The Acid Diaries (Christopher Gray)

I have felt myself to be in the position of geographers or explorers of an earlier age, as they pushed into terra incognita. I am still not sure myself of exactly what happened, or of what I saw. In the words of Terence McKenna: The early approach with psychedelics was the correct one. This is the notion that intelligent, thoughtful people should take psychedelics and try and understand what’s going on. Mature, intelligent people need to share their experiences. It’s too early for a science. What we need now are the diaries of explorers. We need many diaries of many explorers so we can begin to get a feeling for the territory.

Depression and anxiety were particularly responsive to treatment, and by the mid-1950s, lysergic acid was beginning to look like a major breakthrough in the entire field of analytically oriented psychotherapy. The drug worked equally well for Freudians, Jungians, and any other major school of psychoanalysis, and a variety of new approaches to treatment began to appear. A patient might, for instance, be seen the day before a session with the drug, be supervised for the session itself, then be seen again for a follow-up session the following day. This made work with patients much more intense, but it was estimated that the overall length of individual analysis could be reduced to one-tenth of what it had been. At last there was the real possibility psychoanalysis could be applied on a mass level. Particularly promising work was being done with alcoholics, largely in Canada; and it was here lysergic acid suddenly proved that its creative potential had still barely been touched.

Dosage was finally established around the mid-1950s. One hundred micrograms was low, 200 was medium, 300 and above, high. And the two major schools of LSD psychotherapy that evolved were defined primarily by the dose range they employed. The first school used relatively low doses for session after session, or “serially,” as it was called, an approach that became known as psycholytic therapy. The second was based on the concept of the “single overwhelming dose,” sessions never being given more than twice or at most three times, the purpose of which was to shock patients out of their obsessional behavior and give them a glimpse of transcendent reality. Sacred music, religious statues, or other imagery could form part of the setting in this second approach—as could natural beauty—which became known technically as psychedelic therapy. The first was the dominant school in Europe, the second in the United States. By the early 1960s, well over a thousand research papers and several dozen books had been written on the subject; and lysergic acid diethylamide, or LSD, as it was already becoming known, seemed set fair to become the wonder drug of psychotherapy for the second half of the twentieth century.

Oscar Janiger, a Los Angeles psychotherapist, was the first person to study the effects of LSD on a wide range of people not suffering from any particular psychological problem.

Earlier in his essay he had referred to possibilities broached by the English philosopher C. D. Broad. The function of the brain and nervous system and sense organs is in the main eliminative and not productive. Each person is at each moment capable of remembering all that has ever happened to him and of perceiving everything that is happening everywhere in the universe. The function of the brain and nervous system is to protect us from being overwhelmed. Now Huxley replaced this with a much more vigorous paraphrase: Each one of us is potentially Mind at Large. But in so far as we are animals, our business is at all costs to survive. To make biological survival possible, Mind at Large has to be funneled through the reducing valve of the brain and nervous system. What comes out at the other end is a measly trickle of the kind of consciousness which will help us to stay alive on the surface of this particular planet.1 What mescaline does, Huxley suggests, is temporarily bypass this “reducing valve” function of the brain, allowing through a flood of data that had previously been screened out as it served no “practical” purpose . . . a speculation that has remained the guiding image of theories as to how psychedelics work.

While researching this book, I reread Martin Lee and Bruce Shlain’s Acid Dreams: The CIA, LSD and the Sixties Rebellion. Not only is the book the best history of LSD, it’s the best history of ’60s counterculture as a whole: an eyewitness account of just how close the West, in particular the apparently monolithic United States, came to internal breakdown in the late ’60s. I was beginning to think I had imagined it all, so outrageous did the things we had done seem in the light of the past twenty-five years’ abject political and cultural conformism—but no, everything was there in Acid Dreams . . .

By the middle of the decade so many young people were dropping out that it looked as though “youth” was becoming a social class in its own right, one about to inherit the revolutionary dynamism Marx had ascribed to the industrial proletariat. For between the two world wars, capitalism had cut a deal with the traditional working class. The worst of the exploitation would be relegated to the Third World, and workers in the West would be given a larger slice of the capitalist pie—providing they stayed in line. Over the following years, standoff had become status quo; more than that, the ever-increasing consumption of goods by the updated, mid-twentieth-century working class had become an essential part of capitalist economy, one without which it couldn’t continue to function . . . but the exclusion of the vast majority of people from any real control of their own lives remained untouched. What the hippies were saying was that poverty and exploitation hadn’t been done away with, they had merely been modernized. The overcrowding, hunger, and disease of the nineteenth-century working class had been replaced by the loneliness, tension, and free-floating anxiety of its twentieth-century equivalent. Poverty had become psychological, and this at a time when there was logically no need for poverty at all. Technologically, humanity had reached the point where basic material survival could be assured with much less labor than ever before. In principle, at any rate, we stood on the verge of a new age of leisure. “Workers of the world disperse,” as one hippie graffito put it succinctly. That was the negative side of the ’60s political program, the refusal to work, the embracing of a degree of voluntary poverty. The positive side lay in trying to prospect the values of the new Renaissance now possible. If consumer goods are a mockery of true human desires, then what exactly do we want? Most of the ’60s experiments in creating a new lifestyle can be seen as an attempt to answer this question.

LOOKING BACK ON THAT time, what seems so incomprehensible is that we never took LSD more seriously. How was it we failed to grasp its importance? For the concept of deconditioning was at the heart of the New Left of the time. If any single feature set ’60s and ’70s radicalism apart from any previous insurrectionary politics, it was insistence that individual subjectivity had to be transformed. The political was the personal. Politics were psychopolitics. Our own hearts and minds were precisely where the old order was ingrained—and if we couldn’t change ourselves, then what hope was there we could ever change the world? The near hysterical hostility of psychotherapists toward hippies didn’t help. It made us disregard everything else they said, which was stupid. The best summary of research until then, Robert Masters and Jean Houston’s Varieties of Psychedelic Experience, came out in 1966, and there was much we could have learned from it.

Masters and Houston start by asking the basic question facing anyone who becomes involved with LSD—how can individual trips differ so wildly from one person to the next?—and drawing on several years of research, they speak of “four levels of the drug experience hypothesized as corresponding to major levels of the psyche,” levels that they proceed to characterize as follows: the sensory level First, LSD brings changes to perception, most obviously to sight, but more generally to the body image—which can appear to grow or shrink, age or become youthful—changes tending to congregate in the early stages of a session, while the drug’s effects are still mounting. the recollective-analytic level This general loosening of one’s perception of oneself and the world, plus the massive influx of energy, allows unconscious material to begin to work itself free. This was the level that so excited psychotherapists. There was no longer any need to go digging for repressed emotions or memories; they burst into consciousness with little or no prompting. Using the term loosely, this could be described as the Freudian level of the drug’s action. the symbolic level If the session goes deeper, a further level is reached. Personal identity starts to thin out and disappear. Phenomena don’t just become more beautiful physically, they become more densely charged with meaning. They become mythopoetic. The personal unconscious appears to be becoming replaced by something you could well call the collective one . . . the theater of ritual and myth. Masters and Houston call this the “symbolic level”—and it could, again using the term loosely, be characterized as the drug’s Jungian dimension. the integral level The sensory . . . the autobiographical . . . the archetypal. A typical session would be multilayered with these three levels shifting in and out of one another. However, there was one final, qualitatively different variety of psychedelic experience, reported by Freud and Jung, that in a few cases appeared to be religious epiphany. This had always been the most contentious implication of psychedelics, the possibility that God could be put in a pill; and Masters and Houston, while admitting themselves baffled as to how any such thing could be happening, were forced to acknowledge that a small number of their subjects did appear to be having authentic mystical experiences.

Rather than the terrorists, it was the early feminists who dealt capitalism the body blow. Their work offered the first critique of Western society as a whole and provided the first tools with which revolutionaries could begin to revolutionize themselves—to question their very concept of identity: their mind or ego. During the early to mid ’70s, erstwhile militants in droves took to individual and group psychotherapy and later in the decade to various spiritual practices. This was the time the counterculture really tried to come to grips with deconditioning in an organized manner. And this was the time you would have expected a proper exploration of LSD . . . but no such thing took place.

Basically, I never trusted LSD; and despite all the song and dance about psychedelics at the time, I suspect that a large number of my peers didn’t either. Amazing eye-opener LSD might be, but it seemed too volatile, too violent to be workable. Had we known of the research Stanislav Grof had been doing in Prague—with its high doses, dozens of sessions, and openness to religious or paranormal experience if it occurred—we might have changed our attitude, but Grof’s Realms of the Human Unconscious was not published until 1976, and by then it was already too late. By that time the possibility of any real revolutionary confrontation was draining away. While a few experimental cults, such as Osho’s or Adi Da’s, were to continue into the ’80s, the zeitgeist that had inspired our generation was all but played out. Perhaps we had destroyed too much and failed to replace it with anything positive, leaving the next generation with no alternative but to back away from the yawning void we bequeathed them.

Perhaps revolts that fail always create this murderous backlash. Ringleaders are either dead or thoroughly discredited; and the rest, however sick at heart, have little option but to try to pick up the pieces and lead some semblance of normal life, to curl up with a lover and a couple of kids and draw the curtains on the horror outside. Acid and the revolution dropped out of sight together; and there the matter stood until . . . well, I’d say, comparatively recently.

Personally, as a young Marxist, religion had always been anathema to me, and it was only because I was ill in bed and couldn’t find anything else to read that I opened Ouspensky’s In Search of the Miraculous, a book I had been sedulously avoiding for years. But the psychology I stumbled on was the last thing I had been expecting. “Everyone you see is asleep,” Gurdjieff tells Ouspensky early in the book. “Asleep and lost in dreams.” This hit me like a bucket of cold water. Perhaps it was particularly shocking for me personally because of something that had happened in a car crash—that had happened twice, in fact, and both times in car crashes. During the last seconds before impact, time had gone into extreme slow motion—or perhaps it would be more exact to say it was both moving and frozen at one and the same time. There was absolutely no fear. On the contrary, I was euphoric: I seemed to have become an integral part of Being itself and felt enormously safe. I wasn’t myself at all, yet never before had I been myself so intensely.

To say I had briefly “woken up” would express perfectly what had happened. And as I read more of Ouspensky’s book, I realized I had known this strange state before. Falling in love had taken me there; so had Third World travel; so had political activism when it involved crime. I remembered how, in moments of danger, my voice had sounded as though it was someone else speaking. This was a eureka moment for me. I thought I had found in Gurdjieff’s ideas of “sleep” and “dreams” and “self-remembering” and “waking up” the basic vocabulary of the revolutionary psychology we had been searching for. Part of the thrill of direct action had always been the transformation of consciousness that being totally in the present moment brought about. Demonstrations, particularly when they turned into riots, could create just the same mental silence, even the same sensation everything was happening in slow motion. The placards, the rearing horses, the flying mud . . . and inside the quiet and emptiness, the oddly straightforward happiness. Unfortunately, like many others before me, I found I couldn’t stay in a state of “self-remembering” for more than a few seconds at a time.

After the best part of a year, my failure to make any progress at all had brought me close to nervous breakdown. In fact, I think I would have cracked up (Gurdjieff students do) if it hadn’t been for my discovery of vipassana, the Buddhist meditation technique in which you concentrate on your breath to give yourself some purchase on the present moment.

FOR ASTROLOGY THERE ARE two particularly critical junctures in the life of any individual, the first at the end of their twenties, and the second at the end of their fifties. Called the Saturn Return, these are the two occasions the planet Saturn completes its orbit around the sun and returns to the position it occupied at your birth. Seen negatively, these times border on nervous and mental breakdown; seen positively, they are crises that put you back in touch with your own deeper nature. I can’t answer for the theory, but I can vouch for the fact that these two occasions were the times of the most dramatic self-confrontation in my own life; and it was with the second of the two that LSD was to reenter my life.

What made me sit down and reread Stanislav Grof’s Realms of the Human Unconscious at precisely this point? I just don’t know. Several times in the following narrative there are going to be examples of events I can understand only as direct intervention of the unconscious in my daily life, and perhaps this was the first of them. I had read the book several years before, on the insistence of a friend who swore it was one of the few masterpieces of contemporary psychology and philosophy; and having read it, I could only agree with him. On that first reading the introductory chapters seemed to be in agreement with what little I could remember of Masters and Houston’s Varieties of Psychedelic Experience. Grof’s argument, like theirs, was based on a fourfold classification of LSD’s effects . . . though Grof spoke of “realms” rather than stages or levels.

the transpersonal realm One of Grof’s most provocative findings was that birth and death appear to be deeply interrelated in the unconscious mind. Reliving their own birth, subject after subject believed they were in fact dying—dying for real—and, emerging from their ordeal, claimed to feel spiritually reborn. They reported a sense of identity that had at times expanded far beyond ego boundaries and transcended the limitations of time and space. Paranormal or esoteric and religious capacities could be briefly activated. Grof cited various out-of-body phenomena: among others, telepathy, precognition, clairvoyance, clairaudience, meeting with deities, and space and time travel. And with an open-minded but noncommittal review of such experiences, Realms of the Human Unconscious closed.

There was one very clear episode where a sort of voice-over was saying how the only authentic life was one lived in the light of death;

I tripped in the bedroom again, and again had a wonderful afternoon, which I spent in almost exactly the same way—the most intense part of the trip with the blindfold and earphones, then the bath, then the walk on the Heath. In fact, from the first my tripping tended to ritualize itself. I began to take a 100-microgram trip every second or, more frequently, every third weekend. To my surprise, the blindfold and earphones worked brilliantly. The blindfold allowed me to let go of the world and other people completely, while the music was like an Ariadne’s thread I could follow through whatever happened. Should things threaten to become overwhelming, I just went back to concentrating on the music. Rather than feeling at the mercy of my mind, I felt more open and relaxed than I ever had when I tripped in my youth. The real change the blindfold brought was to make me more aware of my emotions. As the trip came on, it made them bigger and clearer, like a magnifying glass. Yet at the same time I would have been hard put to verbalize what I was feeling so intensely. Something incredibly poignant was trying to thrust itself into my awareness, but I still couldn’t see what it was. I kept arching my spine, trying to loosen the tension I felt in my lower back. When it came, the rush was like a dam breaking. Psychologically I was bowled over by a wave of collective and symbolic material. LSD must be God’s gift to the Jungians, I remember thinking, during one of the moments I surfaced from the flood of visions, voices, and emotions. These followed one another so fast I had difficulty keeping up with them, dazzled by the bravura of the . . . psychedelic language, or so I came to call it.

By the second or third trip, however, specific themes were beginning to stand out and evolve—and the serial approach began to make self-evident sense. I had marked a passage from Realms of the Human Unconscious where Grof discusses this development of material from one session to the next. Rather than being unrelated and random, the experiential content seemed to represent a successive unfolding of deeper and deeper levels of the unconscious. It was quite common that identical or very similar clusters of visions, emotions, and physical symptoms occurred in several consecutive LSD sessions. Patients often had the feeling that they were returning again and again to a specific experiential area and each time could get deeper into it. After several sessions, such clusters would then converge into a complex reliving of traumatic memories. When these memories were relived and integrated, the previously recurring phenomena never reappeared in subsequent sessions and were replaced by others.1 Mother and child, that was probably my first clear “cluster of visions, emotions, and physical symptoms.” As with the warrior/poet of my first trip, this archetype was something I perceived from different viewpoints, sometimes from inside, sometimes from out. Sometimes I saw the child through the mother’s eyes, sometimes the mother through those of the child. There were confused episodes where I seemed to have become a woman myself and be giving birth to a child; and despite my intoxication, I became surprisingly embarrassed by this and tried to pretend it wasn’t happening.

Ego loss crept upon me without my even noticing. Several times, half-submerged amid mounds of foam sparkling like a Christmas tree, I realized I had completely forgotten who I was. Once I had to get a glass of water from the kitchen and wandered, dripping wet, through the living room. Glancing at the long pine table with the computer on it, the few books, the window box full of summer flowers, I wondered briefly who lived there . . . only to climb back in the bath and promptly forget about it. What a paradoxical space acid accessed! Hardly ever had I felt I was myself so intensely, yet at the same time I hadn’t a clue who I was! Never had I imagined personality to be something so superficial, something you could peel off so easily, peel off without impeding the normal functioning of the mind . . . peel off, in fact, without even noticing it had gone!

For centuries, Western industrial society has overplayed the importance of the left hemisphere, referring to it as the major hemisphere, while systematically downgrading the right and calling it the minor hemisphere. The idea I was pushing around in my journal was that LSD brought about a revolutionary reversal of this hemispheric dominance. Could Aldous Huxley’s “reducing valve of the brain and nervous system” be delineated more precisely, as something specifically designed to throttle the contribution of the right brain? A reducing valve that, when “bypassed” by mescaline, LSD, or other psychedelics, could no longer prevent the left brain being flooded by the very different way the right perceived, allowing a glimpse of the possibility the two hemispheres could one day be harmonized, bringing about a far richer, literally stereoscopic vision of life in the world?

The apartment looked wrong. Normally I loved its raffishness, but now both apartment and its contents looked seedy to the point of being sinister. Gazing around I thought, Christ, what a dump! How has my life come to this? Which wasn’t without a certain humor, since I was rapidly losing any idea of where I had come to, period. Peering through the living-room window, I failed to recognize the buildings on the other side of the lawn. The lawn itself appeared baked and drought-ridden, which led me to believe I was in California, possibly in the suburbs of Los Angeles. At the moment I turned away from the window, my mind went into overdrive. Everything started to happen so fast it became a blur. I don’t know how long this lasted, just a minute or so, I imagine, when equally abruptly everything started to decelerate again . . . like a movie that has been on fast-forward returning to normal with a jerk.

The next morning I sat staring blankly at the trip journal. What on Earth had happened? Was that Grof’s “transpersonal realm”? If so, describing it as “multilayered and multidimensional” was putting it mildly. How did such an amalgam of diverse elements—astoundingly sophisticated communication, buffoonery, and stone-cold terror—belong together? Above all, what got through to me was the fear. So nothing had really changed. LSD still had the power to terrify me in a way nothing else had ever done, with a quality of the supernatural, of metaphysical damnation nothing else could command, and that an intervening lifetime had done nothing to diminish. At the heart of LSD was something that scared the living daylights out of me . . . but what was it? Confused and upset, I turned to Aldous Huxley and reread The Doors of Perception and found, much to my surprise, that Huxley had gone through something very similar. I had forgotten a key passage in his essay. His trip had not, as I remembered, peaked in the living room, the is-ness of which had been so miraculously revealed to him. Not in his perception of his books, nor his vase of flowers, nor his furniture . . . no, the climax had come just after that. Huxley had wandered out of the living room into the garden, dazzling in the L.A. sunshine, and been stopped dead in his tracks by the explosion of terrifyingly beautiful color into which a garden chair had turned.

Confronted by a chair which looked like the Last Judgment—or, to be more accurate, by a Last Judgment which, after a long time and with considerable difficulty, I recognized as a chair—I found myself all at once on the brink of panic. This, I suddenly felt, was going too far. Too far, even though the going was into intenser beauty, deeper significance. The fear, as I analyse it in retrospect, was of being overwhelmed, of disintegrating under a pressure of reality greater than a mind, accustomed to living most of the time in a cosy world of symbols, could possibly bear. Magnificent description that this was, and while I could recognize much of my own experience reflected there, I felt there was something missing. Huxley suggested such visions were purgatorial. “The literature of religious experience,” he continued, “abounds in references to the pains and terrors overwhelming those who have come, too suddenly, face to face with some manifestation of the Mysterium tremendum.”

At the time I didn’t know what to make of any of this—and all I am doing at the moment is to give a quick synopsis of what I read. For the really important bit came next. Grof suggested that these primal experiences, our very first taste of sentient life in the world, were of an intensity that nothing in our subsequent life could rival, and as such they formed existential cores around which all subsequent experience tended to congregate and classify itself. In fact, or so it struck me, he was proposing a new body of archetypes, although, perhaps because of the overriding Jungian associations, he did not want to use the term. Instead he called them Basic Perinatal Matrices, abbreviated (mercifully, I remember thinking at the time) to BPM. Thus mystical experiences, experiences of cosmic unity, were referred to as BPM 1; classic bad trips were BPM 2; experiences of heroic effort in life-threatening circumstances were BPM 3; while those of spiritual rebirth were BPM 4.

In his experience of hands-on LSD psychotherapy, Grof said, if an individual’s memories of pleasure or pain were traced back through his or her life, they would betray increasingly clear features of their origin in the perinatal realm. Consciously reexperiencing the core memories themselves could help cure physical and mental problems as surely as remembering crucial postnatal trauma. However, full reliving of the core experience (and this was something he stressed) was not always essential. Matrices could become conscious in various symbolic or even philosophic forms and be successfully integrated on this level alone. Finally, in his observation, BPM 2 tended to be the first material from the deep unconscious to be activated by LSD. As a rule of thumb, the order in which the matrices manifested was BPM 2, then BPM 3, then BPM 4—and only last of all BPM 1, the realm of nondual perception.

The session in which my personal story was to explode started in the same way as the others. Perhaps it was worse. Again I was twisting on the bed with the pressure building, until I thought I was going to burst. Never before had I seen nightmarish visions inside my head, but now I did: slithering, dark things; piles of wet coils, vicious eyes flicking this way and that, seeking me out. Tentacles whipped at my face, and instinctively my head jerked sideways . . . and a wash of watery blood, like something out of a horror movie, was spilling across the visual field behind the mask. Then everything just popped. What it was all about was devastatingly clear. The journal entry I scribbled—and underlined—the following morning starts: The sense of inner pressure, which has been mounting steadily throughout the first part of all the trips I have taken, finally exploded yesterday. Suddenly I saw what I have been repressing from the first . . . the most terrible sense of worthlessness. Everything I have ever tried to do has been a complete failure. Subconsciously I am eaten away by self-hatred . . . I stood in the middle of the bedroom, stunned.

What happened next had me staring incredulously! First one then another of the mallards or moorhens seemed to wake up and start, jerkily at first, to move about, until they were all doing something. Around they went, pecking and waddling, the swimming moorhens making that prodding backward-and-forward movement with their heads. More bizarrely, some ducks in the background were ascending and descending almost vertically, like bees. The photo was like a laptop screen playing a flickering sepia documentary from the depths of my unconscious. God, I thought, I’m seeing this the way a young child would see it. I am seeing what I once saw when I was very little. Something broke—and the tears started to pour. All of it had been taken away! My Gran and her magical world had been taken away! The grief throbbed like a wound that had just been inflicted . . . and suddenly I grasped the whole story of my life. Nothing had ever lived up to the promise of childhood. It was as simple as that. That was where the sense of failure came from; from that, and from the fact that somehow, though I still didn’t know exactly what I’d done, I had been responsible for it. Somehow I had betrayed myself. I’d swapped everything I had—and it was everything; I’d had the whole world in my hands—for an adulthood that was worth nothing. Nothing at all. The awful simplicity of it took my breath away.

Hurriedly I looked for one of our son . . . and, yes, that one worked. Taken when he had lost his front tooth, it went straight to my heart. I turned the pages of the album, and all the photos of him had the same sparkling, happy quality . . . though they didn’t suck me into them almost bodily the way the childhood ones did. Looking at the photos of my son simply made me see how much I loved him. But, returning to the photos of Asha, I drew the same blank. I turned over pages of her pregnancy, of pictures I’d taken of our son’s blood-splattered birth, of the funky old North London houses where we had lived . . . and all of it had the emotional impact of a bus timetable. Uh-uh, I thought, I don’t like the look of this. There’s something I’m deliberately refusing to feel here. I pushed the albums aside and leaned back against the wall. But what do you do when you run into massive resistance like this? Volatile as ever, the acid promptly turned against me, and I was flooded with doubts about everything I had been trying to do. Could you try to analyze yourself with no professional training of any sort? Didn’t dissolving blocks like this call for considerable expertise? Or, I reflected after a moment, was I making a basic mistake with what I was trying to do? Could it be that acid simply didn’t work with recent memories? That its forte was the distant past . . . particularly early childhood? Not just for the rest of the session, but for several days afterward I was in that state of irritability and pervasive depression in which a dud or ill-resolved trip can leave you. I began to suspect I could not think my way through this alone. What I needed was someone to talk to. Probably just a few tips from a professional would be enough . . . but where could I find such a person?

Jacob continued to expand this clandestine network throughout his sixties and seventies. By the end he estimated he had initiated some four thousand people, a large percentage of them psychotherapists and health care professionals, into the use of psychedelics—particularly, from the mid ’80s onward, into Ecstasy. There was never a serious mishap. No psychotic episodes were triggered. No one informed on him, and Jacob continued “tripping” people, as he nicely phrased it, until his death in the ’90s. The Secret Chief, slight a book though it was, had a hugely demystifying effect on the way I saw LSD psychotherapy. Push comes to shove, I thought, I can work out this stuff for myself. Instinctively I had realized that the material that came up in a session needed to be worked through subsequently, and I was doing my best with the trip journal. Equally I had found out about the use of photos on my own, and whatever the block I had run into with them, I would find some way of solving it. Hadn’t the first therapists taught themselves? And if they could, then why couldn’t the rest of us?

For the first time I understood what a terrible blow banning LSD from psychoanalysis had been. We’ve seen that therapists at the time had reckoned the drug could cut down the average duration of individual analysis by a magnitude of ten to one. This could have meant that psychoanalysis entered society as a mass healing force. Either such a huge potential breakthrough was going to have to be scrapped—or the professional mystique about analysis was going to have to be brushed aside, and many of us would have to start to learn the basics. With acid we would have a head start. Whatever technical skills there were to this or that school of therapy we could rediscover for ourselves. All you really needed to begin was a good sitter—most obviously a lover or close friend—for surely nothing could match the healing power of someone who genuinely cared for you. And, in broader social terms, wouldn’t this bring back to friendship and to sexual relationships much of the spiritual muscle that has been filched? “Love has to be reinvented,” wrote the French poet Arthur Rimbaud, an observation whose edge time has done nothing to dull. Wouldn’t LSD give friends and lovers a profound psychological adventure to share—at once reempowering intimacy, and bringing some magic back to interpersonal relationships, from which it is so cruelly absent?

Looking back on it today, the answer doesn’t seem to make that much difference. Either way, what 9/11 did was trash the last vestiges of middle-class society. For decades—for most of the twentieth century, in fact—the broad-based economic power of the middle classes had been steadily undermined, and by the end of the century it was a thing of the past. What became horribly clear as the U.S. military/corporate juggernaut rumbled into action was that even the pretense of democracy was gone too. Five hundred years of middle-class society, with its complex system of checks and balances, was over, and all that remained was to rescind civil liberties that had taken hundreds of years to win. Henceforward the West was controlled by a few vast multinational corporations—a government not only unelected but also composed of individuals whose very identity was unknown. All that was clear was their agenda: the introduction of a kind of urbanized neofeudal order, and the creation of a single World State. And almost immediately anticorporate, anti-imperial sentiment hitherto restricted to a politically educated minority began to spread. The pitched battles at Seattle (1999) or Prague (2000) or the still wilder surreal riots at Genoa (July 2001) began to seem more than vehement but localized outbursts against the powers that be. They began to look like the first stirrings of a New Left. And, despite the horror of the carnage in Manhattan, it felt like a breath of fresh air was blowing through the world. The mighty U.S. imperium was no longer the unchallenged colossus straddling the planet. At least the truth, however awful, was out in the open—and it was exhilarating.

Whatever the truth, one of the ideas I kept coming back to was that any future revolutionary movement, however you conceived it, must have some kind of psychotherapy at its heart: some basic analysis of the ego. This struck me as being just as important, if not far more so, than any purely political or economic strategy. What kind of psychotherapy? Obviously my own recent experiences, both of getting in touch with repressed emotions and of seeing how this could be organized clandestinely along the lines Jacob had been exploring, were uppermost in my mind. But when I tried to work out how this could be done on a large but decentralized scale, I was forced to admit that I hadn’t a clue . . . Several months later I was to find myself researching psychedelic history; and, oddly enough, one of the first things I ran across was an example of just what I had been trying to envision. During the mid-1960s a young radical feminist had gone to Tim Leary’s psychedelic center at Millbrook, New York, and taken LSD. On her return she introduced the rest of her sizable and tight-knit group of friends to the drug. Such was their enthusiasm, they started to take it regularly together and to turn on other people they knew. They were cautious and responsible, offering the drug only to friends, or close friends of friends. Books were passed around, and newcomers were welcome to attend group trips solely as observers.

Over the intervening years I had been surprised by the increasing number of people who were coming to feel the same way. Not only had Buddhism made steady inroads into Western culture, but so had the Indian tradition of Advaita Vedanta, of nondual philosophy. Probably Ramana Maharshi had been its most celebrated exponent in the twentieth century, and his teaching, like Gurdjieff’s—or like Zen, for that matter—was simply to locate, from moment to moment, your own most intimate sense of yourself and to examine whether it is truly separate from everything else. The meaning of the Sanskrit word advaita is not just “one,” it is something subtler than that. Literally advaita means “not-two”; and by the end of the twentieth century, a number of different contemporary religious philosophies were beginning to crystallize around the term. What I found particularly striking about this process was the way it was happening outside any kind of previous “religious” context. Perhaps it’s worth remembering that twentieth-century awareness of “sleep” and daydreams wasn’t originally highlighted by a religious teacher at all, nor by a psychologist, nor even by a philosopher. On the contrary, they were first held in the spotlight by a creative artist, by a novelist—by James Joyce in Ulysses.

Exactly what had happened I couldn’t remember. One moment I had been my habitual agnostic self, the next I was a Christian fundamentalist—and the trip saw me seesawing wildly between the two. One moment I was yearning passionately for God, convulsed by emotions that seemed torn from my very depths; the next I was standing there incredulously, appalled by the whole performance. I appeared to be experiencing the emotions of another person entirely. Never before had dual personality been a real phenomenon for me, but now I saw that being haunted, or even possessed, was a frighteningly real psychic possibility. I felt exactly as though I had been hijacked by a seventeenth-century Protestant, by the kind of religious bigot I had always steered well clear of.

Abruptly, almost with a pop, my mind cleared and I came back to myself. I was utterly calm and centered . . . ominously so. I felt I had acceded to a higher type of thought, something still in the process of evolution, and was thinking with a speed and urgency previously only known in moments of great physical danger. Back and forth I paced in the little living room, with tigerish theological intensity. Essentially three factors—God, the world, and the self—confront us. What we have to do is discover the true relation between them. Can the three coincide? The power with which I could concentrate began to alarm me. The acid was climaxing in huge, slow pulses, propelling me irresistibly into greater and greater intensity. Was direct revelation at hand? I remembered the Bible: “It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.” Too late I recognized the symptoms, the sense that everything was decelerating, that objects were becoming heavier and increasingly dense. The pressure in the little room was building up alarmingly. Before I knew it I was overcome by apocalyptic terror once again. The whole was about to manifest in the part, and the universe be torn apart.

To what natural state will we revert? To the detached purely attentive consciousness, which has always registered everything we have ever experienced. To what Indian religion calls the witness—that is, the presence of consciousness itself in each individual. Pure consciousness, consciousness independent of, and prior to, any experience. Search the whole of our past, search the present moment itself, and we will find that this is the only thing we have always been. Always are, rather. The only constant in our experience . . . the sole element that has never changed, and that is in some sense a substance, one out of which everything is made. “I am not a person,” as the old beedi shop owner assured his visitors affably, as he ushered them in. “I was never born.”

WHAT “THE ACID” (as I was coming to think of it) had done was to blow my so-called spiritual trip out of the water. I saw that Advaita philosophy had become just a way of coasting along, vaguely assuring myself that I was consciousness itself from time to time. It had no transformative power over my being. If I was honest, I would have to admit that it was just a bandage over a wound that refused to heal. Spiritually I was in denial . . . and had been for years. Scratch the surface and there was a sense of being little more than a zombie. My life was a blur. Briefly I would wake up, look around in momentary wonder, then without even noticing it, be back on autopilot again. Horribly, I appeared to wake up for only long enough to know I was asleep, and then I was asleep again. Yet, almost perversely, I refused to commit myself heart and soul to trying to do something about it.

For Grof insisted there was no way of stably accessing the transpersonal without living through the full implications of the perinatal—implications that climaxed in a convulsive death/rebirth crisis. And, frankly, I wasn’t sure how much I was up for this. I double-checked by reading another of his early books, LSD Psychotherapy, which is very much the professional, hands-on manual; and, spelled out in greater clinical detail, the final paroxysms of the perinatal make chilling reading. In a section titled “Critical Situations in LSD Sessions,” he wrote: For some it can contain certain physical conditions, such as a high degree of suffocation, agonizing physical pain, blacking out, or violent seizure-like activity. Others have to face a situation which is psychologically utterly unacceptable to them, and surrender to it. The most frequent of these are vomiting, losing control of the bladder or bowels; sexually unacceptable behavior; confusion and disorientation; making various inhuman sounds, and humiliation or loss of prestige. A very difficult and important experience that occurs in the context of the ego death is the expectation of a catastrophe of enormous dimensions. Subjects face agonizing tension increasing to fantastic proportions and develop a conviction that they will explode and the entire world will be destroyed.1

I’ve got to get a handle on this, I thought. I’ve got to find some other, firsthand accounts of ongoing self-experiment with LSD. I can’t be the only person who has done this. There must be others; surely someone has left a written record? Dr. Grof, I thought, I want a second opinion; and I settled down to do some more sustained serious reading than I had done in years.

By the time I had read a couple of books and looked through some underground magazines, I realized that this was far from being the case. Both LSD and MDMA had been eclipsed by the plant hallucinogens, in particular by magic mushrooms and dimethyltryptamine. A large proportion of the books I looked at were focused on ayahuasca and South American shamanism. At first I thought that this could be traced back to Carlos Castaneda. The Teachings of Don Juan, first published in 1968, has, after The Doors of Perception, probably been the most widely read book on psychedelics ever written. But according to recent psychedelic literature, The Teachings of Don Juan wasn’t the pioneer in the field of plant hallucinogens I had imagined. In 1957, more than a decade before Castaneda, there had been a striking, not to say sensational, article in the mass-circulation Life magazine called “Seeking the Magic Mushroom,” and if there was any single text to which the new orientation in psychedelic studies could be traced, this was it. A true-life adventure story, the article recounted the journey of a wealthy New York banker, R. Gordon Wasson, and his wife, Valentina, deep into the mountains of Mexico in an attempt to track down rumors of an ecstatic mushroom cult of great antiquity that still survived there. Finally, led to the remote mountain town of Huautla da Jimenez in the state of Oaxaca, the couple were introduced to a local curandera, a diminutive, middle-aged Mazatec woman called Maria Sabina.

Such speculations were to run through the two-volume Mushrooms, Russia and History, which the Wassons published on their return from Mexico. Their book, or so the story goes, had started life as a cookbook of mushroom recipes. As the couple researched their subject, however, they were struck by the vehemence of the taboo against eating wild mushrooms, the overwhelming majority of which are well known to be harmless, with the few poisonous ones being easily identifiable. This taboo extended over large geographical areas, and as the Wassons began to trace back cultural references to fungi, they found an association with the supernatural to be widespread in folklore. Etymologically, there were repeated links to the infernal. Why such a widespread yet manifestly irrational attitude? The Wassons put forward the hypothesis of a prehistoric religion stretching across most of Europe and northern Eurasia, one in which psychoactive mushrooms had played a sacramental role. The religion was suppressed by Christian missionaries (hence the demonization), but vestiges of it had survived until comparatively recently, most notably in Siberia. As eucharist, the Wassons proposed the most charismatic of all fungi, the Amanita muscaria, or fly agaric, the archetypal red-andwhite-capped mushroom, stock in trade of countless fairy tales. That, however, was only the first part of their hypothesis. Bolder still, the second was the suggestion that hallucinogenic mushrooms could have played a decisive role in human evolution. Eaten by prehistoric hunters and gatherers, magic mushrooms could have opened an entirely new dimension to primitive awareness. They could even, or so the Wassons suggested, have provided the initial impetus toward religion itself. Our divine mushrooms, along with the secondary vegetable hallucinogens, may have played a role in the origins of human culture. . . . Our divine mushrooms must have unlimbered the imagination of those first men who ate them, stirred their curiosity and speculative faculties. Our mushrooms could have sparked in them the very idea of God.2

The next book I set about reading was Mircea Eliade’s Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, which proved to be an inspired choice. Mircea Eliade’s groundbreaking research had been published only a few years before the Wassons’, and in many respects their books dovetailed. Like the Wassons, Eliade believed that the primitive, virtually archaic tribal societies stretching in an arc from Scandinavia to Indonesia all evidenced traces of a vast pre-Christian religion. But whereas the Wassons thought they had discovered the sacraments at the heart of such a religion, Eliade believed he had identified its priesthood. For the spiritual life of all the tribes Eliade studied revolved around a single maverick figure—at once doctor, magician, and poet—for whom Eliade used the Siberian term shaman. Anything further from the Christian priest would be hard to imagine. At best chronic misfits, at worst shamans appeared downright insane. They could be either men or women; in fact, they were often sexually ambivalent and cross-dressed. Shamans were neither hereditary nor elected, but were individuals who assumed the role on their own initiative. Their right to do so came from having survived a mental breakdown or life-threatening illness (frequently epilepsy) during their childhood or adolescence.

Only after this experience of death and resurrection were they apprenticed to an established shaman. The teaching they received was substantially the same over a vast geographical area—that they were not their physical body, but were capable of sidestepping time and space. For this world was not the only one. There were two adjacent worlds: a world beneath us, which was the underworld; and a world above us, which was the heaven realm. What the sorcerer’s apprentice learned from his or her mentor was how to navigate these three worlds: the “archaic techniques of ecstasy,” which compose the central practice of shamanism, and which Eliade refers to as magical flight. The essential schema is always to be seen, even after the numerous influences to which it has been subjected; there are three great cosmic regions, which can be successively traversed because they are linked together by a central axis. This axis, of course, passes through an “opening,” a “hole”; it is through this hole that the gods descend to earth and the dead to the subterranean regions; it is through the same hole that the soul of the shaman in ecstasy can fly up or down in the course of his celestial or infernal journeys.4 This was the point at which Eliade’s and the Wassons’ version of archaic religion diverged sharply. Angrily, Eliade repudiated any suggestion that psychoactive plants could have fueled magical flight—dismissing such substances as “narcotics,” which hardly indicates familiarity with the subject. Vigils, trance-dancing, vision quests, these Eliade could accept—but reliance on psychoactive plants was a sure sign the shaman belonged to an increasingly degenerate tradition.

The dispute was to be resolved from an entirely different quarter: from the fieldwork of the Harvard botanist Richard Evans Schultes. Richard Schultes was the last of the great explorer/botanists of an earlier age. As a graduate student he had researched the peyote cult in the American Southwest. Moving to Mexico, he collected the first specimens of teonanactl, the legendary Aztec psychoactive mushrooms (it was this research of Schultes that had first directed the Wassons to Huautla). Next he identified ololiuqui, another long-lost Aztec psychedelic, one said to have been used for divination, as the seeds of one of the morning glories. These, when he sent them to Albert Hofmann for analysis, turned out to contain lysergic acid, which was the first time LSD had been discovered in a natural form.

In particular, Schultes put the ayahuasca brew in its commanding position on the South American cultural map and started to unpick the complex chemistry involved.

Before Schultes, no one had understood that the decisive ingredient of ayahuasca wasn’t the giant Banisteriopsis caapi vine so much as the various dimethyltryptamine-rich admixture plants that also went into the brew. The visions came, or came largely, from the DMT. What the Banisteriopsis caapi was doing was something subtler. Normally DMT has to be either smoked or injected, because if it is taken orally it is instantly neutralized by a stomach enzyme, monoamine oxidase; but Banisteriopsis contains alkaloids that can temporarily neutralize the monoamine oxidase itself (hence referred to as MAO-inhibitors) and allow the DMT to be digested gradually in the stomach. This results in a much longer and steadier exposure to the world’s most potent hallucinogen than the few timeless, action-packed minutes you get if you smoke it.

Indeed, the far-reaching question Schultes’s fieldwork raises is how the local tribes could possibly have worked it out. Trial and error, in a jungle containing some eighty thousand different species of plant, hardly seems credible. The case of curare, the paralyzing arrow poison (the chemistry of which Schultes also cracked) is even more enigmatic. In The Cosmic Serpent, Jeremy Narby writes: There are forty types of curares in the Amazon, made from seventy plant species. The kind used in modern medicine comes from the Western Amazon. To produce it, it is necessary to combine several plants and boil them for seventy-two hours, while avoiding the fragrant but mortal vapors emitted by the broth. The final product is a paste that is inactive unless injected under the skin. If swallowed it has no effect. It is difficult to see how anybody could have stumbled on this recipe by chance experimentation.5 So how did these “primitive” tribes acquire such botanical and chemical knowledge? The Indians, Narby reports, all say either (a) that the gods told their ancestors how to do it at the dawn of time, or (b) that they were taught by the plants themselves, particularly when the plants were taken in conjunction with ayahuasca, which showcases the properties of any given plant. Such explanations have, needless to say, left most Western scientists speechless with indignation.

Neither Wasson, nor Eliade, nor Schultes—nor, for that matter, Carlos Castaneda, nor Wasson’s disciple Terence McKenna—none of these great trailblazers of shamanism have paid much attention to what is clearly its primary feature. Shamanism is about healing, about curing pain, and (just like LSD) the complex interplay between healing and reconnecting with information we have lost. While there are Westerners who have studied to become ayahuasceros, I couldn’t find any account of their training, nor how they thought their experience could relate to the contemporary West. My earlier decisiveness about acid began to falter. Was I going to continue with trips that were becoming steadily crazier, and with the only person who had ever studied LSD in depth saying that they were about to become considerably more so? Misgivings I had brushed aside started to return. Another of the books I had been reading was Terence McKenna’s wonderfully subversive The Archaic Revival, but his banging on endlessly about DMT and psilocybin being the true model psychedelics had further undermined my confidence. Was I way off beam, following an approach everyone else had long abandoned? Much of my old negativity about LSD resurfaced. I was right about this drug when I was young, I thought. Admittedly it can do things that border on the miraculous, but at best it’s a hit-or-miss affair.

Finally, I washed them down with a wineglass of water and repacked the rest in the foil. I had barely stashed it away when the trip started to come on. I had never known a trip to kick in so fast or with such violence. I could just about ride the first surges, but then a huge wave smashed into me. It bowled me over, and I blacked out. . . . I came to in the bath. The water was up to my chin. An alarm bell, clear but very small and far away, was ringing. Something about drowning. Irritatingly, I couldn’t remember precisely what drowning consisted of. Something about either going up or going down, but I couldn’t recall which . . . nor on further reflection could I work out which direction was up and which was down. In fact, I seemed to have lost all capacity to distinguish one thing from the next. So I did what seemed the most intelligent (if that’s the word we are looking for) thing to do and just froze.

When I came to I was standing beside the bath, with no recollection of how I had managed to get there. Nor did I have any idea what to do next. Drying myself proved impossible because I couldn’t figure out what was me and what was not. Perhaps hell has its own unio mystica. The same applied to my underpants; I could not get into them because I could not work out what was inside and what was out. My underpants and I were, as mystics promise, “not-two,” but by no stretch of the imagination could the experience be described as blissful or illuminating.

The next morning I still felt dislocated and physically in shock. What had happened? I’d had experiences of overload before, brief episodes from trips I couldn’t recollect . . . but never total blackout for hours on end. Were the official warnings I dismissed with such indifference all too accurate, and LSD could well trigger psychotic breaks? For the first time in my tripping career I started to get really scared. Then I remembered that Grof had listed blackouts in the passage from LSD Psychotherapy I quoted a couple of chapters back. I reread that section, “Critical Situations in LSD Sessions,” more closely and found another paragraph that was equally chilling. Ego death involves an experience of the destruction of everything that the subject is, possesses, or is attached to. Its essential characteristics are a sense of total annihilation on all imaginable levels, loss of all systems of relation and reference, and destruction of the objective world. As it is approached in different directions and on different levels, the process requires more and more psychological sacrifice. In the final stages, subjects have to face and confront experiences, situations, and circumstances that are unacceptable or even unimaginable to them. Even after I had calmed down a bit (and, truth to tell, furtively combed the local paper for corpses on the Heath), something had snapped inside me. What the fuck do you think you are doing? I thought. You are risking psychosis, without even so much as a sitter. True, you started off with some very positive experiences. Acid dissolved a state of chronic depression, and those trips about childhood and adolescence changed the way you saw your whole life—but these recent escapades are totally out of order. All that lunacy about Christianity. You are doing exactly what everyone else did with acid in the ’60s—and that’s take far too much. Don’t be a fool. What’s happening now is a clear message to stop.

More generally, what I’d suggest was involved was . . . resistance. Resistance is an analytic concept you don’t hear much about in relation to psychedelic drugs, as though they were so potent that blocking them was out of the question. Such hasn’t been my experience. My first dose of mescaline I managed to stop dead in its tracks, and I wonder whether a lot of recreational acid trips don’t owe their remarkable shallowness to the same subconscious fear of losing control. So what was I resisting? Something personal? Some long-buried trauma? That could be the case, since later I was to unearth a massive physical and emotional wound in early childhood . . . but somehow I don’t think that was what it was. Rather, looking back on it today, I’d suspect there is a qualitative break involved in leaving the aesthetic and psychodynamic realms behind and beginning to penetrate the deeper, transpersonal levels of mind. Perhaps we weren’t meant to do any such thing. Perhaps there’s a Promethean, heaven-storming quality to acid that arouses deep-seated, almost biological levels of resistance. Perhaps all the fear we have been denying suddenly explodes in our faces. I just don’t know. All I can say for sure is that serial tripping may well run into phenomena that will not make sense unless you factor in resistance. Failing to do so—which was what happened to me—led me to try to abandon the whole project.

During the trip when I caught my first glimpse of the sacred, I had been listening to a CD of Hildegard of Bingen. The music must have touched me more deeply than I realized, because when I returned the CD to the library I borrowed two further discs of late medieval/ early Renaissance music. I took them home and listened, though more dutifully than anything else, for they lacked the pristine clarity of St. Hildegard; and, if anything, sounded predictably churchy. However, one evening I’d had a smoke before I started to cook supper, and I put one of the discs, Ockeghem’s fifteenth-century Requiem, on the stereo as background music. I was doing something at the stove when all of a sudden I heard it. It was as though my ears had been unblocked. I took the pan off the gas and walked back into the living room to listen. At first I was just amazed by the intricacy and richness of the counterpoint, the aesthetics of the voices dancing in and out of one another; then as I continued to listen, I became increasingly fascinated by the nature of the emotion the music was expressing. I couldn’t find any adjective to describe it . . . but whatever it was, the lugubrious ecclesiastical quality had vanished. Abstruse liner notes sketched in some background. Historically Ockeghem was considered the first true master of Western polyphony. Early in the Renaissance the old medieval plainsong (where everybody sang in unison, and which I’d always called Gregorian) began to give way to new approaches to sacred music. A small number of voices, generally between four and eight, sang individual parts in counterpoint. Instruments were never used, just voices, a style that became known as a cappella. Despite the Italian, such sacred music had not originated in Italy, but in Northern Europe, in the old Low Countries, most of its first masters being Dutch, French, or Belgian.

It was during this time of abstention from acid that I first saw the drug was having an ongoing effect. Had I not been living such a placid and outwardly uneventful life, I doubt that I would have noticed, but the personal, biographical material, which I believed those last trips had put an end to, was on the contrary continuing to flow. If anything it had quickened. Childhood and boyhood memories continued to surface in the same abrupt manner, but I could understand the story they were telling now. A sort of spontaneous self-analysis was taking place. Piece by piece I put together the truth that I had been an unwanted child, one who had responded by overcompensating wildly. I had set myself impossibly high goals, because (and I’m sure this is all too typical a story) the only way I had been able to cope was by believing I was special. Suddenly it was as though I was learning to read the story of my own life.

All my life I had flaunted being a public school dropout, but now I saw that there was part of me that had wanted to go to university and to have lived a successful academic life. It was as though I had to think all the things about my life I had never allowed myself to think before. What made me so angry was that the overcompensation had meant I could never see myself objectively. Imperceptibly, life had maneuvered me into stupidity. That was what really pissed me off. I had been forced to be a fool.

Somehow the acid had catalyzed a process that continued without further chemical action. Gradually this ongoing life-review began to bring about an increasing sense of dissociation from the self I had so blindly identified with. My life seemed to become ever more objective, something “out there” in the world. Something no longer subjective . . . even, in a sense, no longer “mine” at all. Needless to say, this happened almost imperceptibly, over a period of months; it was just that I first began to notice it at this time.

I think it must have been ten days or a fortnight after Anna’s cremation—it was an afternoon, I remember—when abruptly I understood what had been happening. In a flash I saw that all of it was an ongoing form of the opening to religion, to Christianity in particular, that I had been struggling to deny during my last acid trips. Several times already I had suspected there was more than the call of friendship involved in my desire to help Anna: an unconscious need to be exposed to the reality of death, which I, in common with our whole culture, had spent a lifetime denying. While I had been able to repress religious feeling during those last trips themselves, the acid had outflanked my defenses and started to operate directly on my daily life. A cappella was part and parcel of the same thing. First and foremost, it hadn’t been about music but about getting me to acknowledge the reality of prayer and devotion. Aesthetically I was open in ways that I was not intellectually. Sacred music allowed me to surrender to an inner melting—to an ecstatic thrust into disembodiment—that otherwise I would have continued to deny.

During my reading spree I had run across an essay by Houston Smith titled “Do Drugs Have

Religious Import?” The text was well known and had been one of the most widely reprinted of all papers on psychedelics in the ’60s. Despite being in many ways unusually positive for an academic, Houston Smith had felt bound to draw a line under psychedelics, and his tentative conclusion had become all but axiomatic in psychedelic studies. Drugs appear to be able to induce religious experiences; it is less evident that they can produce religious lives. While I was still tripping I would, however ruefully, have agreed. But since I’d stopped tripping I had observed, as I just mentioned, a process of self-analysis at work, which was continuing without any further doses of the drug. Acid appeared to have kick-started a process that in itself was spontaneous. Trips were not “just a drug” at all. Aldous Huxley’s original image of mescaline bypassing a reducing valve in the brain, however simplistic in terms of brain chemistry, was substantially correct.

No doubt it was reprehensibly primitive thinking, but I was beginning to find it difficult not to see acid as something akin to an intelligent entity, capable of autonomous action. Jung’s concept of “the Self ” was as close to making this intellectually acceptable as I could get . . . though in my present mood I would happily have inserted “Higher” in front of the term, and have done with it. For these insights left me with a glowing sense of melting into a more comprehensive identity. Into something, somewhere, that was looking out for me.

I had ever felt truly meditative on a trip. The acid hadn’t been played out at all. The same sense of boundaries dissolving, which had allowed me to become one with people on the street, was granting this gentler, sweeter sense of empathy with wind and water and trees. I felt I could lie there watching them forever. Why was something normally so difficult now so effortless? All at once my attempt to introvert acid with mask and earphones seemed to be crudely manipulative. I needed to open up, not contract still further. I needed to let go. Was that what my sessions of several months before—trips I had brushed aside—had been trying to tell me? That my approach was far too intellectual and needed to become more heartfelt? More passionate? More prayerful? Patently that had been the message of the first of the group of trips, the one when I had been listening to St. Hildegard. That I needed to let go . . . but I needed to let go into something. I needed to let go into beauty,

into natural beauty. That was my way. I should start tripping on the Heath, I thought, as I finally rose to my feet. I should find a quiet corner of the woods and see what happens if I just sit quietly and don’t try to control things at all.

THE NEXT MORNING I opened my copy of Realms of the Human Unconscious, laughing aloud at myself as I did so. Really, this is getting to be too much, I thought, thumbing through the pages . . . but there it was! Dual unity, Grof calls such moments, and they figure largely among the transpersonal phenomena that compose the final category of psychedelic experience. The subject experiences various degrees of loosening and losing of his ego boundaries and merging with another person into a state of unity and oneness. In spite of feeling totally fused with the interpersonal partner, the individual always retains simultaneously the awareness of his own identity. In LSD sessions, this state of dual unity can be experienced with the therapist, sitter, family members, or other participating persons.1 The concluding chapters of Realms are the truly mind-blowing ones. For Grof, while transpersonal phenomena can appear sporadically in early sessions, they only begin to occur regularly in the measure that the death/rebirth crisis is lived through. What is the “transpersonal”? Perhaps the term boundary loss is more graphic. In The Doors of Perception, Huxley quoted the English philosopher C. D. Broad, and so powerful is the passage I’d like to repeat it here. The function of the brain and nervous system and sense organs is in the main eliminative and not productive. Each person is at each moment capable of remembering all that has ever happened to him and of perceiving everything that is happening everywhere in the universe. Over the top as this is sounds, psychedelic experience does appear to bear out its possibility. Something resembling…

For me personally, my experience of turning in to the passerby on the street initiated a cycle of boundary-loss experiences, marking a qualitative break with everything that had come before. My earlier trips seemed like fumbling with a radio dial and getting bursts of this or that station: but from the time of that first trip on the street, I felt I had tuned in to one station loud and clear. Everything became coherent, and session after session went deeper into the same themes.

I was horrified to see tiny bugs crawling up the flower’s stem. I looked more closely. They were not bugs, but very small droplets of moisture moving by capillary action up the inside of the stem. I realized with shock that I could only be seeing this because I had X-ray vision. Is it possible for the visual cortex to process energy outside the visible spectrum? While I struggled to understand how this could happen, I lost the novel visual ability and the daffodil became just a daffodil once more. But interaction between myself and the flower wasn’t yet over. Some time later, I entered into a most curious empathic relationship with it. There was no visual component; it was strictly an emotional link. Without losing my own (admittedly by now somewhat bruised and fragile) sense of identity, I found my awareness slipping inside that of the daffodil. While still being conscious of sitting in a chair, I could also sense my petals! Then an exquisite sensation cascaded through me, and I knew I was experiencing light falling on those petals. It was virtually orgasmic, the haptic equivalent of an angelic choir. At every moment I felt, repeatedly, as if I were receiving the first ray of sunshine on the first morning in Eden.

During the mid-1950s Christopher Mayhew, former journalist and author (and at the time a member of Parliament), took mescaline under the supervision of Humphry Osmond, the same Osmond who had been responsible for Aldous Huxley’s first trip. The entire session was filmed by a BBC film crew for television. Those were the days.

Again, and even more derisively, the materialist stance would be that this is pure imagination. And again I wouldn’t contest this, so much as to reply that such so-called explanations merely beg the question. What is imagination? Surely that is the question. Why is it so disparaged? One of the most fundamental features of tripping is that the experience is more real than normal reality. “We imagine the truth,” said Osho, summing up the idealist position in a phrase.

During the past few days I had picked up The Secret Chief again, and I had memorized part of the seventeenth-century prayer that had been Jacob’s preferred “set” for psychedelic work. Lord, I know not what I ought to ask of Thee . . . I am silent; I offer myself in sacrifice; I yield myself to Thee; I would have no other desire than to accomplish Thy will. Teach me to pray. Pray Thyself in me. Amen.

By now it must have been more than two hours into the trip, and I was slumped against the beech looking upward into the tree canopy, idly watching the midges darting to and fro in the shafts of sunlight. How much energy they put into something so futile! There’s no real difference between my life and theirs, I thought morosely, watching them with sudden sympathy . . . and, without a moment’s warning, everything turned inside out. For an instant I became one with the midges. I knew the thrill of hurtling through the rays of light, the knack of being able to turn in midair on a dime. Wow, I thought, and sat up, enthralled.

For a moment I saw into the mind of God. Everything was equal—that was the secret. All creation was of a piece. Problems, and this was as clear as a bell, can never be solved, they can only be transcended. All you can do is step back into a larger and more inclusive frame; and in that bigger frame things are perfect just the way they are. It was a flawless

I leaned back against the tree and tried to relax. Let go, I told myself. Let go, and let it take you where it wants . . . the trouble was, I liked the look of where it wanted to take me less and less. There was growing pressure on my chest, and I was finding it hard to breathe. Then I seemed to catch sight of something inside myself that made me freeze with incredulity. I saw that I wanted to die. Deep down, I didn’t want to live at all. No, no, I thought. That can’t be so. That doesn’t make any kind of sense. Then I remembered Freud’s concept of the death instinct, and I wondered whether there could be some truth in that after all. Hadn’t Freud called it “the Nirvana Principle” at first? That would have quite different connotations. Returning to a state neither living nor dead . . . returning to the changeless, the unmanifest. Suddenly death was all around.

During that summer in the glade I read Christopher Bache’s Dark Night, Early Dawn, which had just come out and remains the outstanding attempt to get LSD studies on the road again. For a large part of his self-experimentation Bache had a series of horrendous trips. At the most agonizing point of each one, however, when he felt he could truly bear no more, the trip went through a 180-degree turn, and he found himself swept up by new insight and joy. From this experience he suggests that the dynamics of a fully resolved trip fall into two opposed halves, which are related dialectically. In the first, which he calls the provocative, the subject is flooded, and not infrequently submerged, by unconscious material. In the second, which he calls the integrative, the new material is digested in a more balanced, more highly evolved whole. While the provocative stage can indeed be dire, the integrative almost always tends to be joyous. In this sense the only truly “bad” trip is the one in which the process isn’t fully completed, and material that has not been integrated can linger and cause distress for days or weeks to come. Which perhaps could be seen as corroborating the old hippie street wisdom that a high dose of psychedelics is in fact much “safer” than a low one.

Gradually I was reading more and more religious material, and the most satisfying overview I found was the model proposed by Evelyn Underhill in her Mysticism. In this classic work she breaks down Christian spirituality into five major stages, the first three of which are: Conversion Purgation Illumination These speak for themselves, and applied to psychedelics, the majority of trips fall into the Purgation/Illumination bracket. In practice, the intensity and duration of either stage varies with the individual, but commonly (Underhill clearly mirroring Chris Bache here) Purgation coexists and interrelates closely with Illumination. These three stages form the substance of a sane and spiritually fulfilled life in the world. Ultimately, however, they constitute no more than what Underhill refers to as “the first religious life,” and she proceeds to describe two further stages, which form a “second” and truly mystical religious life. These two more advanced stages are: Dark Night of the Soul (which is something qualitatively more devastating than Purgation) and only after this, at the very end, Unity with God. I found Evelyn Underhill’s simple map to offer a very helpful overview of spiritual experience. To an extent it informs or at least colors much of what follows, and I will come back to it in more detail later.

How come, I asked, you are so disgusted with yourself when you can’t even remember who you are? True, I had long forgotten who I was; let alone why I was so despicable. In a flash I understood that this was no longer my own pain. I had sunk through the bottom of personal suffering and was drowning in an ocean of anonymous, collective pain.*4 At one point I remember thinking: I am personally responsible for the failure of everything Western civilization has aimed at since the Renaissance. Presumably you get sanctioned for thinking considerably less . . . yet, of what would true morality consist if not of making each one of us personally—repeat, personally—feel responsible for everyone and everything else? I believe I was catching a glimpse of the world from a genuinely post-individual, in fact almost post-human, point of view . . .

At which point I decided I would like to go for a walk through the woods. I felt perfectly capable of handling this; in fact I appeared to have come down and be functioning quite normally again. Unbeknownst to me, a new phenomenon had appeared in my sessions: one referred to in the clinical literature as, ominously, “illusory sobering up.” This is when, in the middle of a trip, you suddenly feel you have come right down, and the trip is now over. This, and the point needs stressing, is emphatically not the case.

My only misgiving was that I had lost all sense of time. In itself this wasn’t particularly uncommon. To counter it, I had made a habit of always taking my dose at exactly twelve noon: twelve o’clock I could always remember, and I had only to look at my watch to tell my whereabouts in the drug’s trajectory. The first hour it was still coming on; the second it was going deeper fast; and in the third it climaxed. During this particular trip I even found a note printed in capitals I had written to myself and propped up against the water bottle. “peak during third hour,” it read. Unfortunately I could no longer work out exactly what this meant. Twelve to one, I thought, that’s one hour. One to two, that’s two hours (I was counting this out on my fingers, as ponderously as a Neanderthal); two to three, that’s three. But what I couldn’t work out was whether the note meant that the climax came in the hour leading up to three, or in the hour following it. I squatted under the tree, staring at my three mute fingers.

This is the very worst of the worst, I remember thinking—when, lunging unannounced like the other insane emotional swings of the afternoon, the pain just vanished into thin air. I found myself gazing around the apartment as though it were the very heart of the Mystery. There was no thought. I was both alone and simultaneously an integral part of everything. I was pure wonder . . . but as against any state of meditation I had known in the past, this lacked any sense of fragility or precariousness. This was solid. Substantial. Tentatively I took a few steps around the living room, then, with the glee of a child, jumped up and down on the floor to see if that dislodged it. Nothing shifted a fraction of an inch. Faintly I could sense the fine-material disturbance of what could have become thoughts, but spirit checked them effortlessly, the way your body corrects its balance when you are riding a bike. In such stable absence of mental activity, any Tom, Dick, or Harry could see what the Buddha saw: that the one place, the only place, where there is no confusion or suffering is the immediate present moment. Perceived thus, every instant is potentially sacramental.

When my mind cleared I was sitting quietly, leaning up against the beech trunk, thinking about death. Gurdjieff used to speak of two higher “centers” in us, a higher emotional center and a higher intellectual one; and I know that on several trips I have touched on a qualitatively more highly evolved type of thought, something far more focused, swifter, and more incisive than the sluggish mulling over of things I normally call thinking. So it was now. Far from being a taboo from which my thoughts inevitably skittered away, death had become a subject of compelling interest; and what I was trying to understand was the extent to which we have lost our freedom through our culture-wide denial of death. For once you know, really know, that you are going to die, there is no way you can take this world with the same deadly humorlessness. A crack runs through your identification with your own life. You start to see the forever disappearing, evanescent, insubstantial nature of all objects and events. You start to intuit that the only truly solid thing is the very thing that seemed the least substantial of all: consciousness itself.

I saw that I had not been so wide of the mark in the woods. Ultimately, fear of death is the cement of slave society—that’s at the root of our fear of freedom, and we’ll never get out of this mess until we have integrated both life and death in a higher unity. Because it’s awareness of death alone that can wake us up: death alone that can make us kind and gay.

As I write this, true recall of what I felt, the existential suchness of it, has gone. But like the other no-boundary states that summer, what I do remember perfectly is its overwhelming self-evidence. I was everything. It was as simple as that. Nor was this something I had just become, I always had been everything. What was really difficult to understand was how I could ever have thought I was anything else. There was a roaring in my ears, and I was trembling with the energy pouring through me. Way back in my mind I could hear a voice as distant as it was shrill. Wait! Wait! You are saying you have become God! This is classic psychosis! Effortlessly sweeping that aside, the revelation surged back a second time. There is only me. Whatever I perceive I am. What else could I be? Though, gazing around, I had to admit I had never seen anything remotely resembling these woods. Again the trees seemed to be made of some kind of quartz or mineral, but compared to this, the vision in the glade had been mere prettiness. Magic had been eclipsed by mysticism. The intensity of is-ness these woods radiated was not to be endured. Their beauty was appalling. This was meltdown in God. I thought I was going to black out. Providentially, there was a bench under a small holly tree (or under what had once been a holly tree), and I sank down. The revelation came in waves, and I just had time to catch my breath before it flooded through me a third time. It is all me! I am this wood! I am sitting in myself! But that was the last of the great surges of it . . . and over the next few minutes I could feel the intensity begin to ebb, gradually at first, then faster, and it was gone. Far from falling to my knees in gratitude and awe, which surely would have been the appropriate response, my identification with my mind began to reinsinuate itself immediately. Surely that couldn’t be what it had so self-evidently seemed to be? The Presence of God? The direct proof that religion was true? You’re kidding yourself, I said. You’re off your face on drugs. Fortunately I still had enough wits about me to wonder at my own vehemence: at why I felt so threatened by the thought that God was real and could be known directly. Why was even the possibility of this so . . . so taboo?

I LOOKED UP THE passage, the one I had remembered under the holly, from Suzanne Segal’s Collision with the Infinite: In the midst of a particularly eventful week, I was driving north to meet some friends when I suddenly became aware that I was driving through myself. For years there had been no self at all, yet here on this road, everything was myself, and I was driving through me to arrive where I already was. In essence, I was going nowhere because I was everywhere already. The infinite emptiness I knew myself to be was now apparent as the infinite substance of everything I saw. Collision with the Infinite was one of the most widely acclaimed accounts of awakening to appear at the end of the twentieth century. The “years there had been no self at all” to which Segal refers had been the key experience of her life. Out of the blue (in the middle, in fact, of boarding a bus) she had lost all sense of who she was. All her subsequent life had been spent in a state of ego-free dissociation in which she found, to her surprise, that she could function perfectly well. The passage quoted above was the beginning of her finding a new and far more profound sense of identity.

In any case, how can you take a vision that a saint or contemplative has worked toward for years and say that it is the “same” as one produced by dropping a dose of a drug? In the first place, the revelation, which has crowned years of effort, remains and transfigures your life and understanding, while one of the most unnerving features of acid is the speed with which its impact fades. While personally I am sure that acid can transform your life, it just doesn’t work in the same way. In which case, how to explain the undeniable parallels?

During the ’60s, when the debate as to whether psychedelics afforded an authentic mystical experience was at its height, there had appeared to be only one solution: to find someone who had experienced both states and could affirm or deny their identity. The only person who had managed to pull the scoop off was Ram Dass, when he gave his newly found Indian guru Neem Karoli Baba two hefty doses of LSD. These, or so the popular version of the tale went, had no observable effect on Neem Karoli, who merely made a disparaging comment to the effect that LSD did not produce “true” samadhi. The story was well known at the time, but when I came to read Ram Dass’s own account of what happened, as he records it in The Only Dance There Is, I found something considerably more ambiguous . . . and considerably more interesting. Ram Dass (the name itself came from Neem Karoli) used to be the Richard Alpert who was Tim Leary’s right-hand man during the crusade to legalize LSD of the early and mid-1960s; but by the end of the decade, Alpert had realized that the psychedelic scene was spiraling out of control and went to India looking for a guru. Thus the background to the story is that Alpert/Ram Dass wanted to get away from the drug counterculture and yet was still not very familiar with Hindu philosophy. What happened was that during one of his first visits to Neem Karoli, the guru had casually asked Ram Dass whether he had any LSD. Ram Dass did, and on Neem Karoli’s insistence had given him some 900 micrograms, which indeed had no visible effect. Again, on a subsequent visit, Neem Karoli had asked him if he had any more and promptly downed the remainder of Ram Dass’s stash of 1,500 mikes. This, Ram Dass assured him, would take effect within the hour. At the end of the hour he says, “You got anything stronger?” I said no. “Oh.” And he said these substances were known about in the Kulu Valley, long ago, but all that knowledge is lost now. Then he said, “It’s useful, it’s useful, not the true samadhi, not the true samadhi, but it’s useful.” What he said after this Ram Dass does not quote but paraphrases: He said it will allow you to come in and have the visit—the darshan—of a saint, of a higher being of a higher space—higher consciousness is how you can translate it. But he says you can’t stay there—after a couple of hours you gotta come back. He said, you know, it would be much better to become the saint, rather than to go and have his visit; but having his visit is nice. He said it strengthens your faith in the possibility that such beings exist.2 Neem Karoli’s rudimentary English and Ram Dass’s unfamiliarity with Hindu terminology give a somewhat misleading picture here. Darshan, literally the sight of a holy object or enlightened being, is a highly charged concept for Hinduism, not far from the Western idea of Grace. No way can it be translated as “visit.” What Neem Karoli was saying is that LSD is an authentic opening to spirit, though certainly not…

I found myself—literally, as though I had just woken up—in the middle of Hampstead Village. I was standing in front of Christchurch, and in the forecourt of the church was a nursery school. The children were little more than toddlers, mostly two or three years old. They were all pottering around in their rapt, elated way, falling over and picking themselves up again, when to my amazement I saw that silver light was streaming off them. It was subtle, but perfectly distinct. I moved around to look at them from another angle, and it was still there. The children were all radiating silver light. They weren’t doing anything in particular, just staring at things in wonder and spacing out. They are sane! I said to myself. They are acting the way we are all meant to act! I wanted to climb over the gate, sit down at their feet, and learn the proper way to be . . . but, fortunately, I saw how gross and alarming I must appear. I had to turn my eyes aside from what was effectively a small group of angels I had bumped into and lurch on my way—lost, befuddled, and desperate.

Again I found a luminously clear reflection of what had happened in Nisargadatta Maharaj. Consciousness coming apart from its identification with matter plays a crucial role in I Am That. Speaking of meditation, Nisargadatta says: When the mind is quiet, we come to know ourselves as the pure witness. We withdraw from the experience and its experiencer and stand apart in pure awareness, which is between and beyond the two. The personality, based on self-identification, on imagining oneself to be something: “I am this, I am that,” continues, but only as a part of the objective world. Its identification with the witness snaps. That described it perfectly . . . aside from “snaps” seeming a somewhat understated way of describing being torn in two. To “stand apart in pure awareness” you have to let go of absolutely everything. To all intents and purposes you have to die; and the terror I felt at dying was what kept blocking me.

Seemingly I was involved in a new cycle of trips. They weren’t like any previous ones: first and foremost because each one was the same, something that had never happened before. There was no beauty . . . no terror . . . no madcap humor. All that remained from earlier sessions were the bizarre somatic symptoms I had always dismissed as side effects. Now these took center stage. While my legs had always trembled, never before had they vibrated with such violence. First one would start, then the other, then both together, the heels drumming wildly on the bed: when I raised the blindfold to look, they were literally a blur of action. The hacking cough returned, now so harsh I was frightened I was going to damage my lungs. There were waves of nausea. The eerie taste of blood came and went. All along I had been in denial of this purely physical dimension to acid. Shaking in the legs I had dismissed as some form of bioenergy being discharged; while the coughing I conjectured, in an even more woolly minded manner, could be related to birth: perhaps to choking on the first breaths. This, as I said before, was one of the areas where my do-it-yourself psychoanalysis fell flat on its face. Any professional would have zeroed in on these symptoms, while all I did was try to pretend they weren’t happening.

It’s a long time ago now, but the runaway success of the first warehouse parties in the 1980s had seemed to promise a fresh cultural and political breakthrough. Since those days Ecstasy has been so commercialized that it’s hard to recapture the excitement that greeted its first appearance in Thatcher’s England of the Living Dead. Here at last was a psychedelic that was workable, a psychedelic that could excise the ego with surgical precision, but without the experience ever becoming overwhelming the way it does on acid. A psychedelic that could be used safely by anyone, however inexperienced, for MDMA simply switched off psychological fear—disconnecting it at the socket, so to speak. No longer was there any need to defend oneself, for rapport with others was revealed as the very substance of social life . . . and yet the experience could go very deep. For me at least, it was the first time that the mystics’ assertion the world is made of love—literally so—made self-evident sense.

In his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Gibbon declared famously that Rome was destroyed by Christianity and the barbarians; and Toynbee’s analysis could be seen as an extended commentary on the thesis. For him, as for Gibbon, the untold millions of people enslaved by the dominant civilization break down into two huge groups, into what Toynbee refers to as two distinct “proletariats” (insisting on using Marx’s term and, one imagines, courting his own subsequent academic doom by doing so). First, an internal proletariat, which consists of almost everybody living within the dominant society: frustrated and, if you probe to any depth, basically desperate, with only the thinnest veneer of ideology masking the fact that they have no real control over their lives at all. Not that their existence is not luxury itself compared with that of the second, or external proletariat. This is formed by all those living beyond the increasingly militarized borders of the dominant civilization: those who bear the brunt of the exploitation and brute labor, and live and die lives little better than those of draft animals. Humiliated and treated with open contempt, this external proletariat finally explodes in violence. Fighting as terrorists and guerillas, they exhibit a ferocity and intelligence the mercenary troops of the imperium can never match. The two proletariats come together in a pincer movement, which defines the last days of the disintegrating civilization.

Toynbee’s analyses of the various forms such resistance takes are too complex to do more than touch upon here—initially workers tend to be conservative and merely want to return to an earlier, less dehumanized stage of society; only as such Utopianism proves impossible do they turn to violent insurrection—and only after repeated failures on both fronts do a substantial number begin to see that there is only one way in which they can effectively secede: by what Toynbee, and I think he was one of the first Westerners to use the phrase, calls “being in the world, but not of it.”*8 This process—which he further characterizes as being one of detachment and transfiguration—forms the matrix of a new “higher” or universal religion. Such a religion is predicated on the equality of all beings, spiritual brother- and sisterhood eclipsing the concern for personal salvation, which dominated the same civilization’s earlier and less successful attempts at renewing spiritual awareness. Toynbee points to early Christianity or Mahayana Buddhism as being prime examples of such religions produced by vast civilizations in their agony. This is the only way the parent civilization can redeem and preserve any true values it may still possess; and, in my reading of him, at any rate, Toynbee is inferring that this is the process in which we are all involved today. Obviously what I was wondering at the time was: Could Ecstasy play the role of sacrament in such a process? I don’t think there can be much doubt about the drug’s quality of being a sacrament in search of a religion. Not that the religious issues reflected

The CD played out, so it must have been the best part of an hour—then abruptly several disparate pieces of information jigsawed themselves together. Suddenly I knew that I had been very seriously ill as a young child when I was living at Windle Hey. Perhaps it was bronchitis, though I was sure I could remember Mum telling me I had nearly died of whooping cough during the war. How old would I have been then? Two? Three? Equally, I was certain that the cough which has haunted so many of my trips was the ghost of this illness; and that such physical trauma could be just as devastating, if not more so, as any purely emotional shock. Not only would I have felt that I was choking to death, I would have felt abandoned, interpreting my mother and my Gran’s inability to do anything to help me as wanton if not malign indifference. Furthermore, it seemed perfectly plausible that such pain going on for weeks on end could form a “matrix,” an original template for all my later chronic mistrust of life. I saw exactly why the coughing would have first erupted during a trip when I was trying to focus on the deep feelings underlying my break-up with Asha. The unconscious spotlit the root trauma suffusing all my feelings of abandonment and despair, and which would have to be confronted before any later distress could be drained of its irrational affective content. Not

Yet again I was amazed at the drug’s flexibility. All last summer I had been going deeper and deeper into boundary- and ego-loss states, and when finally I panicked at the depth to which surrender was being demanded, the acid had doubled back on itself to concentrate exclusively on digging out a trauma that appears to have been at the root of much of my difficulty in trusting, letting go, and surrendering to experience. This, so it seemed, had to be unearthed before the deconditioning process could proceed any further.

Belatedly, I saw the full extent of what Grof had meant by “perinatal” experience: not just what I, and I suspect many other people who read his early books, tend to reduce exclusively to the birth trauma, but all the other shocks inflicted upon and recorded by the physical body. I couldn’t honestly say, since what happened to me didn’t free anything resembling verifiable “memories” to consciousness. What did happen, however, was that more typically psychedelic material started to reappear in the later sessions of the series.

The coding of trauma in the physical body is an enormous subject; and the two cents’ worth of personal understanding I have of it comes down to a hunch that the convulsive body tremors are of key importance. At the time of these sessions the only analogy I had was from the work of Wilhelm Reich. Among the most widely used techniques in the bodywork drawn from Reich’s experiments are the “grounding” exercises developed by Reich’s student Alexander Lowen. In these, the trembling brought about by standing still in stress-inducing postures is used to loosen what Reich referred to as “muscular armor,” which he understood to be the chronic rigidity of groups of muscles originating in repression of unacceptable feelings: feelings, which, so far as he was concerned, could far more easily be reexperienced by dissolving the muscular armor than by conventional verbal analysis. Not until this book was virtually complete did I first run into the Taoist discipline of Chi Kung. In Chi Kung such tremors in the body, whether fine or gross, are seen as activation of what Taoists call the dantian or primal energy center and prize as the key to the healing of disease and rejuvenatory power in general. Indeed, thinking back, I recalled that body tremors had been the first symptom of the first acid trip I’d had, and, phenomenologically speaking, had been the most frequently repeated feature of all my sessions. Was this just personal idiosyncrasy—or was it possible that LSD accesses, at least in part, the same energetic powerhouse as is explored by Far Eastern, specifically Taoist, medical traditions? This, once again, is something that can only be checked out when more of us have made comparable experiments and pooled our findings.

And from the kaleidoscope of contributions, a crude but effective analysis not only of the invasion of the Middle East, but of the political situation of England and Europe as a whole was spreading through hundreds of thousands of people: The various European governments couldn’t give a flying fuck what their electorates wanted. The democratic system had long since been meaningless; Europe-wide there was only one political party, had only been one political party for decades, and the various purportedly national media had been in its pocket all along. Nobody but idiots voted. If you wanted to be emotional about it, you could say that the Third Reich had never been defeated; on the contrary, it had been installed universally and was functioning—functioning far better, in fact—as an economic system than it ever had as a political one. So far as a more restrained, and specifically British, analysis went, the most influential book going round the park (certainly the one I saw the most dog-eared copies of) was George Monbiot’s Captive State. It’s a harrowing picture of contemporary Britain that Monbiot’s left-wing best seller paints, of a country eaten up from within by giant capitalist corporations: corporations interlocking more and more tightly as the months went by, eliminating every trace of quality, variety, and intelligence as they did so. Who was behind big business? Not only were the key executives of the transnationals unelected, nobody even knew their identities. Who were the new ruling classes,

Later that year George Monbiot was to bring out The Age of Consent, the sequel to his success with Captive State. In it he tries to trace all economic and political problems back to a single source, lack of communication. Faithfully reflecting the spirit of the gatherings in the park, he suggests that ultimately the only solution is radical reform of the electoral system worldwide and the creation of a truly democratic World Parliament. Could something like an authentic—radically revised—United Nations be created? If so, how could delegates remain accountable? How could such a parliament exert effective power without becoming a tyranny in its turn? How could it retain economic independence? The sense and sincerity with which Monbiot tries to answer these questions are hard to fault, and I couldn’t understand why I was feeling increasingly restless . . . until I came to the following passage: If you respond with horror to the idea of a world parliament, as many do, I would invite you to examine your reaction carefully. Is it because you believe that such a body might become remote and excessively powerful? Or is it really because you can not bear the idea that a resident of Brussels would have no greater voice in world affairs than a resident of Kinshasa? That the people of Mexico would, collectively, become two and a half times as powerful as the people of Spain, while the Indians would cast seventeen times as many votes as the inhabitants of the United Kingdom? That, in other words, the flow of power established when a few nations ruled the world would be reversed? Are you afraid that this parliament might threaten democracy, or are you really afraid that it would actuate it?1

A well-established, even well-heeled cult I had been expecting, but not one thriving like this. The hall was so packed you could barely move. Of all the revolutionary groups of my youth—the hippies, the New Left, the students, the blacks, the feminists—it was, however improbably, the druggies and the druggies alone who had made it through in one piece. And not just survived, but boomed. Culturally, psychedelics had been vindicated. After the death of his wife, Gordon Wasson, putting archaic cultures behind him, had proceeded to write two elegantly subversive studies of the role plant hallucinogens could have played in the evolution of major world religions. In the first, Soma: Divine Mushroom of Immortality (1968), he attempted to identify the enigmatic soma, which had played so prominent a part in the genesis of Hinduism. Again he found Amanita muscaria the most likely candidate: a hypothesis, which, so far as I know, has been accepted by scholars from a number of widely different disciplines. Subsequently, joining forces with Albert Hofmann and classics scholar Carl Ruck in The Road to Eleusis (1978), he examined the equally mysterious kykeon, the sacred potion drunk at the climax of the Eleusinian Mysteries. With initiates including Sophocles, Plato, and Aristotle, the possibility that kykeon was psychoactive (Hofmann was to suggest a further ergot-based hallucinogen, ergonovine maleate, which could be produced by water infusion) would mean that an organic psychedelic could have helped catalyze an experience of transcendence informing the whole philosophy of classical antiquity. Ethnobotany had become a legitimate branch of science. Psychedelics, far from being the handful of high-tech mind-benders they had seemed in the 1960s, had a pedigree stretching back to the dawn of human history. Far from being toxic, with unknown long-term effects, they appeared disconcertingly safe. LSD itself had been tested for more than three generations now—ironically enough, there were few other drugs on the market with so clean a bill of health—and a variety of independent psychologists had suggested that altered states of consciousness were, just as much as dreams, vital to human health and sanity. “Our failure to incorporate hallucinogenic experience into our culture,” wrote Paul Devereux in The Long Trip, “puts us out of step with the entire record of human experience. It is our culture that is eccentric.”

The fastest-selling publication on the bookstall was the fourth edition of Jon Hanna’s Psychedelic Resource List, a compendium of websites, organizations, and mail-order businesses dealing in organic and synthetic drugs. The variety of items for sale was mind-boggling. Live plants, cuttings, seeds, spores, and dried herbs were just the start of it. There were grow lights and hydroponic systems, research chemicals, digital scales, and capsule fillers. Books, bookstores, and publishers abounded, as did magazines and newsletters, films, CDs, and DVDs. There were websites (with Erowid, the giant, sprawling over more than 16,000 pages), free online libraries, and chat rooms. And legal, political, and religious bodies to back things up should they prove necessary.

and from what I have glimpsed through them, I would say that Western technology could be pruned back, and pruned back hard. Most of it strikes me as having gone off at a tangent; it’s not even relevant. Personally, I want an apartment and a job like I want a hole in the head. You can shove your cars and your planes and your creepy nerdy Internet. Come to it, you can shove your precious electricity itself—or three-quarters of it, anyway. For myself I’d stand by the hippie yardstick, that the purpose of technology is to reduce the amount of labor we are forced to do to survive. The working day could be shrunk immediately to four hours a day, the rest of the day being for people to do whatever they see fit.

What’s more, you could (we were getting quite open-handed by now) add an Ecstasy trip to the envelope and suggest that taking it two hours or so before the acid would provide the best possible introductory set and setting for a first acid trip.

Earlier we saw that Advaita Vedanta was putting down roots in the West and beginning to develop into a new nondualistic philosophy. This is the context in which I’d like—very briefly—to prospect a possible psychedelic/spiritual interface, particularly in terms of the two spiritual teachers perhaps most characteristic of the late twentieth century, Osho and Adi Da. Much of The Mystic Experience, Osho’s first and most closely argued book, revolves around demystifying Hindu Tantra. Obviously I can only touch on the subject here, but one of the main themes Osho pursues is the nature of kundalini energy and the meaning of the Tantric chakras. The chakra system, he suggests, is a blueprint of humanity’s possible evolution. The first three chakras (technically muladhar, swadhishtan, and manipur) symbolize the physical body, the emotions, and the intellect, respectively. Evolution-wise, these three chakras, or “bodies” as Osho prefers to call them, are already in existence and functioning, albeit erratically. And, like Gurdjieff before him, Osho argues that the first step in spiritual life lies in their integration: in getting body, heart, and mind to function harmoniously. In the measure that this begins to take place, anahat, the fourth chakra or evolutionary level, starts to become active. And it is with Osho’s descriptions of this “fourth body” that we are concerned here, for they bear very close resemblance to Grof’s descriptions of the transpersonal.

It was late at night, and the young Adi Da wandered through the streets, intoxicated by what he had glimpsed: I saw that we are, at any moment, always and already free. I knew that I was not lacking anything I needed yet to find, nor had I ever been without such a thing. The problem was the seeking itself, which created and enforced contradiction, conflict, and absence within. Then the idea arose that I am always already free.2 [my italics] This is totally at odds with all traditional approaches to religion. Only Zen—Zen with its denial that any practice can ever be of any ultimate help—reflects the same intuition, that there is nothing you can do to find God because God is not an object that was ever separate from you in the first place. God is an understanding, not an experience. God is simply That Which Is. “Truth is always already the case,” as Adi Da tried to sum up his understanding in a phrase . . . Yet the paradox running through The Knee of Listening—as through Osho’s The Mystic Experience—is that the unchanging can only be revealed through change itself. “There’s nothing you can do about it,” as they put it in Zen with customary helpfulness, “but you can’t do nothing either.” Adi Da’s “prior sense of an absolutely unqualified reality” that ends all spiritual seeking can only be discovered by understanding the mechanics of seeking itself. As the old proverb has it, “If you want to find yourself, get lost.”

In summary, I would suggest that, yes, psychedelics and the magic they access could possibly prove a key factor in the birth of a new universal religion. They are coming from an angle outflanking all our materialistic conditioning—and doing so with a speed and to a depth nothing else can command. But this is only half the story. In the mid-1950s Aldous Huxley wrote Heaven and Hell, an attempt to produce a sequel to The Doors of Perception, in which he observed: Visionary perception is not the same as mystical experience. Mystical experience is beyond the realm of opposites. Visionary experience is still within that realm. Heaven entails hell, and “going to heaven” is no more liberation than is the descent into horror.3 In light of such a distinction, I’d say that while psychedelics can produce transpersonal, esoteric, or even—using the word loosely—religious experience, they cannot access genuine mysticism. Not directly. They can take you right to the door, give you a glimpse through, but not propel you any further. Their forte is to decondition: after that you are on your own . . . But that’s just my personal opinion. Awakening is subtle, dialectical, and unexplored.

As the minutes went by, I found that I was losing any personal sense of identity. At first I could remember bits and pieces about my life, but it was getting more and more difficult to join them up into any coherent whole

Turning a corner in the path, Step 4 struck with blinding clarity. I knew exactly what I was. I was everything. There was the same huge influx of energy as the previous summer. The same astonishment that all my life I could have overlooked the utterly obvious. The same roaring vortex. Whatever I beheld, I was. Perhaps I was more observant than before. I remember stopping and listening to the roar in my head, as attentively as though I had a stethoscope and was trying to establish whether the sound could be the circulation of my own blood. What made observation tricky was that, so self-evident was the way things now were, I could not remember how they had ever seemed any different. Everything was equal. The I was out there: it was an integral part of the world, and on the same footing as everything else. There was no inside.

Whenever I had approached such intensity before there’d been a whirring, then cracking sound in my head; this time, however, it wasn’t sound but sight that started to disintegrate. Vision went pointillist. It began to break down into pixels. The world started to go grainy, wobbling somewhat, like a handheld camera. As though I was seeing sight itself. The insight was so shocking I thought I was going to throw up. Was such a thing possible? Could I be seeing the brain from the outside? Was I withdrawing from the body and beginning to see its most intimate processes as mechanisms out there in the world? Literally waking up from my identification with it? Was I disincarnating? Excarnating—was that a word?

The moorhens were gliding toward me across the burning black water. Somehow they were both moving and staying still at one and the same time. There was a flash of pure heaven. I felt absurdly weak; my knees were starting to give way. In his Duino Elegies, the poet Rainer Maria Rilke had written: for Beauty’s nothing but beginning of Terror we’re still just able to bear, and why we adore it so is because it serenely disdains to destroy us Perhaps that’s what happened to me. Like Rilke, I just wasn’t able to bear it any longer, because after that moment of watching the moorhens both still and moving simultaneously, there’s just a blank.

“People may sense internal organs and physiological processes usually kept out of consciousness.” That was exactly what had just happened to me when I felt I was seeing the internal structure of the eye. Then I began to wonder whether the same mechanism couldn’t have been behind my experience earlier in the trip (and behind the identical and equally electrifying insight the previous summer) that “I had become everything.” At the time I had interpreted this, in a distinctly woolly minded way, as meaning that I had become one with everything in some “mystical” nondual sense. Now I began to wonder whether the experience couldn’t be interpreted differently. Bear with me a moment. So far as I understand it, it is a commonplace of scientific thought that “the world” is in fact generated in our brains from data the objective nature of which we are, strictly speaking, almost entirely unaware; and that is then projected by us collectively as a solid three-dimensional world “out there.” Could what happened to me last summer have been that I suddenly glimpsed this processing at work? When I said “I am everything I behold,” the remark had been perfectly accurate, because my brain and the world are inseparably interrelated. “Processes usually kept out of consciousness” were abruptly laid bare. I was creating the trees, the bracken, the path—the holly bush under which I sheltered—just as surely as they were creating me. I was the world, and the world was me. This was objective “scientific” fact, there was nothing mystical about it. But what was it that had seen this? Bowled over by the intensity of the experience, I had entirely overlooked the nature of the experiencer. Had I always been a “witness” or “pure consciousness”—or a soul, or Love itself, if that sits better with you—entirely independent of the physical body, as though all my life I’d had my eye so tightly pressed to the sensory keyhole through which I was peering that I had long forgotten there was a keyhole there at all? Could I step back from the keyhole, back from the lock, from the door . . . and finally realize that I was something else entirely? Were we a qualitatively different entity that did not so much separate from the physical body at death as realize that it had never been one with it in the first place?

Repeatedly over the following days I tried to relive those few apocalyptic seconds. For a timeless moment I had stood apart from everything. From absolutely everything. Then there had been nothing. But it had been so fast, so brutal, so like the proverbial bolt of lightning . . . yet that was exactly what it had been like. A flash, a blinding flash. Now I could see why Tibetan Buddhists called the ultimate vision “the Clear Light of the Void” and why they insisted that seeing it naked inevitably meant recoiling in mortal terror.

Reputedly, these are all that remain of a once-fashionable eighteenth-century mall marking the northern boundary of the village. Beneath the trees, to your right, the ground drops steeply to a small oval meadow. The secret about Judges Walk is that it’s probably the best spot in London to watch the sunset. Coleridge used to walk over from Highgate, and Constable lived just around the corner. Today, however, hardly anyone ever ventures there. Just a few lovers, the occasional tramp sleeping rough, or, when it snows, local kids who use the steep slope to toboggan.

Why, or so it was impressed upon me that evening, we hang on to life so desperately is because we are enjoying it so little; but once we are living life to the full, then the meaning of death changes entirely. Somehow it becomes the consummation of life. Before, whenever I compared joy to sorrow—to sorrow that seems so endlessly sensitive—joy had always appeared relatively flat and one-dimensional. Now I saw that this was because I had always missed the vital connection between beauty and death. But Keats had put his finger on it in Ode to a Nightingale: Now more than ever seems it rich to die, To cease upon the midnight with no pain, While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad In such an ecstasy!

Describing BPM 4, the climactic moment of the baby’s delivery, Grof lists some of the salient features of reliving this matrix. [The subject] is struck by visions of blinding white or golden light and has feelings of enormous decompression and expansion of space. . . . The general atmosphere is that of liberation, redemption, salvation, love, and forgiveness. The individual feels cleansed and purged. . . . The individual tuned in to this experiential realm usually discovers in himself genuinely positive values, such as a sense of justice, appreciation of beauty, feelings of love, self-respect, and respect for others. These values, as well as motivations to pursue them and act in accordance with them, seem to be, on this level, an intrinsic part of the human personality. Basic Perinatal Matrix 4 is the matrix of spiritual rebirth. Its typical themes run through all religious conversions, from Road-to-Damascus-type theophanies to the quietism of many ordinary people’s nature mysticism. As an erstwhile hippie, I had been especially dumb, for that evening should have thrown a flood of light on my own generation’s experience with LSD. The passage continued: Symbolism characteristic of BPM 4 selectively displays situations . . . such as spring landscapes with melting snow or ice . . . luscious meadows and idyllic pastures in springtime . . . trees covered with fresh buds and blossoms.1 What Grof was describing was Flower Power! My first response to this was equally discreditable. I was pissed off that it had taken me some fifty trips to arrive at the point many of my contemporaries had reached on their first excursion. Swanning around in their party gear to the Grateful Dead, and regarding “bad trips” incredulously . . . as from the worldview of BPM 4 you would be bound to do.

Mulling it over afterward, however, I saw that it did allow me to reframe the question of why some people had “good” and others “bad” trips. All along Grof had maintained that the typical order in which the matrices tend to manifest is BPM 2, BPM 3, BPM 4 . . . and only then BPM 1. Surely one could argue that this sequence was based too strictly on his personal clinical experience with severely traumatized individuals, already in many, if not most, cases substantially regressed, and that such would not necessarily be the case with the fresh-faced teenagers we once were? Perhaps in many instances of recreational LSD use, the first trips tended to be BPM 4, and only in later sessions did the drug begin to eat through to the darker realms of BPM 3 and BPM 2? Obviously that’s no more than a suggestion; but understanding why some people have positive experiences straightaway while others have nightmarish ones will remain a key issue if we are going to try to reintroduce psychedelics as a major countercultural force.

Then she would fish bleakly in a bag of sugared almonds that she produced from somewhere on her person, making a big show of offering me one, since she knew I detested them. (Unlike the box of fancy Belgian chocolates she bought on the sly and would hide in ever-changing places in Windle Hey, refusing to share them. This stinginess with the violet creams was the one cloud on our otherwise unconditional love.)

I was leaving Judges Walk by a different route from the way I had come, down a tiny cul-de-sac. If you go that way the first thing you pass is a tall old red-brick wall, over the top of which you can glimpse some trees. At its foot were clumps of nettles, limp and dusty with the heat, and as I walked along beside them, I glanced down. As I did so I froze—then felt as though I had been picked up and hurled bodily back through time. This was just the way it had been by the huge wall on those walks with Gran to Little Crosby! The two walls rushed together. Everything staggered; my mind opened on vast empty space. I gazed around, in silence and slow motion. There was no more time. All these years I thought I had betrayed and lost everything—but now I saw that nothing could have been further from the truth. Nothing had changed. Nothing had been lost. Nothing had been lost at all. More than that. Nothing ever could be lost—because nothing ever happened. All my life nothing had ever really happened to me. Nothing ever did. I felt like a drowning man who finds that all along his feet have been a fraction of an inch from the Rock of Ages. Finally, finally I had become what I always had been. Again there was that shock of recognition, as though something at the very root of memory had been jarred. Indeed, as thought began to return, that was the first thing I asked myself.

Earlier we looked briefly at the career of the American teacher Ram Dass. Here was someone who had been deeply involved with psychedelics who, while continuing to acknowledge the importance of the role they had played in his life, returned to more traditional forms of religion . . . and insisted there was a clear cutoff point, beyond which psychedelics were no longer beneficial. After some three hundred trips, Ram Dass said the drug stopped doing anything much: “I found that if I kept taking LSD every month, I’d plateau, I’d get the same experience over and over again, and I’d get bored with it all.” His conclusion was that psychedelics could decondition, heal, and initiate, but that was the extent of their power. “They are a catalyst, a door opener,” he said. “I will still do it, all things being equal, but I don’t feel like I’m learning something that new anymore.”1 Accordingly, Ram Dass adopted a more traditional approach to spiritual life: first devotion to a guru, to Neem Karoli Baba; then, after Neem Karoli’s death, to various awareness-training practices in the Buddhist vipassana and dzogchen traditions.

To the best of my knowledge, he never defined more precisely what he meant by “catalyst” or “door opener,” nor mentioned whether he had explored the possibility of using psychedelics and awareness practice in tandem. More significantly, he overlooked another teacher who, in mid-twentieth-century India, at any rate, was unmistakably towering head and shoulders above the rest—Ramana Maharshi.

Who are you? Ramana asked. Just that. Who are you? Find the quick of your sense of identity, of your most intimate sense of you-ness, and see what you consist of for yourself. “You are awareness,” he said. Awareness is another name for you. Since you are awareness there is no need to attain or cultivate it. All that you have to do is to give up being aware of other things: that is of the not-Self. If one gives up being aware of them then pure awareness alone remains, and that is the Self. That was it. That was Ramana’s entire practice—if practice it could be called. To be wary, not just of the glamour of the esoteric, but of the glamour of religion, period. For what we are looking for is right under our noses.

Several times already I’ve referred to Evelyn Underhill’s analysis of individual religious evolution, but largely only in relation to the stages of Conversion, Purgation, and Illumination. But these constitute only the introductory steps to a full spiritual life (which Underhill calls “the first religious life”) and are followed in fully mature cases by two further dimensions of a much more profound and dramatic nature: The Dark Night of the Soul and Unity with God. “The Dark Night of the Soul” was the term coined by St. John of the Cross to describe the spiritual devastation recorded by many of the world’s mystics immediately before their final awakening. Without warning a great, apparently integrated contemplative is split in two by the insight that all their spiritual “attainments” are without the slightest value. They are vanity, pure vanity. If anything, they are spiritually pernicious. From feeling they were on the verge of finally dissolving into God, such a person becomes tortured by feelings of the most intense worthlessness.

The bitterness and sense of betrayal (the recourse to smack or fundamentalist Buddhism) are totally in accord with Underhill’s descriptions of the Dark Night. For only true self-obliteration—the old medieval self-naughting—can leave us totally, unconditionally open for the final stage of religious life, total surrender to the will of God. Is there any other way we can learn that, in the end, there is only Grace?

Shortly after that momentous May morning in the Los Angeles hills, Aldous Huxley’s wife, Maria, had died of cancer. Huxley nursed her devotedly through her last days, but during the months following her death he found himself increasingly attracted to a younger woman, Laura Archera. During this period Huxley had a second mescaline trip in the company of two friends, though this appears to have fallen far short of the intensity of the first one; and for his third experiment he asked Laura to sit for him. Nominally this was because Laura was a psychotherapist, and Huxley, who could remember next to nothing of his early childhood, wanted her to help him probe for these lost years. Predictably enough, no such thing took place. A few days after the session, Huxley wrote to Humphry Osmond, the doctor who had supervised his first mescaline trip and subsequently become a close friend, as to the distance separating that first session from what had just happened. Instead there was something of incomparably greater importance; for what came through the closed door was the realization—not the knowledge, for this wasn’t verbal or abstract—but the direct, total awareness, from the inside, so to say, of Love as the primary and fundamental cosmic fact. The words, of course, have a kind of indecency and must necessarily ring false, seem like twaddle. But the fact remains. I was this fact; or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that this fact occupied the place where I had been.

Did Eleusis birth the basic concepts of Western and Near Eastern metaphysics—the “Forms,” the “Ideas,” the “Archetypes”? The concept of another world, prior to, more pristine than this, from which we journey forth and to which we return in a richer, more highly evolved form? That was as high as I was to get anyway. During one of those last trips at Judges Walk, I remember gazing spellbound at a single blade of grass. “The first and last blade of grass,” I wrote, “the original stroke of genius.” That stalk of grass held a different cosmic status to anything I had ever known. Literally, it was The Idea of a blade of grass: I could no longer distinguish the thought of it from its full-blown material reality. It participated equally in two dimensions of reality, like a revolving door. Furthermore, discovering the archetypal world was inseparable from discovering what holds us apart from it. In Plato’s cosmogony, this role is played by what he named anamnesis: his theory was that we have always been aware of, have always been at home in this prior world . . . but have merely forgotten. Here again there would seem to be an explicit tie-up with the conscious reliving of birth at the heart of the psychedelic experience. Surely, by and large, birth is the worst pain we as individuals undergo—and as such could present a plausible etiology for our universal state of posttraumatic amnesia.

The ’60s and ’70s high tide of firsthand reports is a thing of the past. Today the only popular compilation in print is Charles Hayes’ Tripping: An Anthology of True-Life Psychedelic Adventures (2000). Despite patchiness, the fifty accounts make gripping reading. While I was finishing this manuscript, Grof himself brought out a new book, When the Impossible Happens (2006), which contains a large and varied number of cases of trans-personal experience from his own files.