LSD, Psychedelic, Drugs, Acid
A brusque psychedelic experience in a tilted, coldly clinical setting could do more harm
than good.
A completely different set of LSD sessions emerged when it became obvious that the
drug experiences could enhance creative potential in certain individuals.
A genuine artistic talent of extraordinary power and scope may emerge during the LSD
procedure.
A good experience with drugs heightens and intensifies all experience—a new and deeper
appreciation.
A healthy society provides and protects the sacredness of the teen-age psychedelic
voyage. A sick, static society fears and forbids the revelation.
A Mexican Indian told a newspaper reporter who referred to peyote as a drug, “Aspirin is
a drug, peyote is sacred”.
A person in the psychedelic state can perceive much more in other human beings than he
can when he is in his everyday mind.
A psychedelic is the solvent which dissolves the vigorous stereotypes of egocentric
behavior.
A significant danger confronting our society may lie in losing out on the values that the
responsible use of these drugs may offer.
A society in which a large percentage of the population changes consciousness regularly
and harmoniously with psychedelic drugs will bring about a very different way of life.
Acid allowed me to experience my soul. Ego, ambition, defenses, critical faculties are
sloughed off or suspended.
Acid opens your door, opens the window, opens your senses, opens your beam to the vast
possibilities of life, to the glorious indescribable beauty of life.
Activists didn’t understand that LSD was a revolutionary tool, far more powerful than the
manifestos and slogans of the political radicals.
After having had the LSD experience, I know that there can never be love where there is
secretiveness and darkness. Love only endures in the bright light of the day.
All who have taken LSD know that there are levels of consciousness of which we know
nothing in our normal state.
Although this is in no way the norm, psychedelic experience can result in a major
personal transformation or can resolve a chronic emotional problem.
An architect on LSD figured out the design for an arts and crafts shopping center. He
caught the essence of the image.
An externalized psychedelic experience in the mountains, on the seashore, in the woods
or even in one’s own garden can become a unique and unforgettable event.
Another striking aspect of the psychedelic transformation is the development of an
intense interest in consciousness, self-exploration and the spiritual quest.
Anyone with philosophical ambitions and a thoughtful desire to increase intelligence
could learn how to use drugs effectively.
Are they outlawed because we fear drugs or because we fear the social effects of altered
states of awareness, religious intensity, and mysticism?
As a psychedelicist, one tries to bring fragments of the other reality back into this one, as
building blocks.
As drugs entered the scene, songwriters and musicians became interested in interior
experience, outer space and the Meaning of Reality.
As the phenomena gains in richness, colors stream and mingle at the edges of things and
colored objects stand revealed in all their characteristic drug-state vividness.
Astronauts could be using these substances for preparation of altered states of
consciousness in space exploration.
At the present time, man is so sick that today it is safe to say that drugs are the specific
and almost only way that the American is ever going to have a religious experience.
“Authoritative” articles appeared authored by those who had had no direct experience
with the drug.
Beautiful natural scenery or certain objects that reflect nature’s creativity usually have a
very positive influence on the LSD experience.
Because of the unique nature of the psychedelic state it is impossible to reach a real
understanding of its quality and dimensions unless one directly experiences it.
Before taking the drug, I feel apprehensive about the possibility of flipping out, but
during the high, I am afraid I won’t flip out enough.
Brain-activating drugs expose people to powerful, mind-blowing experiences that shatter
conventional ideas about reality.
Brilliant minds, some of the world’s leading scientists and artists, engaged in discovering
these drugs and applying them to a whole range of things.
By inducing ego-death and evolutionary perspectives, psychedelic drugs can counteract
the fear of death.
Certain myths keep appearing and reappearing and many of them refer to the magic and
wonder of the sacred drug, the potion, the elixir of life.
Certain pieces of music came across under LSD as so holy, it was almost as though God
was humming the tune.
Compared with sex under LSD, the way you’ve been making love, no matter how ecstatic
the pleasure you think you get from it, is like making love to a department-store-dummy.
Consciousness-changing devices initiated many of the religious perspectives which,
taking root in history, continued after their psychedelic origins were forgotten.
Consciousness-expanding drugs unplug these narrow programs, the social ego, the game-
machinery.
consciousness of the Universal Mind—This is one of the most profound and total
experiences observed in LSD sessions.
“Drug” means positive things, possible growth, opening up the mind, beauty, sensual
awareness, religious revelation.
Drug users often refer to emotions or combinations of emotions they have never felt
before.
Drug users soon came to understand that psychedelic trips are not to be embarked on
lightly.
Drugs could free man’s consciousness and bring about a new conception of man, his
psychology and philosophy.
Drugs do not merely duplicate or stimulate theologically sponsored experiences but
generate or shape theologies themselves.
Drugs have light to throw on the history, phenomenology and philosophy of religion and
the practice of the religious life itself.
Drugs, intelligently used as tools to enter other states of consciousness, are potentially
beneficial.
Drugs like LSD reveal something of the otherwise dimly visible expanse of the mind and
suggest that its vast potential is scarcely to be comprehended.
Drugs open awareness to messages from the autonomous nervous system, signals from
the great organ and tissue centers within the body.
Drugs suspend certain inhibitory or selective processes in the nervous system so as to
render our sensory apparatus more open to impressions than usual.
During several minutes of objective time, persons under the influence of LSD can
subjectively experience entire lifetimes, centuries, millennia, or even eons.
During the acid trip, the nervous system is most open, most unconditioned and ready to
take a completely new imprint.
During the LSD experiences, the subject loses his accustomed habits of thinking and
feeling.
During the psychedelic experience, the heavy shackles of the mind are loosened,
consciousness free to move in any direction.
During the psychedelic session the nervous system returns to that state of flux and unity-
chaos of infancy.
East and West, civilized or primitive, religious thought and all that flows from it almost
certainly has been importantly influenced by psychedelic drugs.
Elements of mystical consciousness can occur in psychedelic sessions of well-educated,
skeptical and scientifically oriented individuals.
Every kind of typically religious emotion, symbol, and insight appears during
psychedelic drug trips.
Everyone says give LSD to the medical profession. The medical profession has had LSD
for 23 years and hasn’t known what to do with it. (It’s now a lot more than 23 years.)
Excitement was brewing in the Haight. The psychedelic city-state was having its brief
golden age. The energy was unmistakably sky-high.
Facing the drug state once it sets in is usually easier than dealing with all the fantasies as
to what the experience will be.
Far from inducing window-jumping and self-destruction, the suicide rate for young
people actually dropped during the LSD boom.
Few therapists are capable of assessing, evaluating and integrating psychedelic
experiences in a useful way.
For more than four centuries, the Indians have kept the divine mushroom close to their
hearts, sheltered from desecration by white men, a precious secret.
For psychedelic drugs to be administered by doctors on a “Now take this” basis defeats
the whole purpose of the experience.
For thousands of years, the greatest artists, poets, philosophers and lovers have used
consciousness-expanding substances.
Frequently, individuals who did not show any artistic inclinations at all prior to the LSD
experience can create extraordinary pictures. (That’s once they had the LSD experience.)
From 1950 to 1962, when LSD and mescaline were more freely available within the law,
there were very few reports of adverse reactions.
Grass was good but only LSD could get you past the receptionist, through to God on the
phone.
Greater access to unconscious resources is a cardinal feature of psychedelic, creative, and
other novel perceptual experiences.
Hallucinogenic agents throughout their long history have served primarily to stimulate
religious and spiritual understanding.
Hallucinogenic drugs do actually belong in the church, in a prominent place in the
church, for they are sacred drugs.
He has found God and his connectedness to the rest of reality in his psychedelic
experiences.
He (Leary) knew how important it was to have a warm supporting setting to experience
the ego-shattering revelations of the mushroom.
He said that a few LSD sessions had given him more insight into his personality than the
whole of four years in analysis.
He said that he did not “really think it possible to study and understand modern
philosophy without at least having tried a psychedelic.”
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.
Here, in the far-out frontier of quantum mathematics, physics and psychedelics meet
harmoniously.
How many are open to the idea that God might be easier to find with LSD in the body
than with white bread or bourbon or liverwurst in the body?
How many of the current ideas of eternity, of heaven, of supernatural states are ultimately
derived from the experiences of drug-takers?
How odd that a chemical can do what a lifetime of spiritual exercises rarely brings to
anyone.
Huxley had taken mescaline in a garden and shucked off the mind and awakened to
eternity.
Huxley was fascinated by the potential in drugs such as mescaline, LSD and psilocybin to
provide a learning experience normally denied us within our educational system.
I anticipated a remarkable experience, but was in no way prepared for the mind-
staggering voyage into distant dimensions that was my first acid trip.
I knew that the experience was not the result of a psychosis brought on by the drug but a
glimpse into a world beyond ordinary reality.
I know from first-hand experience that the LSD-type drugs in the right hands are superb
psychiatric tools.
I know now that I never knew what people were talking about when they talked about
feelings till I took LSD.
I know that this is a new me. The drug does things nothing else could do. Everyone
should be confronted with its virtues.
I now knew what the shamans meant when they said, “the mushroom takes you there to
the place where God is”.
I realized that under the proper circumstances, psychedelic experiences are truly, a “royal
road to the unconscious”.
I think it’s no accident that in so many myths passed down from generation to generation,
there is this theme of the magic potion.
I’ve been given tremendous mileage on my quest for meaning by the few transmitting
glimpses LSD has given me of the cosmic mesh that stitches the universe together.
Ideal conditions for an LSD session involve a simple, safe and beautiful environment and
an interpersonal situation that is supportive, reassuring and nourishing.
Ideas acquire a strong emotional component, thinking and feeling being hardly separable
in the LSD state.
If, as we believe, the drug-state distortions are manifestations of tendencies found also in
“normal” perceptions, then they afford opportunities for studying the perceptual process.
If LSD treatment for alcoholics is allowed to resume and is expanded, alcoholism will be
dealt a crippling blow.
If organized religion decides to avail itself of LSD’s efficacy in spiritual matters, the
church may once again be a strong spiritual force.
If psychedelic drugs actually do expand consciousness, then it is socially irresponsible
not to put them into the toolbox.
If you attach more importance to your beliefs than to self-understanding, you’ll probably
need an awful lot of LSD.
In addition to being instruments of philosophic revelation, mystical unity and
evolutionary insight, psychedelic drugs are very powerful aphrodisiacs.
In addition to widening my spiritual and aesthetic horizons, psychedelic drugs affected
my feelings about my self.
In every culture of recorded history, men have used chemicals of vegetable origin to alter
consciousness.
In general, the level of intelligence goes up for LSD takers; they become more than they
were.
In one sense, psychedelics are enzymes that make the creative process and the process of
discovery go faster.
In psychedelic drugs, we might find out how to promote creativity by enhancing the
creative imagination.
In psychedelic sessions, all of the elements in the universe in its present form and
throughout history can be consciously experienced by the individual.
In psychedelic therapy, there is a great emphasis on aesthetically rich settings and a
beautiful environment.
In psychology, the psychedelics have provided the key to the unimagined vastness of the
unconscious mind.
In sessions where the emphasis is on aesthetic experiences and artistic expression, LSD
subjects are primarily interested in changed perceptions of forms, colors and sounds.
In taking LSD with someone, you are relinquishing all of your personality defenses and
opening yourself up in a very vulnerable way.
In the case of the psychedelics, the conditions under which they are tried deeply influence
the direction of the experience.
In the LSD era, religion without drugs would be unnatural and pointless, like astronomy
without telescopes.
In the LSD state, the sensitivity to external factors and circumstances is intensified to a
great degree.
In the psychedelic state, our mind seems to exist outside the scope of ordinary rational
consciousness.
In the right psychological environment, these chemical mind changers make possible a
genuine religious experience.
Information that comes to the LSD user seems more real than ordinary reality. (It sure is
more real and meaningful than ordinary reality.)
Intelligence increase drugs like LSD enormously accelerate, extensify, intensify the
human brain function.
Internal freedom people find through the drug is a personal and not a governmental
matter.
Isn’t the whole point of psychedelics to break down the walls of absurdity and reestablish
a divine intuition amongst the human species on this good earth? Well, of course it is.
It became obvious that the drug experiences could enhance creative potential in certain
individuals. Highly creative individuals became favorite subjects for LSD sessions.
It began to dawn on me that the origins of some philosophical and religious ideas might
be better understood by a scholar who had ingested and experienced the psychedelics.
It has been puzzling how a single drug can produce such an enormous range of different
experiences, appearing in various combinations and seemingly on the same continuum.
It has been suggested that the resurrection of Jesus was an illusion created with the help
of mandrake (a drug)).
It is easier to change behavior if you understand the learned-game nature of behavior.
This sort of insight can be brought about by consciousness-expanding drugs.
It is hard to imagine a more useful way to combine medicine, psychology and religion
than psychedelic therapy with dying individuals.
It reveals the soul. My own experience under LSD was the revelation of my soul to me.
There can be no deeper experience, or more profound revelation.
It was in the Haight that the cultural rebellion fueled by LSD happened so vividly and
with such intensity.
It was puzzling how a single drug can produce such an enormous range of different
experiences, appearing in various combinations and seemingly on the same continuum.
It would appear that LSD is a ticket to a wondrous time machine that transports the
tripper on a whirlwind tour of mankind’s ancestral past.
It’s philosophical. I could write a book about the cosmic thoughts I had. This is the Rolls
Royce of dope.
It’s possible in one session to eliminate a neurosis that had resisted years of non-drug
psychotherapy.
Just as a microscope can help a biologist, LSD can remove the inhibitions to perception
which prevent us from seeing the central relationships of the world.
Leary and Alpert say they shouldn’t be considered drugs at all, but should be classed with
poetry, music, literature and art.
Leary insisted that the insane rat race was the real “narcotic escape” and that people
could find a new kind of harmony by “sanitizing” themselves with LSD.
Leary links the psychedelic experience to Oriental mysticism as well as to the most up-to-
date concepts of modern biology and brain physiology.
Leary saw the revolutionary possibilities of psilocybin and later LSD for psychotherapy
and religion.
Like a microscope, LSD magnifies. Instead of magnifying things outside the body, it
magnifies inner experience.
LSD activates deep repositories of unconscious material and brings their content to the
surface, making it available for direct experience.
LSD activates emotionally important material in different areas and on various levels of
the personality.
LSD allowed you an objective look at your own conditioning, at all the categories you
had been taught to filter experience into.
LSD-assisted analysis could deepen, intensify and accelerate the therapeutic process and
produce practical results.
LSD breaks down those barriers that have made it possible for words to hide truths from
us. Taking of the drug is in fact essential to a true understanding of the experience.
LSD, by permitting consciousness on several levels at once, becomes specifically a
tuning device for the senses.
LSD can be not just a “mind-or consciousness-expanding” drug, but a “conscience-
expanding” one as well.
LSD can produce dramatic changes in personality leading to unprecedented peace, sanity
and happiness.
LSD can temporarily bring back the vividness of newness, the novelty of the first sensory
experience after repeated exposures.
LSD can truly accomplish the transcendence repeatedly and unsuccessfully sought in
drunkenness.
LSD carried with it a certain messianic vision, a certain understanding of the meaning of
freedom.
LSD could enable one to study psychic material that is buried in the deepest layers of the
unconscious and is usually inaccessible to less dynamic techniques.
LSD could expedite the psychotherapeutic process and shorten the time necessary for the
treatment of various emotional disorders, which makes it a potentially valuable tool.
LSD could shake people out of the rut of ordinary perception and catalyze some sort of
revelation.
LSD could trigger a peak experience with therapeutic benefits on psychological growth
and self-actualization.
LSD enables us to penetrate deeply and bring about changes in personality formerly
thought impossible.
LSD encaptulates an enormous amount of experience into a relatively short period.
Insights that might normally take years to acquire can burst forth in an awesome flurry.
LSD experiments gave new impetus to exploration into the essence of religious and
mystical experience.
LSD has been said to be capable of inspiring artists to new heights of originality and
productivity.
LSD has confirmed and strengthened what was already genuine in my religious
intuitions.
LSD has had phenomenal success in helping individuals attain long-sought solutions to
specific creative and technical problems.
LSD helps patients in psychoanalysis and psychotherapy to perceive their problems in
their true significance.
LSD in psychiatric use is much more often said to have prevented suicide than to have
caused it.
LSD is a catalyst or amplifier of mental processes. If properly used it could become
something like the microscope or the telescope of psychiatry.
LSD is a key to opening up sensory, cellular and precellular consciousness so that you
flow and harmonize with these different levels.
LSD is a kind of cure for intellectualism, a remedy for minds hung up in categories. We
feel like a medical team in a plague area. (That was Timothy Leary.)
Alan Ginsberg said that the first time that he
turned on to women was during an LSD session.
LSD is a way of extending yourself so that something spectacular and beautiful can be
available to you.
LSD is extraordinary because of the rich view of the unconscious which it permits.
Somewhere in this rich view of the unconscious lies the mystic experience.
LSD is magnificent and for a fetus, it must be ultra-magnificent (referring to a mother
tripping while pregnant or while giving birth).
LSD just blew the frame right out of the picture. It gave you a sense of infinite
possibility. LSD gave us the idea it could be different. It was tremendously inspiring.
LSD may lead to the finding of new potential for growth and development and to a new
beginning.
LSD might be the brain’s experience of itself when all the electrical circuits are turned on
at once.
LSD phenomena are extremely interesting material for a deeper understanding of the
mind, the nature of man and human society.
LSD propels them into hitherto unmapped regions of the mind while the mystical lore of
the East serves as a guide through this virgin territory.
LSD provided me with a map of the territory, a deeper self-understanding within, a wider
context than my own personal history.
LSD provides unrivaled insights into the dynamics of emotional disorders and the
functioning of the human mind in general.
LSD psychotherapy can be beneficial over a very broad spectrum of emotional and
psychosomatic disorders.
LSD religious experience—A Christian will report it in terms of the Christian vocabulary
and the Buddhists will do likewise.
LSD remains one of the most valuable tools in understanding the functioning of the
human mind.
LSD rips away the facade that keeps us from understanding how preoccupied we may
have become with the trivial.
LSD serves as a catalyst for inducing rapid and profound changes in the subject’s value-
belief system and in his self-image.
LSD sessions can be seen as opportunities to confront the mysteries of the universe and
the riddle of human existence.
LSD shows me the real Reality. It is the final enlightenment. The insights I gain are true.
(That’s right and don’t ever listen to anyone who doesn’t understand that.)
LSD stimulates an easy recall of events long buried in a patient’s subconscious and
striking insights into his own nature and the real world around him.
LSD strips off the protective barriers of the ego and all sensitivity and perception is
heightened.
LSD subjects can have several sequences of death and rebirth in a single psychedelic
session.
LSD subjects frequently experience contact with water as being not only physically
cleansing, but also emotionally and spiritually purifying.
LSD subjects frequently report being able to perceive worlds that have 4, 5 or more
dimensions.
LSD subjects frequently report that the flow of music helps them to let go of their
psychological defenses and surrender fully to the experience.
LSD subjects in this state experience powerful currents of energy streaming through their
bodies.
LSD subjects report experiences in which they identify with various animal ancestors in
the evolutionary pedigree.
LSD subjects report numerous visions of archetypal forms, individual deities and
complex mythological sequences. (eyes closed)
LSD translates into the language not just of religion, psychology and psychotherapy, but
also of the physical and biological sciences.
LSD, used improperly as in the infamous CIA experiments, can sabotage the brain so
totally that “mind murder” seems the best word for such unethical experimentation.
LSD will change biochemical balances inside our nervous system and you can experience
directly some of the things which we externally view through the lens of the microscope.
Many are able to apply various insights from their psychedelic sessions in a creative way
in their professional lives.
Many examples of the identification of a consciousness-changing drug with God and
associated with religious ritual could be cited.
Many persons have taken LSD and have experienced remarkable enhancement of their
sense of well-being.
Many people become more sensitive to the psychedelic qualities of marijuana after using
more powerful drugs.
Many LSD subjects discover in their sessions new dimensions in music and new ways of
listening to it.
Many LSD subjects report endless odyssey through the network of circulatory tunnels.
(eyes closed)
Many LSD subjects reported unusual aesthetic experiences and insights into the nature of
the creative process; they frequently developed a new understanding of art.
Many of the phenomena occurring in psychedelic sessions could not be understood
within the context of theories dominating academic thinking.
Many people become more sensitive to the psychedelic qualities of marijuana after using
more powerful drugs.
Many persons have taken LSD and have experienced remarkable enhancement of their
sense of well-being.
Mescaline and LSD take you beyond the senses into a world of cellular awareness. (eyes
closed)
Mescaline raises all colors to a higher power and makes the percipient aware of
innumerable fine shades of difference, to which, at ordinary times, he is completely blind.
Modern psychopharmacology is written and practiced by scientists who do not take drugs
and who therefore write textbooks about events they never experienced.
Most of the art in the collections of psychedelic therapists comes from subjects who were
not professional artists, but had LSD sessions for therapeutic, didactic or other purposes.
Most of the great world religions were based on inner exploration employing brain-
changing vegetables.
Most people who use LSD and marijuana to get high don’t really know how to use it.
(That was Timothy Leary.)
Music has several important functions and adds new dimensions to the psychedelic
experience.
My experience was so deep, so moving, so meaningful. What I really discovered under
LSD is love. Some call it God.
My most interesting intellectually stimulating experiences have been psychedelic
sessions. Psychedelics open wide the doors of learning.
Mythological materials often emerge in consciousness during a psychedelic experience.
(eyes closed)
Never before had a single substance held so much promise in such a wide variety of
fields of interest.
No less renowned a prophet than the late Aldous Huxley has suggested that humanity at
large may in fact come to avail itself of psychedelic drugs as a surrogate for religion.
No longer need man wonder with Job about God’s mysterious ways. LSD has all the
answers and more. It is The Truth, The Experience, The Godhead.
No matter how much mental training and psychological exploration had been done,
further realms of experience could be revealed by the psychedelics.
No one should take LSD unless he knows that he’s going into the unknown. He’s laying
his blue chips on the line.
No one should take LSD unless he’s well prepared, knows what he’s getting into and is
ready to go out of his mind. Be with someone you trust emotionally and spiritually.
Not infrequently, LSD subjects discover dimensions in music that they were unable to
perceive before.
Not LSD, but mishandling of the session, is with few exceptions the key factor when a
normal subject experiences an LSD “psychosis.”
Not only can psychedelic drugs deepen and broaden our understanding of religious
experience, but they may also contribute to genuine spiritual development.
Nothing before LSD ever brought home to me the idea that things of the spirit might be
real and palpable.
Now the chemical messiah has come which has the ability to awaken this sleeping
realization of mind potential in even the most skeptical.
Objects take on a pristine immediacy, looking as they may have looked to Adam on the
first day or to the drug user as a child.
Of utmost importance is the psychedelic peak experience which usually takes the form of
a death-rebirth sequence with ensuing feelings of cosmic unity.
On a fundamental level, the human mind is connected with the Infinite; psychedelics
simply made manifest this basic truth.
On an LSD trip, nearly anything one looks at can seem pregnant with meaning,
embodying great truths.
On occasion, LSD subjects have stated that they experienced themselves as neurons in
their own brains.
One conception of psychedelic therapy for alcoholics is that LSD can truly accomplish
the transcendence that is repeatedly and unsuccessfully sought in drunkenness.
One must have a genuine curiosity about new direction of personal growth and the fabric
of psychedelic insight and discovery. There should be dedication of purpose.
One of the important contributions of the drug movement to religion is that it has called
the attention of religious people to the necessity of ecstasy for vital religion.
One of the most interesting aspects of LSD research is the relationship between the
psychedelic state and the creative process.
One of the most striking effects of LSD is its ability to activate the leisurely pace of
conventional consciousness.
One of the real tragedies of our time is that such an extraordinarily valuable and
necessary tool as LSD should be held in such disrepute.
One of the things that is shaking to an individual of LSD is that he has to come to a
realization that he is Christ and then recognize that everybody else is.
One of the unique properties of the drug is that it excludes random distractions from the
immediate perception and permits total concentration.
One unusual characteristic of the psychedelic experience is the number of levels on
which one can operate. It is just as if one is actor and audience at the same time.
Only a warm, supportive atmosphere can lead to a therapeutic LSD experience, not the
cold, clinical environment.
Our social policy has all but ignored the extraordinary potential of psychedelic drugs for
therapeutic use and inner development.
Our understanding of these most complex and fascinating of drugs remains incomplete,
and they represent unfinished business for psychological research and psychotherapy.
Peace and joy engulfed me and I knew that the kingdom of heaven was truly within and
that LSD had made this day the most important one in my life.
Peaking on LSD is above all one of an open horizon, a field of presence in the wildest
sense.
People may come to understand better through psychedelic drugs the visionary and
mystical language of poets like Blake, Wordsworth and Whitman.
People who have used LSD are much more attuned to getting turned on. Marijuana
usually sends them much higher than it does others.
Persons who take drugs on their own are most interested in aesthetic and mystical
experiences.
Peyote-eating and the religion based upon it have become important symbols of the red
man’s right to spiritual independence.
Pieces of music with which I thought I was thoroughly familiar, having heard them
hundreds of times before, I hear as if for the first time during an LSD trip.
Profound emotional bonds can develop as a result of an LSD session—bonds that can last
a lifetime.
Proponents argue that LSD may widen their window on the world and on themselves as
well.
Psychedelic agents may facilitate lasting change in the direction of increased creative
expression and self-actualization.
Psychedelic drug therapy did not die a natural death from loss of interest; it was killed by
law. (That is fascism.)
Psychedelic drugs afford the best access yet to the contents and processes of the human
mind.
Psychedelic drugs allow us to study—directly, experientially, empirically—the problems
which have perplexed philosophers for millennia.
Psychedelic drugs allow you to see and hear new patterns of energy that suggest new
patterns for composition. In this way, they enhance the creative perspective.
Psychedelic drugs bring you into levels of reality which aren’t structural because the
mind can’t structure them.
Psychedelic drugs can stimulate a breakthrough to an enlarged consciousness of a
transfigured world of the Eternal Now.
Psychedelic drugs enable the individual to cultivate those creative and spiritual facets of
his personality that so often remain unexplored.
Psychedelic drugs enhance creativity, providing solutions to artistic and intellectual
problems through new combinations of ideas and feelings (and perceptions).
Psychedelic drugs give me a sense of harmony and beauty. For the first time in my life, I
can take pleasure in the beauty of a leaf; I can find meaning in the processes of nature.
Psychedelic drugs give promise of providing access to the great and hitherto largely
impenetrable realms—the vast, intricate and awesome regions we call mind.
Psychedelic drugs have allowed me to believe impossible things, and I am grateful to
them for that.
Psychedelic drugs have enabled them to attain significant experiences otherwise
unavailable to them.
Psychedelic drugs held the promise of changing mankind and ushering in a new
millennia. (The promise is still there and everywhere, at all times.)
Psychedelic drugs manifest universal native capacities of the mind and permanent
possibilities of human experience.
Psychedelic drugs open up the possibility of working in areas little or not at all touched
by psychoanalysis and other therapies.
Psychedelic drugs opened to mass tourism mental territories previously explored only by
small parties of particularly intrepid adventurers, mainly religious mystics.
Psychedelic experience emphasizes the unity of things, the infinite dance…You are the
wave, but you are also the ocean.
Psychedelic experiences mediate access to deep realms of the psyche that have not yet
been discovered and acknowledged by mainstream psychology and psychiatry.
Psychedelic experiences seem to have a powerful effect and can change a person’s
attitude toward life.
Psychedelic substances are extremely powerful tools for opening the depths of the
unconscious. They have great positive potential.
Psychedelic substances can induce without any specific programming, profound death-
rebirth experiences and facilitate spiritual opening.
Psychedelic substances can occasionally facilitate extrasensory perception (like
accurately describing something that is historically or geographically far away).
Psychedelic substances have been used very wisely in primitive cultures. Our culture
doesn’t have this framework, the closeness to God and nature.
Psychedelic therapy can have a positive effect on a variety of emotional symptoms and
problems.
Psychedelics bring normally unconscious, subliminal under-the-threshold experiences
into awareness.
Psychedelics have shown me that certain things are possible, things I would otherwise
never have believed.
Psychedelics make it easier to see and accept aspects of reality that one can’t rationally
explain.
Psychedelics offer unique opportunities for healing of emotional and psychosomatic
disorders, for positive personality transformation, and consciousness evolution.
Psychedelics provide opportunities for mystical insight in much the same way that well-
prepared paints and brushes provide opportunities for fine painting.
Psychiatrists secretly drop LSD into the water glasses of psychotic patients and report
that LSD enhances insanity.
Psychotherapy has to be significantly reevaluated in view of the observations from
psychedelic therapy.
Pursuing the religious life today without psychedelic drugs is like studying astronomy
with the naked eye.
Rationalist intellectuals tend to scorn the psychedelic experience as antagonistic to clear
thinking if not a flight into delirium. (Have any such “intellectuals” had the experience?)
Religious training or metaphysical inquiry seems to provide the ideal context for these
drugs.
Ritualized and responsible use of psychedelics received social sanction in some ancient
societies and pre-industrial countries and was meaningfully woven into the social fabric.
Robert Kennedy’s wife Ethyl reportedly underwent LSD therapy with a close associate of
Hubbard.
Science and philosophy have been betrayed because of our irrational rejection of
psychedelic evidence. It is a professional duty to help redress this error.
Sensitivity to others and their problems was stimulated by the drug. It grows naturally out
of the experience of unity.
Since consciousness is a biochemical process, chemicals are the keys to the different
levels of consciousness.
Some marijuana smokers learned from irrational condemnations and persecution to
mistrust all laws and conventions of our society.
Some referred to their first psychedelic experience as a “peak experience,” as a turning
point in their lives.
Some psychiatrists very early saw the remarkable potential of LSD for telescoping many
weary hours of psychotherapy into a brief, intense experience.
Something told me that if there was any microphone I could use to ask God a question, it
was peyote.
Specialized training of the therapist, which includes first-hand experiences of psychedelic
states of consciousness, is an important element in LSD psychotherapy.
Spiritual experiences in psychedelic sessions usually do not take an orthodox religious
form. More frequently, they resemble what Einstein referred to as cosmic religion.
Spiritual insights accompanying the psychedelic experience might be subjective accounts
of the objective findings of astronomy, physics, biochemistry and neurology.
Subjects consistently reported that the drug induced in them a variety of changes which
facilitated the creative process.
Such a tremendous potential to alter the consciousness made LSD a sure subject of heated
debate.
Terrence McKenna, among others, has speculated that the evolution from prehuman to
human was the result of synergy of mind-altering plants and the human mind.
The action of consciousness-expanding drugs on the cortex can be holy and intensely
educational.
The actual experience of a hallucinogenic adds dimensionality to one’s understanding of
a patient who is attempting to describe his.
The aim of all Eastern religion, like the aim of LSD, is basically to get high, that is, to
expand your consciousness and find ecstasy and revelation within.
The association of drugs with religious experience is so offensive to some that they will
deny that such things can be.
The average church will tend to reject any discussion of the drugs that does not damn
them.
The basic mystery of the eidetic images will deepen along with the drug-state levels. (The
eidetic images are seen with the eyes closed.)
The basic structure of experience is given by our sense of space and passage of time.
Both are profoundly altered in psychedelic mystical states.
The Christian must accept by faith. The mushroom of the Aztecs carries its own
conviction; every communicant will testify to the miracle that he has experienced.
The claim that drugs “expand consciousness” refers to changes in several dimensions of
experience.
The consciousness-changing (expanding?) drugs give a glimpse into the mind. One could
almost say that LSD gives a glimpse into the very soul of man, taps a universal knowing.
The content of LSD sessions entails simultaneous perception of many dimensions and
levels of the mind.
The day of the LSD experience often became a dramatic and easily discernable landmark
in the development of individual artists.
The deep psychedelic experience is a death-rebirth flip. You turn on to the ancient
rhythm. You become its beat.
The discovery of LSD and subsequent psychedelic research opened up new revolutionary
avenues in the study of human consciousness.
The discovery of LSD is as important to philosophy and religion as the discovery of the
microscope was to biology.
The discovery of mind-expanding, mind-blowing, mind-bending and mind-transcending
properties of drugs seems to go back to the New Stone Age, if not earlier.
The drug can be seen as a means of passage to the inmost self, the collective unconscious,
or the transpersonal realm.
The drug can open and sensitize all the sensory channels to an extraordinary degree and
make it possible for the subject to perceive the world in a totally new way.
The drug experience seemed to reduce depression, tension, pain and fear of death
dramatically.
The drug invites self-disclosure and emotional closeness without disturbing intellectual
capacity.
The drug is a superior instrument for treating the whole range of neuroses or any similar
disorders.
The drug itself is seen as a catalyst that activates the unconscious processes in a rather
unspecific way.
The drug user feels himself to have transcended the trivial and absurd preoccupations of
his fellows—the “game world” of ordinary consciousness.
The drug user lives through the archetypal adventures described in myths and fairy tales.
(eyes closed)
The drug-induced experience has been regarded by primitives and even by the highly
civilized as intrinsically divine.
The drugs diminish defensive attitudes without blurring perception, as in the case of
alcohol.
The drugs produced sudden insight that one has been living in a narrow space-time-self
context.
The early experimentation with LSD brought important new insights into the nature of
the creative process.
The effect of consciousness-expanding drugs will be to transform our concepts of human
nature, of human potentialities, of existence.
The effects of these drugs result in an intensity of personal experience and emotion more
meaningful than the term “hallucinogenic” implies.
The emotional impact of sound can be modified. Not infrequently, LSD subjects discover
dimensions in music that they were unable to perceive before.
The essential effect of the psychedelic experience is the death of the time-bound ego and
the consequent realization of the Supreme Identity.
The evangelists and social historians of the psychedelic revolution have a delightful
roster of hero-comedian-clowns available for legendary canonization.
The experience of ego-death in psychedelic sessions is the most powerful remedy against
suicidal tendencies.
The experience of peaking on LSD is above all one of an open horizon, a field of
presence in the widest sense.
The fact that the experience was induced by drugs has no bearing on its validity (as a
religious experience).
The ingestion of psychedelic substances evokes an activation of deeply buried psychic
contents and a bringing of them to the surface of consciousness.
The insights psychedelics potentiate frequently enable one to see through the myriad
pretentions and deceits which make up the mythology of the Social Lie.
The insights that have been achieved by LSD experimentation are of lasting value and
relevance.
The intelligent use of drugs required a new professional, unfamiliar to the Western world,
the brain guide. The multiple-reality coach.
The intense drug experience permits an impact on the subject not obtainable by any other
means.
The knowledge that was suddenly revealed to me under LSD seemed to be remembered
rather than learned.
The law against LSD is a violation of a people’s God-given right to experience their own
divinity.
The longing of my soul to experience the Reality of Oneness with the Absolute was my
paramount hope and motivation in taking LSD—that some breakthrough might be given.
The LSD experience appears to involve a variety of factors on many different levels; each
has a distinct therapeutic potential.
The LSD experience cut right through the Zen games and intellectual disillusionment of
the once worshipped Beat generation. Acid’s first and most powerful message was love.
The LSD experience is all about merging, yielding, flowing, union, communion. It’s all
lovemaking.
The LSD experience is felt by almost everyone who undergoes it to be profoundly
significant and enlightening.
The LSD experience is not concerned with morality. Rather it is concerned with
immortality.
The LSD experience made available again the “lost” and forgotten visual modalities one
has a child.
The LSD experience spurs a driving hunger to communicate in new forms, in better
ways, to express a more harmonious message, to live a better life.
The LSD gamble is that risk men have faced for thousands of years if they wished to
pursue what lay beyond their minds.
The LSD revelation is the clear perspective. The LSD panic is the terror that ego is lost
forever.
The LSD session helped them gain deep insights into the world of painters, empathize
with them and understand their art.
The LSD state is, in essence, one of greatly heightened suggestibility, with environmental
cues sensed most exquisitely.
The marijuana laws in this country were passed with no attempt to incorporate the
available scientific evidence on the effects of marijuana.
The mere suggestion of a connection between psychedelic drugs and authentic religious
experience will outrage many and perhaps, puzzle most.
The Mexican Indian who said, “Aspirin is a drug, peyote is sacred,” was making a
distinction that our laws do not permit.
The mushrooms might have been a “mighty springboard” which first put the idea of God
into men’s heads.
The nature of psychedelic therapy is such that the process itself automatically selects in
each session the material that is most emotionally relevant at the time.
The only aspect of the LSD controversy about which all parties do agree is that the
consciousness-expanding drugs are powerful.
The only way to study these drugs properly is to take them. You don’t learn anything of
significance by watching a subject under LSD.
The parallels between the phenomenology of rites of passage and LSD experiences
involving death and rebirth are far-reaching.
The person who takes the drug undertakes a journey into his or her psyche. For this
reason, LSD is of deep relevance for understanding the human mind and psychotherapy.
The peyote road has shown me many wonders. I shall continue to follow that adventurous
path, that sublime way of life.
The plant sources of these drugs, the visionary vegetables, have been worshipped as gods
in many times and places.
The power of psychedelics to evoke evolutionary archetypes awakened many women to
the goddess within.
The power of substances to produce altered states of consciousness is understood by
Western scientists in biochemical rather than supernatural terms.
The psychedelic drugs genuinely give some inkling of the complexity of Eastern
consciousness.
The psychedelic drugs produce insights into some of the absurdities within the individual
and also within the social structure in which he is embedded.
The psychedelic experience basically has been one of turning on to the life process, to the
dance of life.
The psychedelic experience can become a source of revelatory, aesthetic, scientific,
philosophical or spiritual insight.
The psychedelic experience frequently involves elements totally alien to an individual’s
own religious tradition.
The psychedelic experience has been around for a few thousand years before Haight-
Ashbury.
The psychedelic experience has the potential of initiating the unfolding of a self-healing
and self-realizing process.
The psychedelic experience is a way to stand apart from yourself in a way you ordinarily
cannot.
The psychedelic experience is fundamentally or ideally the bursting of ego-
consciousness, with the concomitant realization of cosmic-consciousness.
The psychedelic experience is incomprehensible to a rational, achievement-oriented,
conformist philosophy.
The psychedelic experience is incomprehensible to one committed to a conformist
philosophy.
The psychedelic experience is man’s oldest and most classic adventure into meaning.
Every religion was founded on the basis of some flipped out visionary trip.
The psychedelic experience provides ecstatic moments which dwarf any personal or
cultural game.
The psychedelic experience provides nothing less than a means of truly going “beyond
Freud” and to venture into these previously inaccessible regions of mind.
The psychedelic experience seemed to have opened new realms of mystical and cosmic
feelings within her.
The psychedelic peak experience is certainly an important factor mediating deep
personality transformation.
The psychedelic religious movement uses the same chemical aids or sacraments as the
first American religion—the peyote religion of the native American Indians.
The psychedelic session should take place in a protected environment where the client is
not disturbed by external influences and in turn, has unlimited freedom of full expression.
The psychedelic spectrum covers the entire range of experiences that are humanly
possible.
The psychedelic state, and other forms of altered consciousness are worthy of serious
study if the act of human creation is to be better understood, guided, and encouraged.
The psychedelic state is an immensely powerful one for obtaining insight and
understanding through visual symbolism.
The psychedelic state is not a “toxic psychosis” but a “journey into the unconscious or
superconscious mind.”
The psychedelic style involves a revolution in our concepts of art and creativity, the new
music, the new poetry, the new visual art, the new film.
The psychedelics give warrant of being man’s most valuable resource to date in solving
problems and in treating emotional disorders.
The psychedelics offer the hope that we are on the threshold of a new renaissance in
which man’s view of himself will undergo dramatic change.
The psychedelics permit access to preverbal impressions, to unconscious material, and to
intuitive processes.
The psychedelic technique fulfills the hopes of many troubled individuals for magical
intervention, a quick solution to their problems.
The psychedelics ain’t junk. The psychedelics are holy sacraments! Everybody should
take acid at least once to straighten-out their heads.
The psychedelics’ special effectiveness for mental illness is closely associated with their
capacity to release ecstatic religious states.
The public at large fails to take seriously any positive feelings of inner change through
drug experience. (That’s because they have never experienced those positive feelings.)
The Puritans killed the senses. English culture killed emotion. And now it was necessary
to dynamite the concrete lid, to “blow the mind” as the LSD followers call it.
The rate of recovery or significant improvement was often higher with LSD therapy than
with traditional methods.
The refusal to admit that drugs can induce religious experiences is like the 17th century
theologians’ refusal to look through Galileo’s telescope.
The rigidity of the normal mind was so different from the complete openness of the
psychedelic situation.
The role of the psychedelic guide is new in our society, but the newness of the role
should not blind us to the antiquity of its precedents.
The sacramental process of our religion is the use of marijuana and LSD and nothing can
substitute for that.
The selective, systematic use of psychedelics in creative problem-solving situations may
turn out to be one of the most significant applications of these chemicals.
The significance of the LSD observations transcends the framework of psychiatry and
psychology and extends to many other scientific disciplines.
The significance of the psychological components in the mechanism of pain relief
induced by LSD is unquestionable. (This refers to physical pain.)
The singing is good, but under the influence of the mushroom, you think it is infinitely
tender and sweet. It is as though you were hearing it with your mind’s ear.
The so-called “instant psychotherapy” is in fact a possibility in the psychedelic
experience.
The spiritual experiences they had in their LSD sessions were important evidence that
spirituality is a genuine and deeply relevant force in human life.
The spiritual insights accompanying the psychedelic experience might be subjective
accounts of the objective findings of astronomy, physics, biochemistry and neurology.
The story of drug-taking constitutes one of the most curious and also it seems to me, one
of the most significant chapters in the natural history of human beings.
The study of psychedelic drugs has engendered an enormous emotional reaction from
society. (Will society ever wake up?)
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.
The tendency of LSD seems to be to switch the operations of the mind from the verbal
association stream of thought to intuitive perception of images and forms.
The therapeutic claims made for these drugs are of sufficient potential importance to
warrant serious unprejudiced study.
The time of dreams is different than the time of waking. The time of mystical or
psychedelic states is different again.
The time will come within a century when an educated man will be one who knows who
he is and where he came from, knows on the basis of direct psychedelic experience.
The total impact of an LSD experience can never be forgotten regardless of how much
the visions may dim.
The use of drugs by witches appears to make intelligible to us on a scientific level many
phenomena formerly seen as involving elements of the supernatural.
The use of drugs to alter consciousness is nothing new. It has been a feature of human life
in all places on the earth and in all ages of history.
The use of LSD is a ready way of stirring deeply buried sources of the religious life and
perceptions, which create feelings of awe, joy, wonder, peace and love.
The use of LSD led to a resurrection of the body. The person discovered that his body
belonged not to the state, the moralist or the doctor but to himself.
The use of mind-altering drugs as religious sacraments was not restricted to a particular
time and place, but characterized nearly every society on the planet.
The use of psychedelic substances for ritual, religious and magical purposes can be traced
back to ancient shamanic traditions and is probably as old as mankind.
The user observes what he is experiencing in the situation and realizes it is not how he
usually experiences the stimuli.
The user of LSD and marijuana is not running away from life, but looks for a fuller
experience.
The words which one uses to describe the psychedelic experience depend upon the
investigator’s cultural background, his language repertoire, his literary breadth.
There are no specific psychological reactions to these drugs; there are, rather, various
reactions.
There came a knowing beyond all doubting, convictions unshakable in their strength, as
if LSD had pulled back a curtain and allowed the light of wisdom to shine through.
There exist hardly any perceptual, emotional or psychosomatic manifestations that have
not been observed and described as part of the LSD experience.
There exist societies that make liberal use of drugs to alter awareness, but do not appear
to have problems with them.
There exists an abundance of evidence to indicate that mind-changing drugs have
importantly affected the course of human history.
There is no doubt that psychedelic drugs produce experiences regarded by those who
undergo them as religious in the fullest sense.
There is no issue in psychology, physics, biology and theology which cannot make use of
these microscopes of consciousness.
There is pretty clear evidence of the religious use of psychedelic drugs among the ancient
Greeks.
There is so much mystery in a psychedelic day, so much happens in the person who is
having the experience that he cannot express.
There’s a whole body of literature on the phenomenon of people temporarily possessing
supernatural powers, particularly tribal peoples who use psychedelic substances.
There was a beautiful flash to meeting another acid freak. It reminded you that you were
part of something big.
These chemicals will inevitably revolutionize our procedures of education, child rearing
and social behavior.
These drugs are useful in producing valuable personality changes in individuals with
serious personality disorders.
These drugs can elicit material normally in the subconscious that can be of considerable
value to virtually all schools of psychotherapeutic thought.
These drugs characteristically generate heightened responsiveness to feelings and a sense
of closeness to other people.
These drugs, handled correctly, appear to offer incomparable opportunities for studying
religious experience.
These drugs have the unique effect on the human psyche of bringing into awareness
forms of consciousness that are usually hidden or unconscious.
These drugs, if properly used, could be the source of energy that is to transform the
human mind.
These drugs intensify experience, transfiguring the way we normally regard objective
reality.
These drugs produce ecstatic states from which new learning, a shift in values, or
subsequent behavior change purportedly ensue.
These drugs provide their users with direct intimations of attractive alternative realities
which might normally never be encountered.
These drugs tremendously intensified bodily sensations— taste, smell, touch, colors,
sounds, motion, breathing.
These foods and drugs have always been shrouded in mystery, misunderstanding and
controversy (in Western societies).
These people need real love and understanding, the love and understanding which seems
to come through LSD.
These plants and drugs as expanders of human consciousness could revolutionize
psychology and philosophy.
These plants are found all over the world all the way back in history and probably used
and known about before the creation of any system of mind-changing exercises.
These remarkable medicines temporarily dissolve our defenses and permit us to see what
separative consciousness normally ignores, the world as an interrelated whole.
These sacraments are fantastic privileges. It is an undescribable grace, an undescribable
privilege.
They enjoyed the feelings of supreme happiness and well-being that explain the age-old
power these “sacred mushrooms” exercise.
They shouldn’t be considered drugs at all, but should be classed with poetry, music,
literature and art.
They would return through psychedelic drugs to a lost state of innocence, a time before
time, when creation was fresh and the earth a paradise.
This intensified connection through LSD at the advent of our relationship resulted in a
permanent bond.
This moment now is it, eternity. The acid was acting as a cleansing agent, dissolving all
the wholly stuff that got in the way of my direct perception of the here and now.
This is what I realized on LSD. This is our playground and we are here to laugh and
dance and sing in the sunshine.
This “very high sort of seeing” is the heart and veritable core of the psychedelic
experience.
Those who use psychedelics with religious intent are now members of a persecuted
religion which appears to the rest of society as a grave menace to “mental health.”
Through the psychedelics, it is possible to experience the world as many of our great
writers have experienced it.
Throughout history, the alchemist has always been a magical awesome figure. The
potion. The elixir.
To develop graceful, fulfilling ways of living a more serene, beautiful and creative life,
psychedelics will help to point the way.
To say that someone has taken LSD tells little more about the content and import of his
experience than to say that he has had a dream.
To study drugs, one has to do it. It’s possible to be scientific about data of the internal
world.
To those who rode on the crest of the wave of the psychedelic years, the transformation
of society seemed only an arm’s length away.
Turning on requires a change in the physiology of the human body. You have to have
something to bring about the biochemical change, a sacrament.
Under LSD, the most devastating of buried memories have been recovered and within a
single session relived and resolved.
Under LSD you come to know that God is not apart and aside from Man but that God is
within Man and that Man is within God.
Under the drug, they claim to feel the glory of God and the spiritual glory of each other—
and all of mankind.
Unquestionably this drug is very useful to the artist, activating trains of association that
would otherwise be inaccessible.
Until you have experienced the effects of the drug, you cannot know how narrow your
previous ideas about the world were.
Used therapeutically, a psychedelic drug might help to resolve a neurosis or other
psychological problem and therefore release creativity.
Virtually in every religious tradition, both civilized and primitive, use has been made of
mind-changing drugs used for the purposes of inducing visionary experiences.
Wasson says the mushrooms might have been a “mighty springboard” which first put the
idea of God into men’s heads.
We are so ignorant of the basic effects of psychedelics that we can only legislate or
“educate” in ignorance and emotional hysteria at present.
We can anticipate that normal reality without drugs will be simply one of a possible two
or three hundred realities interrelating at a given time.
We had discovered the long-sought after philosopher’s stone, the key to increased
intelligence.
We have in our culture, even in the scientific and professional literature, a bias toward
reporting only the negative effects of psychedelics.
We have much to learn from appropriate investigation of this powerful mind-altering
chemical.
We must change our thinking to use the potentialities of our new instruments. (The new
instruments are psychedelic drugs.)
We were using a new kind of microscope, one which made visible an extraordinary range
of new perceptions.
Western scholars have greatly underestimated the importance of these drugs to the
cultures that use them.
What kind of world was it back when LSD could be discussed scientifically, objectively,
rationally?
What you learn from LSD can make you a better person—more alive, awake, intelligent,
loving, creative.
When I was strongly under the influence of the drug were the most important hours of my
life.
Where the patient suffered paralysis in one arm, LSD was finally tried as a last resort.
The arm became normal again.
Whenever I’d taken LSD, I’d always sought a revelation of the sacred. Now I was in the
midst of one. It was a great honor, a blessing, and I felt very humble.
Whether or not objective tests show a “real” increase in sensory acuity seems laughingly
irrelevant to the drug user.
While one is under the drug, one has penetrating insights into the people around one and
also into one’s own life.
With its internal, invisible, indescribable phenomena, the psychedelic experience is
incomprehensible to a rational, achievement-oriented, conformist philosophy.
With LSD, technology has produced a chemical which catalyzes a consciousness which
finds the entire civilization leading up to that pill absurd.
With LSD, we had found the means with which our Western kind of civilization could be
renewed by the discovery of new mysteries.
With psychedelics, a new energy—a potent psychic energy—has entered the world stage
and must be reckoned with.
With the aid of LSD, I had recognized that God was the whole of this paradise which lay
deep within each person.
With the aid of these drugs, I was exposing myself to the most intense emotions available
to the human nervous system.
With the decrease in the power of words in the psychedelic experience, the immediate
sensory life gains in range of significance as well as strength.
You can no more do research on LSD and leave out sexual ecstasy than you can do
microscopic research on tissue and leave out cells.
You get from an LSD experience only what you bring to it and what you’re ready to take
away from it.
A child sees his first bright red ball, tastes his first piece of chocolate, smells his first
flower, touches his first piece of velvet and hears his first few notes of music in a manner
not unlike that of the individual under LSD.
A conceptual system that could account for at least the major observations of LSD
therapy requires not just a new understanding of the effects of LSD, but a new and
expanded model of the human mind and the nature of human beings.
A good experience with the drugs heightens and intensifies all experience and just as one
can enjoy music and art during the experience with a new and deeper appreciation, so one
can do the same with sex—it can be a beautiful experience under the drug.
A know-it-all attitude, that of a “big shot” will usually cause suffering. That’s what
peyote can do to a man who thinks he knows everything. Peyote will bend him down and
turn him inside out.
A lively boost was the publication of Huxley’s books, Doors of Perception and Heaven
and Hell; his enormous erudition and lucid explanations put the whole business of taking
a drug to change your consciousness on a totally new level.
A number of architects have added to the extensive evidence for the drug’s use as an
instrument for enhancing perception, for training in visualization. They report that visual
and auditory acuity are revolutionized.
A number of patients in psychotherapy could begin to paint after having been given the
drug. Most of them had not previously done any painting at all, and yet the quality of the
work was far above average for the ordinary beginning art student.
A professional engineer-physicist who was skeptical about the enhancement of creativity
through LSD was surprised by the “intensity of concentration, the forcefulness and
exuberance” with which he could work.
Alcohol is a “down” experience. It narrows consciousness and makes you a rather sloppy,
a rather messy person in thought and action. The psychedelic drugs take you in the
opposite direction.
Americans are permitted to do almost anything in the name of psychotherapy or religion
except use disapproved drugs. (That means the U.S. is a fascist state without religious
freedom.)
Amorphous surfaces, textures of objects and spots on the floor or walls can be seen as
fantastic animals, grotesque faces or exotic scenery. The optical side of aesthetic LSD
sessions can be so overwhelming and rich that it has been described as “orgies of vision”.
An enormous amount of energy from every fiber of your body is released under LSD,
most especially including sexual energy. There is no question that LSD is the most
powerful aphrodisiac ever discovered by man.
Artistic and literary folks respond ecstatically and wisely to drug experience. They tell us
this is what they have been looking for: new, intense, direct confrontation with the world
about them.
As long as human beings have had these kinds of bodies, living on a planet of this sort,
certain myths keep appearing and reappearing and many of them refer to the magic and
wonder of the sacred drug, the potion, the elixir of life.
As the sexual activity continues and the drug takes greater hold on you, the sensations
intensify. The penis feels bigger, stiffer and strangely “rubbery”. Sensations of pleasure
expand to more areas of the body than usual.
Become a cheerleader for evolution. That’s what I did and my grandfather before me.
These brain-drugs, mass-produced will bring about vast changes in society. (That was
Aldous Huxley speaking to Timothy Leary while both were tripping.)
Before beginning the program there were issues in the marriage that she could not
acknowledge or break through. But the psychedelic experiences permitted breaking
through them, even exploding through.
Before taking LSD, I never stayed in a state of sexual ecstasy for hours on end, but I have
done this under LSD. It heightens all of your senses and it means that you’re living the
sexual experience totally. Each caress or kiss is timeless.
Blake said that “gratitude is heaven itself”-a phrase I was unable to understand before
taking LSD, but which now seems luminously comprehensible. (That was Aldous
Huxley. One can say that LSD is heavenly gratifying.)
Certain drugs can produce in otherwise normal individuals deep mystical and religious
states. Matrices for such experiences exist in the unconscious as a normal constituent of
the human personality.
Could the drugs help us who are now located between the animals and the angels, to one
day leave our larvel state and become butterflies? With all my heart I wanted to believe in
our potential to evolve, to emerge from our brutish past.
Do these drugs then promise discoveries about mind as important and far reaching in
their ultimate effects as have been the revolutionary findings of this century concerning
the physical universe? At the very least, the promise is so great.
Dr. David Smith, of the Haight Street Free Clinic said, “Acid lowers your powers of
discrimination until everything seems important.” When I heard that, I said,
“No. Acid RAISES your powers of INTEGRATION until everything IS important.”
Documentation of the wide-spread use of cannabis for medical, religious and intoxicant
purposes begins to appear about the tenth century B. C. (That’s right. The medical use of
marijuana is at least 3000 years old.)
During a government investigation of the use of peyote by the Native American Church,
an Indian made the statement, “You white men go to your church houses and talk about
God. We eat peyote and talk with God.”
During the next few hundred years, the major activity of man will be scientific
exploration of and education in the many new universes of awareness which have been
opened up by psychedelic drugs.
During the psychedelic session the subject’s nervous system is in a state of disorganized
flux closely analogous to that of infancy. (This isn’t infantile. It’s very high level of
maturity.)
Entheogens is the currently designated name for psychedelics used for spiritual
realization, and according to Jonathan Ott, is derived from an obsolete Greek word
meaning “realizing the divine within.”
Experiencing the profound psychological changes induced by LSD is a unique and
valuable learning experience for all clinicians and theoreticians studying abnormal mental
states.
Exploration of the human psyche with these powerful catalyzing agents has shown
beyond any doubt that the biographical model developed by Freud’s “depth” psychology
barely scratches the surface of mental dynamics.
For at least 3000 years, primitive tribes have had visionary orgies at feasts of certain
sacred plants, often mushrooms. (Were they primitive or is modern man, ignorant of all
of this, who is really primitive?)
For many people, one or two psychedelic experiences can accomplish the goals of a long
and successful psychotherapy, a deep understanding and game-free collaboration between
participants, plus insight.
For many professional artists as well as laymen, the LSD session represented a profound
aesthetic experience that gave them a new understanding of modern art movements and
art in general.
For millennia, man has been involved in the ritual ingestion of substances reputed to
produce an awareness of a sacramental reality and has come to incorporate these
substances into the myth and ritual pattern of the culture in which they occur.
For the historians and critics of art, the LSD experiments provided extraordinary new
insights into the psychology and psychopathology of art, particularly various modern
movements as well as paintings and sculptures of native cultures.
For the perception of art, particularly music, it is not infrequent that as a result of
psychedelic experiences, nonmusical persons develop vivid interest in music and others
discover entirely new ways of experiencing it.
From time immemorial, plants containing powerful mind-altering substances have been
used for the diagnosing and healing of diseases, enhancement of paranormal abilities, and
for magical or ritual purposes.
Hallucinogenic drugs give people who lack the gift of spontaneous perception the
potential to experience this extraordinary state of consciousness and thereby to attain
insight into the spiritual world.
Hallucinogens could lead to deepened understanding of religious and mystical content
and to a new and fresh experience of the great works of art. (Actually, with LSD,
whatever you look at becomes a great work of art, even if it’s dust or garbage.)
Houston Smith ran psilocybin sessions for MIT undergraduates and graduate students as
laboratory exercises for his seminars on mysticism. How elegant and civilized! This was
exactly how we thought education should operate. (That was Timothy Leary.)
I became intrigued by the possibilities that LSD psychotherapy seemed to offer for the
alleviation of the emotional suffering of cancer patients facing the prospect of imminent
death. (That was Stanislav Grof.)
I felt strongly that the study of nonordinary states of mind in general and those induced
by psychedelics in particular, was by far the most interesting area of psychiatry and
decided to make it my field of specialization. (That was Stanislav Grof.)
I found myself wishing that every living person might be given LSD and see beauty equal
to that which I had witnessed, have the same feelings, know the blessed nearness of God
and that these feelings might stay uppermost in all of us at all times.
I hope that religious organizations in this country will begin to understand that highs
triggered by drugs may be more relevant to spiritual development than appearances of
spirituality on Sunday mornings.
I think it’s time to be brave and honest. I know that if everybody who’d ever taken a
major psychedelic stood up and said “Yeah, I did that and this is how it shaped my life,”
the world would be a better place the next day.
I’m eternally grateful for this experience. LSD changed my life. I’ve lived more, felt
more, enjoyed life more in the last dew years than I had dreamed possible. LSD gave me
that treasure. (That was actor Cary Grant.)
If drugs can change the way in which the brain sees, hears, smells and assembles
meaningful form out of the chaos of sensation, they can also radically transform the
nature of sexual feeling.
If people in our schools and industries were allowed to participate in LSD programs
aimed at making the most of their creative abilities and stimulating peak production, we
could anticipate a Periclean age of achievement in all fields.
If psychedelics offer valid ways of exploring man’s “inner world”, the hidden ways of the
mind and brain, we should surely admit that new knowledge of this inmost frontier may
be worth quite serious risks.
If the perceptions touched off by the drugs are in any reliable sense religious, then an
invaluable means of studying the dynamics and effects of profound religious experience
at firsthand is available to us.
If we can even start to move in the direction of relying on intuition and experience to
discover the positive potential of drugs, the drug problem will automatically begin to
recede. (The fight against drugs is what creates, causes or is the “drug problem.”)
In some circles of serious research into the drug’s effect, it is thought that LSD is
possibly the clue that will lead to the discovery and disclosure of man’s unconscious, its
meaning and function.
Insofar as performance has lagged because of inability to perceive the solutions to
specific problems, LSD can actually increase creative activity. (With LSD, the person can
“perceive the solutions” that they couldn’t otherwise.)
It is important to realize that by banning psychedelic research we have not only given up
the study of an interesting drug or group of substances, but also abandoned one of the
most promising approaches to the understanding of the human mind and consciousness.
It is unfortunate that federal and state legislatures rush into law prohibitions based on
ignorance of the nature of psychedelic drugs and on fear fostered by psychiatrists and
newspapers.
It may be that LSD not only changes the pre-conditions of death, but alters the transition
as well. The question is, does it do anything else? No one can answer, for in this realm,
there is not a single expert.
It seems likely that any religious use of the drugs will have to be carried on in cults,
outside traditional institutions. This is a pity, for it deprives the churches of a powerful
influx of ecstatic energy—the very element of which they are in shortest supply.
It was a magical time. Visions of utopia flooded my brain. The pictures the psychedelics
beamed into my mind opened me up to the world in new ways and showed me what is
possible when love, trust and faith replace envy, possessiveness and violence.
It was very evident to her that there was a Spirit, an entity higher than herself that was
part of her. She has found the psychedelic sessions helped her to cut through the layers of
unconsciousness that keep her from realizing her true nature.
Leary felt that LSD’s significance lay beyond all social analysis and all psychological
categories and since the drug experience was completely unique, a new model was
needed, a new structure.
LSD can catalyze and precipitate a sudden dramatic transformation. On occasion, one
LSD experience has drastically changed an individual’s world-view, life philosophy and
entire way of being.
LSD had flipped consciousness out beyond life into the whirling dance of pure energy,
where nothing existed except whirring vibrations and each illusory form was simply a
different frequency.
LSD patients who had experienced profound feelings of cosmic unity frequently
developed a negative attitude toward the states of mind produced by intoxication with
alcohol and narcotics.
LSD produces an upsurge of unconscious material into consciousness and repressed
memories are relived with remarkable clarity—with therapeutically beneficial
consequences.
LSD subjects may scream and produce inarticulate sounds, toss and turn, act up, kneel,
put their head in one’s lap, pace around the room or even roll on the floor (and it’s all
right).
LSD subjects sophisticated in mathematics and physics have repeatedly reported that in
their psychedelic sessions they gained illuminating insights into a variety of concepts and
constructs that are not imaginable and visualizable in the ordinary state of consciousness.
LSD was a means of exciting consciousness and provoking visions, a kind of hurried
magic enabling youthful seekers to recapture the resonance of life that society had
denied.
LSD will change biochemical balances inside our nervous system and you can experience
directly some of the things which we externally view through the lenses of the
microscope.
Magic is a psychological branch of science, dealing with the sympathetic effects of
stones, drugs, herbs and living substances upon the imaginative and reflective faculties
and leading to ever new glimpses of the world of wonders around us.
Many mainstream scientists are very unsettled by the fact that among the most
outstanding experiences of psychedelics is the discovery of the presence of Divinity and
the sacredness of life.
Many observations from psychedelic research indicate that LSD can be of extraordinary
value to various scientific disciplines that are traditionally considered domains of reason
and logic.
Many of the statements made about the drug by professionals reflected a strongly
irrational emotional basis rather than solid scientific evidence. (Unfortunately, that is still
the case.)
Marco Polo’s book contains one of the earliest accounts of the psychedelic experience.
(Actually, that’s not true because psychedelic experiences go back to the beginning of
man.)
Millions already know that beyond the fears of the state-sanctioned psychiatry and
governmental policy, under the right set and setting psychedelics can lead to joy,
mystery, rebirth and realization beyond belief.
Most of the LSD experience takes place in a nonverbal region of the mind and deliberate
overintellectualization stands in the way of the free flow of the subject’s stream of
consciousness.
Music seems to serve several important functions in the context of psychedelic therapy. It
tends to evoke a variety of powerful emotions and facilitates deeper involvement in the
psychedelic process.
My experiences with these substances have been the most strange, most awesome and
among the most beautiful things in a varied and fortunate life. (I’m surprised he indicates
that he has experienced beauty of this magnitude before trying psychedelics.)
Mystics who believe that God is everywhere but is invisible to us due to our ego-centered
nature, will find it easy to believe that a drug that occasionally obliterates the ego can
also make God more visible.
No one who has studied the matter closely doubts the reality of psychedelic peak
experiences, the capacity of psychedelic drugs to open up the unconscious, or the
conviction of some who take them that they are gaining insight.
Observations from LSD research clearly indicate that in various states of mind, the bliss
of paradise, and ecstatic raptures of salvation can be experienced with a degree of
vividness and a sense of reality that surpass our everyday perceptions.
Oftentimes, those who underwent psychedelic therapy reported dramatic personality
changes involving not only the relief of neurotic symptoms but a wholesale revamping of
value systems, religious and philosophical beliefs, and basic lifestyle.
On the verbal level, the “psychedelic” conversation may include a mutual awareness of
nuances rarely encountered in ordinary conversation, multiple meanings and shades of
meanings, all attached to a single word or brief phrase.
One of the most common statements one reads in subjects” reports about LSD sessions
refers to the feeling that on the session day, they really heard music for the first time in
their life.
One of the most fascinating by-paths of the history of religion is the one that traces the
use of chemicals in various religious traditions for the purpose of changing the state of
mind and producing enthusiasm, the sense of God within.
Only the most static, repressive society need worry about psychedelic subversion.
Consciousness-expanding chemicals, in reality, present no threat, but rather offer hope
and encouragement to a democratically oriented social structure.
Our culture teaches you that you’re nothing but shit in a lot of ways, both obvious and
subtle. You have to discover for yourself that you’re better than that. The Psychedelic can
actually help teach this lesson, but it requires guidance and preparation.
Peyote is not a plaything; Peyotists say that “if you play around with Peyote, it will turn
around and start playing with you”. The Native American Church is not for the curiosity
seeker: it is a serious religion.
Peyote produces self-transcendence in two ways—it introduces the taker into the Other
World of visionary experience and it gives them a sense of solidarity with his fellow
worshippers, with human beings at large and with the divine nature of things.
Psychedelic drugs offer new perspectives on every aspect of human thinking, human
behavior, human searching. There is no issue in psychology, physics, biology and
theology which cannot make use of these microscopes of consciousness.
Psychedelic drugs produces reactions which are not conventional. Ecstatic behaviors are
not conventional and “normal” and it follows that they must be abnormal, psychotic,
crazy.
Psychedelic drugs were used for more than 15 years by hundreds of competent
psychiatrists who considered them reasonably safe therapeutic agents. (This was between
1950 and the mid 1960’s. These psychiatrists were not radicals or rebels.)
Psychedelic equals mind-opening consciousness. Psychedelic means ecstatic which is to
stand outside our normal patterns. It means going out of your mind, your habitual world
of contingencies, space-time coordinates.
Psychedelic experiences are very complex phenomena which have not yet been
adequately explained and which represent a serious challenge to present theoretical
thinking.
Psychedelic, mind-manifesting drugs give promise of providing access to the great and
hitherto largely impenetrable realms—the vast, intricate and awesome regions we call
mind.
Psychedelic rebels have likened modern medicine to a state religion. This established
religion is said to treat unorthodox healing practices as heresy or pagan superstition to be
eliminated by a mixture of official coercion and missionary activity.
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.
Psychedelic research seems to offer a unique approach to the future exploration of the
process of ritual transformation. The parallels between LSD sessions and the ritual death-
rebirth process are striking.
Psychedelic subjects reported experiential identification with other people, animals and
various aspects of nature during which they gained access to new information about areas
which they previously had no intellectual knowledge.
Psychedelics can be healing tools. I’ve seen a lot of healing, not just of mental problems
but of physical problems, from psychedelic experiences; they’ve got great potential in
that regard.
Psychologically, the psychedelics promised easier access to repressed unconscious
materials, shortcutting the years and prohibitive expense of psychoanalysis. In behavior
change, they held the promise of reducing the recidivism of paroled prisoners.
Reports of successful marital adjustments with LSD increasingly give evidence of
restored appreciation for the partner and the partnership. It seems not unreasonable,
therefore, that one day LSD may be regarded as a strong asset to marriage counselors.
Saying that a drug experience can precipitate a psychosis is not the same as saying that
drugs cause psychosis. We do not say that sex and college cause psychosis even though
we commonly see that both can trigger it.
Since LSD is a non-specific amplifier of mental processes, the LSD phenomena cover an
extremely broad range, extending potentially to all aspects of human experience and
behavior.
Since psychedelic drugs expose us to different levels of perception and experience, use of
them is ultimately a philosophic enterprise, compelling us to confront the nature of
reality.
Since the crisis in Christian culture is mainly sexual, we should not be surprised that
sexual elements are very prominent in the unconscious channels opened by the Drug
Revolution. These channels are a traditional part of religion outside Christianity, anyway.
Some people find it so useful in gaining new perspectives or seeing problems from a
different vantage point that they smoke it in preparation for intellectual work (refers to
marijuana).
Some theologians tended to view LSD and other psychedelic substances as sacred and the
sessions as sacraments because they could bring the individual in touch with
transcendental realities.
Somewhere deep in our DNA memory banks there is this intuitive knowledge that
chemicals are the key. I think it’s no accident that in so many myths passed down from
generation to generation there is this theme of the magic potion.
Spiritual experiences in psychedelic sessions frequently draw on the symbolism of the
collective unconscious and can thus occur in the framework of cultural and religious
traditions other than the experient’s own.
Take LSD in a nuthouse and you’ll get a nuthouse experience. These poor patients are
usually not even told what drugs they’re given; they’re not prepared. I consider this
psychological rape. (That was Timothy Leary.)
That Plato had some kind of profound ecstatic experience is indicated by the famous
Parable of the Cave, found in the Seventh Book of the Republic. Ingesters of LSD have
had no trouble in recognizing and understanding the metaphysical dimensions.
The ability of the drug to connect diverse people in empathic bonds suggested exciting
social applications. Once people learned to share others’ perceptions, a higher level of
human consciousness might be possible.
The argument that the person who has taken the psychedelic drugs thereby disqualifies
himself as a person able to objectively view and evaluate the experience, must strike most
seasoned researchers as simply ludicrous.
The ban on emotional expression, especially in Anglo-Saxon cultures and especially
among men, makes the enthusiasm and wonder arising from drug-induced states readily
understandable.
The best model for understanding the changes in behavior that occur after psychedelic
drug use is the changes in one’s views of self and world after a voyage to a strange
country.
The content of LSD visions could be influenced by thoughts and feelings immediately
preceding the experience. (Where your head is at, coming into the experience, is a key
factor.)
The drugs appeared to suspend imprints of reality inducing a critical period during which
new imprints could be made. In a positive, supportive atmosphere, new realities were
being imprinted.
The drugs are opening possibilities and additional doors in a wide variety of fields
because they seem to provide a means to the contriving of periods of intense
concentration and examination.
The educational topics, philosophical issues, intellectual questions, and personal insights
which evolved from my LSD experiences and subsequent investigations are a continuing
source of growth.
The esoteric core of the great religious and spiritual traditions could be seen as roadmaps
to higher states of consciousness, and some of the most profound material in these
traditions became especially clear and meaningful during psychedelic sessions.
The experiences have been described as waking dreams. But to me, the visions are far
more colored and vivid than any dream can possibly be. With LSD, you see with striking
and unforgettable clarity.
The fact that many people take LSD in an attempt to find a solution to their emotional
dilemmas or from a deep need for philosophical and spiritual answers should not be
underestimated.
The first noticeable effects of LSD are primarily on the five senses: sight, hearing, touch,
smell and taste. Colors seem more vivid and luminous; hearing becomes more acute; the
sense of touch is intensified.
The guide should have considerable experience in psychedelic sessions. To administer
psychedelics without personal experience is unethical and dangerous. (That was Timothy
Leary.)
The illegality of cannabis is outrageous, an impediment to full utilization of a drug which
helps produce the serenity and insight, sensitivity and fellowship so desperately needed in
this increasingly mad and dangerous world.
The LSD experience is a confrontation with new forms of wisdom and energy that dwarf
and humiliate man’s mind. This experience of awe and revelation is often described as
religious.
The LSD voyage goes out far beyond one’s small private history. My trip was back
through the cycle of being, which, if Jung’s collective unconscious really exists, as I
could now swear that it does, is the recurring history of you and me, all of us.
The main objective of psychedelic therapy is to create optical conditions for the subject to
experience the ego death and the subsequent transcendence into the so-called psychedelic
peak experience.
The meaningful things seen in the mescaline experience are not symbols. They do not
stand for something else, do not mean anything except themselves. The significance of
each thing is identical with its being. Its point is that it IS.
The metaphysical hunger that provides one reason for the interest in these drugs is a
permanent human condition, not an aberration that is created by the drugs nor one that
can be eliminated by suppressing them.
The mind must be prepared and the conditions right for a profound mystical or religious
experience to occur. And even then, the drug user may go through a descent into torment
and even a seeming death agony before attaining joyous unity and rebirth.
The most important reason for making the observations from psychedelic research
available to professionals, as well as the general public, is the revolutionary nature of the
observations associated with it.
The motivations for psychedelic experimentation can be extremely serious and reflect the
most fundamental needs of human beings—cravings for emotional well-being, spiritual
fulfillment and a sense of meaning in life.
The phenomena that can occur in the course of LSD sessions cover a very wide range;
there are hardly any perceptual, emotional or psychosomatic manifestations that have not
been observed and described as part of the LSD spectrum.
The process of serial LSD sessions transcends the framework of traditional depth-
psychological analysis and offers unique possibilities for a serious philosophical and
spiritual quest.
The psychedelic can alter the perception of energy, matter, and time in such a way as to
enable select random access of the spatial and temporal dimensions and make it possible
to inhabit the skins of a variety of forms and entities.
The psychedelic drug doesn’t mean doctor-disease, dope fiend-crime or instant insanity
but ecstasy, sensual unfolding, religious experience, revelation, illumination, contact with
nature.
The psychedelic experience at its best embodies a mythic substantiation of the universe
that is frequently overpowering in its revelations. It is a world of myth and ritual, a never-
never land of infinite grace and goodness.
The psychedelic experience can be not only a challenge, but also a support of my faith. I
can see Judaism in a new and amazing light. (A Hassidic rabbi who tripped with Timothy
Leary said that.)
The psychedelic experience tends to bring the subject into intimate contact with nature
and dramatically enhances his or her sensory perception of the world and an encounter
with nature at its best can become an aesthetic and spiritual experience of lasting value.
The psychedelic mystical experience can lead to a profound sense of inspiration,
reverential awe and humility, perhaps correlated with the feeling that the experience is
essentially a gift from a transcendent source.
The recent convergence between mysticism, modern consciousness research and
quantum-relativistic physics suggest that psychedelic research could contribute in the
future to our understanding of the human mind and consciousness.
The recent rapid convergence between mysticism, modern consciousness research and
quantum-relativistic physics suggests that psychedelic research could contribute in the
future to our understanding of the nature of reality.
The religious “establishment” dare not avoid facing the issues raised by the drugs without
laying themselves open to the charge that they are neglecting the very roots of faith. But
it often seems that there is nothing that the churches fear so much as religion!
The richness of opportunities for deep dramatic shifts and transformations that is
characteristic of psychedelic states seems to make LSD a very special adjunct to
psychotherapy.
The scientist of consciousness must have courage, take the drug himself, the courage that
comes from faith in your body, cells, the life process, conscious faith in the harmony and
wisdom of nature.
The so-called “mushroom stones” really represented mushrooms and they were the
symbol of a religion, like the Cross in the Christian religion, or the Star of Judea or the
Crescent of the Moslems.
The study of psychedelic-stimulated states of consciousness is, in principle, not opposed
to science and reason. On the contrary, the refusal to study them is both unreasonable
and antiscientific.
The things that are most important to many young Americans are not being discussed in
academic life. The sterile formalism of much American higher education can hardly hold
a candle to the psychedelic experience.
The unusual states of consciousness induced by LSD can generate important insights,
facilitate problem-solving and lead to valid intuitions or unexpected resyntheses of
accumulated data.
The variability of response to the drugs is enormous, largely because what is most
important for a particular person to learn at a particular time will vary tremendously and
thus the experience will differ accordingly.
The vision-producing drugs have a long history. As far back as knowledge of man exists,
there have been stories of herbs, roots, brews and potions to be eaten, drunk or smoked to
change in some way the state of consciousness.
The voyager may see his companion at different ages of life, at different periods of
history, and as different persons. At one time or another, during the psychedelic session,
the voyager looks at his companion. Often it is an overwhelming discovery.
The walls were vibrating and the air was becoming three-dimensional with psychedelic
trails and energy patterns moving through it. Everything was coming alive with
psychedelic energy.
The wonder of LSD is that it can bring within the capabilities of ordinary people the
experience of universal love and the reality of our divine nature which was once possible
only to the mystics.
The world of the LSD voyager is precisely one in which opposing ideas are true
simultaneously (non-Aristotelian), space is geodesic rather than linear (non-Euclidian)
and cause and effect are unreal (non-Newtonian).
There are dedicated scientists trying to find some way in which supplies of LSD may be
made available for important research in brain physiology, psychology, theology or
mental therapy.
There are many reports of patients receiving meaningful insight about themselves in an
LSD experience without the intervention, participation or even the presence of a
therapist.
There have been few serious attempts to make theoretical use of the full range of
psychedelic experiences in terms that do justice to the understanding of those who
undergo them.
There is a need for dedicated scientists willing to take the calculated risk of ingesting the
psychedelics themselves, for the sake of the understanding that such an experience will
give them.
There is evidence that the spiritual insights accompanying the psychedelic experience
might be subjective accounts of the objective findings of astronomy, physics,
biochemistry and neurology.
There is good reason to believe that the psychedelics are the opposite of hallucinogens
insofar as they decrease the selectivity the senses and expose consciousness to events
beyond those that are supposed to deserve notice.
There is no doubt that the drugs have introduced many of the youthful generation to a
firsthand religious experience that they would have encountered in no other way. (That
was written in 1969.)
There is probably not one major rock group that has not been influenced, directly or
indirectly, by LSD and paid homage to the ecstatic experience in one or more of their
songs. (That was written in 1968.)
There is the intense feeling of compassion for those who, for whatever reason, make it
impossible for themselves to get anywhere near the reality revealed by the drug—the
reality which is always there for those who are in the right state of mind to perceive it.
These drugs are opening possibilities and additional doors in a wide variety of fields
because they seem to provide a means to the contriving of periods of intense
concentration and examination.
These drugs promise discoveries about mind as important and far reaching in their
ultimate effects as have been the revolutionary findings of this century concerning the
physical universe.
This euphoric feeling includes elements of profound peace and steadfastness, surging like
a spring from a depth of my being which has rarely, if ever, been tapped prior to the drug
experience.
This is what LSD seems to tell him. It tells him that he is still in Eden, if only he knew it.
It is only necessary to spit out the apple and look at the world through psychedelic eyes.
The apple is his intellect or way of looking at things.
This new psychedelic style has produced not only a new rhythm in modern music, but a
new decor for our discotheques, a new form of film making, a new kinetic visual art, a
new literature and has begun to revise our philosophic and psychological thinking.
Those aspects of the psychedelic experience which subjects report to be ineffable and
ecstatically religious involve a direct awareness of the energy processes which scientists
measure.
Those psychiatrists and psychotherapists who had taken the obvious preliminary step of
trying the new chemical themselves, soon began to pursue different objectives from their
psychosis-oriented colleagues.
To cure the junkie and the alcoholic, you must admit that he is a deeply spiritual person
and accept the cosmic validity of his search to transcend the game and you help him see
that the way is through psychedelic rather than anesthetic experience.
To some people, looking only at the surface, the sequence of events of my first
psychedelic experience might seem to border on madness; others will see it in a profound
logic and wisdom.
Unless the LSD therapist is equally at home with both old and new ideas he may
overlook creative aspects of the patient’s thinking and label it all as merely confused or
psychotic. The therapist’s confusion may in turn confuse the patient.
Unusual states of consciousness, similar to those produced by LSD, occur spontaneously
in many dying individuals for reasons of a physiological, biochemical, and psychological
nature.
We are in need of a kind of philosophy or vision, an intellectual grasp of its nature and
recognition of its value, so that the psychedelic experience may be incorporated into our
lives as wisdom.
We came to believe, as a result of our own experiences and those reported to us by others
using psychedelics, that they had the potential to facilitate for the individual the
experience of major insights and problem solutions of an intellectual-emotional nature.
We can perhaps see the whole course of a psychedelic experience as an effort of
consciousness to rid itself of false identifications and experience its own everchanging
identity.
We have suggested that the divine mushroom played a vital part in shaking loose early
man’s imagination, in arousing his capacity for self-perception, for awe, wonder and
reverence. They certainly made it easier for him to entertain the idea of God.
We see on the part of young people, directly or indirectly involved with the psychedelic
scene, an affirmation of positives, not an “escape from reality”. (That was written in
1968.)
We were getting turned on in so many ways, lit up to new experiences, discoveries,
adventures, music, all of which had something very tangibly related to the drugs
available.
What I learned from Tim (Leary) had nothing to do with drugs but it had everything to do
with getting high. His die-hard fascination with the human brain was not about altering it,
but about using it to the fullest.
When they observe mystical reactions, psychiatrists employ the labels of pathology.
Psychiatrists are hung up on psychosis and think that LSD causes normal people to act
like psychotics.
When used with integrity, and fortitude, psychedelic substances can reveal the
unfathomed love supporting all of creation, a love that can dissolve the death grip of
Thanatos to free Eros and joyously illumine life in all of its aspects.
When you sit across the room from a woman during an LSD session, you’re aware of
thousands of penetrating messages floating from her through the air into your sensory
center, grenades of eroticism exploding.
You cannot take LSD once a week and stay rigidly rooted in a low-level ego game. You
have to grow with the flow or you will stop taking LSD. You must hook up your inner
power to a life of expanding intelligence.
You haven’t eaten, you haven’t tasted, you haven’t fucked, you haven’t seen colors, your
fingers haven’t touched rock and soil until you’ve had acid and then you know you’re
alive and you know what life is.
A high dose of LSD in the right circumstances brings you into contact not only with your
deep self but with other dimensions—extraterrestrial intelligence, a collective mind,
intelligent unity of life, living God, things that they don’t understand and can’t control
and don’t want free and available.
A single high-dose LSD session can frequently be of extraordinary value for those
persons who do not have any serious clinical problems. The quality of their lives can be
considerably enhanced and the experience can move them in the direction of self-
realization and self-actualization.
A trip can function as a crack of lightning, an explosion of light so brilliant that it
scorches the emotional flesh and casts deep saturnine shadows in the cavern of the soul.
Many trippers feel as if their psyches were opened up from above or from within as a
rolling wave of stimuli floods their sensorium to the point of overflow.
Acid taught me a different mode of experience. I learned how to see: how to give
something my attention, to be drawn into it, to concentrate, to see worlds within worlds.
Through psychedelic drugs, then, a few extra layers of perspective were added to my
view of things.
Adventurous painters and musicians discovered that LSD was a catalyst, an impetus to
startling new rearrangements of vision, to a bubbling, ecstatic, seemingly inexhaustible
pool of images and ideas, to a new-old kind of harmony between the artist and the
medium.
An LSD trip will show the subject the manifold aspects of reality—a reality that does not
unfold upon a single level or within a single event, but involves a great variety of events
on a number of levels. As the experience becomes more profound, the spectrum of
sensations and feelings becomes almost infinite.
Apparently those in control of the instrumentation of coercive power in the U. S. had no
difficulty in recognizing a psychedelic religion as a psychedelic religion when that
religion was safely encapsulated in a racial minority group living outside the mainstream
of American life. (This refers to the Native American Church legally able to use peyote.)
Consciousness after the ingestion of LSD manifests a characteristic qualitative
transformation of a dreamlike nature. It can transcend its usual limits and encourage
phenomena from the deep unconscious not accessible under normal circumstances. This
is frequently referred to as expansion of consciousness.
Controlled research aimed at maximizing their safety, their effectiveness, and their
human value has barely begun. In addition to questions concerning the possible uses of
LSD as a therapeutic or educative device, its potential value as a basic research tool for
investigating higher mental processes has also been minimally explored.
Doors of Perception/Heaven and Hell. Aldous Huxley. Harper Collins; 1954/1956. A
demonstration of what a refined, prepared mind can do with the opportunity afforded by a
psychedelic in observing nature, art, colors, and forms in their full glory, with a profound
appreciation of the transpersonal and numinous aspects of life.
Drug experiences, like all novel experiences, can provide themes and material for the
artists’ imagination to work on. And it has also been suggested that psychedelic drug
experiences can subtly affect the faculty of insight, providing original solutions to artistic
and intellectual problems through new combinations of ideas and feelings.
Drug use may be criticized as an escape from reality. However, this criticism assumes
unjustly that the mystical experiences themselves are escapist or unreal. LSD is by no
means a soft and cushy escape from reality. It can easily be an experience in which you
have to test your soul against all the devils in hell (the ego’s fight for its life).
Drugs is a subject that can never come under discussion without so much emotion that
rational argument becomes obscured if not totally banished. (Fascist idiots who are
ignorant about drugs and insist on forbidding them are not rational, regardless of how
much power they have. Those who abuse power lack wisdom.)
During this long journey I saw recurrent images of mandala-like forms. Eventually I saw
life arise on this planet, and humans evolve, and civilization develop to a point where a
person with my Name/Address personality sat in a room and took some LSD and saw the
evolution of the universe.
Each level of consciousness is inevitably produced by biochemical means, either by
natural biochemical events or by introduced chemicals that move you to these different
levels just as accurately as the magnification of a lens moves you to different levels of
external reality.
Every time you take LSD you completely suspend, you step outside of the symbolic
chessboard which you have built up over the long years of social conditioning and you
whirl through different levels of neurological and cellular energy, continually flowing
and changing.
experiences of other universes—The strange and alien worlds that LSD subjects discover
and explore in this type of experience seem to have a reality of their own, although not
within the range of our cosmos; they appear to exist in other dimensions, in universes
coexistent with ours. (eyes closed)
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. (eyes closed)
For us, a proposition is either true or false, a or not-a, God exists or does not exist and
countless gallons of ink and blood have been shed in disputes stemming from this kind of
rigid either-or logic. Indian and Chinese thought, as well as mystical and psychedelic
experiences, lead one to a logic of levels, rather than of propositions.
He takes a fantastic inner journey into the unconscious and superconscious mind. These
drugs thus reveal and make available for direct observation, a wide range of otherwise
hidden phenomena that represent intrinsic capacities of the human mind and play an
important role in normal mental dynamics.
He who controls the mind-changing chemicals controls consciousness. He who controls
the chemical can twist your mind, can alter your personality, can change you and your
concept of the world. (No one has the right to control your consciousness and experiences
by threatening you with jail. Your life belongs to you.)
His drug-induced religious experience vitalizes his religious life and demonstrates the
error of those who think that only the logical and rational aspects of religion are valid.
(How logical and rational is it to think that you were born in sin because of something
from 2000 years ago which you had nothing to do with?)
How strange that we should all carry about with us this enormous universe of vision and
that which lies beyond vision and yet be mainly unconscious of the fact! How can we
learn to pass at will from one world of consciousness to the others? Mescaline and LSD
will open the door.
Huxley’s Island expresses hope for mankind. It dramatizes the conviction that the drugs
can be used, rather than condemned and neglected, and that finding a way to use them
well is a test for humanity. We should use our resources of intelligence, imagination, and
moral discernment to face that test.
If I put on glasses and see details more clearly, no one can say that I am hallucinating.
But if, under the drug, I see colors and forms I did not see before, they say I am
hallucinating. But maybe I really achieved a new and better vision of external reality.
(There are no maybes about it.)
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, he 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.
I would say that the mind is not insular, but an interconnected part of a universe of both
physical and symbolic substance, whose linkages extend throughout space and time. The
Psychedelic has helped me to feel like a part of this connection. I feel like I have a much
greater understanding of non-Western and pre-industrial mind-sets.
If any single theme dominated young people in the 1960’s, it was the search for a new
way of seeing, a new relation to the world. LSD was a means of exciting consciousness
and provoking visions, a kind of hurried magic enabling youthful seekers to recapture the
resonance of life that society had denied.
If I put on glasses and see details more clearly, no one can say that I am hallucinating.
But if, under the drug, I see colors and forms I did not see before, they say I am
hallucinating. But maybe I really achieved a new and better vision of external reality.
(There are no maybes about it.)
If properly handled, a psychedelic crisis has great positive potential and can result in a
profound personality transformation. Conversely, an insensitive and ignorant approach
can cause psychological damage and lead to chronic psychotic states and years of
psychiatric hospitalization.
In a letter to Humphrey Osmond, Aldous Huxley described a mescaline experience,
during which he came to the conclusion that “I didn’t think I should mind dying, for
dying must be like this, a passage from the known, constituted by lifelong habits of
subject-object-existence, to the unknown cosmic fact”.
In the midst of our emotional turmoil about the drug problem, many of us fail to notice
that most of the authorities who are supported by public funds, quoted extensively in the
scientific and lay press, and sought out for advice by policy makers have never
themselves experienced highs in association with drugs.
In the psychedelic ‘60’s the flower children had been lit up like living torches and
beamed out their powerful little lights across the world. For a while it looked like the
light would conquer the dark, and there would at last be peace on earth. We were filled
with wonderment, gratitude, awe, love. We had seen MORE than the everyday reality.
Individuals who encounter transpersonal experiences of this kind in their psychedelic
sessions frequently gain access to detailed and rather esoteric information about the
corresponding aspects of the material universe that far exceeds their general educational
background and their specific knowledge of the area in question.
Is the use of LSD the initial event that will guide us to a new morality and to new patterns
of human life on this planet? Will we keep our heads straight and our bodies and minds
clear? Or will we become anti-intellectuals devoted to the culture of “big fishes eating
smaller fishes” in the holy names of religion, education, civilization, progress.
It does help you to look at the world in a new way. And you come to understand very
clearly the way that certain specially gifted people have seen the world. You are actually
introduced into the kind of world that Van Goth or Blake lived in. You begin to have a
direct experience of this kind of world while you’re under the drug.
It is clear that psychedelics have the potential to cut through whatever blocks stand
between us and higher experiences, magically letting us enjoy, if only temporarily,
transcendent states. I hope it is not necessary to belabor the point that this potential is
realized if only set and setting support it.
It is man’s challenge to develop new symbol systems for these new levels of internal
consciousness. Just as we had to develop a new symbol system for the invisible,
uncharted world which was opened up with the microscope, the task now is to develop
symbol systems for the new invisible worlds which are opened up by psychedelic drugs.
It is not unusual in psychedelic sessions to experience quite concrete and realistic
episodes identified as fetal and embryonic memories. Many subjects report vivid
sequences on the level of cellular consciousness which seem to reflect their existence in
the form of a sperm or ovum at the moment of conception. (eyes closed)
It should be one of the chief tasks of the guide to help the subject select out of the wealth
of phenomena among which he finds himself, some of the more promising opportunities
for heightened insight, awareness and integral understanding that the guide knows to be
available in the psychedelic experience.
It will enable each person to realize that he is not a game-playing robot put on this planet
to be given a Social Security number and to be spun on the assembly line of school,
college, career, insurance, funeral, good-bye. Through LSD, each human being will be
taught to understand that the entire history of evolution is recorded inside his body.
Just as photographic chemicals bring to light the picture already imprinted on the film,
the psychedelic chemicals have, in actual practice, introduced many people to an
appreciation of music, a capacity for art or a sensitivity to poetry that was there but which
they never dreamed they had.
Leary once remarked that people who believe that LSD should be illegal because some
users have committed suicide, maybe because of it, should agitate even more heatedly for
the abolition of examinations. Statistics show that the link between final exams and
suicide is true beyond any doubt. Every year the college suicide rate rises at exam time.
LSD subjects have, in certain special states of mind, access to information about almost
any aspect of the universe. The holographical approach makes it possible to imagine how
the information mediated by the brain is accessible in every cerebral cell, or how the
genetic information about the entire organism is available in every single cell of the body.
LSD subjects often arrive at the conclusion that no real boundaries exist between
themselves and the rest of the universe. Everything appears to be part of a unified field
of cosmic energy, and the boundaries of the individual are identical with the boundaries
of existence itself.
LSD subjects report numerous visions of archetypal forms, individual deities and demons
and complex mythological sequences (eyes closed). In the extreme form, the individual
consciousness seems to encompass the totality of existence and identify with the
Universal Mind.
LSD subjects sophisticated in mathematics and physics have occasionally reported that
many of the concepts of these disciplines that transcend rational consciousness can
become more easily comprehensible and be actually experienced in altered states of
consciousness.
Many of the experiences and observations from psychedelic sessions seemed to seriously
challenge the image of the human psyche and of the universe developed by Newtonian-
Cartesian science and considered to be accurate and definitive descriptions of “objective
reality”.
Most of the subjects felt that the psychedelic experience could sometimes supply a
guiding vision which provided direction and meaning for one’s life thereafter. They
mentioned intense emotions such as love, compassion, or empathy, and the recognition
that the mind can be and should be highly trained.
My own experiences leads me to believe that with LSD as a vehicle of transport, many
addicts could find the determination to carry them through the remainder of the journey
to freedom. (The “remainder” isn’t the rest of the LSD trip, but what happens with the
addict after the trip or as a result of it.)
One of the major causes of discomfort while taking psychedelics is the subject’s attempt
to maintain an image of him/herself that is not in harmony with one’s authentic self. The
greater the investment in the created image—and consequently, the greater the reluctance
to change—the greater the discomfort.
One traumatic event can shape a life, one therapeutic event can reshape it. Psychedelic
therapy has an analogue in Abraham Maslow’s idea of the peak experience. The drug
taker feels that the self is part of a much larger pattern, and the sense of cleansing,
release, and joy makes old woes seem trivial.
Organized religion had little to offer. Faith in an invisible divinity was not enough. What
LSD promised was the direct, unmediated experience of self-transcendence—the
mystical enlightenment where we KNOW what the philosophers and the prophets talk
about.
Our capacity to identify with the consciousness of plants contributed to the fact that many
cultures hold certain plants to be sacred. Plants with psychedelic properties have been
incorporated into the religions of many cultures and are considered deities or the “flesh of
the gods”.
People not capable of coping with a drug experience of their own are not likely to be able
to cope with the experience of a subject either; and thus the sessions of the guide-to-be
may serve the additional purpose of helping to eliminate from a training program
candidates too disturbed or anxious about the psychedelic state.
Perceptually, LSD produces an especially brilliant and intense impact of sensory stimuli
on consciousness. Normally unnoticed aspects of the environment capture the attention;
ordinary objects are seen as if for the first time and with a sense of fascination or
entrancement, as though they had unimagined depths of significance.
Plato tells us that beyond this ephemeral and imperfect existence here below, there is
another Ideal world of Archetypes, where the original, the true, the beautiful Pattern of
things exists for evermore. It is clear where Plato found his Ideas; Plato had drunk of the
potion in the Temple of Eleusis and had spent the night seeing the great Vision.
Physicists and mathematicians report that after using LSD they have developed “a
feeling” for such concepts as the photon, the hypercube or imaginary numbers. Similarly,
philosophers have reported they have “understood” the meaning of existentialism, and
theologians report having “experienced” that which they had been preaching for years.
Psychedelic drugs dramatically suspend the conditioned, learned aspects of the nervous
system. Suddenly released from its conditioned patterning, consciousness is flung into a
flashing loom of unlearned imagery, an eerie, novel landscape where every-thing seems
possible and nothing remains fixed.
Psychedelic subjects regularly report experiencing events that seem to harmonize with
quantum mechanics. They speak of participating in and emerging with pure energy; of
witnessing the breakdown of objects into vibratory patterns, the awareness that
everything is a dance of particles.
Psychedelics expand attention. They make the spotlight of consciousness a floodlight
which not only exposes ignored relationships and unities but also brings to light
unsuspected details, details normally ignored because of their lack of significance or their
irrelevance to some prejudice of what ought to be.
Psychedelics induce alterations of perception which make the nervous system aware of
itself. (It’s not that the nervous system becomes aware of itself. It’s always aware of
itself. The alterations of perception allow the person to become consciously aware of
what’s going on with the nervous system.)
Psychology, man’s view of his nature, is always the last to adapt to a new world view.
From the standpoint of established values, the psychedelic process is dangerous and
insane—a deliberate psychotization, a suicidal undoing of the equilibrium man should be
striving for.
Psychotropic substances of plant origin had already been in use for thousands of years in
Mexico as sacramental drugs in religious ceremonies and as magical potions having
curative effects. (It wasn’t just in Mexico but in many if not indeed all parts of the
world.)
Review of psychedelic literature shows that favorable results have been reported in a
wide variety of clinical problems, including depressions, phobias and other types of
psychoneuroses, psychosomatic diseases, character disorders, sexual deviations, criminal
behavior, alcoholism, narcotic drug addiction, and even psychoses.
Some candidates, resisting the effects of the drug out of fear that their personalities or
their “selves” are being destroyed, are inclined to put up defensive barriers to nullify the
drug’s action. The subject should be aware that what is being destroyed is not his true
“self”, but the abstract formulation of values and concepts society has imposed upon him.
Take the sense of sight. LSD vision is to normal vision as normal vision is to the picture
on a badly tuned television set. Under LSD, it’s as though you have microscopes up to
your eyes, in which you see jewellike, radiant details of anything your eyes fall upon.
You are really seeing for the first time.
That Plato had some kind of profound ecstatic experience is indicated by the famous
Parable of the Cave, found in the Seventh Book of the Republic. Ingesters of LSD have
had no trouble in recognizing and understanding the metaphysical dimensions of this
notable piece of classical symbolism.
The capacity of LSD and some other psychedelic drugs to exteriorize otherwise invisible
phenomena and processes and make them the subject of scientific investigation gives
these substances a unique potential as diagnostic instruments and as research tools for the
exploration of the human mind.
The consensus among the architects interviewed seems to be that LSD, when
administered under carefully controlled conditions, does enhance creativity to the extent
that it vastly speeds up problem-solving, aids in visualizing three-dimensionality and
generally heightens perceptivity.
The current public taboo on any evaluation of drug-use experience that fails to be shame-
faced and remorse-laden…individually and generationally reinforces hypocricy, denial,
guilt, inhibition and repression. Like any ban on the utterance of truth, it warps public
morality and cripples the soul.
The drug can mediate access to vast repositories of concrete and valid information in the
collective unconscious and make them available to the experient. The revealed
knowledge can be very specific, accurate and detailed; the data obtained in this way can
be related to many different fields.
The emotional effects are even more profound than the perceptual ones. The drug taker
becomes unusually sensitive to faces, gestures, and small changes in the environment. As
everything in the field of consciousness assumes unusual importance, feelings become
magnified.
The entire range of pleasurable experiences has gone unstudied, unlabeled, undefined.
You will not find the word “fun” in the index of most psychology texts. Indeed, until the
psychedelic movement, unconditioned behavior and unconditioned experience were
considered ipso facto schizophrenic.
The exploration of ways of expanding human consciousness will occupy a prominent
position in the mainstream of contemporary psychology. We can look forward to a far
more extensive application of these powerful agents as a means of facilitating social as
well as individual potentialities.
The findings from psychedelic explorations throw entirely new light on the material from
history, comparative religion and anthropology concerning the ancient mysteries of death
and rebirth, rites of passage of various cultures, shamanic practices of various religions
and mystical traditions and other phenomena of great cultural significance.
The idea of drug use as a religious practice—in fact, of any connection between drugs
and religion—is one we are willing to indulge in pre-industrial cultures but violently
reject for ourselves. Orthodox religion in the West long ago abandoned the sacramental
use of drugs.
The individual has become relaxed, has begun to enjoy the increased sense perceptions
and has become fascinated with the world of awareness that is beginning to open to him.
The deep and profound experiences released by the LSD then flow uninterrupted in an
ever widening scope.
The information about psychedelic drugs spread by the mass media and various agencies
was mostly superficial, inaccurate and one-sided. Such distorted information, since it was
unbalanced, disproportional and frequently obviously incorrect, was regarded with
suspicion by young people, many of whom found it easy to laugh it off, reject it totally.
The most lasting value of the drug experience for me appears to be a number of
convictions, most of them religious in nature, which are so strong that it makes not one
iota of difference whether anyone agrees with them or not. (When you know the truth, no
one can talk you out of it. The truth is the truth.)
The psychedelic experience depends upon many factors—the dosage, the circumstances
under which it is given, the knowledge of the people giving it, and, most of all, upon the
attitude of the person taking it, what he wishes to learn about himself, how much he trusts
the people working with him, and how much he trusts his own underconsciousness.
The psychic depths and time depths can be tested and explored in the psychedelic
experiences. The theoretical foundation of such a statement is that the ingestion of
psychedelic substances evokes an activation of deeply buried psychic contents and a
bringing of them to the surface of consciousness.
The reason psychedelic experiences are important and valuable is that people live their
lives by their own “chess-boards,” playing the lawyer-game, the merchant-game or some
rule-ridden ego-game, rarely if ever expanding their consciousness to the point of true
awareness and understanding of man and nature, including themselves.
The remarkable thing about the LSD experience is that you see the broad range of the
underconsciousness without losing consciousness, a state wherein you are aware of all
things in the conscious mind and at the same time aware of all things in the
underconscious mind.
The reports of LSD subjects who have experienced episodes of embryonic existence, the
moment of conception and episodes of cellular, tissue and organ consciousness abound in
medically accurate insights into the anatomical, physiological and biochemical aspects of
the processes involved.
The sensation of leaving one’s body is quite common in drug-produced states and can
have various forms and degrees. Some persons experience themselves as completely
detached from their physical bodies, hovering above them or observing them from
another part of the room.
The spiritual experiences frequently observed in LSD sessions offered a radically new
understanding of a wide variety of phenomena from the world of religion, including
shamanism, the rites of passage, the ancient mysteries of death and rebirth, the Eastern
spiritual philosophies, and the mystical traditions of the world.
The strange and alien worlds that LSD subjects discover and explore in this type of
experience seem to have a reality of their own, although not within the range of our
cosmos; they appear to exist in other dimensions, in universes coexistent with ours. (eyes
closed)
The theoretical formulations and practical principles that LSD psychotherapy has
discovered or validated include a new expanded cartography of the human mind, new and
effective therapeutic mechanisms, a new strategy of psychotherapy and a synthesis of
spirituality and science.
The training for this new profession of psychedelic guides will aim at producing the
patience of a first-grade teacher, the humility and wisdom of a Hindu guru, the loving
dedication of a minister-priest, the sensitivity of a poet and the imagination of a science
fiction writer.
The whiskey-drinking white middle class imprisons those with different cultural and
religious preferences. People who consider LSD a sacrament of their religion are being
persecuted and deprived of their religious freedom which is “guaranteed” in the First
Amendment of the Constitution.
They had understood for the first time what the sages of pre-scientific and anti-scientific
traditions were talking about. Psychedelic drugs opened to mass tourism mental
territories previously explored only by small parties of particularly intrepid adventurers,
mainly religious mystics.
Under appropriate conditions the psychedelics could considerably speed and facilitate the
process of working through psychological blocks. Material inaccessible in an ordinary
state could be brought into awareness, sometimes producing dramatic transformations
including death/rebirth experiences and alleviation of symptoms.
Until the government gets it bloody, reeking paws off our sacred psychedelics and ceases
to harass and persecute our members, until, indeed, every poor wretch now suffering in
prison because he preferred the mystical uplift of pot to the slobbering alcoholism of the
politicians, is set free, our attitude must be one of uncompromising hostility.
Veneration for the induced visionary experience has roots in virtually every culture on
earth, however subliminated or repressed it is today. In fact, one could argue that the use
of visionary plants and hallowed drafts has been seminal to the development of
civilization.
Was I going mad? Did the psychedelics rob me of my senses? No. They brought me to
my senses. The world around me—people, scents, colors, sounds—all was intensified. I
never knew how keen my senses were! And that other sense—the sense of oneness with
all creation!
Wasson suggested that every major world religion had originated in the botanical
hallucinations of some early visionary. Food of the gods. Flesh of the gods. Even the
name Jesus Christ in Aramic, he claimed, was derived from the word for psychedelic
mushrooms.
We are confronted by the very real possibility that the known and unknown uses of these
drugs that could prove to be legitimate and beneficial for individual persons and society
may be suppressed until some future century when investigation will be permitted to
proceed unhampered by popular hysteria and over-restrictive legislation.
We hoped that fellow scientists and administrators, recognizing the power of drugs to
change behavior, would support our work. The opposite reaction developed. The more
successful our research, the more grumbling from the bureaucracies of science. (That
was Timothy Leary, referring to his days at Harvard.)
We now consider that they give us therapeutic possibilities in areas where we were
formerly powerless. In fact these drugs are of such great importance in our psychiatric
instrumentation that we can hardly think of doing without them. Indeed, this is a great
step forward in psychiatry.
We often 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 (eyes closed).
When I started taking LSD, I just saw that the academic thing was more or less a socio-
political game more than a true learning experience, in that the things that I really felt I
was learning were when I was just purely being or purely experiencing something and not
trying to read it from a stilted textbook or hearing it from a superintellectual professor.
While the religious establishment worries itself into reams of cross arguments on whether
or not God is dead, these thinkers merely smile and shake their heads. God isn’t dead; He
isn’t even lost. He is right here in the deepest recesses of the mind where he has always
been. Doubting Thomases need only allow LSD to show them the way.
Words like hallucination and psychosis were loaded; they implied negative states of
mind. The psychiatric jargon reflected a pathological orientation, whereas a truly
objective science would not impost value judgments on chemicals that produced unusual
or altered states of consciousness.
Work done by those who refused to take drugs does not demonstrate greater objectivity
than that of persons who have had the drug experience; and doubtless, refusal to
experience the psychedelic state is a product, in some cases, of anxiety about the person’s
ability to cope with that state.
You are right about the hopelessness of the “scientific” approach. Those idiots want to be
Pavlonians not Lorenzian Ethnologists. Pavlov never saw an animal in its natural state,
only under duress. The “scientific” LSD boys do the same with their subjects. No wonder
they report psychoses. (Aldous Huxley wrote that in a letter to Timothy Leary.)
A new and exciting area was discovered for psychedelic psychotherapy: the care of
patients with terminal cancer and some other incurable diseases. Studies of dying
individuals indicated that this approach was able to bring not only alleviation of the
emotional suffering and relief from severe physical pain associated with cancer, but also
dramatically transform the concept of death and change the attitude toward dying.
A person in the psychedelic state can perceive much more in other human beings than he
can when he is in his everyday mind. The voyager may see his companion at different
ages of life, at different periods of history, and as different persons. At one time or
another, during the psychedelic session, the voyager looks at his companion. Often it is
an overwhelming discovery.
All the learned games of life can be seen as programs that select, censor and thus
dramatically limit the available cortical response. Consciousness-expanding drugs unplug
these narrow programs, the social ego, the game-machinery. And with the ego and mind
unplugged, what is left? What is left is something that Western culture knows little about:
the uncensored cortex, activated, alert and open to new realities.
Although scientific interest in psychedelic substances is relatively recent, their ritual use
can be traced back to the dawn of human history. From time immemorial, plants
containing powerful mind-altering substances have been used for the diagnosing and
healing of diseases, enhancement of paranormal abilities, and for magical or ritual
purposes.
Anything in the environment—a painting on the wall, a pattern in the carpet—may
become a universe to be entered and explored; drug users say they understand what Blake
meant by “the world in a grain of sand and heaven in a wild flower.” Color seems
dazzlingly bright and intense, depth perception heightened, contours sharpened, and relief
clearer; details usually overlooked become intensely interesting.
As an educational psychologist, I’m interested in the implications of LSD research for the
study of human learning and further human development. Through the LSD experiences I
have learned to look at myself and society in a new way. These experiences have been, in
effect, an additional higher education for me, equal in impact, effort, knowledge, beauty,
and scope to obtaining a doctorate at Stanford.
As knowledge of the existence of mind-expanding plants and chemicals dawned upon the
consciousness of Western man, swift re-evaluations of our attitudes toward certain so-
called “primitive” tribes became necessary. It became apparent that some of these
cultures had preserved the key to higher knowledge which the civilized world had
relegated to the status of myth.
At the end of the record, I felt that I had been on a long journey and that I had come to
my destination. My guides came to me and welcomed me into this “brave new world.” I
felt that I had reached the psychedelic shore and enjoyed the wonderful things around me.
I felt joyous and deeply related to everything, as if I were part of a whole. It was a sense
of total relatedness and involvement, bringing with it a sense of joy, peace and wonder.
Both Freud and Skinner explained creative processes in terms of their deviance from
“normality” rather than as positive, healthy processes to be encouraged and developed. It
is not surprising that most American psychiatrists and psychologists are baffled by the
reports of LSD activity, puzzled by the subjective reports of LSD users, and skeptical
about the value of LSD in man’s efforts to understand, describe and change his behavior.
Christianity and even Protestant Christianity has remained, willy-nilly, the most
authoritarian and bigoted of all world religions. He who attempts to question or modify
any of its dogmas quickly gets into very hot water in any Christian country. There has
been one “revelation” and it is enough. He who has new ideas is probably inspired by the
Devil or has been out in the woods taking strange drugs with the witch women.
Detailed study of psychedelic phenomena would require a long-term systematic team
cooperation of experts from diverse disciplines, such as psychology, psychiatry,
neurophysiology, neuropharmacology, ethno-botany, modern physics, zoology, ethology,
genetics, internal medicine, obstetrics and gynecology, anthropology, history of art,
theology, philosophy and comparative study of religion and mythology.
Drugs were a passport to an uncharted landscape of risk and sensation and those who
entered the forbidden territory moved quickly into areas where most adults could offer
little assistance. The drama enacted in this zone of enchantment was totally alien to the
academic curriculum, which failed to provide the necessary tools to deal with the rewards
and pitfalls one might encounter on such a journey.
Early experiments with LSD revealed its unique potential as a powerful tool offering the
possibility of deepening and accelerating the psychotherapeutic process, as well as
extending the range of applicability of psychotherapy to categories of patients that
previously had been difficult to reach such as alcoholics, narcotic drug addicts, and
criminal recidivists.
Exploration of the human psyche with these powerful catalyzing agents has shown
beyond any doubt that the biographical model developed by Freud’s “depth” psychology
barely scratches the surface of mental dynamics. To account for all the extraordinary
experiences and observations in psychedelic states, it was necessary to develop a vastly
expanded cartography of the human mind. (psyche?)
Feeling not that I was drugged but that I was in an unusual degree open to reality, I tried
to discern the meaning, the inner character of the dancing patterns which constituted
myself and the gardens and the whole dome of the night with its colored stars. All at
once, it became obvious that the whole thing was love-play. This single source was not
just love as we ordinarily understand it. It was also intelligence.
Hallucinogens are still criminal. The “food of the gods” is illegal. The keys to the doors
of perception are against the law. Using LSD therapy with convicts, drug addicts, and
alcoholics is illegal. The great therapeutic tool of LSD that was proven so effective in
case after case of psychological maladjustment has been taken away from the doctors of
the mind by the fundamentalist, fascist guardians of our public morality.
Harvard—Over 400 “subjects” shared high-dosage psychedelic experiences with the
researchers in an atmosphere of aesthetic precision, philosophic inquiry, inner search,
self-confident dignity, intellectual openness, philosophic courage and high humor. The
historical impact of this “swarm” of influential scholars has not yet been recognized by
the still-timid press, popular or scientific. (That was Timothy Leary.)
I developed a whole theory of evolution based on psychedelics, saying that the critical
factor in moving advanced primates into being primitive human beings was the presence
of psilocybin, which improved acuity, thus improving hunting, stimulated sexual appetite,
and bifurcating consciousness, offering a choice between the static and a fantasized
alternative. (That was Terence McKenna.)
I doubt whether artists will have much power to shape public policy on psychedelics, but
I also doubt whether illegality will ever dissuade artists from exploring all sources of
stimulation and inspiration. I hope to see a day when artists, and indeed anyone else who
wishes to explore all the possibilities of mental experience, will have the legal option to
use substances having such power and promise.
I pronounced that LSD was the greatest discovery man had ever made. It has such
enormous potential because the mind is infinite. LSD opens up the resources of the mind.
Since the mind is the most important aspect of the human being, what could possibly be
more important than a drug that revealed the awesome, infinite potential that lies within?
(That was Timothy Leary.)
I was proud to know that my people had a medicine that was God-powerful. Listen to me,
peyote does have many amazing powers. I have seen a blind boy regain his sight from
taking it. Indians with ailments that hospital doctors couldn’t cure have become healthy
again after a peyote meeting. Once a Crow boy was to have his infected leg cut off by
reservation doctors. After a peyote ceremony, it grew well again.
If an experience could not be expressed in words, he told the class, it could not exist. He
was very sure of himself and obviously unwilling to be contradicted. But a few weeks
before, when I had tried mescaline for the second time, I had an experience that certainly
felt ineffable to me. There seemed to be no point in trying to convey anything of its
nature to Professor Whatnough. (That was Andrew Weil, about a Harvard professor.)
In an LSD state, the old conceptual frameworks break down, cultural cognitive barriers
dissolve and the material can be seen and synthesized in a totally new way that was not
possible within the old system of thinking. This mechanism can produce not only striking
new solutions to various specific problems, but new paradigms that revolutionize whole
scientific disciplines.
In my utopian fantasy, Island, I speculated in fictional terms about the ways in which a
substance akin to psilocybin could be used to potentiate the nonverbal education of
adolescents and to remind adults that the real world is very different from the misshapen
universe they have created for themselves by means of their culture-conditioned
prejudices. (That was Aldous Huxley.)
In Road to Eleusis authors Albert Hoffman, Gordon Wasson and Carl Ruck present
convincing evidence that the Eleusinian Mysteries, the oldest religion in the West,
centered around a mass tripping ritual. For 2 millennia pilgrims journeyed from all over
the world to take part in the Mysteries and drink the sacred kykeon. Plato, Aristotle and
Sophicles were among those who participated in this secret ritual.
In sessions where the main objective is to have a religious or spiritual experience, there is
a definite tendency to deemphasize or ignore descriptive aspects, psychopathological
phenomena and traumatic personal material. The aesthetic elements are considered
important, but the major focus is on the supraindividual, transpersonal and
transcendental. To a great extent, this is also characteristic of psychedelic therapy.
In the field of treatment of alcoholism, there were several studies showing a close to 50
percent control rate following “LSD therapy,” a figure which cannot be matched by any
other therapeutic approach to this problem and successful beyond the wildest dreams of
Alcoholics Anonymous, to say nothing of conventional psychoanalysis, which has a
success rate of curing alcoholics of about one in every hundred, which is nobody.
In the LSD state, the old conceptual frameworks break down, cultural cognitive barriers
dissolve and the material can be seen and synthesized in a totally new way that was not
possible within the old systems of thinking, This mechanism can produce not only
striking new solutions to various specific problems, but new paradigms that revolutionize
whole scientific disciplines.
In the transpersonal domain, where psychological and spiritual growth are one,
psychedelics appear to be powerful tools for the investigation of consciousness; they
could enable us to expand our understanding of the human mind and the nature of
creative consciousness. A willingness to question our assumptions and to keep an open
mind with respect to potential benefits and potential hazards is essential.
In this day, when spiritual hungers and longings are both widespread and acute, LSD has
a great potential in the field of religious development alone. (“Alone” doesn’t mean that
LSD’s potential is just in religious development, but also many other fields. To put it
another way, even if LSD’s great potential was just in religious development, it would
still be very significant.)
It became obvious that the drug experiences could enhance creative potential in certain
individuals. The drug became popular among artists as a source of inspiration and many
hundreds of painters, sculptors, musicians, architects and writers volunteered for LSD
experiments. Somewhat later, scientists, philosophers and other highly creative
individuals became favorite subjects for LSD sessions.
It has been shown that LSD experiences of death and rebirth and mystical states of
consciousness can change patients’ concepts of death and life and alleviate their fears of
dying. Psychedelic therapy has proved to be more than an important tool in the control of
mental and physical pain, it has contributed greatly to our understanding of the
experience of death.
It was possible to guide man to a world where no longer does man view himself as a
creature separated and estranged from all other creatures but rather as a participant in a
rich and fertile reality, a reality so interrelated and so full that it could only best be
described as a dynamic continuum; the new reality that unfolds in the psychedelic
experience.
Leary always talked about the deadening effect of the “adjust or else” brand of
psychology that had held sway over the 1950’s, but he hadn’t realized just how dead in
the water most of his colleagues were until he offered them psilocybin and they refused
to try it. My God, these were psychologists yet they lacked the slightest curiosity about
their own unconsciouses!
Leary believed that the human race is presently evolving to a higher level of
consciousness and a greater spiritual awareness. His research with LSD seemed to bear
out the fact that our nervous systems are equipped to receive a vastly greater spectrum of
reality than we realized; and once the veils of perception are cleansed, wars, racism,
competitiveness and violence will be seen as old, outgrown, pre-human traits.
Leary had always talked a great game about the deadening effect of the “adjust or else”
brand of psychology that had held sway over the 1950’s, but he hadn’t realized just how
dead in the water most of his colleagues were until he offered them psilocybin and they
refused to try it. My God, these were psychologists yet they lacked the slightest curiosity
about their own unconsciouses!
Leary was joined by assistant professor Richard Alpert, a hearty band of graduate
students, and a constant stream of many of the leading intellectuals and artists of that
time. Leary and his team employed new methods in psychological research by using
themselves as subjects, reporting directly the drugs’ effects on their own minds.
Sometimes they would take psilocybin with their students. This was unheard of.
Liberal principles demand free speech, freedom of worship, and the right to privacy. The
government does not claim to know what sorts of experiences and thoughts its subjects
should and should not cultivate. But drugs are a special case. We do not admit, even to
ourselves, that outlawing psychedelic drugs could be in part an attempt to eliminate
certain kinds of experience and thinking.
LSD is a unique and powerful tool for the exploration of the human mind and human
nature. Psychedelic experiences mediate access to deep realms of the psyche that have
not yet been discovered and acknowledged by mainstream psychology and psychiatry.
They also reveal new possibilities and mechanisms of therapeutic change and personality
transformation.
LSD subjects often consider the possibility that consciousness is a basic cosmic
phenomenon related to the organization of energy and that it exists throughout the
universe; in this context, human consciousness appears to be only one of its many
varieties and outgrowths. Episodes of consciousness of inorganic matter can be
accompanied by various insights of a philosophical and religious relevance. (nature?)
Many psychiatrists, even though they talk constantly of the unconscious mind and are
always speculating on the unconscious thoughts of their patients, appear to know this part
of the mind only as an intellectual construct and not as a direct experience. Furthermore,
many of them appear to be quite frightened of patients who actually live in their
unconscious minds, particularly if patients have made this contact by using drugs.
My soul, I learned, is most “into” joy and beauty, i.e., experiences of joy and beauty most
occupied me on acid. Joy and beauty do not dominate my awareness in general—and
never with a comparable intensity—so I treasure these experiences on the grounds of
their rarity alone. They were also profoundly educational. I think I understand the human
race a little better
Mystical insight is no more in the chemical itself than biological knowledge is in the
microscope. There is no difference in principle between sharpening perception with an
external instrument, such as a microscope and sharpening it with an internal instrument,
such as one of these drugs. If they are an affront to the dignity of the mind, the
microscope is an affront to the dignity of the eye.
Newspaper headlines describing the horrors of LSD “bummers” and drug-related
accidents ignited a witch-hunting response in legislators, politicians, educators and many
professionals. Ignoring the data from almost two decades of responsible scientific
experimentation, the anti-drug propaganda presented LSD as a totally unpredictable
devil’s drug that represented a grave danger.
None of the hundreds of questions raised by the psychedelics, many of them fundamental
to the way the mind processes information, have been answered. Rather, the powers that
be have performed a holding action comparable to the one the Papal Curia tried with
Galileo, when they confined him to a house in Arceti and forbade him the right to
continue his research.
None of these people has the slightest idea of why the Indians use peyote, or what the
effects of the drug are. Since they do not know, and will not try to understand, they
presume that it can only be evil and therefore must be prohibited. Certainly, they feel, a
practice which is so incomprehensible to Christianity cannot be religious and therefore
has no right under the constitutional guarantees of religious freedom.
One of the major problems in LSD psychotherapy was the unusual nature and context of
the psychedelic experience. The intensity of the emotional and physical expression
characteristic of LSD sessions was in sharp contrast to the conventional image of
psychotherapy, with its face-to-face discussions or disciplined free-associating on the
couch.
One thing had become clear in their research with LSD. The beneficial results of the
experience were almost entirely dependent upon the person’s willingness to accept the
experience for whatever it might be. This willingness was dependent to a large extent
upon how much you trusted yourself, and how much you trusted the people administering
the program.
Opposing terms like psychosis vs. revelation, hallucination vs. vision, regression vs.
mystical insight, and sensory distortion vs. sensory enhancement embodied two different
attitudes toward the experience and even suggested two different world views.
Psychedelic drug users thought that the words of psychiatry and medicine were being
used as a weapon against them.
Our society classifies an intoxicated individual as criminal or noncriminal on the basis of
which drug he used to get high. It’s like living in an occupied country. I feel like I’m in
one of those old movies about Occupied Europe from the 1940’s. That is precisely how
the majority of pot smokers feel. They are the largest minority group in the country and
yet they are living in a weird scenario straight out of the French Underground.
Previously almost-depressed individuals typically emerge from a successfully integrated
LSD session with elevated mood, joyful appreciation of existence, enhanced self-esteem
and self-acceptance and greater capacity for meaningful human relationships. Their inner
life is enriched, they are more open and they show an increased appreciation of beauty in
nature and art.
Previously, I had forgotten the childish joy of simply being alive. Tripping makes you
feel the way an infant must feel, in the absence of discomfort, simply being: energetic,
open, interested. Tripping lent to my life the grace of fairy tales, where everything is
right and appropriate and satisfying. Psychedelic drugs engender storybook experiences:
one is tremendously cozy, delighted, enchanted, lucky.
Psychedelic drugs had an amazing potential, not only as aids to psychotherapy but in
such areas as prisoner rehabilitation, personal growth and individual freedom,
interpersonal community structures, improved human relations, creativity, art and
entertainment, education, religion and philosophy, politics and sociology, experimental
behavioral science, to mention just a few of the practical applications we had pursued.
Psychedelic drugs released new forces into the consciousness of millions of people.
These forces might be seen as good, evil, or morally ambiguous; they might be regarded
as coming from within, as an upsurge from the unconscious mind, or from beyond, as a
revelation from other planes of existence; or some way to reconcile these interpretations
might be sought.
Psychiatrists should listen to what their patients say about drug experiences; patients
often know more about the workings of the unconscious mind from direct experience
than doctors do from their intellects. Teachers should try to learn from students who
know more about the subject than they do. In these ways, we will come to have better
information than we now get from experts who do not know what they are talking about.
Reports created a witch-hunting response from parents, teachers, ministers, police
authorities and legislators. Unfortunately, many mental-health professionals participated
to some extent in this irrational approach; although the reports of two decades of
scientific experimentation with LSD were available in the psychiatric and psychological
literature, they allowed their image of this drug to be fermented by newspaper headlines.
Since the psychedelic experience includes so many elements that are not part of nondrug
experience, the guide never will be able to understand the subject or communicate with
him adequately unless the guide himself has first-hand knowledge of the drug state and
its phenomena. The point has become controversial but we see no sound reason why it
should be.
Subjects repeatedly reported that they experienced consciousness of the ocean. On other
occasions, they have identified with what they felt to be the consciousness of fire. Many
LSD subjects also stated that they experienced consciousness of a particular material or
even the microworld of the atoms. (You can experience and/or identify with the
consciousness of anything.)
The acid took me directly to my lucid, “higher self.” It was as though I’d arrived at my
true nature: sincere, clean of purpose, and more useful and wonderful than I’d ever felt in
my life. I can’t fathom what it was that made me feel so “perfect” and “enlightened” or
what specific obstacle the chemical had overcome to enable me to feel so wholesomely
fabulous. I felt a sweeping reassurance that everything was all right after all.
The action of a psychedelic often focuses on those areas in the unconscious that most
demand resolution. The willingness to surrender to the experience and allow such
resolution to proceed often results in the most valuable kind of learning about one’s
repressed feelings, hidden values, compulsions and aspirations, and inappropriate
behavior.
The argument that the person who has taken psychedelic drugs thereby disqualifies
himself as a person able to objectively view and evaluate the experience must strike most
seasoned researchers as simply ludicrous. It is also unanswerable since all who might
reply to it on the basis of real knowledge are declared in advance unfit to deal with the
question.
The CIA and military investigators were given free reign to conduct their covert
experimentation. Apparently, in the eyes of the FDA, those seeking to develop
hallucinogens as weapons were somehow more “sensitive to their scientific integrity and
moral and ethical responsibilities” than independent researchers dedicated to exploring
the therapeutic potential of LSD.
The discovery of brain-change drugs has been compared to the discovery of the
microscope. New forms swim into perception. It’s a truism that you cannot impose the
ethics and language of the past upon the subject matter revealed by a new extension of
the senses. Galileo was arrested for describing what he saw in his telescope. The
inquisition would not bother to look through the lens.
The effect of ecstasy is to create motivation, the longing to continue the ecstasy and
fulfill it. Critics of the drug cults complain that they retreat from life’s realities, become
passive and inert. Actually, it is not so much this aspect of the psychedelic scene but its
precise opposite to which they object. It is not the reading of Thoreau; it is the taking
him seriously to which society objects.
The everyday clinical practice of LSD psychotherapy brings repeated evidence of the
powerful healing potential of the death-rebirth process. The discovery of this potent
therapeutic mechanism, as yet unrecognized and unacknowledged by Western science,
represents one of the most surprising findings of my LSD research. (That was Stanislav
Grof.)
The experience from LSD therapy and the new experiential psychotherapies clearly
indicates that exposure to another person’s deep emotional material tends to shatter
psychological defenses and to activate corresponding areas in the unconscious of the
persons assisting and witnessing the process, unless they have confronted and worked
through these levels in themselves.
The experience must come from the drug itself and the training must be specialized. No
present medical or psychological degree qualifies for the job. (A medical or
psychological degree doesn’t qualify someone to be an airplane pilot and nothing
qualifies someone to be an LSD guide if they don’t have direct, personal tripping
experience with LSD.)
The findings from psychedelic explorations throw entirely new light on the material from
history, comparative religion and anthropology concerning the ancient mysteries of death
and rebirth, rites of passage of various cultures, shamanic procedures of all times,
aboriginal healing ceremonies, spiritual practices of various religious and mystical
traditions and other phenomena of great cultural significance.
The global popularity of chemical mind-changers is due to their producing ecstasy,
perception change, fresh sensation. Ecstasy means to break out of the verbal prisons,
suspend your imprints, see things anew, perceive directly. With freshened perception
goes the feeling of liberation, insight, the exultant sense of having escaped the lifeless net
of symbols.
The reduction of ideational barriers by LSD permits certain kinds of creative activity. A
direct connection exists between the ability to experience prelogical, primitive-archaic
thinking and artistic creativity. (This writer, Sidney Cohen, was wrong to use the term
“primitive-archaic thinking.” The thinking of the ego is what’s primitive and archaic, not
what’s beyond the ego.)
The work of many artists—painters, musicians, writers and poets—who participated in
LSD experimentation in various countries of the world has been deeply influenced by
their psychedelic experiences. Most of them found access to deep sources of inspiration
in their unconscious mind, experienced a striking enhancement and unleashing of fantasy
and reached extraordinary vitality, originality and freedom of artistic expression.
There had been previous explorations. There was a history, a tradition. There were maps
and guidebooks. Though trained in the Western methods of scientific research, Leary
(and the rest of us) felt affirmed in our spiritual approach to psychedelic experiences by
the discovery of these ancient writings. Our initial work on this text was later developed
and published as The Psychedelic Experience. (That was Ralph Metzner.).
Those who argue that LSD-induced spiritual experiences cannot be valid because they are
too easily available and their occurrence and timing depend on the individual’s decision,
misunderstand the nature of the psychedelic state. The psychedelic experience is neither
easy nor a predictable way to God. Many subjects do not have spiritual elements in their
sessions despite many exposures to the drug.
To be able to face all of the challenges of psychedelic therapy, the therapist has to have
special training that involves personal experiences with the drug. Because of the
extraordinary nature of the LSD states and the limitations of our language in describing
them, it is impossible for the future LSD therapist to acquire deeper understanding of the
process without first-hand exposure.
Transpersonal experiences, especially in psychedelic experiences, do not always occur in
a pure form. Embryonal experiences can occur simultaneously with phylogenetic
memories and with the experience of cosmic unity. These associations are rather constant
and they reflect deep intrinsic interrelations between various types of psychedelic
phenomena as well as the multileveled nature of the LSD experience.
Transpersonal psychology has emerged as that branch of psychology specifically
concerned with the study of human consciousness. It attempts to expand the field of
psychological inquiry to include such human experiences as those induced by
psychedelics, as well as similar states attained through the practice of meditation or other
disciplines.
We find drug subjects with little or no scientific training describing evolutionary
processes in some detail, spelling out the scenery of microcosm and macrocosm in terms
roughly equivalent to those used by the modern physicist, empathizing with primal states
of matter and energy and them recounting this experience in terms more reminiscent of
Heisenberg than of a hallucinatory state.
We forgot that for thousands of years the psychedelic vision has been the rite of passage
of the teen-ager—the Dakota Indian boy who sits on the mountaintop fasting and
sleepless, waiting for the revelation. The threshold of adult game life is the ancient and
natural time for the rebirth experience, the flip-out trip from which you come back as a
man.
We use all sorts of drugs to ease our minds but none to reveal our minds. We seem to
want change, but not understanding. Most of us have never heard of psychedelic drugs,
and those who have would never think of using one themselves. Although man has used
drugs in religious rites to discover his relationship with God since the dawn of history,
the Judeo-Christian mind cannot accept such practices.
We were convinced that drug effects were almost entirely determined by what people
around the tripper did. If the environment radiated safety, beauty, wisdom, then even
neurotic subjects would have experiences that were safe, aesthetic and revelatory. The
theory held that all “bad trips” could be converted to “good trips” if the environment was
intelligently managed to provide support. (That was Timothy Leary.)
We were dealing with a powerful aphrodisiac, probably the most powerful sexual releaser
known to man. The effect was sensory—contact was intensified thousand-fold but also
deeper. The union was not just your body and her body but all of your racial and
evolutionary entities with all of hers. It was mythic mating. Neurological union. Cellular
sex. Archetypes merging. It was the direct reliving of thousands of matings.
What is needed is the clear voice of people who have no stake in disguising the truth. The
young must be taught to distinguish between psychedelics, which hold out the promise of
religious experience and of self-transcendence, and destructive drugs like cocaine,
amphetamines, heroin, crack. They must be taught to respect the psychedelics and to be
ready spiritually and psychologically before they attempt to take them.
When someone asks me to describe an experience of LSD, I try to explain: “Well, say
one has a pie of many pieces and each is of a different flavor. Someone asks you what
kind of pie it is. Because of the nature of speech, you can only speak of one flavor at a
time. To give a list of the flavors doesn’t capture the essence of the pie, which can be said
only it you could say all the different pieces at once.”
When the backlash against psychedelics began, the therapeutic community fell all over
itself in its eagerness to denounce the LSD work as bad science and the researchers who
had been involved in it as charlatans. A curious situation arose whereby those who knew
the most about psychedelics were relegated to the sidelines of the debate, while those
who knew the least were elevated to the status of “expert.”
While looking at a candle flame, tiny fragments of light began to sputter off the top like a
fountain of fireworks, filling the room with sparkles of resplendent light. It was the first
time on psychedelics that I cried for joy. Beholding such beauty, I felt I was being
welcomed to an ineffable mystery, as I’d finally come into contact with a spiritual
dimension that gave hope to humanity.
While samples of psychedelic drugs of doubtful quality are available in the streets and on
college campuses, it is nearly impossible for a serious researcher to get a license for
scientific investigation of their effects. As a result of this, professionals are in a very
paradoxical situation: they are expected to give expert help in an area in which they are
not allowed to conduct research and generate new scientific information.
Will you merely enjoy them as you would enjoy an evening at the puppet show and then
go back to business as usual, back to behaving like the silly delinquents you imagine
yourselves to be? (That was Aldous Huxley indicating that once you have been
enlightened by psychedelics, you don’t just go back to business as usual with the same
outlook, as if nothing happened.)
Within our own consciousness, there is a memory, waiting to be recalled, of every
movement, feeling and desire in our lives. This implies that everything survives in a way
more complete than just intellectually. The psychedelic experience heightens this recall,
and if handled properly, could pass through beneficial channels leading to psychotherapy
and rehabilitation.
You have to take it with your patient or at least have taken it yourself in order to
empathize with and follow him as he goes from one level to another. If the therapist has
never taken it, he’s sitting there with his sticky molasses Freudian psychiatric chessboard
attempting to explain experiences that are far beyond the narrow limits of that particular
system.
One of the first effects noted by many persons after ingesting a psychedelic drug is a
change in spatial perception. Distances suddenly seem to be different. A person sitting
across the room may suddenly seem to be sitting only a few feet away. The ceiling may
seem to bulge at the corners of the room and the walls may undulate as though they were
breathing. It may actually seem possible to step inside a picture of a woodland scene on
the wall and walk among the trees.
Our attitudes towards psychedelic drugs involve response to certain kinds of experience
as well as certain substances. We have a mysticism problem as well as a drug problem,
and its historical causes are older and more complicated than the causes of the drug
controversy. Mystical, messianic, and shamanistic religion always comes into conflict
with established authority after social evolution has reached the stage of hierarchal state
systems.
Particularly valuable and promising were the early efforts to use LSD psychotherapy with
terminal cancer patients. These studies showed that LSD was able to relieve severe pain,
often even in those patients who had not responded to medication with narcotics. In a
large percentage of these patients, it was also possible to alleviate or even eliminate the
fear of death, increase the quality of their lives during the remaining days, and positively
transform the experience of dying.
That first experience with psilocybin had an immeasurable effect on my life. It was
radically and totally different, yet during the course of the experience I felt closer to my
true self than I had ever been and more aware of my innermost feelings and thoughts. I
had also been fully and intensely aware of people and things around me and did not lose
the reality perceptions that govern our ordinary world. Rather, ordinary perception was
enriched and enlivened beyond comparison.
The guide must be a versatile individual. His functions may include that of nursemaid
and baby-sitter, priest and trouble-shooter, soul mate and sympathetic ear, scullery maid
and mother and any other role the situation may demand. The competent guide never
forgets that it is the subject’s session and not his. He must be adaptable to any of the
eventualities of an acid session; and he must leave his own emotional involvements
behind.
The richness of the experiential content is augmented by the fact that the process involves
an endless variety of illustrative material from biology, zoology, anthropology, history,
mythology and religion. Psychedelic sessions focusing on the death-rebirth process not
only have great therapeutic potential, but are a source of invaluable scientific,
sociopolitical, philosophical and spiritual insights. (That material is seen with the eyes
closed.)
The thing that most aroused my interest was the tone and contents of what my classmates
who had taken the drug were saying. They talked to each other in stunned, excited voices
about love, sharing, identity, unity, death, ecstasy—topics not generally discussed by
psychology students except with cynical flippancy or heavy academic seriousness—but
certainly never from experienced confrontation, as was happening now. (That was Ralph
Metzner.)
When subjects were given a psychedelic drug without knowing what to expect or how to
respond, being left alone in a dark room or threatened by unfamiliar researchers
demanding cooperation in psychological testing, it is easy to understand why so many
experiences became psychotic. If nonpsychotic experiences are desired, subjects must be
prepared, feel secure in a friendly environment, and above be willing and able to trust in a
reality greater than themselves.
Who has the right to control your mind? To explore it? To use it? With the invention of
consciousness techniques, a new kind of freedom faces a new kind of control. People
want to explore and develop their minds, and psychedelics are an efficient way to do so.
This desire is part of human nature, but law and social ignorance block the way. I propose
that we recognize a general human right: the right to explore, control, and develop one’s
mind.
A few adventurous and courageous intellectuals have made the psychedelic voyage.
A good experience with the drugs heightens and intensifies all experience.
A heavy psychedelic experience is upheaval time for anyone.
A psychedelic drug may open a brave new world.
A psychedelic experience flips you out of your mind.
A psychedelic system of education would result in a true utopia.
Acid awakened something in me like a waiting genius that I knew was there.
Acid enables you to take that leap ahead and come back ten years richer.
Acid taught us the universe inside our mind.
Acid wired in an understanding of the other side.
As aids to learning about being, psychedelics are of great potential value.
As unpredictable as the content of the LSD reaction is its intensity.
Because of that mushroom experience, I never forget what’s really important.
Before psychedelics, she had no sense of fulfillment.
Before taking LSD, I had all but lost interest in sex.
By driving LSD use underground, we multiply its dangers while minimizing its benefits.
Chronic LSD users tend to be above average in intelligence.
Composers given the drug discovered that they had greater insight into music.
Drug-induced mysticism is an expression of grace in modern form.
Drug-induced religious and mystical experience is unusually intense.
Drug-taking, it is significant, plays an important part in almost every primitive religion.
Drugs are the first and last frontier of human freedom.
Drugs are the religion of the 21st century.
Drugs can be said to promote the creation of art.
Drugs change the quality of consciousness profoundly.
Drugs dramatically alter the manner in which reality is experienced.
Drugs have always been associated with the mythical, intuitive dimension.
Drugs open up glorious and pleasurable chambers of the mind.
Drugs released people from the grip of the game-world.
Drugs stimulate quiet, serene, humorous, sensual, reflective responses.
Each drug experience is a unique journey of exploration into the mind.
Einstein’s E=MC2 is a very powerful, psychedelic thing.
Emerson took drugs with David Thoreau.
Even a single psychedelic experience can have profound and lasting consequences.
Every LSD experience is unique.
Experiences under LSD can be overwhelmingly rich and emotionally kaleidoscopic.
God produced LSD.
Hallucinogens provide a key to the creative process.
His art was inspired by the visions he saw on LSD.
Hollingshead called LSD his daily consciousness vitamin.
I experienced the euphoric effects of LSD, a celestial transformation of reality.
I had my acid glasses on.
I have changed my attitudes, ideas and values quite radically since my first dose of LSD.
In a psychedelic experience, a few seconds can yield a whole new orientation.
In LSD, we had a new chemical tool for human expression and development.
In terms of human evolution, people not on psychedelics are not fully human.
In the psychedelic drug-state, mythologies abound. (eyes closed)
In the use of LSD, there’s great potential if it’s used properly and channeled.
Indians believe peyote to be of divine origin.
Indians called the magic mushroom God’s flesh.
Indians use peyote as a means of communion with the divine world.
Insights are retained after the drug has worn off.
It is clear that the promise of LSD may be as infinite as the experience itself.
It is increasingly clear that our society cannot be both drug-free and free.
LSD-assisted analysis could deepen, intensify and accelerate the therapeutic process.
LSD can be used to harness creativity and put it to use in problem-solving.
LSD can create affection and end alienation.
LSD can deepen and intensify the therapeutic process.
LSD can “facilitate focusing on anything”.
LSD can produce enormous changes in our sensory and emotional systems.
LSD can provide very therapeutic experiences.
LSD connected us to the Great Spirit.
LSD could greatly facilitate the processes of psychotherapy.
LSD could reprogram nervous systems to accelerate consciousness and intelligence.
LSD experiences were often deeply spiritual.
LSD gave a sense of bliss and oneness with life.
LSD gave access to aesthetic, poetic, transcendental or mystical awareness.
LSD gives people appreciation of nature.
LSD grants an 8-12 hour period of both clarity and “transcendence.”
LSD has revolutionized my life.
LSD helps you find divinity and helps you discover yourself, discover God and meaning.
LSD in the right hands intensifies, deepens and shortens psychotherapy.
LSD “inhibits the inhibitors” in the psyche.
LSD is a tool of extraordinary power.
LSD is perfectly in tune with the wisdom of Buddha or the great philosophies of the past.
LSD is the electron microscope of psychology.
LSD is the most precious substance the world has ever known, a million dollars an ounce.
LSD is the source for the energy that is to transform human consciousness.
LSD is the spiritual equivalent of the hydrogen bomb.
LSD is uniquely flashy.
LSD is to treat illness rather than produce it.
LSD is Western yoga.
LSD magnified the environment.
LSD might have undreamed of therapeutic potential.
LSD offers vast possibilities for accelerated learning and scientific-scholarly research.
LSD opened exciting new perspectives and interesting possibilities.
LSD opened mental and emotional horizons for conscious inspection.
LSD opens some window in the mind.
LSD opened up paths of thinking that I never knew existed.
LSD permits the mind to organize its sensory impressions in new patterns.
LSD produces rapid, even sudden cures for emotional disorders.
LSD releases stored hidden programs
LSD, say these latter-day mystics, is the most powerful sacrament of them all.
LSD seemed to herald an alternative, a new way of life. A new sense of oneself appears.
LSD short-circuits the mental stranglehold that society imposes on its members.
LSD should be administered not with authority but in the spirit of brotherhood.
LSD subjects can relive elements of their biological birth in all its complexity.
LSD suspends conditioned reflexes.
LSD swirls the voyager into unknown regions.
LSD takes you out of the normal space-time ego.
LSD tends to intensify the actual psychic state.
LSD trips led to an astonishing intensification of her inner life.
LSD unplugs the ego, the game machinery and the mind, that cluster of game-concepts.
LSD users have entered the unknown land of psyche.
LSD was a catalyst in the evolution from beat to hippie.
LSD was a powerful agent in overcoming resistances in psychotherapy.
LSD will intensify, deepen and accelerate the therapeutic process.
LSD would awaken appetite for spiritual meaning.
Making love under LSD is really where it’s at.
Man is blind to the world inside himself. Acid is to help us see.
Many insights carry over after the drug effects have worn off.
Many of us are profoundly grateful for the vistas opened up by the drug experience.
Many people take LSD in an attempt to find a solution to their emotional problems.
Most people searched for the deeper meaning of life while under the drug.
Music is an essential part of psychedelic psychotherapy.
My LSD episodes have opened my mind and enabled me to look upon life with new eyes.
My old foundation had been eaten away by acid.
No words can adequately communicate the intensity of an LSD experience.
Nothing is more deeply felt than an intense LSD experience. (Nothing else is even close.)
Now I know what Leary means by the “energy” liberated under LSD.
One of the great purposes of an LSD session is sexual union.
One subject of Janiger claimed that a single acid trip was equal to four years in art school.
Profound emotional bonds can develop as a result of an LSD session.
Psilocybin brings out the truth of all around you.
Psychedelic agents could facilitate creative problem-solving.
Psychedelic art is expressive of an inner rhythm like that of music.
Psychedelic chemicals are the microscopes of internal biology.
Psychedelic chemicals have religious properties.
Psychedelic drug therapy was killed by the law.
Psychedelic drug use can change the direction of people’s lives.
Psychedelic drugs allow transcendence of inhibitory societal conditioning.
Psychedelic drugs are capable of producing the whole range of religious experiences.
Psychedelic drugs bring you into levels of reality which your mind can’t structure.
Psychedelic drugs can deepen the grasp of philosophic systems.
Psychedelic drugs can produce a sense of the holy.
Psychedelic drugs changed my feelings about being alive.
Psychedelic drugs enhance mysticism.
Psychedelic drugs enlarge the realm of the conscious.
Psychedelic drugs greatly affected the ‘60’s as a whole.
Psychedelic drugs have a long history of giving rise to cults and belief-systems.
Psychedelic drugs not only enhance sexuality but transforms it.
Psychedelic drugs provide creative experience.
Psychedelic drugs released new forces into the consciousness of millions of people.
Psychedelic drugs slow and magnify the sex act.
Psychedelic experience had given them greater depth as people and as creators.
Psychedelic experience is by nature private, sensual, spiritual, internal, introspective.
Psychedelic experiences can play an important role in the creative development of artists.
Psychedelic experiences create an opportunity to grow and to learn.
Psychedelic feelings are profound.
Psychedelics act as keys or tools to give a person access to his dormant potentialities.
Psychedelics can be extraordinarily intense.
Psychedelics can “trigger” a new sense of identity.
Psychedelics do take us fast and far beyond our normal conceptual framework.
Reality is a curtain for people who haven’t got the courage for acid.
Research in the psychology of religion can utilize such drugs.
Return to nature is an important aspect of the psychedelic experience.
Sensations are tremendously heightened by LSD.
Sex under LSD becomes miraculously enhanced and intensified.
Sexual experiences and behavior can be deeply influenced by the LSD experience.
Spiritual lives have been deepened by peyote.
Stolaroff said that LSD was the greatest discovery that man had ever made.
Take LSD and wipe the slate clean.
Taking of the drug is in fact essential to a true understanding of the experience.
The aim of LSD is to develop yourself spiritually and to open up greater sensitivity.
The Aztec priests used the plants to commune with their gods and to induce visions.
The consciousness-expanding drugs enable one to sense, think and feel MORE.
The discovery of LSD might rank with the Copernican revolution.
The drug appears to bring out latent potentialities.
The drug became popular among artists as a source of inspiration.
The drug can be seen as a means of passage to the inmost self.
The drug can help to uncover one’s “essential self”.
The drug experience could enhance creative potential.
The drug induced experience has been regarded as intrinsically divine.
The drug released such a flood of new thoughts and perceptions.
The drug vision can be astonishing.
The drugs appear to give an enormous impetus to the creative intuition.
The drugs “free” the mind for creative activity that would otherwise be beyond reach.
The drugs induce valuable states of self-transcendence and mystical unity.
The drugs make an end run around Christ and go straight to the Holy Spirit.
The drugs produce valuable states of self-transcendence and mystical unity.
The effects of LSD are unique.
The general understanding of the effects of LSD is poor, even among experienced users.
The government remains steadfast in its curtailment of meaningful psychedelic research.
The Greeks frequently referred to mushrooms as the “food of the Gods”.
The Indians called the magic mushroom God’s flesh.
The insight of LSD leads you to concern yourself more with internal or spiritual values.
The intellect in the drug state remains unimpaired.
The intense reality experienced by the person under LSD is often overwhelming.
The intensity and magnitude of the LSD experiences are so great.
The intensity of psychedelic states deserves notice.
The LSD ecstasy is the joyful discovery that ego is only a fraction of my identity.
The LSD experience heightened intellectual appreciation and curiosity.
The LSD experience is a deeply spiritual event, a religious pilgrimage.
The LSD experience is a manifestation of the psychic unconscious.
The LSD experience is a revelation of something outside of time and the social order.
The LSD experience is not conceptual manipulation.
The LSD experience puts you in touch with the wisdom of your body.
The LSD experiences do not fit any existing theoretical system.
The LSD session is an overwhelming awakening of experience.
The LSD trip is the classic visionary-mystic voyage.
The mystical effects of LSD transcending ego barriers may lead to creativity.
The mythic folk heroes of our times will be the psychedelic drug outlaws.
The nature of LSD phenomena is holographic, multileveled and multidimensional.
The potential of LSD seems to be quite extraordinary and unique.
The psychedelic experience can release learning blocks.
The psychedelic experience is an intimate, personal and sacred one.
The psychedelic experience is one of looking deep within yourself.
The psychedelic experience is so powerful that it far outstrips game ambitions.
The psychedelic experience signified the reality and the beauty of the flower of the spirit.
The psychedelic guide is a liberator who frees men from their life-long internal bondage.
The psychedelic liberation is so powerful that it far outstrips earthly game ambitions.
The psychedelic voyage changed the traveler.
The psychedelic voyage, like many adventures, changed the traveler.
The psychedelics triggered the switch that allowed me a glimpse—an instant of eternity.
The subject often conceives of his psychedelic experience as a kind of journey.
The taking of a drug should be a carefully thought-out and purposeful religious act.
The therapeutic promise of psychedelic drugs is still unfilled.
The transcendent process lies at the core of the therapeutic use of the psychedelics.
The use of LSD may have signified and started a revolution.
The use of psychedelics was a search for meaning, not an escape from life.
Their general effect is to sharpen the senses to a supernormal degree of awareness.
There are genuine and valid levels of perception unavailable to us without drugs.
There is a hidden truth or statement in each acid session.
There is a need for a proper study of original thinking and artistic creativity under LSD.
These drugs cause intense self-reflection.
These drugs have present value and an enormously greater potential value.
These drugs hold a potential of evolution and education.
These drugs increase society’s range of human experience and human knowledge.
These drugs offer a means for enhancing spiritual sensitivity.
These drugs tremendously intensified bodily sensations.
These new mind changers will tend in the long run to deepen the spiritual life.
These substances dramatically alter consciousness and expand awareness.
They activate our capacity for the miraculous.
They contact a potential greater than those afforded by ordinary means.
They forbid a premature closing of our accounts with reality.
They were shocked by the power and complexity of LSD.
Things I had read and passed over before now took on a new and psychedelic dimension.
This can jar people loose, this can break people through, this can do all kinds of things.
This chemical could ultimately help man in his search for the ultimate truths.
Thoughts come with amazing rapidity and clarity when one is under LSD.
Under LSD, childhood memories emerge which are relived with intense emotion.
Under LSD. I relived the strongest, most intense emotional experiences conceivable.
Under LSD, music seems to have an immediate and powerful impact on one’s emotions.
Under LSD, the universe is perceived in its entirety as eternal, natural and perfect.
Under LSD, the world becomes a world of miracle and beauty and sublime mystery.
Under the influence of LSD, one is not insane but is in a special state of consciousness.
Unlike psychotherapy, psychedelics work.
Unrecognized sources of wisdom did seem to be set free by the drug.
Very few people in the U. S. know how to use marijuana.
Visionary foods were used by witches from 1450-1750.
Wasson theorized them (mushrooms) to be at the origin of religion.
Wasson told of giving the mushroom to a mute who thereafter was able to speak.
We could see with the miracle of LSD vision.
When sex and LSD converge, the experience is said to be indescribably ecstatic.
With LSD, every moment is eternity.
With LSD, every moment is eternity and there is no rush or hurry.
You can’t get out of the mind by using the mind. A catalyst like LSD is needed.
You’re never the same once you’ve had LSD. It makes life take on richer meanings.
a psychedelic experience a drug-induced loss of self, a journey to the inner world, the
endless possibilities of the experience
a wave of psychedelic painters whose work reflected dimensions accessible only to the
turned-on eye
acid a boon to psychotherapy, an enlarger of creativity, a religious sacrament and a
liberation of the human spirit
an all-too-natural wild and satisfying, defiantly brave psychedelic religious pioneer
existence, backed by smiling Buddhas and holy Christian martyrs all giving me the nod
and the go-ahead
an inner dedication, an unruffled optimism, a deep belief in the religious experience and
the power of psychedelic drugs to produce it
an instance in which vision was so heightened under LSD that a subject was able to read
a newspaper at a distance of 30 feet
burst through the shell of language and convention into the country of the real under
impetus of the psychedelics
centuries of safe ritual and spiritual use of psychedelics by generations of shamans,
individual healers and entire aboriginal cultures
courage not to be afraid in facing those unknown realms of experience opened up by
psychedelic drugs
drugs—part of the search for the meaning of life, as tools to reach new levels of
awareness, for revelation
drugs useful for exploring perception and different possibilities and modes of
consciousness
evidence that ergot, from which LSD is derived was used in the annual Eleusinian
Mysteries (That was in ancient Greece.)
expanding consciousness through the use of sacramental substances in accord with
spiritual growth and well-being
full appreciation of the therapeutic potential of the mystical and religious dimension of
the LSD experience
Ginsberg the cosmic politician, the cosmic crusader, the social worker politician
explaining the sex-drug-freedom, ecstasy movement (Timothy Leary said that.)
how to explain in scientific terms the mechanism that allows psychedelics to change
behavior
influencing the mind-body-essence of man, as a magic, spiritual drug, a new world age
which begins to act evolutionarily
insights into aspects of people’s lives on psychedelic drugs that you could never have
known and they turned out to be true
Leary never stinting to dare all in pursuit of his idealistic dream of universal psychedelic
enlightenment
LSD a kind of telescope to scan the deep-space regions of the spirit and discover a greater
understanding of his religious instinct
LSD a “psychic broom” to sweep out the cobwebs and bring alive those senses so little
used that they are all but atrophied
LSD a very powerful behavior-changing agent with immense potential for therapy if used
properly
LSD, its eerie power to release ancient, wise, at times even holy sources of energy, inside
the human brain
LSD one of the most important scientific discoveries of our time, the significance of
which has yet to dawn on modern man
LSD religious experience—a Christian will report it in terms of the Christian vocabulary
and the Buddhists will do likewise.
LSD startlingly effective in releasing blocked emotions, recovering repressed childhood
memories, revealing defense mechanisms and developing emotional insights
new chemical instruments for accelerated consciousness, enhancing memory and
speeding up learning
psychedelic art—trying to express something in a non-conceptual highly figurative and
often emotive way, through symbols which may themselves be magical, the power to turn
us on
psychedelic drugs especially valuable in the area of comparative religion where the
researcher might find a key to the understanding of the genesis of religious experiences
psychedelic drugs potentially useful for a wide variety of therapeutic, religious, and
creative purposes
psychedelic drugs the great liberating force of our time, the destined sacrament of the
Aquarian Age
psychedelic experience not a matter of intellectual conviction or belief but of direct
vision
psychedelic rebels promoting LSD as the basis for a new kind of society and a new kind
of humanity
psychedelics a powerful tool to cut through conditioning, to bring a person to direct
understanding of their own true nature, and the nature of the universe
psychedelics, that they had the potential to facilitate for the individual the experience of
major insights and problem solutions of an intellectual-emotional nature
psychedelics—the potential to facilitate for the individual the experience of major
insights and problem solutions of an intellectual-emotional nature
psychotherapeutic value in the LSD experience as a new beginning—an existential
encounter of decisive proportions to be followed by a realignment of the perceptual set
telescope, microscope—aids to perception of external states, LSD—aid to perception of
an internal state of the nervous system
that at least for some cancer patients, LSD psychotherapy could become a factor
contributing to healing and not only a preparation for death
that drugs had been used in esoteric religious rituals from the days of antiquity right up to
the present, as a stimulus to religious experience
that hallucinogens produced radical changes in consciousness that could have a profound
and beneficial effect
that psilocybin had the potential to facilitate major insight of an intellectual-emotional
nature
that psychedelic insight can supercede both science and religion as we presently
understand them
that view of life or mode of living and knowing, which lies at the heart of the psychedelic
experience
the administration of LSD to terminal cancer cases, make dying a more spiritual, less
strictly physiological process
the ancient traditions of religious psychedelic use—always one of the places where
spirituality and psychotherapy have converged
the characteristic property of hallucinogens, to suspend the boundaries between the
experiencing self and the outer world in an ecstatic, emotional experience
the concentration on the present movement that psychedelic drugs produce by crowding
so much into immediate awareness
the delicate nuances of sensitized perceiving and feeling under psychedelic drugs, the
sensitized nuances of being and perceiving
the drug, its revelation of interior mysteries, its glimpses of supernatural beauty and
sublimity
the enormous potential importance of psychedelic research for many scholarly and
scientific disciplines
the enormous potential of psychedelics, both as therapeutic tools and as substances of
extraordinary heuristic value)
the feeling of profundity and truth that insights acquire under the influence of psychedelic
drugs
the feeling of universal fellowship and empathic communion encountered in the peyote
rites (of American Indians)
the heuristic value of LSD as a tool for the exploration of the human unconscious
(Heuristic means a person learning, finding out or discovering something themselves, not
just being told about it. With LSD, this is especially true. The person has to have the
experience or they are just blowing meaningless smoke.)
the intense vividness, composition and significance of things seen in the psychedelic
condition
the irrationality that pervades much psychiatric thinking about drugs and altered states of
consciousness
the kaleidoscopic whirling of sensations, thoughts and emotions, to which the LSD
subject is hyper-attuned
the landscapes of the mescaline experience rich with precious stones (eyes closed) All
paradises bounds in gems
the law against LSD a violation of a people’s god-given right to experience their own
divinity
the message of the mushrooms which is the wordless, mindless rapture of the moment
(The magic mushrooms are psychedelic.)
the parallels between LSD sessions and esoteric procedures focusing on the death
experience
the possibilities that psychedelic experiences can offer in terms of self-exploration,
finding the roots of one’s emotional symptoms and solving life’s problems
the potential of psychedelic therapy in the treatment of various psychiatric problems and
in the training of mental health professionals
the potentials of the drug experience for revealing new levels of consciousness and
bringing about changes in personality and behavior faster and more effectively than any
other method known to us
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
(eyes closed)
the psychological implications of the psychedelic experience, the accelerated personality
change, the rapid learning, the sudden life changes so regularly reported by psychedelic
researchers
the psychedelic movement, or psychedelic revolution, or perhaps better, the psychedelic
evolution
the rarely satisfactory imposition of standard therapeutic procedures upon the psychedelic
experience
the retrospective impressiveness of the drug experience (If one has an impressive
experience, they don’t forget about it. If they do forget, then it wasn’t that much of an
impressive experience for them.)
the sacred mushroom that gives visions and transports the eater to “the world where
everything is known”
the subconscious minds of people which LSD is able to penetrate and to bring to life as
experienced reality
the tendency of LSD to selectively activate unconscious material that has the strongest
emotional charge
the uncanny ability of LSD to open new creative avenues which stimulated mental
processes rather than dulling them
the undoubted historical fact of the widespread use of visionary plants in religious
contexts
the universality of perception in the psychedelic experience, the universal central
perception
the value of the drug experience for the purpose of both therapy and personal growth and
fulfillment
the value that psychedelic experiences could have for the personal development of
“normal” individuals
those delicious raptures of beauty and sublime revealing of truth which break upon the
mind under the influence of the drug
to allow themselves to experience whatever is emerging in the LSD sessions in order to
find the roots of their emotional problems
to dedicate oneself wholly to the true inner universe, the study of one’s own nervous
system, after one has turned on with LSD
to learn how to use psychedelic drugs to create a heaven on earth, to use drugs
intelligently
to use marijuana and LSD to get beyond the TV studio, to enhance creativity, as catalysts
to deepen wisdom and meaning
use drugs to intensify our ecstatic, sensual, emotional, intellectual and spiritual
perspectives
a beautiful autumn day when the leaves are at their psychedelic best
a comprehensive theory of LSD therapy based on a new model of the unconscious
a deeper level of reality perceived by psychedelics
a drug that will magnify sensation
a glace behind the veil through the holy holes poked by LSD
a higher degree of self-fulfillment in the psychedelic drug experience
a much wider area of potential application of the LSD reaction in the therapeutic field
a mushroom-inspired Hellenic Age (ancient Greece)
a potentially valuable drug
a psychedelic religious revelation
accelerated and expanded consciousness opened up by psychedelic drugs
acid sexually intensifying and luxurious
acid vision
acid’s electric visions
acid’s soul-connected properties
acquiring real knowledge of the process of life while in the drug-state
analogy of the psychedelic trip and the space journey
ancient painting of an obviously psychedelic religious feeling
beneficial magical-mystical effects of LSD
biochemical keys which unlock experiences shatteringly new to most Westerners
communes—to apply psychedelic experience to new forms of social living
“descent” to a “deeper” drug state level
drug-induced, brain-change experiences
drugs—catalysts to deepen wisdom and enhance creativity
drugs for reprogramming the brain
drugs that have triggered a firsthand awareness of the religious consciousness
drugs useful as spiritual preparation for reading holy writings or entering sacred places
effects—a mixture of drug plus psychological factors
energizing, sense-heightening drugs
freedom to explore oneself and the cosmos, freedom to use LSD
full, unselected experiencing of whatever surfaces during the drug sessions
gamble out of spiritual faith, the psychedelic key to revelation
getting new meaning in life, LSD the greatest thing that ever happened to me
hallucinogenic creativity
hallucinogenic insight
insight produced by chemicals the source of higher wisdom and creativity
intelligent-hedonic use of drugs
introduced to the realities of religious existence through drugs
LSD a “learning tool”
LSD a means of inhabiting a supremely sensual reality
LSD a method of changing consciousness and brain function
LSD a new experience, a new beginning
LSD a new form of energy
LSD a non-verbal, visionary experience
LSD a tool of evolution
LSD a tremendous theological breakthrough
LSD a way to transform the world
LSD an intellectual aphrodisiac
LSD capable of ushering in the Kingdom of Heaven on earth
LSD enhancing sex
LSD helping them overcome their sense of lifelessness
LSD in relation to the creative process
LSD permitting consciousness on several levels at once
LSD the key to the religious or mystical state, could lead to a truer metaphysics of being
LSD, the “mind detergent”
LSD the most potent aphrodisiac yet discovered
LSD the source of the energy that is to transform human intelligence and consciousness
LSD, the universal experience
LSD therapy which considerably deepens and intensifies all psychological processes
LSD which can activate the awareness of the divinity within
LSD, which opens up access to vast dimensions of the human mind
LSD with its plunge into the deep unconscious
LSD’s potential as a visionary or transcendental drug
LSD’s powerful rush into the unconscious
LSD’s problem-solving potential
LSD’s profound effects on the way the mind handles both emotions and perceptions
LSD’s revolutionary potential
music to fill the new spaces in one’s mind that drugs unlocked
my LSD-enhanced vision
my pre-LSD days, an hour or an eon ago
my psychedelically accelerated mind
new drugs which expand and speed up the mind
non-addictive, revelation-recreation drugs
on a new psychedelic plane
people who used psychedelic mushrooms for personal growth and spiritual discovery
perceptually gratifying, emotionally exhilarating LSD experiences
potentialities of the cortex, not the drug. The drug is just an instrument.
potentially unique drugs
psychedelic acceleration of creativity
psychedelic agents as facilitative of creative activity
psychedelic drugs as learning devices
psychedelic drugs inspiring talented musicians to create new kinds of work
psychedelic drugs to speed up mental evolution
psychedelic drugs with unique effects
psychedelic experience as a unique phenomenon with special therapeutic value
psychedelic experience, its tremendous range
psychedelic exploration
psychedelic intuition
psychedelic lovemaking
psychedelic mysticism
psychedelic participatory visions of embryos, body organs, cells and atoms (eyes closed)
psychedelic realms
psychedelic self-exploration
psychedelic sensuality and intimacy
psychedelic vision
psychedelic visionaries
psychedelic visions of harmony, love, and trust in the sweet, divine energy of creation
psychedelics allowing all kinds of creative connections to take place
psychedelics as potential facilitators of development
psychedelics for personal exploration and psychological growth
psychedelics, mind-manifesting or mind-revealing substances
pursuit of the Divinity through the sacrament of LSD
responsible religious use of chemicals
rich drug experiences
roam around eternity via LSD
sacramental chemical like LSD
sacramental substances, spiritual growth
sacred drugs
sacred mushrooms
sacred plants
sacred psychedelic plants
spiritually oriented psychedelic sessions
take acid to cleanse his soul
taking sacred substances to induce a heightened state
textures with LSD colors superimposed on them
that an LSD-induced mystical experience might harbor unexplored therapeutic potential
that dimension of consciousness opened by the psychedelic drugs
that golf was originally a cover for mushroom hunting (in Scotland)
that in these chemicals the evolutionary acceleration of man’s spiritual nature is at hand
that LSD was the tool mankind needed to be free
that religion itself is psychedelic in origin
that the apple Adam ate was consciousness expanding
that view of life or mode of living, which lies at the heart of the psychedelic experience
the ability of LSD to act as an educational implement
the ability of LSD to deepen, intensify and accelerate the psychotherapeutic process
the ability of LSD to enhance the mystical self-understanding of a person
the acid world
the ancient sacramental meaning of LSD
the authenticity of psychedelic peak experiences
the awesome and amazing experience of LSD
the changes in sensation and awareness that LSD can call forth
the clinical potential of these drugs
the complexity of the LSD experience and all the major variables involved
the creative-fostering potential of psychedelic agents
the creative potential of the LSD state
the crucial agency of the drugs in a new religious birth
the crucial importance of drug-induced “far-reaching insight experiences”
the crystal-like quality or immediacy of the psychedelic experience
the cult-creating power of psychedelic drugs
the cultural and religious influence of psychedelic plants
the curative, religious and heuristic properties of psychedelic drugs
the deep and profound experiences released by LSD
the dimensions the psychedelics open up
the divine plant/god Soma as the inspiration for the Hindu religions
the divine potion
the dream of psychedelic utopia
the drug as a liberator which facilitates accurate perception, self-insight
the drug experience a means to a fuller existence, to a life more innately human
the drug movement and its significance which may be crucial to our society
the drug’s ability to give a patient “a new beginning”
the drug’s mind-changing powers
the drug’s real potential
the ecstatic process initiated by the consciousness-expanding drugs
the educational potential of psychedelics
the educational value of psychedelics when used intelligently
the educational value of the psychedelic experience
the effects of the drug on a number of mental and emotional levels
the ego-shattering effects of the drug
the emotional afterglow of the drug experience
the emotional power of LSD on the human psyche
the enchanted life I led under the influence of the drug
the enormously rich and varied range of experience open to the psychedelic subject
the expanded vistas that psychedelics make possible to the earnest explorer
the expansive universe to which drugs such as LSD can open up the mortal brain
the expansiveness of psychedelic consciousness
the experiential territories that were made available through the catalyzing action of LSD
the extended awareness of time in LSD, can get outside the time context
the extraordinary value of LSD for the education of psychiatrists and psychologists
the fantastic experiential explosions induced by psychedelics
the feelings evoked by the change in the subjective sensations due to the drug
the fluidity of the LSD state
the full range of effects of these drugs
the grandeur, splendor, romance and revelation of LSD
the greater depth of psychedelic experience
the healing-educational possibilities of psychedelics
the heightened perception produced by LSD
the humanizing influence of the psychedelics
the ineffability of psychedelic experience
the infinite amount of possibilities available in psychedelic drugs
the infinite openness of psychedelic consciousness
the intense emotional impact of the drug
the intensification of sexual experience and the potentiation of sexual ecstasy by LSD
the intensity of psychedelic states
the “internal logic” of the LSD situation
the knowledge of the self, as revealed by the LSD experience
the liberating power of psychedelic drugs
the life-changing therapeutic effects of the psilocybin experience
the LSD experience significant, useful and enriching
the magic of LSD
the magic of the mysterious, miraculous pill
the magical effect of LSD
the magical, spiritual component that was really what acid was all about
the magical virtue of the sacrament
the message of the mushrooms which is the wordless, mindless rapture of the moment
the mind-changing, mind-manifesting, or mind-revealing drugs
the most powerful drug yet known to man
the most valuable chemical discovery of the century
the multi-faceted realities that the LSD experience opened up
the multi-level perception of LSD
the multidimensional and multifaceted content of LSD experiences
the multileveled nature of the LSD experience
the mysterious world of chemical hallucinogens
the nature and flavor of the psychedelic experience
the nature of LSD phenomena, multileveled and multi-dimensional
the new, cleansing sacrament of the Aquarian Age
the new concept of man which emerges from LSD transformations
the new eyes the psychedelic had given me
the new insights provided by consciousness-expansion drugs
the new neurology and psychedelic pharmacology
the new reality that unfolds in the psychedelic experience
the new “wisdom drugs” which were responsible for an emerging spirituality
the new world of consciousness which these substances reveal
the opportunities for personal growth available through chemical ecstasy
the peyote wonder-world
the philosophical and spiritual dimensions of the LSD experience
the potency of the drugs and the range of the experiences they afford
the potent consciousness-altering qualities of LSD
the potential depth and complexity of psychedelic experience
the potential of LSD for enhancing creativity
the potentially vast possibilities of LSD
the power of LSD to change humanity for the better
the power of psychedelics to take us further on the evolutionary ladder
the power of these drugs to change behavior
the power of these drugs to change beliefs and transform ways of life
the preternatural activity of sense in the hasheesh state
the prismatic, climactic, revealing experience which LSD promises and fulfills
the “psychedelic artist”
the “psychedelic consciousness”
the psychedelic experience, a Niagara of light energy
the psychedelic experience of mystical consciousness
the psychedelic experience so intense and impressive
the psychedelic experience, the treasure it promises
the psychedelic journey
the psychedelic-mystical state
the psychedelic revolution
the psychedelic road to discovery
the psychedelic road to divinity
the psychedelic sea
the psychedelic visual experience, a Niagara of light energy
the quality of consciousness which these drugs induce
the range of feeling and thought produced by the drugs
the rare unexpected ecstasy and adventure of the psychedelic drug trip
the raw, electric, shuddering sensitivity of the psychedelic experience
the reality revealer, the truth-and-beauty pill
the relationship of psychedelic states to creative inspiration
the religious aspects and dimensions of the psychedelic drugs
the religious aspects of the psychedelic revelatory experience
the religious dimensions of the psychedelic experience
the religious-ontological nature of the psychedelic experience
the religious potentialities of LSD
the religious significance of psychedelic drug experiences
the revelation of LSD
the rhythmic beauty of detail which the drugs reveal in common things
the rich and complex content of LSD sessions
the rich and complex phenomena of the psychedelic death-rebirth process
the rich world of psychedelic observations
the role of psychedelic drugs in mystery cults in ancient times
the role of psychedelics in exploring the mind’s potential
the secrets and mysteries of the psychedelic world
the sense of awestruck discovery psychedelic artists tried to communicate
the spectrum of experiences induced by psychedelic compounds
the spiritual content of the psychedelic experience
the spiritual meaning of LSD
the state of acute sensitivity that the drugs induce
the therapeutic potential of psychedelics
the transformation potential of LSD
the tremendously expanded awareness that I was brought to by LSD
the understanding of love which people find in the LSD experience
the unfamiliar altered consciousness induced by LSD
the universality of drug use by human beings, a universal phenomenon
the unusual ability of this drug to facilitate intensive emotional abreactions
the unusual nature and context of the psychedelic experience
the value of a drug-induced, sudden transforming encounter
the value of these drugs as superlative means for the study of religious experience
the various levels and types of experience manifested in psychedelic sessions
the vividness, intensity and perceptual peculiarities of drug trips
the yogic possibilities of psychedelic drugs
these internal microscopes
these most complex and fascinating of all drugs
these new wonder medicines
these wonderful, magical, mystical drugs
this extraordinary experience of self-discovery under LSD
this fascinating and holy drug
this heavenly, world-transfiguring drug
this most magical stimulant
this new reality that unfolds in the psychedelic experience
this powerful catalyst
this powerful new tool
this psychedelically induced Divine Comedy
those unknown realms of experience opened up by psychedelic drugs
to determine how LSD can best be used in releasing the potentials of the human mind
to explore the mystical and religious dimensions of psychedelic experiences
to go within—to explore the landscape the psychedelics had opened up
to release creative mental activity with hallucinogens
20th century magic potions, the psychedelics
use drugs to intensify our aesthetic, emotional, intellectual and spiritual perspectives
using LSD as a tool to explore the creative attributes of the mind
vast experiences and insights via LSD
viewed with eyes cleansed by a psychedelic
visionary vegetables
vivid psychedelic imagery
whether a suicidal individual can satisfy his “need to die” by “dying” in a drug session
which drugs the soul
will take LSD to satisfy a deep-rooted need for wholeness and meaning
words—static, psychedelic experience—fluid and everchanging