began running around the courtyard like that of a decapitated chicken, splattering the onlookers with blood. The crowd cheered and jeered and the body finally fell at S's feet, one of its hands grasping S's ankle in a painful death grip. S tried frantically to free herself from this dutch, but to no avail. Then the brawny executioner strode towards her and pulled the hand free of her ankle. S felt that her ankle had been severely bruised by the headless body's steely grip and then discovered that she was unable to walk. The executioner then said he would take her to a place where she could rest. He picked her up and, holding her under one powerfully muscled arm, he carried her up a flight of crum-bling stone steps to a room at the top of a tower where he placed her on a couch.

S now observed the executioner closely and saw that he was a huge, brutish, cruel-looking man. He wore the traditional executioner's black sack over his head, with slits cut in it for eye holes, and another slit for the mouth through which she could see that his lips were fat, red, and sensual. 'There seemed to her to be something strangely famil-iar about this man, and suddenly it came to her that in a curious, distorted way he resembled her own husband.

The executioner smiled at her, revealing broad, thick teeth and asked if she was hungry. When she said that she was—for suddenly S had discovered that her appetite was ravenous—he walked to a kind of heavy oaken sideboard on whose panels many "menacing" symbols had been carved and returned with a large bowl filled with grapes. S took two of these and was about to swallow them when she noticed that what she held in her hand were two intense black eyes that fixed her with an unwavering malevolent glance. She screamed, leaped to her feet, ran down the steps, through the now-empty courtyard, and into the forest. (S now was totally involved in the drama. Her images were vivid, she was breathing heavily, her face was reflecting powerful emotion, and her body, although she remained in her chair, went through motions appropriate to the unfolding events.)

S ran for "a long time" through the darkness of the forest, her terror at first increased by glowing eyes and dim but sinsister and threatening forms that appeared at the edges of the path along which she was running. Then, gradually, as she felt herself safe from the executioner, the forest lightened, the dim forms seemed "neutral" and then "maybe even friendly," the trees lost their grotesquely gnarled appearance, and at last she reached a pleasant glade where the sun shone down upon the grass and decided to rest for a while under a shade tree. She seemed to fall into a kind of half-sleep, during which she "dreamed" that she wandered in a forest that was "a place of great security." Only, eyes hung in clusters like grapes from certain trees having almost-human forms and she felt a strong impulse to eat two of these but could not bring herself to reach out and pluck them from the clusters. She "awak-ened" from this "drgam" and discovered that a man was standing over her.

This man was inquiring if something was wrong, and at once she told him she had injured her ankle while running through the forest. He said that he would like to help her and she noticed that he was younger, better formed, and more handsome than the headsman. He was also a kindlier figure and yet he, too, wore a mask and had a curiously dis-torted appearance. She then thought that he resembled in some way the headsman, and that he also resembled her husband, and began to grow afraid.

The man picked her up under one arm, carried her to the bank of a beautiful river or stream, and gave her some clear, cold water to drink. He asked if she was hungry, she discovered that her appetite was raven-ous, and she said she would like to have something to eat. He brought her a bowl of grapes, she took two, and was ready to put them into her mouth when she noticed that they were not grapes but rather two melancholy-looking brown eyes. She became very frightened, cried out, leaped up, plunged into the stream and then was borne along on its waters for a long time. Finally, the waters washed her up on a shore at the edge of the forest where another castle stood. This castle seemed newly built and had about it nothing of the evil aspect of the first castle. She discovered that in jumping into the stream she had injured her anlde, and now hobbled painfully towards the castle, where she hoped to find help and sanctuary.

She entered the open door of the castle, walked down a long, nar-row, high-ceilinged hall, and entered a room where she sat down on a long wooden chest which had panels on which many strange but some-how "good" symbols had been carved. A man entered the room and she noticed that he was younger, better-looking and gave the impression of being "much warmer and more human" than the headsman and the man in the forest. However, he was wearing "a lcind of purple Hal-loween mask" that covered his eyes, except for the eye slits, and had at its bottom a piece of cloth that hung down to just above his lips. His face was not distorted, but veiled by the mask, and she had the feeling that she would recognize his face if he only would take off the mask.

The man asked her in a gentle way what she was doing in the castle and she explained that she had injured her ankle, had had many terrible adventures, and now had no place to go so that she hoped she would be permitted to stay in the castle for a while. The man smiled and nodded and then instructed her to follow him. She started to get to her feet but her ankle collapsed beneath her and she fell to the floor. He then picked her up, holding her in both his arms, and carried her into a dining room containing a long table. He placed her on a chair and asked her if she would like something to eat, whereupon she discovered that her appetite was even more ravenous than it had been before. When she admitted this, he brought her a bowl of grapes. She picked up two of them and started to put them into her mouth when she noticed that what she held were two clear, penetrating blue eyes. Her impulse was to throw them down and run away, but now it seemed to her that she could not run anymore and she placed the eyes on the table in front of her and said she no longer was hungry.

She asked the man to remove his mask. He then told her that he was not wearing a mask and that she was unable to see his face for just the same reason she had been unable to see the faces of the other two men. She needed new eyes to see with, he said, and she again was being offered those eyes. Now it was up to her to accept what was being offered. Upon hearing this, she suddenly picked up the eyes, popped them into her mouth, and swallowed them down at a gulp. At once, she saw before her the unveiled face of a very handsome and "wholly trustworthy" young man who bore a striking resemblance to her hus-band. At the same time, she knew that he was also the man at the first castle and the man in the forest. But the man at the first castle had not really been an executioner. There had been no execution and the be-heading of the girl whose face was her own face had represented a projection of her own fears with regard to the man and his intentions toward her.

S now sat up and with great intensity began to interpret the eideti-cally imaged sequence. 'This sequence, she said, with its dreamlike, nightmarish flavor corresponded to aspects of her own life wherein she had been seeing "everything as if from in a nightmare." Her distortion of the three men reflected the distorted view of her husband she had been taking in her daily life. She had misinterpreted his every attempt to help her to see things in their proper light and to his every act of kindness towards her she had attributed a fiendish motivation. When-ever he had denied such motivation, and insisted that 'This is not at all why I am doing these things," S had stubbornly refused to believe him. Now, she thought that he had been trying to give her "eyes to see with."

S then began to vividly recall an "almost forgotten" incident that had occurred a few years earlier and did much, she thought, to explain some particulars of her drug-state drama. She recalled that she and her husband were on vacation and had gone for a horseback ride in a large wooded area. He was riding his horse at a fast pace and was some distance ahead of her when she, trying hard to catch up with him, had been knocked from her horse by a tree limb and had fallen to the ground, badly spraining her ankle. Her husband had not noticed her fall and had kept on riding. For several hours she had remained on the ground in great pain, all the while building up a fantasy concerning her husband's motive in thus "abandoning" her. She thought that her hus-band had seized on the opportunity presented by her fall to ride back to the hotel and initiate an affair with an attractive woman guest who had shown interest in him. Then she decided that her husband probably thought she was badly injured and was leaving her alone in the woods with the hope that she would die. Finally her husband returned and told her that he had ridden some distance before noticing that she was not behind him. 'Then, in looking for her, he had become lost and had had much difficulty in relocating the trail. This story, which S now viewed as "wholly plausible," had been rejected by her at the time in favor of the version constructed while she lay weeping on the ground. Afterwards, she became increasingly suspicious and "downright para-noid" about her husband's behavior and motives. By the time of her session, she felt, this had even resulted in her seeing him in a distorted way. She had begun to visually perceive him as looking "almost like the brutal executioner," instead of seeing him as "rationally" she knew him to be—i.e., his appearance was close to that of the good-looking young man in the second castle. But now, the distortions had "dropped away" and in her "mind's eye" she "saw" a picture of her husband that she felt was the true—and attractive—one. S felt that "my unconscious has been playing me tricks," but now she was "over all of that." In fact, in the ensuing months it became evident that the subject's relationship with her husband was enormously improved. Ten years after her peyote experience S continues in a marriage she describes as "very happy" and believes would certainly have ended in divorce "had I not been shocked back into my senses."

This case is especially interesting in that it well may shed light on the mythopoeic process, particularly as it is involved in the genesis and elaboration of the fairy tale. Its details clearly disclose how ugly and threatening figures and settings serve to represent in a fictionalized but life-analogous sequence the problem persons, conflicts, and anxieties of the individual. It further shows many points of both similarity and difference between the drug-state symbolic drama and the dream—the former utilizing readily decipherable symbols as the plainly analogous sequences unfold; the latter, with its usually opaque or heavily veiled symbols withholding from us in most cases its detailed meaning and relevance.

In this case of S-5, the classic symbolism of the subject's experience progresses steadily from the dark to the light, from the ugly and threat-ening to the beautiful and comforting, as S moves in the direction of enlightenment. The first pair of grape eyes offered her are black and malevolent, in keeping with the other components of her situation. The second pair are brown, in keeping with the other components. Finally, the eyes become an acceptable blue and their clear and penetrating quality suggests to her the kind of vision she needs and wants. She then has only to eat the eyes to incorporate their capacity for clear and penetrating vision into herself. Similarly, the men grow progressively handsomer and more reassuring; the second castle is much pleasanter than the first; and so on.

As the subject later explained in some detail, the forest was for her a place of catharsis. The first castle lay on the edge of this forest—was "a kind of hell at the outer edges of the possibility of redemption." The ugly, vicious-looking people in the courtyard, who had gathered there to applaud the execution, were personifications, she felt, of her own self-destructive tendencies and also of the "evil and ugly suspicions" she had entertained vvith regard to her husband. She felt that the execution itself was a warning that she was threatened by a psychosis if she continued to create delusional patterns concerning her husband's motives. By such behavior, she was putting her head on the block and asking to lose her head—i.e., become psychotic—"at the hands" of the distorted version of her husband she had fabricated.

When S ran into the forest she passed successfully through its dark, menacing areas and moved towards a place of light, experiencing what she later saw as her "first catharsis—a liberation from most of the morbid, destructive ideas." She "needed to get into nature and there fall asleep to the old self." After she awakened, everything looked better than before. Her "second catharsis" occurred when she leaped into the stream and was borne along by its waters, finally to be washed up on a shore near "the other edge of the forest," where stood the castle repre-senting the terminus of the redemptive process. She experienced the waters of the stream as a cleansing of her spirit and later remarked that she had emerged from the waters with a feeling of having been reborn. She now was sufficiently wise (having seen the evils of her former condition) and strong (having been cleansed and reborn) to be able to take the offered gift of clear vision. However, she remained crippled (the injured ankle, which also referred to the horseback riding acci-dent) so that she could only approach the gift of vision with the help of her husband who carried her towards it, holding her in both of his arms (not under one arm, as had happened in the previous episodes). The experience of the forest, she felt, "meant principally in my case a resto-ration to my own nature, through the contact with Nature. 'The forest was terrifying in the beginning because of my alienation from nature—both my own nature and Nature. All of its terrors are products of such alienation. It then follows that the closer one gets to one's nature, and to one's basic roots in Nature, the more the forest becomes home and its plants and creatures take on a friendly and lovely appearance. But man is something more than Nature, and must finally rise to some extent out of it, leaving behind him, although not without regret, some of its more primitive aspects—the things of the forest, for example. We have to keep our rapport with Nature, even while our own nature has to rise above it. The castle was, on another level, what man has built in rising above nature. It preserved its contact with Nature by remaining on the edge of the forest—but this second castle was 'above and be-yond' Nature, while the first castle, also on the forest's edges, was almost 'below' it, and showed me that man's nature is such that he may not only alienate himself from Nature, but also descend to an unnatural level where he goes beyond Nature by sinking to depths that leave him at the very bottom of everything, looking back up at what he has lost with mixed feelings of fear and regret. 'Then he has to 'climb back up' through the forest, which will be a terrible ordeal in the beginning. He has to re-experience all of Nature, good and evil alike, but then he at last becomes one with it, is at home there again, and is able to stand with one foot at least out of, and beyond, the forest."

In fact, the experiences of various drug subjects suggest that the forest often has such a meaning, and that the forest is peopled with ogres and other fearsome monsters about to the extent that the person (and perhaps the culture) has become estranged both from his own nature and from Nature. 'This sense of being estranged from one's own nature is also a fairly common one with the drug subjects. What they mean by this, it would seem, is a sense of having been deflected away from proper goals, of having become bogged down in "unnatural" pursuits—i.e., artificial and meaningless entertainments, striving for status through acquisition of "symbolic" things, etc.—and of having relinquished candor for hypocrisy, individual freedom for the security of the collective irresponsibility of the mass. The forest, then, is a place where individuation is restored, while at the same time the individual regains his sense of being one with that Nature of which he is a part and which is also the very ground upon which he stands. Individuality re-stored, and the sense of oneness with nature regained, the forest is depopulated of its monsters; then, if the experience is sufficiently pro-found, the person returns to a world that also has been depopulated of monsters, no longer experiencing himself as anxious or hostile where no real threat or enmity exists.

The forest in drug-state allegory also can be a place of childlike enchantment—a place where infantile wishes meet with immediate mag-ical gratification, where pleasures have about them the soft, moist qual-ity of dreamy suckling and no intensity intrudes to awaken even by the sharpness of rapture the voluptuous passivity. The security is of the womb or of a maturity-rejecting absorption in childish symbols having about them all the seriousness and substance of caramel-coated red apples and pink cotton candy. Here, the forest is dotted with Hansel and Crete] cottages and licorice trees, while Bambi-lilce fawns frolic in the pale green glades and an occasional resident dwarf or goblin peeps innocuously out from between bushes frosted with multi-colored icings. Sometimes the eidetic images of the forest resemble those Disney car-toon films in which real persons move against the artificial backgrounds or, conversely, comic-strip persons and animals move against a "real" background. 'This last, of course, is an extreme form—indicating an extreme regression on the part of the subject.

In less extreme versions of the fairy-tale enchanted forest the setting may function principally as a means of demonstrating quickly to the subject his immersion in immature attitudes which he must now go beyond. Then, the subject seeks to find his way out of the forest and his decision to do this is also a decision to "grow up" and assume the attitudes and responsibilities demanded by maturity.

In the following case we have an example of regression and "recog-nition" in the "enchanted forest" by a subject who saw her main prob-lem as an incapacity to love on a mature level—an incapacity she felt she had "extended" until she felt cut off in other areas of her life as well. This, in turn, had resulted in a "drinking problem," since only when slightly intoxicated did she feel capable of giving to others the large amounts of love, understanding, and concern that she wanted to give. She felt "blocked by something inside" of herself from giving this love of which she knew she was capable. And the "blocking" she attrib-uted to the negative influence of her mother, a rigid perfectionist, who had demanded that the subject adopt a stoic philosophy and ascetic way of life, along with goals so impossibly high that the subject could only fail repeatedly to achieve them and, then, finally rebel. But the mother's constant criticism had made the daughter extremely self-conscious, and the mother's belittling of emotional states as compared to "analytical reason," had taken its toll of the subject's capacity for emotional re-sponse. Although her mother had been dead for many years, the subject continued to have a strong sense of her mother's presence as a trauma-tizing influence, referring to her as "my Super Ego-Mind-Mother."

This subject, S-6, age thirty-nine, was the wife of an extremely successful lawyer (LSD: 200 micrograms). She had had three previous LSD sessions with another investigator. During one of these there had occurred a profound "rebirth" experience. This, she said, helped her considerably but did not give her in full measure the capacity for in-volvement or ability to love that she so much wanted. Subsequent un-guided experiences with peyote did not give her her "breakthrough" either. Psychotherapy indicated that S had no severe psychiatric problems but perhaps, in accordance with her early training, was trying to exceed her natural limitations and was drinking too much because of her frustration at her inability to do so. Her "drinking problem" was a problem only within her ovvn family. Otherwise, she was functioning in a superior way in her day to day life and gave the impression of a warm, vivacious and—ironically—much "involved" person. She understood that the session was not intended to be therapeutic but rather would require her co-operation in furthering the research of the guides. She expressed a particular hope that she would have a "religious experience."

About thirty minutes after having taken the LSD S experienced a variety of sensations. 'The roof of her mouth seemed to be dissolving and, at the same time, there was a heightening of sensitivity in the pelvic area. She then felt herself to be hollowed out "like an egg that has been punctured so that its insides are pouring out." 'This meant, she said, that "I am emptying out. I want to fill the emptiness with Oneness, with the 'Thinker-feeling synthesis. But do I want feeling even if it brings anxiety with it? A part of me would settle for peace." S was silent for about fifteen minutes and then said that she was "waiting for the curtain to go up." Shortly afterwards she found herself on a moor, where "a lovely, lambent, luminous mist swirled" around her and was "implicit with the promise of sunrise." It was a pearly gray mist and had "a quality of tenderness, of softness." S was happy there because she knew she had only to wait and the pale silver sun would rise when it was time. She fell silent again and, when asked how she felt, said: "I feel good. 'The sharp edges of me are gone . . . the edges that are always bumping into me. But this place where I am now is not where I'm going to be, it's just a place along the way."

About ten minutes later (and a little less than two hours into the session ), S announced that she was in "an enchanted forest." In this forest were all of the elements of the child's fantasy, although the fact escaped her at the time: Hansel and Gretel houses, candy trees, pastel landscapes. She had many innocuous adventures, proclaiming that she felt "like the protagonist of every myth that ever has been." One of these themes occurred repeatedly, as S began to sense that this soft, dreamy world might trap her and prevent her from reaching her goals. She spoke of Odysseus, enchanted by Circe, and unable to devise a way to escape the enchantment. The forest now became "a dangerous en-chantment . .. This isn't life. 'This is like being in a beautiful quicksand. I want to wake up! I have to wake upl"

For many hours, almost the whole day, S wandered in the forest, repeatedly seduced by its beauty only to rediscover her danger and cry out her need to "awaken from this dream-like enchantment." After several hours, asked what it was she wanted to awake to, she responded that: "'The mist is always here, but occasionally it lifts. 'Then I am able to see the Citadel, the Kingdom, and the Power and the Glory, high on a pinnacle in crystal-clear air. I long to reach it. I know that if I reach it I will experience awakening. The air will smell fresh and cool and the blossoms will be scented. I will feel as if I have taken a cold shower in magic water. There will be a coolness, a cleanness, a purity that I have never felt totally." 'Throughout the remainder of her session, S was largely caught up in a struggle to reach the Citadel. 'The forest-Citadel image was finally, at the very end of the session, replaced by another, similar image; but the session ended with S having failed to reach her ultimate goal.

In several follow-up reports S offered additional and instructive materials concerning her experience of the forest. She writes:

"First of all, the landscape the whole time was largely pink and white. 'The air was white, not translucent, and yet I could see perfectly. Perhaps I could better describe it by saying that there was a core of clarity in which I moved and which extended around me for some distance, but then the wall of white fog started, so that I was enclosed in a little world of my own clarity. This circle of clarity moved with me when I moved, rather like a spotlight following a player on a stage, so that I never actually went into the mist where I would have been blinded by it.

"The landscape (and all this was partly visual, partly 'mental' images) was Disney-like. . . . There were gingerbread houses, and spotted young deer like Bambi dancing through the forest. 'The trees had sort of Disney shapes and the people whose presence I felt, al-though I did not meet any, were Cinderellas, Sleeping Beautys, and Marys with their little lambs. All of this was quite charming. There was no feeling of lurking wolves to bother Little Red Riding Hood, or any kind of fairy-tale monsters. Hansel and Gretel were there someplace, but there wasn't a sign of the witch! There was, because of this, and because of the pink-and-whiteness, a real enchantment.

"'There came a time when I left the tiny world of clarity and went deeper into the white mist. At first, there was a peace, a cessation of striving, of struggle, a blissful nothingness; just swirling mist, shutting me off from discord, and strife, and noise, and confusion. I felt that I could rest there forever content, safely blanketed by the enveloping fog, provided for and protected from life.

"Meanwhile, back at the womb .

"Gradually this peace was disturbed. I began to resent the pervasive mist. I wanted to be free of its dinging tendrils, its staleness. I began to wander through it. . . . I began to come out of the mist and then I saw the Citadel, the impregnable place of real security, the home of Love and Purity and Awakening, high on a rocky peak, brilliant and glowing with jewel-deep colors in the unbelievably brilliant clarity of the air. I moved toward it, up the steep hill, until my body was in the clarity from the knees up. I couldn't see me below the knees; I was still enveloped in the white enshrouding mist.

"And that's as far as I gotl In my LSD sessions to date I have gone from being surrounded by a constricting black girdle to a gray barrel and now to a white fluid mist. Next time total clarity maybe?"

As indicated by her "Meanwhile, back at the womb . . ." remark, S subsequently recognized the regressive character of her experience of the forest. In communications written several weeks after her session, and which we here combine, she comments on this regression:

"That (Bambi, Cinderella, et al) part of the enchanted forest was childhood, immaturity. It was a world of superficial prettiness, of unreal values, of fairy tale rewards—a world, in short, that I suspect most of us inhabit. . . . I am amused in thinking of the prevalence of pink and white, the colors I tuned in on, although other colors were there. What else is a little girl's bedroom?

"I have since had a strange and lengthy dream and what I gleaned from it was this: The Disneyland core of the forest, which was sur-rounded by the dense mist was, in its own way, a land of enchantment. But it was the land of childhood or immaturity in which the inhabitants still believe in fairy-tale endings—`they married and lived happily ever after,' etc. As long as these illusions last the forest is a lovely place to live, and the air is good, and there are clear streams, and mushrooms and berries, and easy laws which everyone knows and obeys because those are the laws they want—the 'rules' of the 'game.' But there comes a time for some of us when this changes, when the air becomes noxious, the mushrooms turn into toadstools, the berries are poisonous, and the streams polluted. Then one must move on.

"Move on, if you like, on pure faith alone, leaving the core of enchantment and walking alone into the mist, seeking the Citadel. It is a hard thing to do. 'The forest's inhabitants are full of dire prophesies. 'You must not go,' they say. `No one who left has ever come back. There are monsters who live in the mist, and roots to trip you up, and quicksand to swallow you. If you go away from here, from us, you will die a horrible lonely death.'

"But what we know, we searchers, is that if we stay to eat the toadstools, to breathe the poisoned air, to drink the stale water, we will surely die. The risks hidden in the mist are better than certain death, and clarity and love and purity lie at the end of the mist.

"So we start our trip, armored only in the hope that if we dash our foot against a stone, Someone will support us.

"I think that those for whom the forest has become unlivable, but who, for lack of courage, or faith, or hope, stay behind, become our alcoholics, our drug addicts, our neurotics, and our psychotics—and, obviously, our suicides.

"Well, that's it, for what it may be worth to you. It is worth a great deal to me, and I am finding my way out of the mist."

Such are some of the meanings of the forest in this seventh decade of the twentieth century.

A Note on Consciousness and the Symbolic Drama. Participation by the subject in the symbolic drama requires the effective, harmonious coexistence and functioning of not less than seven distinct states or types of consciousness. These seven, to which others doubtless could be added, we will enumerate briefly as follows:

A residual environmental and "guardian" consciousness: monitors the symbolic drand but does not otherwise participate in its unfolding. This faint consciousness in effect stands sentinel in the "real world" in order that the person otherwise may become fully engaged in the sym-bolic sequence. It constitutes the subject's link with the "real world" and, in a way not disruptive of his engagement in the symbolic se-quence, is the means of his continuing awareness of himself as physi-cally existing in an objective environment distinct from the environment of the drama. It reminds him, too, that these psychical events in which he now more or less fully participates are on/y psychical, or imaginary, and have as their precondition the psychedelic drug he has taken. This residual environmental consciousness is able, should the need arise, to intrude itself vigorously to disrupt and even terminate the drama in case events in the external world require that the subject function in that world.

Imagistic consciousness: the consciousness that visually perceives the eidetic images (actually, the consciousness that is the eidetic images) and so seems to serve the person as his "organs of sight" in the world of the drama.

Dramatic consciousness: the consciousness that "thinks about" and lceeps track of' what is going on in the "world" of the symbolic sequence. It is more or less comparable to its counterpart in the every-day world with the exception that additional important functions are likely to be required of it. First, since the subject does not hear what is said by the persons who speak to one another in the drama, this con-sciousness is responsible for communication and serves, in effect, as the hearing apparatus and voice of the subject. To further clarify, it might be explained that there is in the drama no sense of telepathic or other extraordinary communication. Only in recollection is the subject likely to become aware that no words were spoken aloud or other sounds heard as they are in the course of life in the "real world." Rather, at the time of the drama, this aspect of the imaginary world seems perfectly natural and one has no sense of not speaking and hearing in the ordi-nary way. Moreover, when the eidetic images are lacking but the drama nonetheless unfolds, this consciousness has to serve also as the eyes of the subject, so that he knows the "visual" content of the experience in the same way that he knows the "auditory" content. In the absence of eidetic images, then, there will have to be "mental images" which seem to fall within the functional province of the dramatic consciousness. This consciousness also may affirm the there-ness of unseen presences and the occurrence of events not actually experienced in the drama. For example, S-6 "felt" that Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty and the others were in the forest, but S did not "meet" them.

Somatic consciousness: consciousness of sensations experienced in terms of the drama—pleasure and pain sensations, odors, etc., experi-enced in response to the imaginary dramatic stimuli. There also may be a residual normal somatic consciousness, providing the subject, for example, with a faint awareness of his body as touching the couch upon which he is lying.

Somatic-kinesthetic consciousness: consciousness of one's body as moving in response to the dramatic stimuli or in terms of the action of the drama. These movements are mostly token approximations, their range limited by the body's situation in the real world. Here, too, there may be a residual consciousness that these movements are being per-formed in the real world—upon this couch, and thus are visible to whatever other persons may be in the room. In some cases, this particu-lar residual consciousness then operates to inhibit movement, "advis-ing" the subject that his movements are such as later may be a cause of embarrassment, or perhaps that he is in danger of falling off the couch.

Affective consciousness: consciousness of responding emotionally to the dramatic stimuli. In addition to consciousness of making emo-tional responses appropriate to the events of the drama, there may be consciousness of another kind of affective state which has few parallels outside the psychedelic drug experience and, even there, is only met with under certain conditions. This is the affective consciousness expe-rienced in those instances where the drama reaches a resolution of the sort that may be transformative of the person. It is that affect experi-enced at the time when "everything falls into place," when the crucial relevance of the drama to the life stands revealed, or when this is about to occur. Here, the subject becomes acutely aware of a powerful emo-tional "atmosphere" or "climate" that seems to press heavily, but not at all unpleasantly, in upon him. It is as if, by sheer weight, this affect were exerting a pressure to impress upon his psyche the important insights being "given." 'This emotion, unlike some experienced in terms of specific dramatic events, is "quiet," but it is not for that reason any the less profound or forceful. Since it is almost always a very different affective consciousness from any experienced apart from certain symbolic- and integral-level drug-state stages, it is difficult, if not impos-sible, to describe to the person who has not experienced it. But the intense affect somehow manages to convey to the subject a sense of controlled prevoluntary purposiveness and complete beneficence.

"Spiritual" consciousness: this state of consciousness, the experi-encing of which we feel well may have contributed to the idea of an in-dwelling human "spirit," is a strange and almost always hitherto unex-perienced awareness carrying with it a curious nonspatial and a-temporal "flavor of eternity." The consciousness discloses itself in the subject's gradually intensifying sense of participation in the drama through a psychical component of the self of which no previous aware-ness existed and which is sensed as having as a precondition of its emergence the falling away of the spatial, temporal and other existential categories serving to delimit the existent in the "real world." The con-sciousness then is finally of universals, of essences and noumena some-how constituting the ground of the subject's, and of the world's, particu-lar existence. Again, we have here an awareness which emerges with few exceptions only under certain conditions of the symbolic and more uniformly throughout the experiencing of the integral level. Almost always unprecedented in the experience of the subject, it will rarely have any precedent in the experience of the reader either, so that we may be trying against insurmountable odds to communicate what is incommunicable and requires to be experienced.

This orchestration of states of consciousness should be kept in mind when, in the next chapter, we consider the authentic varieties of the religious and mystical experience.

In the psychedelic experience the progressive deepening and ulti-mate transformation of conscious life are less the result of self-transcendence "towards the world" than of the gathering enrichment consequent upon increasing knowledge with improved understanding of more of what the self contains within itself. In the case of the symbolic drama the expansion basically involves a movement beyond the limits of the particular-personalistic and towards the personal-universal—a movement towards broadening contexts and more universal formula-tions that has, however, as its precondition the achieving of adequate knowledge with sufficient understanding of that which then may be surpassed.

As we have shown, if the subject has been able to confront and then go beyond the significant literal and empirically grounded data of his life, he then may move to a level of possible symbolic encounter with broader and more profound aspects of his nature. Here, the self reveals itself to consciousness more completely than has been possible hitherto, with consciousness "living" the ensuing symbolic drama in terms of patterns that have become simultaneously personal and universal. Be-yond the surface and the literal, then, seems to lie in potentia for con-sciousness the self's larger vision and comprehension of itself; and, also in potentia, a dynamism possible of drug-state (and possibly non-drug-state) activation and which, to the analytical consciousness, increas-ingly represents itself as an entelechy now "liberated," activated, and functioning. Further, this entelechy appears to achieve its effects by means of symbolic systems most often formally structured along archaic lines as myths, rituals and other motile and plastic forms appropriate to the end of realizing the transformation of the particular in the universal.

VVhen one inquires as to why this entelechy emerges clothed in the archaic symbolism of the mythic form it further may be suggested that in the symbolic mythic drama (as in the drug-state religious experi-ence) consciousness is confronted with a context one of the essential characteristics of which is a primordial state wherein space and time remain undifferentiated; that this primordial state is characteristic of the deepest levels of the psyche; and that the mythic drama is just that temporally and spatially undifferentiated form into which consciousness most easily and effectively may be drawn with the result that a new consciousness is born. Moreover, consciousness, no sooner entering as participant into the drama, finds itself also in this primordial "eternal" state which by disallowing the preconditions of individuation (i.e., par-ticularity in real space and time), allows for involvement in the univer-sal myth as distinguished from the strictly individual factual or fictional sequence and in the essential as distinguished from the exclusively par-ticular existential reality.

That the symbolic dramas occur on a depth level of the psyche "deeper" than that on which occur such phenomena as revivification of past experiences, recovery of lost memories, and other factual historical materials seems evident both on the basis that the latter recollective-analytic level materials and experiences characteristically precede the symbolic level phenomena and are a prerequisite in most cases of mean-ingful symbolic level experience, and also on the basis that the trans-formative effects of the recollective-analytic experiences and materials, like their counterparts in psychoanalytic psychotherapy, provide in-sights essential to growth, remission of symptoms, and even elimination of neuroses, but cannot abruptly and in a fundamental and positive way transform the individual as may the symbolic level experiences and, still more, the experiences on the yet deeper integral leve1.12

Thus, in providing a means of access to these deeper symbolic and integral levels of the psyche the psychedelic drugs open up the possibil-ity of working in areas little or not at all touched by psychoanalysis and other therapies unable to penetrate beyond those psychical levels where the encounter is with the literal life-history materials and related affect; they also open up the possibility of work on these levels that aims not at restoring the sick to health, but at enabling the comparatively healthy to realize growth potentials thwarted by processes science has not yet even begun to describe, much less to understand.

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