Drug Abuse

One: Some Varieties of the Psychedelic Experience

The once impenetrable mysteries of matter have begun to unfold and to point to consequences still incomprehensible to thought and beyond the farthest reaches of vision. Unlocked by such keys as the work of Ein-stein and Heisenberg the gates of the physical universe open upon pos-sibilities that already have resulted in the drastic transformation of man's position not only with respect to his own planet, but also to the measureless vastness around it.

Now, as research advances, the psychedelic (mind-manifesting) drugs give promise of providing access to another of the great and hitherto largely impenetrable realms—the vast, intricate, and awesome regions we call mind. Our own research, which will be described here, like all other research in this area, can be no more than an early, tentative exploration. Even so, we hope to make entirely credible our belief that the psychedelic drugs afford the best access yet to the con-tents and processes of the human mind.

Much already has been written about the psychedelic drugs as they have been used in the treatment of severely disturbed individuals. The present volume, however, is principally concerned with the psychedelic drug-state as it is experienced by the comparatively normal individual- the "average person" rather than the psychotherapist's patient. It is, then, the remarkable range and richness of the inner life of normal individuals, as revealed in purposeful, controlled drug sessions, that will be described. And the effort will be made to detail means by which the average person may pass through new dimensions of awareness and self-knowledge to a "transforming experience" resulting in actualization of latent capacities, philosophical reorientation, emotional and sensory at-homeness in the world, and still other changes beneficial to the person. We also will try to make unmistakably clear the enormous potential importance of psychedelic research for many scholarly and scientific disciplines. And, while our major concern has not been with exploring the many implications for therapy, we believe so abundant and novel a detailing of the contents and processes of mind cannot fail to interest those whose business is the mind in its various conditions of distress. Especially, this may be the case since the data so strongly suggest a tendency or impetus towards self-actualization, that can be set into motion and then may carry the person to a high degree of self-fulfill-ment in the psychedelic drug experience.

The dimensions of human fantasy life revealed here should, we think, have a liberating effect upon many persons who may find a greater degree of self-acceptance once they have understood what a complicated being is man and how many and varied are his ideas, imaginings and tendencies, in health as well as in sickness. We hope that equally beneficial will be this first detailed presentation of a Western-oriented, non-mystical phenomenology and approach to the direction of the psychedelic session.

That there are dangers in the use of these drugs is something we very well appreciate and many of those dangers will be pointed out and described. However, where we think alleged dangers have been exag-gerated or otherwise misrepresented, that aspect, too, will be discussed. Here, we will remark that we emphatically do not agree with those who would make these drugs available to everyone, or almost everyone, to use tinder any conditions at all. The psychedelic experience is one that has to be responsibly directed if it is to be of maximum benefit to the drug subject. The same responsible direction should eliminate the dan-ger of psychological damage to the subject and should minimize the frequency as well as the intensity of some painful experiences always possible in the drug-state and which we will discuss along with the other phenomena.

To be hopeful and optimistic about the psychedelic drugs and their potential is one thing; to be messianic is another. Both the present and the future of psychedelic research already have been grievously injured by a messianism that is as unwarranted as it has proved undesirable. The present work, then, should be understood as hopeful and optimistic, but realistic.

The materials here presented are based upon first-hand observation of 206 drug sessions and upon interviews with another 214 persons who have been volunteer subjects, psychotherapy patients, or who have ob-tained and taken the drugs on their own. Our own work, covering a combined total of more than fifteen years, has been very largely with two of the psychedelic drugs: LSD-25 and peyote.' The former is a synthetic chemical substance more lengthily known as d-lysergic acid diethylamide. The latter is a cactus plant (Lophophora
found in the American Southwest and contains a number of alkaloids, the best known and most important of these being mescaline.

LSD and peyote are potent psycho-chemicals that alter and expand the human consciousness. Even the briefest summation of the psycho-logical effects of these drugs would have to include the following: Changes in visual, auditory, tactile, olfactory, gustatory, and kinesthetic perception; changes in experiencing time and space; changes in the rate and content of thought; body image changes; hallucinations; vivid images—eidetic images—seen with the eyes closed; greatly heightened awareness of color; abrupt and frequent mood and affect changes; heightened suggestibility; enhanced recall or memory; depersonalization and ego dissolution; dual, multiple, and fragmentized consciousness; seeming awareness of internal organs and processes of the body; up-surge of unconscious materials; enhanced awareness of linguistic nuances; increased sensitivity to nonverbal cues; sense of capacity to communicate much better by nonverbal means, sometimes including the telepathic; feelings of empathy; regression and "primitivization"; appar-ently heightened capacity for concentration; magnification of character traits and psychodynamic processes; an apparent nakedness of psycho-dynamic processes that makes evident the interaction of ideation, emo-tion, and perception with one another and with inferred unconscious processes; concern with philosophical, cosmological, and religious ques-tions; and, in general, apprehension of a world that has slipped the chains of normal categorical ordering, leading to an intensified interest in self and world and also to a range of responses moving from ex-tremes of anxiety to extremes of pleasure. 'These are not the only effects of the psychedelic drugs, biA the listing should suffice to convey some idea of the potency of the drugs and the range of the experiences they afford.

Concerning our use of the term "psychedelic," meaning mind-manifesting„ first proposed in this connection by Humphry Osmond, we have used it in preference to such other current terms as "halluci-nogenic" and "psychotomimetic" (mimicking a psychosis) because it is both more accurate and less pejorative than those others. And while it may be vague, "psychedelic" does have the merit of being comprehen-sive. We will make occasional use, when appropriate, of the terms "hallucinogenic" and "psychotomimetic," since it is true that halluci-natory and psychosis-like phenomena do emerge in some of the drug sessions. But the main interest of the authors should be understood to lie in exploring the full range of the consciousness-changing aspects of the psychedelic experience and in recording the phenomenology of that experience.

Turning now to the forthcoming examples of psychedelic drug expe-riences, it is not possible to say that they are "typical." Every such experience is in many significant ways very individual and depends for its structure and content upon what the subject brings to the session in the way of personal history and frame of reference—"who he is" at that time. The other principal determinants of the experience will be the physical environment and the other person or persons present, most notably the guide conducting the session. The drug itself makes certain experiences possible; but rarely would it be accurate to say that the drug in any other sense determined a particular experience.

Finally, before passing on to the examples, something should be said about the remarkably high quality of the writing of those drug subjects who have given us first-person accounts of their psychedelic experiences. In many cases, the style is worthy of a professional author and the idea content is almost equally impressive. As others before us have noted, this surprising display of literary talent is not at all uncom-mon among former psychedelic subjects writing accounts of their expe-riences, and we think the reasons for it are clear. First of all, the subject has had what he regards as an enormously impressive and important experience and this valuation of the experience provides a very high degree of motivation to describe the session well and to try to convey to others the details, flavor, and impact of what occurred. Also, the psy-chedelic experience almost always is so unusual and richly various that all the materials are at hand for a vivid prose statement that requires no imagination to construct while, at the same time, the contents seem to the writer to rival the creative productions of even the most imaginative authors. In the case of our own subjects, it is relevant, too, that many were persons of superior intelligence and considerable education. More-over, many were educators, clergymen, attorneys, and other such per-sons whose day-to-day work demands a fairly high degree of verbal facility.

Example No. 1. 'This contains no especially unusual elements but does describe a good many of the more common components of the psychedelic experience. Of particular interest is the summation by the subject (S), at the end of his account, of the reasons why he considers the term "consciousness-expanding" to be warranted.
S, a thirty-six-year-old assistant professor of English literature, had his peyote session in the company of the guide and S's wife, neither of whom took the drug. Several pre-session interviews and some corre-spondence and other reading had prepared S for his experience and eliminated misconceptions and most of the anxiety concerning it. S's own account follows:

"My peyote experience began in a house on a farm in the rugged hill country of Northwest Arkansas. A kind of tea had been brewed from the green 'buttons' or tops of the cactus plants and I had no trouble consuming an amount the guide told me was sufficient. The Dramamine I took ahead of time apparently was instrumental in keeping the hour or so of nausea within manageable proportions.

"Apart from this nausea and some feelings of being alternately too hot and too cold, no effects of the drug were noticeable for about one and one-half hours from the time of consumption. Then I suddenly became extremely aware of the croaking of frogs and then of the chirping of crickets. The former came from a stream about a block or so away from the house but sounded very close and I fancied that the frogs had come down to stand before the door and serenade me.

"Darkness had come on almost unnoticed and my attention was first called to the dimness of the light when my wife got up to turn on a small lamp that was standing on a table in one corner of the room. Very shortly after this I saw moving toward me across the room a ball of red fire about the size of a golf ball. It drifted, swaying a little from side to side, while moving toward me at about the level of my shoulders as I was seated in a chair. I felt no uneasiness, only interest, and when the ball of fire had come close enough I poked at its center with my finger. It then exploded, a lavish shower of multicolored sparks cascading and dropping on the rug at my feet. I smiled happily at the others and remarked: 'It has started. Now let's see what kind of traveler I am going to make.'

"Ever since I first had heard of the peyote I had wanted to observe the effects of such a drug on myself. I sought no particular experience but I expected to have a happy and interesting time and also possibly to learn a good bit about my own psychology. The beautiful images some writers have described were something I hoped would be a part of my experience. While outside the house were lovely natural surroundings that later I planned to explore.

"To see if the images would come I closed my eyes and perceived at first a succession of geometric forms, mostly circles and triangles. 'The colors were soft pastels and aroused in me a kind of emotional warmth that encompassed my wife, the guide and all of my surroundings and remained with me throughout most of the session. This warmth was accompanied by a sensation of relaxing muscles, although the mind kept very much alert and alive. Then began the images I had wanted to see, brilliantly colored and drenched in white and golden light. Also, objects in the images seemed to generate a light of their own and cast off glowing and pulsating or rippling waves of color. 'The first image I remember was of an Egyptian tomb made of granite, alabaster and marble. Behind it great golden sculptures of pharaohs rose to awesome heights and there was the fragrance of eucalyptus burning in brass bowls mounted upon tripods of iron that had the feet of falcons. Priests in ornate headdress ringed the tomb and raised their arms to greet a procession of many brightly robed figures bearing torches and with faces obscured by masks resembling the heads of various beasts. Funer-ary orations seemed to blend into marriage ceremonies where fruit and great platters of meat, even the forbidden pig, were served up by fierce glistening black slaves. The platters were placed upon massive stone steps leading to a dais upon which were seated royal figures in carved black chairs whose arms were the heads of solemn cats.

"From a distance, after that, I saw pyramids and knew that in one of these the ceremony just observed was unfolding. But the pyramids were transformed into haystacks, golden under a huge red sun, and then these became dunes in a great desert. Here, tents were clustered half-buried by swirling stinging sands. Inside one of these, in appropriate garb, my wife and I were seated on pillows of camel's hair. Girls in filmy garments were dancing, their dark eyes flashing above gleaming white teeth. There were tambourines, a drum, and strange stringed in-struments, playing a music I could hear and that seemed intended to lay bare and set quivering the elemental passions of the listeners. Swarthy, scowling, bearded men were ranged near the tent's entrance. They had black, glaring eyes, wore daggers, and some held naked swords in lean weather-beaten hands.

"In many of the images that came to me I saw myself, sometimes with my wife, more often alone. I was a fur-capped Mongol huntsman, cold-eyed and cruel, bow in hand, striking down a running rabbit from the back of a racing, gaunt half-wild stallion. I was a stark black-robed figure, protected by an amulet suspended from a heavy gold chain that was worn about my neck, somberly wandering, lost in bitter ascetic reflection, among the crumbling walls of old temples overgrown by thick, twisted and gnarled vines. At other times there were legions of warriors, darkening deserts or in ranks that extended across immense bone-littered plains. There were brown-cowled monks, pacing cloisters in silent, shared but unadmitted desperation. Image after image after image, flowing in succession more rapid than I would have wished, but all exquisitely detailed and with colors richer and more brilliant than those either nature or the artist has yet managed to create.

"Again and again I returned to the images, so numerous I could not begin to recount them, but in between times many other curious phe-nomena came to my attention. So extended was time that once it seemed to me I lighted a cigarette, smoked it for hours, looked down and noticed that the cigarette still had its first ash. A few moments were hours, possibly longer, and any one event seemed to take almost no time at all. I remarked to my wife that We are out of time, but that is not to say that time has run out.' What meant was that, in the moment when I spoke, time's fingers had ceased their nervous, incessant strum-ming upon the space that contained us. But that space was—how can one put it?—irregular. A space that expanded and contracted and im-posed upon us (actually, of course, upon me) the arbitrary quickening rhythms of its pulsations. For, as I remarked, this timeless space was a bubble, and would burst. 'Then I experienced a dull sort of sadness, since I wanted to remain forever out of time. Or, if not that, then in a world of moments which, like those I was experiencing, were enor-mously extended. I wanted to know that those moments would not, in some instant to be dreaded, snap back like an elastic drawn out for a while but then released as if God were punishing some pleasure so great as to be an unforgivable transgression.

"I believe it was simultaneous with this that I became aware of the body that encased me as being very heavy and amorphous. Inside it, everything was stirring and seemed to be drawing me inward. I felt that I could count the beats, the throbbing of my heart, feel the blood moving through my veins, feel the passage of the breath as it entered and left the body, the nerves as they hummed with their myriad mes-sages. Above all, I was conscious of my brain as teemingly alive, cells incredibly active, and my mental processes as possessing the unity of perfect precision. Yet this last, I suspected, was not really true and instead my mind, 'drunk on its own ideas,' was boastfully over-estimat-ing its prowess.

"Sensations were acute. I heard, saw, felt, smelled and tasted more fully than ever before (or since). A peanut butter sandwich was a delicacy not even a god could deserve. Yet, I took only a few bites and was too full to eat more. To touch a fabric with one's fingertip was to simultaneously know more about both one's fingertip and the fabric than one had ever known about either. It was also to experience intense touch-pleasure and this was accentuated even further when, at the guide's suggestion, I 'localized consciousness' in the fingertip with the consequence that all phenomena at that point were greatly enhanced.

"I took my wife's hand and it seemed to me a great force of love flowed through my hand into hers, and also from her hand into mine, and that then this love was diffused throughout our bodies. Her smile, her whole face was beautiful beyond description, and I wondered if I would be able to see her like this when the drug experience had ended.

"Together we walked to one end of the room, where a large repro-duction of Rousseau's Sleeping Gypsy was hanging on the wall. Try as I might I could not at that time decide if the Gyspy was a man or a woman, but my wife said 'A man,' and I accepted her judgment. Study-ing the bulging-eyed beast in that painting, I saw that its mane is all dendrites and energy pulses through each branch and is transmitted to the brain of the sleeping Gypsy. The beast seemed to be sniffing, while the moon shimmered and winked and smiled, and the strings of the instrument that lay upon the ground were plucked by an invisible hand. I saw that in the painting gray-green waters never stir to wash upon brown sands. 'The sleep of the Gypsy was endless. The beast hovered, rooted forever in its place, and the life that I now breathed into that scene gave new life to me but not to those figures transfixed in captive immortality projected by a brain long since gone to its rest and returned to the dust. Better, I said, to be a live beholder than to be a great artist in his grave. Better life, than to be an immortal but immobile Gypsy or moon or sea or beast. My life suddenly seemed to me infinitely precious and I cried out with joy at the thought that I was now living so much in so short a span of time.

"Later, we walked in the woods and by the river and it seemed that my love was so great it evoked a response from animals, birds and plants, and even from inanimate things. On the river bank, as the sky began to brighten, I threw my arms around my wife and at once the birds broke into a song that bespoke a universal harmony always exist-ing but requiring that one approach it in a certain way before it can reveal itself. The silver-surfaced river, bathed in fresh dawnlight, re-flected trees reaching down as if yearning toward the heart of the earth. The leaves of the trees were as intricately patterned as great snowflakes and at other times resembled webs spun by God-inspired spiders of a thread of unraveled emeralds. The beauty of nature was such that I cannot describe it, although I have managed to retain some measure of the feeling it awakened in me.

"Along with all this there were torrents of ideas, some amplifica-tions of my own past thinking, but others that were strange and entered my mind as if from without. At the house, when we returned and the effects were much less, it seemed to me that what I had experienced was essentially, and with few exceptions, the usual content of experience but that, of everything, there was MORE. This MORE is what I think must be meant by the 'expansion of consciousness' and I jotted down at that time something of this MORE I had experienced.

"The consciousness-expanding drugs, I wrote then, enable one to sense, think and feel MORE.
"Looking at a thing one sees MORE of its color, MORE of its detail, MORE of its form.
"Touching a thing, one touches mom. Hearing a sound, one hears MORE. Tasting, one tastes MORE. Moving, one is MORE aware of move-ment. Smelling, one smells MORE.
"The mind is able to contain, at any given moment, MORE. Within consciousness, MORE simultaneous mental processes operate without any one of them interfering with the awareness of the others. Awareness has MORE levels, is many-dimensioned. Awareness is of MORE shades of meaning contained in words and ideas.
"One feels, or responds emotionally with MORE intensity, MORE depth, MORE comprehensiveness.
"There is MORE of time, or within any clock-measured unit of time, vastly MORE occurs than can under normal conditions.
"There is MORE empathy, MORE unity with people and things.
"There is MORE insight into oneself, MORE self-knowledge.
"There are MORE alternatives when a particular problem is consid-ered, MORE choices available when a particular decision is to be made. There are MORE ways of 'looking at' a thing, an idea or a person ..."

In an appraisal of the effects of his session, made about five months later, S said that his view of the psychedelic experience as "essentially a MORE" still seemed to him to be valid. VVhat he had "carried away from" his session was "above all a feeling of very great enrichment." He retained "a more acute awareness of color, a much increased apprecia-tion of the great beauty of my wife, and a wonderful awareness of the almost infinite detail that objects will yield up if only one will give them one's attention."

Most important of all, S thought, was "the knowledge and certainty I now have that it is truly possible to attain to a sense of harmony with all creatures and things." He felt that this sense of harmony as he had experienced it during his session provides the person with "a strength, serenity and capacity for loving not possible when the experience of harmony is wanting." S was having some success at "re-invoking" the harmonious state and making it a part of his everyday life. He felt that this must be done without the "invaluable help of peyote which shows one the way but then, quite properly, leaves one to follow that way through one's own efforts. This has to be so, since the way pointed out has its application in this world, not in the peyote wonder-world." S added that his experiencing of the "universal harmony and what it confers was the richest single event of my session and probably, also, of my life."2

In evaluating the session just described, we regarded it as being a very positive and pleasant one for the subject. However, it was not one of those more profound experiences met with in the drug-state in which the subject confronts himself on the deepest levels of his being, receives some basic insight or understanding, and emerges transformed in some fundamental way.

Possibly these deeper levels were not reached because the subject had no need to reach them. His adjustment already was superior and this is reflected in the thoroughly wholesome or healthy-minded charac-ter of his session. Few psychedelic experiences are so free of "negative" elements as this one, although all of our subjects had to meet such basic requirements as: 1) successful present functioning; 2) absence of de-tectable signs of psychosis or serious neurosis; 3) absence of past history of major mental illness; and 4) adequate preparation for and posi-tive expectations concerning the drug experience.

We would add that when these and a few other preconditions are met and when the session is adequately managed, the chances of any subject's "getting into trouble" are reduced to very slight proportions.

Example No. 2. The second example to be presented is of an un-guided "session." 'The "subject" was, of course, not observed during his experience, but he was interviewed subsequently on several occasions and at length. He also submitted a written report of his experience.

We present an example of an unguided dnig experience both so that it may be compared in certain respects with the examples of guided ones and because it illustrates some of the more common painful and delusive varieties of ideation and perception met with in the sessions. Most of these negative aspects will not be found in the other examples given in this chapter, but will be further exemplified and discussed later on. In general, the negative aspects of the experience occur less often and in much milder form in the properly guided session than in the unguided or mismanaged one.

In this case, S, a male university student, age twenty-two, obtained a supply of LSD by "borrowing" it from his older brother, a physician. He took a very strong dose of the drug (estimated afterwards to have been 400 to 500 micrograms) and experienced what he believes was a "transient psychosis." The following is a condensed account by S of his experience:

"I had been thinking for some time about having some LSD. I finally made a decision and at about nine o'clock in the morning I went to the refrigerator where my brother kept a supply and took what I thought would be a sufficient amount. The amount, as I soon discov-ered, was more than sufficient! For the next ten hours I moved through a world that sometimes was beautiful and intensely interesting, but more often resembled a nightmare. For four of those hours I seem to have an almost complete amnesia. The experience as a whole I regard as a temporary psychotic distortion of consciousness.

"The experience did not begin badly. At first there was a very strange sense that all perception and abstract cognition had become lcinesthetic—that these were no more than extensions of one's neuro-muscular being. Then came a profound sense of the tragic and comical aspects of life, with a sense of walking around inside of my own brain.

"I closed my eyes and at once there appeared to me a great variety of Egyptian motifs, statues and bas relief forms with a rigorous sym-metry. Everything was very precise and geometrical. When I opened my eyes and looked at the objects around me, it was as if they were made of tallow and were melting. There was a drippiness of colors, and it also seemed that these things might be made of waxen candy. It occurred to me that this was probably due not only to my heightened awareness of objects, but also to the liquid in my eyes that now imparted to every-thing a liquid coating. Along with these perceptions there was the sense of the intense sensuality of oneself, an extremely luxurious sensuality.

"I had several hallucinations that I recognized as such. At one point elves appeared and accepted me as a jolly fellow spirit. They spoke to me in verse and wanted to guide me to magical places—to castles and mythological realms. Many different personalities, all of them part of oneself, became autonomous and spoke of various things. There was a great concern with personal destiny and a sense that the total attention and concern of the universe was focused upon me. I thought that I was participating in a test, was being observed, and that the observing forces were benevolent. All people seemed to me to be no more than simply different forms of oneself, different masks of oneself. They were all of the different lives that one has, or that one is to live. And there was the sense that the world has no greater claim to substance than does a dream; that all authority, all validity rests with oneself and the world is entirely one's possession. Later, when I went out, this resulted in a total unconcern for social forms, such as not sitting down on the sidewalk or in the street; for now one knew that the sidewalk was a part of one's brain and one could do with it what one liked.

"My solipsism  was accompanied by delusions of grandeur not logi-cally consistent with it, yet reconcilable for the reason that they had a logic of their own. Although I was the All, I participated in the test of living that somehow was connected with the training of the fixture God. I was awed by the stereoscopic solidity of reality, the sheer substan-tiality of it all. Yet reality was my own thought and I was struck with wonder that one's thoughts could suddenly become so substantive and stereoscopic. I congratulated myself upon being able to create reality so well. I felt that others should be grateful to me for supporting their existence. I was holding them up, containing them, giving them air. I was benevolent, and did not kick them.

"I went out and walked through the streets where people were experienced as epiphenomena  of oneself. They were also waxen me-chanical toys, part of a mechanical toy process and were made out of candy. (This may have been because they were seen as having the bright colors of those little candies that are sometimes made in images of persons.) People were an utter absurdity as they went about their rituals, which I contained completely and knew to be absurd in their circularity, unconstructiveness and superstitiousness. But they went about their rituals with a sense of absolute self-righteousness, hilarious zombies who failed to recognize me as the one who beneficently sup-ported their existence. I forgave them for failing to recognize me, know-ing them to be as ignorant as children or animals. I took in the world as my private menagerie, a banquet I have provided for myself. It occurred to me to give them commands, but I knew it was better that I respect their ignorance; at the same time I was telling myself: 'You are under drugs and in a psychotic state and had better be as withdrawn and restrained as possible in a world that is liable to blow up if you make the wrong move.'

"The streets bounce, of course. The world is experienced as a physi-cal extension of oneself, of one's own nervous system. Consequently I felt the blows of pick axes wielded by construction men tearing up the street. One possessed a kinesthetic identity with the street, and yet the blows did not hurt. For the street knows in its own being that it is being broken up and yet does not experience the judgment of pleasure or pain. Related to this was an acute awareness of energy in the world. One felt one's body to be supercharged with 'energy,' a word that was variously associated with 'nervous' and 'spirit.' Or it could be associated with tension of the spirit. The other, when it is person, is supercharged with energy like neonized electric generators, sizzling firecrackers as distin-guished from the other when it is object and is perceived as static electricity. Only water fountains, among things, have energy. Other objects are frozen.

"The persona of people, I thought, are not to be respected. With this thought, they became the absence of materiality—smiling ghosts. However, they are similar to oneself and therefore are no more to be respected than oneself, or feared or approved of. All of my ideas about politics, religion, state and race were, at this point, embellished. I thought about all of the perversions of myself, by which I meant the rest of humanity. 'These perversions were not to be hated, just to be pitied and forgotten. They are the dead-end of evolution.

"I noticed that events in the world occurred or started just where one's own thought left off. One could think 'It's getting warrn,' and then naturally someone just behind you would say 'It's getting warm.' One always anticipates—no, knows—the next stage, the next link in the process, or something in the world may take up at the point anticipated by one's thought. For example, I created a symphonic structure that reached a peak calling for a solo instrument, but there I broke off and at once was answered by an event in the world that was the objective resolution in the world of my subjective harmonies. 'This event was a man who came up to me and asked 'Are you all right, buddy?' This was the completion of the symphony, and I had anticipated his words and even his very tone of voice.

"A phenomenon of importance under the drug is the non-connective tactile awareness of things that consists of an extension of visual aware-ness to incorporate tactile awareness into its scope. 'The substance of a , thing was both seen and felt through the visual perception. And along with this there was the sense that one must speak to beauty and com-mune with beauty in all of its forms, including persons. This included not just pretty girls, but also trees. A major revelation was that of the spiritual nature of trees: the obedient benevolence of trees. One was obliged to commune with them, and with statues. 'This imperative was part of a larger imperative that seemed to stand out absolutely from all other thought as the one overriding imperative statement: That one must seek God. 'The beautiful is a part of the imperative that one must approach the Godhead. This was the ultimate procedural prescription. All of the rest of thought was dispensable and this prescription alone could guide one. Related to this was the falling away of all the normal power and authority sanctions and seeming rightness of familiar social and prescriptive forms of behavior and purpose and attitude. These melted away with awareness of what was truly important, valid and authoritative. Since there was no reason not to, I sat down in the middle of a busy sidewalk and let people pass around me. I noticed that man-nikins in windows were smiling and Elizabeth Taylor from an enormous poster advertising the film Cleopatra several times gestured for me to come to her.

"I got onto the subway thinking that I would ride it to the end of the line. At once these words, 'end of the line,' assumed awesome and multiple proportions. I felt drawn and impelled toward this 'end of the line' where Some Thing was waiting, and beckoning. I felt that I might find there fulfillment or destruction, or both. I recognized now that always at the core of the experience there had been this nightmarish rhythm of acceleration toward some impending unknown. Even so, there was some part of oneself that held to one's sense of mature sobriety.

"I remembered a patient described by my brother. He was schizo-phrenic, oblivious to circumstances and to his orientation in the world, and concerned himself only with considering what was going on in his head—a 'buzzing' in his head, as if it contained a nest of hornets. Now, with all of the stimuli from the environment swarming in upon me, I also felt my internal state to be one of a vast and bti;zing colony of bees. Tingling, vibratory feelings overwhelmed my nervous system and I felt myself lifted upwards toward some unknown bliss or terror.

"I left the subway and lay down on a bench in a park and it was there that I lost my four hours. I had long nightmare dreams that came to me in a state that was different from sleeping but still somehow resembled it. These dreams, I think I have forgotten in self-defense against their horror. Yet I recall that they were just as vivid and real as conscious experience, but had gross although somehow symmetrical distortions as one would go through the same motions countless times. One would walk through the same door again and again, endlessly passing out through the door. There was a sense of the normal world having run riot and that it was now transformed into its antithesis. At other times, I 'awakened' into increasingly incredible and terrifying worlds. It seems to me that giant elevator shafts extended down into the infinite and insane-looking men kept passing into the elevators and coming out again—the same men, over and over. I sensed that I was moving toward some final undefined cataclysm of total damnation, but then awakened into what I supposed was another of the nightmare worlds and discovered that instead it was the 'real world.' The vividness and verisimilitude of the dream world is demonstrated by the length of time it took me to realize that now I was back in the 'real world.' From this point on, the drug intoxication diminished steadily and I made my way back home. Afterwards I felt that I had been in a feverish, dnmken state that had left me with a head tied in knots and a feeling of shell-shock, or possibly a feeling like that of one who is undergoing with-drawal from a schizophrenic state.

"I felt also that things might have been much worse: That in the drug intoxication one might lose one's sense of balance and be in utter terror and helplessness before the nature of the universe—just as, for instance, should one lose one's sense of gravitational balance, of upness and downness, one would find oneself in terrified estrangement from the normally beneficent, supporting terrestrial environment."

Several things need to be said about S's account of an experience that contained psychosis-like elements if it was not, as he believes, an actual temporary psychosis. First of all, while the drug experience was definitely a very bad one, it also contained (as interviews brought out) a good many positive elements that S has played down in his account and which suggest that the "psychosis" may have been sporadic and intermittent, rather than continuous. It is characteristic of those persons who have painful experiences with psychedelic drugs that they attack the experience with great vehemence. 'Thus S, in his summation, insists that the "cosmic and mystical unions some drug subjects claim to expe-rience in the drug-state are always [our italics] mere chemically imbal-anced, epileptic-type states." And that all of the drug-state insights "are the insights of madness, which may or may not be valid but whose validity only can be determined by one in a normal state of conscious-ness."

The unfortunate experience of this subject almost certainly resulted in the main from several crucial factors. First of all, S would not have been accepted by a responsible researcher as a volunteer subject. Al-though a very brilliant young man, he has a history of petit mal seizures and this alone would have been a basis for disqualification. Secondly, he took the drug with the expectation of experiencing a "model psychosis"; and this expectation, as the scientific literature makes painfully evident, is frequently fulfilled. Third, not only did he have no supportive and directional guidance, but he exposed himself to a variety of stress situa-tions that generated anxiety and accentuated his pathological ideation.

In the following example we offer a first-person account of an LSD experience that was thoroughly pleasurable to the subject, but compara-tively innocuous. The drug was administered by a guide who was on hand for the session, but whose role was only to provide support and to deal with difficulties should any arise (as they did not). S, apart from the few tests she was given was allowed complete free rein to experience what she would and her session, although she tenned it rewarding, was relatively shallow and in that sense typical of sessions where the guide does no real guiding, only observes and, by his presence, enables the subject to feel more secure than she might feel otherwise.

Exam* No. 3. S, a twenty-four-year-old university instructor, was given 225 micrograms of LSD. (She had had one previous LSD experi-ence with a 100-microgram dose.) Her account is as follows:

"'The experience began in my fourth floor walk-up in Greenwich Village. After the initial physical sensations (a very mild nausea and stiffness of the neck) had passed, I began to notice that the wooden floor had started to ripple. I walked across the floor, climbing up its steep waves and sliding down its inclines. Occasionally, I would catch one of its oaken crests and ride it to the wall in much the same way that a surf rider travels on the waves.

"I looked first at the guide, whose appearance was unchanged, and then at my co-subject R, who was sitting in the lotus position. His well-fringal face was alternately shifting from Christ to satyr, then back to Christ again, and he opened his eyes and came out of his private Nirvana for a moment to say to me: 'Well, this is rr1 What more is there to say?'

"I directed my attention towards the room and suddenly everything was holy. The stove, and the pottery and the chairs and the record player and the soup ladles and the old bottles—all were touched with sacrality, and I bowed to each of them in turn and worshiped. One pot in particular was so well endowed with divinity I dared not come closer to it than four or five feet lest I be burned to ashes for my unclean lips and impure heart. But a godly peach proved friendlier and accepted my adoration with kindly beneficence, radiating on me the preternatural light of its numinous fuzz. I bowed my gratitude and moved on, trans-figured by the deity of things.

"I remember looking at a finely detailed photograph of the Swiss Alps. I had admired this photograph before, in my pre-LSD days an hour or an aeon ago, but now its precision became reality and the temperature plunged and fine crystals of snow whipped across my face and I circled like an eagle above the crags and snowy summits of the mountain top. An expedition of climbers waved up at me and I lifted one talon to wave back.

"I was called back to Greenwich Village by obscenity. A sound, a chant, lascivious and brutal, a whining pornography assaulted my ears and left me furious with moral indignation. "How dare you say things like that to me!" said I to the disembodied chant. It suddenly ended, as quickly as it had begun, and I saw R removing a record which he explained to me was a recording of fertility mantras directed to the goddess Kali. A Bach toccata then was put on the phonograph and the music of the spheres left their archetypal abode and took up resi-dence in the walk-up on--Street.

"It was at this time that I closed my eyes and experienced a vision of the future that unfolded in vivid colors before my closed eyes and was accompanied by voices that were audible, however, only inside my head. I found myself and the rest of mankind standing together on the foothills of the earth, being addressed by two splendid and luminous figures many hundreds of miles high. They could be seen plainly in spite of their height and they told us that they were the elders of this particu-lar part of the cosmos and had lost their patience with the human creatures of this earth. The recalcitrance of greedy, warring, barbarous mankind had overexceeded itself and now that nuclear power had been discovered the outrageous breed evolved on our planet might yet at-tempt to subvert the whole cosmos. And so it had been decided in the Council of Elders that unless mankind could find something in its crea-tions with which to justify itself, it would have to be destroyed.

"Having heard this message, we earthlings scattered and searched our libraries, museums, histories and parliaments for some achievement that might be seen as a justification for our being. We brought forth our greatest art objects, our Leonardos, Michelangelos, Praxiteles—But the elders only shook their heads and said solemnly: It is not suffi-cient.' We brought forth our great masterpieces of literature, the works of Shakespeare, Milton, Goethe, Dante. But these also were deemed insufficient. We searched in our religious literature and offered the fig-ures of the religious geniuses—Jesus, Buddha, Moses, St. Francis, but the elders only laughed and said: `Not sufficient.'

"It was then, when destruction seemed imminent and all had given themselves up to their fate, that I came fonvard and offered to the elders the music of Johann Sebastian Bach. 'They listened to the entire corpus and great silver tears of incredible brilliance shimmered and trickled down the length of their luminous bodies, after which they were silent. On and on this silence extended, until they broke it to say only: It is sufficient. You of the Earth are justified.' And then they went away.

"For a period of time I had neither capacity nor wish to measure, I pondered this vision. Then, when the music had ended, I lay on my back and looked up at the ceiling where a kaleidoscope of images from ancient civilizations flickered rapidly before my eyes. Egypt and Greece, Assyria and old China sped across the ceiling. Flickering pharaohs, fluttering parthenons and a palpitating Nebuchadnezzar—all contrib-uted to this panoramic, historical agitation.

"And suddenly—destruction! 'The air was thick with the ammonia smell of death. Noxious vapors stung the eyes and choked the throat. The stench of the Apocalypse rose up with the opening of the graves of the new and old dead. It was the nostrils' view of the Night on Bald Mountain, an olfactory Walpurgisnacht rite. The world had become a reeking decay. Then I heard R rebuking someone with the words: 'Christ, Timmy, couldn't you have used your sandbox?' Timmy was the cat and the apocalyptic smell had issued from a single turd he had deposited in the middle of the floor.

"I turned my attention from Timmy's tangible residues to Timmy himself. He stretched himself with infinite grace and arched his back to begin—The Ballet. Leaping through time and space, he hung like Nijinsky—suspended in the air for a millennium, and then, drifting languidly down to the ground, he pirouetted to a paw-licking standstill. He then stretched out one paw in a tentative movement and propelled himself into a mighty spiral, whirling into cosmic dust, then up on his toes for a bow to his creation.

"He was a cat no longer—but Indra, the primeval God dancing the cosmic dance in that time before time, setting up a rhythmic flux in non-being until it at last had attained to Life. 'The animating waves of the Dance of Creation pulsed all around me and I could no longer refuse to join in the dance. I arose to perform a pas de deux with the cat-Indra, but before I could allow myself more than a cursory leap into the cosmic fray a great flame erupted somewhere in the vicinity of my left elbow and I felt obliged to give it my attention. The guide had started a fire burning in the he,arth and it commanded I concentrate upon it to the exclusion of all else.

"It was a lovely fire. Mandalas played in it and so did gods, and so did many hundreds of beings, known and unknown, rising in El Greco attenuations for one brilliant moment, only to lapse again into nothing. I fell into musing and after aeons had gone by and worlds within worlds within worlds had been explored, I looked up and said something to R. It was an attempt to define our relationship at that precise moment, and I said: 'You and I, we are ships that sometimes pass one another on the seas but never meet."Bull-1' said R—and my vast, rippling reflec-tions were shattered.

" 'Let's get out of herd' I said. 'Where to?' he asked, and seemed to find his question very funny. 'Where to?' he asked again, convulsed with laughter, and managed to add: 'as if there were any other "where" or "to." "Where to, Bnité?' he howled, and along with our guide we headed for the second-floor apartment of a friend whose roomful of Buddhas I had planned to inspect.

"We began to descend the two flights of stairs and they never ended. Down, down, down, down, down, down, down—into the bowels of some ultimate cavem—into the center of the earth, no doubt—or per-haps into nowhere—to descend the stairs, forever and ever. 'Will they never end?' I asked, starting to panic. 'Only one more flight,' I was assured. And then, an infinity of stairsteps later, we arrived and entered the roomful of Buddhas and everything brightened.

"'The room was a cacophony of Buddhas! Screaming gold Gautamas seared the eye from their sun-spot Satoris. Seething stone saviors re-vealed a Buddha-to-come in each of their granular particles. Wooden hermaphrodite Lords-of-the-East reconciled all opposites, all dualities, all dialectics. `Yin, Yang, Jung!' I cried, and dragged R toward another room with a balcony just over the street. But the journey was long, and I felt like Alice when she had to go twice as fast in order just to stay in the same place.

"From the balcony the crowded street leaped up to greet us and it seemed we had only to reach out to touch the passersby. A painted elf skipped past us and I looked after him in astonishment. 'Just a fairy,' R explained. thought it was an elf,' said I—for all double meanings were lost on me. A decrepit old gargoyle tottered by. 'Poor old gar-goyle,' said I. can't find his chapel.' And suddenly I felt very sad, for the whole of life became explainable in terms of men losing their potentialities by default and decaying into gargoyles which could yet be happy if only they could find their proper niche—their own flying but-tress, overlooking eternity.

"Continuing to observe the scene below from the balcony, it seemed that my consciousness was projected downward, and with it my percep-tions, so that I saw the passersby as if I were standing on the sidewalk and confronting them. From this perspective, they became an animated waxworks, escapees from Madame Tussaud, who bit their wax nails, clutched their wax newspapers, and knit their wax brows as they thought waxen thoughts. I kept wondering how long they could keep up this charade before they melted down into puddles and oozed away along the pavement.

"One strange creature approached us slowly, then yawned to reveal little stalagmite clay teeth set in a grotto of red dust. Suddenly, as if just making his decision, he turned and climbed onto a bus. I then noticed that people got on and got off of this bus. On and off. On and off. On and off. 'The eternal return. Primitive yet Christian. Circular but linear. And the bus plunged ahead along the route of its manifest destiny, then stopped a short distance down the street, while people kept climbing aboard at intervals to catch its life force, but only to be deposited unceremoniously along the byways of their partial, all-too-partial life segments. But where was the bus going? Toward what ultimate destina-tion? Heaven? Fort Tryon Park? Utopia? Perhaps it was a million years away.

"It seemed that a horde of people came bearing down upon us—tides of gray automata threatening to engulf us. 'Don't worry,' I coun-seled R. shall be Moses.' And, raising my arm, the crowd parted and we were free to enter the Promised Land.

"People continued to stream towards us and past us. I focused on an old lady in her late seventies, a dowdy pathetic creature dressed in shabby black and carrying impossibly huge shopping bags. As she made her way heavily towards us I saw, no longer much to my astonishment, that she began to lose years. I saw her as an Italian matriarch in her sixties, then in her fifties. As she continued to bloom backwards in time, she entered her portly forties and, after that, her housewifely thiriies. Her face softened, her body grew more shapely, and still the years kept on dropping away. In her twenties she was carrying a child, and then she was a bride and carried orange blossoms. A moment later and she was a child who, in turn, shrank into a newborn baby carried by a midwife. 'The baby's umbilical cord was still intact and it let out a howl of awakening life. But then the process was reversed and the baby grew back into childhood, became again a bride, passed through her thirties, forties, fifties, sixties, and was the old lady in her seventies I had seen at the beginning. The old woman blinked, her eyes closed for a fraction of a second, and in that instant I clearly saw her death mask. She passed us by and had moved a little down the street when I heard from the direction she had come a baby's howl of awakening life. I turned my head, expecting to perceive afresh Our Lady of the Eternal Return, but saw instead the vortex of a crowd.

"The vortex was streaming into the giant doorway of a giant build-ing. It atomized into points of energy, radial lights and shimmering vortices converging into a single solar concentration that seethed in thermal fury to explode at last into a kaleidoscopic burst of falling jewels. Some sound had evidently come to my attention and a golden shovel crunched into a mound of opals near which was a sign that bore the incomprehensible words: DIG WE MUST FOR A GROWING NEW YORK. AII iron-clad tympany bruised the ears with a raucous counterpoint of digging. Construction, destruction or something was in process and two protean tractors loomed before us, large and living. In their cabs these vital creatures bore little robot mannikins—absurd toy trinkets which undoubtedly they wound up every morning to mimic the motions of life. How proper it all seemed—the Man-machine playing at noblesse oblige with the machine—man. But between themselves, the living tractors maintained an uneasy truce. A crystal shelf shattered under the collec-tive impact of their heavy, separate blows. Its sonic vibration stung the nervous system and prepared one for war. 'The tractors made ready for mutual assault, swinging their shovel-antennae high in the air and bel-lowing metallic curses at one another. Dive and attack! Attack and dive! But then their clanging vituperations acquired a primeval reso-nance. Voices were screaming from out of an early swamp. And I saw that the warring tractors were warring dinosaurs, their long necks diving and attacking in sinuous combat. Too much!' I thought, and with what seemed a great effort of will I returned through the centuries to—Street.

"We continued our vigil from the terrace, but now I looked down on the scene below as if from a very high place. I chanced to observe a particularly rough square of pavement and what I saw there caused me to cry out to R to come over and share in this latest wonder. For there below us in that square of pavement lay all of Manhattan—its canyons, and skyscrapers and parks and people—laid out beneath us in minia-ture. 'The proportions, the infinite detail were perfect. We could have been in an airplane flying low over the city. But here it was in a common block of pavement—the city within the city. We could have swooped down like gods and lifted up the Empire State Building if we had so wished. But our ethics precluded that, and we left the little microcosm as it was.

"And so it went—a ten thousand years'-long adventure condensed somehow into a few brief hours. It all ended very suddenly for me, when a parking meter I was watching abruptly flipped its red Time Expired flag. And I knew it was over."

The account just concluded describes quite a few of the usual phe-nomena of the psychedelic drug experience. The altered awareness of time is frequently mentioned and is well exemplified in the subject's description of the interminable descent down the stairs. Mood changes abruptly, often in response to awareness of some perceptual stimulus. A great many altered perceptions—visual, auditory, and olfactory—are mentioned. There are vivid eyes-closed images, the empathic experienc-ing of a picture and the "projection" of consciousness to a point some distance from the body with visual perception appearing to be from that point and not from the actual physical location of the organs of sight.

Making some order out of and deriving something of value fTom these curious experiences and others like them will be a main concern of this book.

Necessarily, the subject describing a psychedelic experience is able to mention only a very few items selected from the wealth of events that make up the total experience. Usually the subject writes down what seems most important, unusual, or entertaining to her, or what she thinks will be of most value to the guide. In practice, these accounts by the subject are supplemental to the extensive notes made by the guide in the course of the session—notes recording both what the subject has said, and what the guide is able to observe apart from what is said.

In the following, fourth example we offer some excerpts from a guide's report on several hours of one session. In a few instances, and where so noted, the subject's post-session write-up has been drawn upon to amplify the guide's in-session observations.

Example No. 4. S, a forty-year-old editor and former medical student, was given 125 micrograms of LSD at 11:00 A.M. and a similar dose' at noon. About fifteen minutes later he complained about nausea and said that he was feeling quite depressed. He explained that although he "knew better," he was being influenced by papers he had read describ-ing the LSD experience as a psychotomimetic one. He proceeded to enumerate his symptoms and listed them as "irrational ideas, a slight paranoia, and a fear of being unable to distinguish the unreal from the real," along with a generalized anxiety. He felt "like the fellow who was cast adrift in a lifeboat with nothing to read but a medical textbook and developed every single symptom except a broken leg." He noted a speed-up in his mental processes and felt this was a "flight of ideas" while "flight of ideas =: mania = maniac."

S was temporarily distracted from this unpleasant trend when the guide encouraged him to examine his associational processes, about which he had commented. He distinguished "two radically different processes, one continuous and associational, the other marked by dis-continuity and sharp breaks." He remarked that so long as his thoughts continued unbroken the ideas were associational, each flowing out of the preceding, along a line, as: A-B-C-D-E-F and so on.

However, the line might be "broken," or so it seemed, and S would "stop thinking." For example, the line A to F might be broken off at that point and S would then take up at some new and seemingly unre-lated place and begin a new chain of associations, as: A-B-C-D-E-F /break-off point/ new A - B - C - D, and so on.

When this occurs, S wondered, "what is the cause of the new A —the new idea apparently unrelated to what has preceded it? How is the sequence able to come to a halt and how, the flow of ideas being halted, is it able to start up again?" He became very interested in this problem and also in the fact that he seemed to be able to follow the chain of his associations "back over at least forty associations, possibly more." He declared his nausea almost gone and his depression lifted.
12:30 P.M.: S decides to observe his eyes-closed imagery and soon declares himself once again quite depressed. He has been imaging material from his days as a medical student: surgical procedures, gaping and infected wounds, "all terribly ugly," and this is the cause of his depression.

At this point the guide does not haphazardly attempt to change the subject's ideation or imagery. Instead, as experience has proved to be effective, the guide suggests a new image but retains the formal struc-ture of the old one. Thus, the guide speaks to S about (wound-like) caverns and molten lava flowing through the center of the earth (like S's "red, oozing gashes"). It is suggested to S that he descend into the center of the earth and report on what he finds there. Attempting this, he soon found himself able to divert his imagery into a more positive setting and described his consciousness as being localized in his "legs, stomach, the room, and also down there in the center of the earth" (this putting a final end to his depression).

The "world at the center of the earth," which S is imaging, he de-scribes as cavernous and having "a thick atmosphere of air that appears to be divided in the manner of a honeycomb or cluster of fish eggs. The inhabitants are fishlike creatures who seem to swim or float through this atmosphere, although it is not watery." The inhabitants are aware of S's presence in their world, but ignore him and seem to be pretending he does not exist. Finally, however, one of the creatures communicates with him telepathically and agrees to be his guide. The creature is then immediately ostracized by his own people, who regard him as a traitor.

In the very remote past, S is told, the sun once reached this world when some great fissure opened in the earth. The fissure has long since dosed, but around their glimpse of the sun the members of this society have constructed an elaborate religion, mythology, etcetera. 'The religion has its priests and among the "people" there are visionaries who claim to be able to see the sun while in their mystic states. But there is some debate as to whether these visionaries are charlatans, or possibly experience hallucinations.

The creatures of this world at the center of the earth have fishlike faces with long snouts and porcupine-like hairs extending outward from their cheeks. Their form suggests that originally they moved by spiraling through the earth or a much more solid substance than is now the case. And now, with a "softer atmosphere" to move in, their bodies, too, have become soft. S adds that they resemble "fishes with faces like possums, only their noses are still more pointed. Their shape is cylindri-cal and their skins silvery and shining. There is kind of light although no source of light can be detected."

12:40 P.M.: S opens his eyes and looks at some Bird of Paradise flowers in a vase. He describes them as unbelievably beautiful and says that they resemble great fiery serpents with flicking tongues of flame. The room is "enormous, like an airplane hangar or huge factory building" and two briefcases sitting at the end of the room about 20 feet avvay appear to him to be "two suitcases that seem so small because they are so terribly far away." (Here one notes that S is simultaneously aware that, in fact, he is seeing briefcases and that the distortions he is seeing are only that.) Asked about the time, he can only estimate that "many hours" have passed. In fact, the drug effects began to be noticed by him less than half an hour ago.

S is told to look at the flowered fabric of the couch on which he is sitting and to relate what he sees there. He perceives a great number of faces and scenes, each of them belonging to a different environment and to a variety of times: some to the American Gay Nineties, some to the nineteen twenties, some later. There are Toulouse Lautrec café figures, Berlin nightlife scenes and German art from the late twenties and mid-thirties. Here and there, a "Black Art" appears and he recognizes the work of Felicien Rops and drawings like those of the artist who has illustrated Michelet's Satanism and Witchcraft. 'There are various Modigliani figures, a woman carrying a harpoon, and persons such as appear in the classical Spanish art of the seventeenth century. Most interesting to him are "paintings" like those of Hieronymus Bosch, and he describes a great complex of sprawling yet minutely detailed figures which combine to make up a larger complex of a mountain scene of trees and snow. In another variation, this same complex consists of "a great face with the trunk of an elephant that is blowing liquid on the face of a demon whose body has been trampled into the ground. The elephant is blowing liquid on the face of the demon either in an attempt to revive him or as a gesture of contempt. A herculean male figure rises next to the elephantine face. He is trapped to the waist in stone and this mar-bled stone looks like sea foam, it is so delicate and lacy. Everything blends into everything else. The herculean figure is also the ear of a face and the elephant-like trunk is the bridge of the nose of another larger, still more complicated figure.

The guide asks a question and S responds that it is very difficult to give an answer entirely his own because it is almost impossible to eliminate the implied, suggested answer from a question. When he at-tempts to answer he finds that, simultaneously his mind "goes out" to find what the guide is asking for; he feels "closing in" on his mind and influencing him what he feels would be the guide's answer to the question; and "irrational impulses and instincts" come up "out of no-where" to influence his answer and also in revolt against his feeling that an answer is being imposed from some external source. S remarks that these processes probably go on under nondrug conditions, but one is unaware of them. Concerning his own ideas he observes that "It is odd that what one thinks at some given moment should seem so important when one knows that one will be thinking something entirely different a few moments later." He further remarks that he is conscious of a differ-ent physiological reaction to the emergence from within or the imposi-tion from without of each different idea. This physiological reaction to ideas, images, and perceptions was referred to repeatedly during S's session. The reaction was felt particularly plainly in his "nervous sys-tem." At this point S was also conscious of his mind as "a big, involved computer."

Closing his eyes, S images mind in terms of a great domed interior supported by the steel frames of a giant Erector set. He thinks about "a mind vvith a screw loose" and images an exquisitely jeweled screw that has come loose and is banging around inside this interior. "It is all presented like a television commercial, but in very vivid colors." He laughs at some length and when asked the cause for his merriment reports another image: He has been "seeing the human brain as a behind that gets more sore and unwholesome-looking as the years go by." After this S attempts to image the brain of Bertrand Russell and reports that Russell's brain "at this stage of the game looks like an old pair of patched trousers with the stitches coming loose around the patches."

Following this "low level cartoon production," S reports a "magnificent, staggeringly beautiful" sequence of images. He is seeing immense zodiacal figures laid out in jeweled definition with blue and gold stones against the heavens that glow with a black interior light. Then vast ships drift through the heavens "on a grand cosmic scale." S speculates that the zodiacal signs that man has "imposed upon the stars" derive from corresponding physical structures in the brain. He "feels" in his brain the patterns that man once employed in creating the zodiacal patterns. He remarks that the physiological pleasure responses experienced by his brain in comtemplating the imagery reinforces the images so that those images eliciting the most pleasurable reponses are the ones that persist for the longest periods of time.

1:00 P.M.: S images a number of additional cartoon sequences including a rather lengthy one set in Harlem that has to do with "a Negro making a cartoon about how a Negro would make a cartoon about a Negro making a cartoon about Negroes." Asked why he thinks the mind produces so many cartoons and caricatures while a person is in the drug-state, S replies that a kind of partial mental economy is involved. The brain "rests" when it produces these images requiring a minimum expenditure of psychic energy, in order that it should be able to "afford" the other fantastic and lavish things with which it provides itself. He makes the analogy of a French laborer who six days out of the week endures an impoverished existence in the provinces in order that on the seventh day he will be able to deck himself out like a prince and enjoy a free-spending "hell of a good time" in Paris.

S lies unmoving on a couch and reports that "nothing much" is going on his body and any activity is limited to the "central commu-nication box." Apart from relaying routine messages, his body feels to him like that of a big lazy alligator lying on a beach: an extremely sensual feeling. He has experienced this serpent-like identification pre-viously but did not mention it. Always, it "gives great pleasure of a very sensual type."

S speaks at some length but in half-sentences and verbally incom-plete statements about the "traditional spirit vs appetite struggle that ever rages in man." He says that since appetite can be weaned away from the body or pulled in various directions so easily, it has set up a "great competition" between persons and groups. Man is very much a creature of appetites for all his pretensions. He is able to "put down" other creatures, but—and here S is convulsed with laughter. He has dosed his eyes and at once has seen an image that anticipates his thinking. He is imaging man as "a god-damned little mangy, scurvy ape that is sitting on top of an ant hill scratching his head and thinking that bis is the top brain in the universe." This image "is of mankind gener-ally, and also of specific individuals who think they are sitting on the apex of everything."

1:20 P.M.: S amuses himself for some time by "playing a lot of psychedelic games." In his report on this "game-playing" he writes (we have condensed his material) as follows:

"I found that I could flatten out the room, including mysélf, and make of it a painting—some part of my awareness then standing away from the result and looking at this painting in which I lay upon a couch in a room completely flattened and projected on a screen-like surface by an effort of my imagination.

"'Then, I created a world in which the imaginary was the real and the real the imaginary. My mind was a stocking, its outside the real, its inside the imaginary. Reaching down, I turned the stocking inside out, making the imaginary real, the real imaginary. When I tired of this, I just turned the stocking inside out again, restoring my world to what it had been before.

"I imagined myself a character in a novel, and had some bad mo-ments when I seemed to be imprisoned on a printed page from which I could not escape. I wondered if all fictional characters were not thus alive and imprisoned between a book's covers, or on the pages where they appear?

"I did a great many things like this and except for those moments when I seemed to be trapped as words on the pages of a book, none of these odd mental events and gymnastics aroused in me the slightest aruciety or even any very great astonishment. I seemed always to have known that the mind is capable of these things and did them instinc-tively."

2:18 P.M.: S enters into the most important phase of his session. He speaks of experiencing a "powerful sense of the whole evolutionary process." This process is symbolized by an incredibly long snake that extends back through time from the present to the beginnings of all life. The snake is seen as an image but S also feels himself, his body, to be what he is imaging. The feeling of snakeness he has may be a kind of "evolutionary consciousness, an awakening of a consciousness traces of which are always present in the nervous system, but ordinarily dor-mant." The seen-felt snake image is retained but along with it, and sometimes superimposed upon it, S sees-feels the "primordial evolu-tionary beginnings. From minute independent organisms tiny lines extend out, touch, intermingle, and unite to form the nucleus of new organisms that continue to organize themselves in various kinds of life." Most of these primordial life forms perish, but a few survive and new forms continue to emerge. "All of this is felt in the deepest roots of one's body. One descends into these roots and relives the prehistoric process."

Suddenly, as he describes his ascent up the evolutionary process, S becomes extremely excited. His whole demeanor changes from that of curious observer to the manner of one experiencing an important reve-lation. Slamming his fist against his palm he reports with mounting excitement that "Something cuts across the Evolutionary process at this point! Something blasts into it! Cuts it clean in twol Changes its course!" 'The severed chain snaps back together quickly, but although the evolutionary process is deflected only slightly, the consequences are enormous. "Had this not happened man would have evolved into just another kind of animal!"

S now is experiencing his vision in terms of immense, panoramic and detailed imagery, brilliantly illumined. But, "when something is not quite clear," he also receives illustrative animated cartoons and dia-grams "that make everything understandable." As he finds himself increasingly able to feel the evolutionary chain in his body and especially in his nervous system, he seems to understand that "If each nerve were allowed to dance its own dance, then all would be confusion. Some music, some form simply must be imposed upon the dancing. This imposition of form and pattern on Being is one of the survival functions of the brain." Asked by the guide: "What is music?" S responds that music is a derivative product of a mathematical function that the brain was forced to develop in order that the organism might survive and progress. "That is why music is never as great as philosophy. Music has to be derived from ecstatic impulses of the body filtered through the mathematical ordering screen of the brain and is shaped by the struc-ture of the brain. But philosophy is a pure emanation from the brain and owes nothing to the lower bodily processes." S emphasizes that his "understanding is all experienced as simultaneous visual and felt think-ing."

Returning to his main vision, S declares that if one is not to see man as only a machine then one must recognize that alien force has blasted into the evolutionary sequence at a certain point and altered its course in the direction of a higher, more sophisticated process. But can one be certain that this alien force is something other instead of just a better disguised mechanism? S here experienced briefly another cartoon image that provoked much laughter: that of "a fellow who keeps looking up into the sky for something good, but always gets clobbered by falling vultures."

S continues that man possesses two distinct varieties of conscious-ness. One is the higher consciousness that came into being at the time when the alien blast cut through evolution. The other, primitive con-sciousness had its origins much earlier and is capable only of feeling and a very low order of intellection. The alien blast into matter initiated a process whereby the higher consciousness evolved along with but did not extinguish the lower, primitive consciousness. The force that struck into the pre-established evolutionary animal pattern was God or Spirit. This Higher Force burst in like a bullet. It imposed itself upon the creation of the "other, earlier God-Force" that had conceived of and created the material world. The subject later reported himself amazed at this gnostic ideation; in fact, amazed at "the whole religious content" of his experience. He described himself as profoundly antagonistic to "religion" and said that these ideas were previously certainly not his and quite foreign to his "usual way of thinking."

S reports a series of images showing "how it would have been" without "the infusion of spirit into matter." Consciousness would have developed along continuous evolutionary lines, would have been "en-tirely animal in nature," and man would have been a creature entirely ruled by his appetites. S sees these "degenerate beings" and their world of "low waterfront cafés." Man "as he might have been" is seen by S as a creature who rather resembles himself. But, unlike himself, this might-have-been man is about three feet high, thick, squat, and coarse, with a head hunched over to one side and vvith frog's weblike protuberances growing out from the sides of the head. The legs are thick and gnarled and the feet are rooted in some "slimy stuff." One effect of the infusion of spirit, then, may be physically observed in the refinement of man's body—his angularity and attenuation. Did the blast, S muses, serve to diminish the effect of the "gravitational squash7"

Both seeing and feeling the images, S continues to experience "the accident of this thing exploding into this planet and sending out its rays and particles through the faults of the earth and the organismic struc-ture it had penetrated. 'The blast touches off a profound reaction in matter and in the animal consciousness. These are infused by the other, but not wholly conquered by it. "Between the lines of silver that surge through the body of matter the chunks of meat remain." S is able to move up and down the evolutionary chain and to pass back beyond the point when the higher consciousness evolved. He descends down his physiological past to a level that seems to be of feeling alone and remarks that "the older consciousness is still there in our bodies. The new consciousness is spirit and must be of a different order since it has cut into the evolutionary process and redirected it from outside of the process."

S continued this discussion for some time, elaborating further upon the basic "revelation." He concluded this phase of his experience by saying that the original creation might be understood as "the Self" while the source of the second creation or infusion of spirit might be under-stood as "the Other." The self, so long as it exists by itself, can only develop in its own terms. If it is to transcend itself, to become some-thing more than itself, it must receive its impetus from something other than itself. This led into a discussion of the interpersonal psychology of Sartre which S summed up as "a Darwinian snarl."

For the many hours remaining in his session, S experienced a wealth of ideas, images, and a wide range of other psychedelic phenomena. But he returned repeatedly to the "infusion of spirit into evolutionary pro-cess" and felt that in some as-yet-undetermined way this idea-complex must be of some importance to him. He regarded this phase of his experience as being "not a religious one in any conventional sense, or any kind of revelation from God, but a message probably from the unconscious" to the effect that he had been suppressing a "real interest in fundamental questions that now I propose to go into seriously and in depth." S was particularly impressed with his "new and firm conviction" that "otherness is an essential condition for growth [and that he must] open myself to an 'infusion' of otherness in order to escape the narrow-ness of my self-limiting self-concern. Whether the impulsion to this actually comes from the unconscious or not is unimportant. It's still a good idea." Subsequently, S embarked on an extensive program of read-ings in philosophy and also scientific material dealing with evolution—this last "on the off chance that somewhere along the evolutionary line there is actually a discemible point of disruption or deflection that might give credence to the LSD notions."

Every reader of the popular literature concerning the psychedelic drugs knows by now that some persons are drastically changed by what occurs during their sessions. A great mass of evidence has piled up and apparently demonstrates that chronic alcoholics may stop drinking, "hardened" criminals may be rehabilitated, and other equally important and beneficial results may come out of a psychedelic session. These transformations, often involving a major reorientation of values, have resulted even from psychedelic experiences where the aim was not "therapeutic" and none of the technical procedures of therapy was employed. 'The drug experiences have also, although far less often, resulted in a disorientation of the subject and some other harmful effects. Most subjects, however (and we here make no comment on treatment of patients), seem not to be significantly changed in any way that would alter the overt patterns of behavior. Positive behavioral changes may ensue in time; but this usually requires that the subject keep working with the data of his session to further break down condi-tioned responses and preserve his ability to be open to, and accepting of, external stimuli and his own positive ideas and feelings.

The subject whose case has just been discussed was not dramatically transformed by his LSD experience; and we have ref-rained from intro-ducing at this point any instances of what we will term the "transform-ing experience." The subject did have what he regarded as an intensely interesting and rewarding session—"probably the most interesting ten hours" of his life. He enjoyed several days of "unusual calm" just after the session; and he regarded his new philosophical and scholarly pursuits as constructive and personally fruitful. He felt, moreover, that his insight into the "fructifying nature of otherness" was helpful to him in his interpersonal relations and would be still more helpful in time to come. Whether this long range benefit in fact was forthcoming, we are unable to say. 'The last possible follow-up on the subject, who as pre-viously planned departed for Europe and new employment, was only six weeks after his session and therefore no assessment of any long-term effects could be made.

In presenting these four examples of the psychedelic drug experi-ence we have not attempted to "glamorize" the experience. Nor will we glamorize it elsewhere. We believe the experience to be of enormous potential value, both to subject and researcher; but it also has negative elements that not all who have written about the drugs have felt it essential or desirable to mention. This needs to be remedied, but by means of objective data rather than a collection of horrendous "scare stories." It is equally necessary to place in proper perspective the nu-merous ill-informed and hostile reports concerning the drug experience and its aftermath.

Even the materials already presented should suggest that the psy-chedelic drugs have legitimate uses beyond the strictly medical, or still more limited experimental psychiatric and psychotherapeutic, ones to which some persons would restrict them. Support for a wider use has come from prominent individuals in a variety of fields who believe that psychedelic research will be of great value in such diverse areas as philosophy, parapsychology and the creative arts, and in the study of literature, mythology, anthropology, comparative religion, and still other fields. The possibility of such applications was remarked at the turn of the century by the German toxicologist Louis L,ewin, sometimes described as the founder of psychopharmacology. His view has been often reiterated since and its accuracy proved by accomplished work. Even so, the effort to close off non-medical research has been very largely successful.

Obviously we, as the authors of this book, do not agree that psychedelic drug research should be confined to medical and psychotherapeutic areas of use. And it is toward a much wider horizon of produc-tive exploration and application that we intend our book to point.

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