Tags / 116 quotes from 2 sources
#psychedelics
Beyond Zero and One (Andrew Smart)
Inceptionism: neural networks dreaming psychedelic images
But why does the human brain react to LSD the way it does? And, if a machine were to achieve human-like consciousness, would it also react to “digital” LSD and enter an altered state of machine consciousness? Recently, Google’s artificial neural networks for image recognition…
Our brains hallucinate all the time
powers of intelligence. One thing discussions on superintelligence are missing that is fundamental to human brains is hallucination. Human brains hallucinate frequently in many different circumstances, because of certain diseases and on certain types of drugs such as LSD…
Everyday experience as hallucination
this is where LSD enters the picture. It turns out that human consciousness is likely itself a form of hallucination. As I have said, it is a very useful hallucination, but a hallucination nonetheless. LSD and psychedelics may help reveal our normal everyday experience for the…
Recalling an LSD trip fifteen years later
I began to wonder if I would ever return to reality, but the voice in the back of my head reminded me again, “LSD is a drug… it will wear off.” The incredible thing about these experiences is that even now, fifteen years later, I can still recall them vividly as if they had…
Does LSD sharpen perception?
Does LSD actually enhance the accuracy of our perceptions? Do we see, think, or hear better on LSD? The question has not been scientifically investigated. In an email exchange, the philosopher Riccardo Manzotti wrote me, “I do not believe that because of drugs one is more…
Seeing TV for what it really was
Someone turned on the TV. The colors were brilliant, images seemingly jumped off the screen, and there was a fuzzy 3-D quality to the newscaster. I instantly felt I could grasp all her psychological problems, those which led her to being on TV playing the role of newscaster. I…
Distrusting reality after frequent trips
Robert and Kristian were using LSD so often during this time that they said they had a hard time trusting the non-LSD reality they experienced even when they were not on the drug. After only one trip, over the following days I too would sometimes wonder if the thoughts and…
Hallucinogens as a shared ritual
Eventually, I fell asleep. When I woke up, I thought about the fact that I was now a person who had taken LSD. I was no longer a pharmacological virgin. Taking hallucinogens is a public ritual among some South American indigenous groups, and these societies provide much social…
No cultural frame for psychedelic experience
cultural references for these experiences, except for the counter-cultural movements of the 1960s, but this cultural framework is limited to our distorted memory and history of that time. All these thoughts were floating around in my head when I looked over at a calendar near…
Ketanserin ends an LSD trip
Ketanserin is a powerful serotonin antagonist, which means it blocks the activity of your serotonin receptors—effectively ending your LSD trip. Ketanserin is used in clinical studies of LSD as an emergency countermeasure in case someone
Talking people down in LSD studies
really needs to come off the drug. However, users can usually be talked out of whatever anxiety they are feeling in these studies.
Random association as AI's missing ingredient
What is the connection of LSD with machine consciousness? The kind of seemingly random association coming from humans on acid may be one of the key missing ingredients that AI has yet to master. Our brains make weird associations constantly. Some people, like the late great…
The structures for hallucination are in all of us
The structures for hallucination are in all of us. For instance, even those who may have barely used their eyes may experience visual hallucinations on LSD. A 1963 study reported:
Blind subjects hallucinate on LSD
It is evident that a normal retina is not needed for the occurrence of LSD-induced visual experiences. These visual experiences do not seem to differ from the hallucinations reported by normal subjects after LSD. Such phenomena occurred only in blind subjects who reported prior…
Huxley's reducing valve
Human perception and consciousness often hide the true complexity of the world. Aldous Huxley, after his experiences with mescaline and LSD, saw the brain like a “reducing valve” that is actually protecting us from the vast amount of information that might otherwise flood and…
Psychedelics and the useful-hallucination theory
In the same spirit as “disorders of consciousness research,” scientists are also beginning to study the neurobiology of psychedelic drugs by using these modern brain-imaging technologies. Which theory about consciousness best supports the conception that consciousness is a form…
Dissolving the divide between subjective and objective
But the divide between subjective and objective could also turn out to be an illusion of our own creation. This division goes to the core of our scientific worldview. If some form of physicalism is true, then the division between the inner subjective worlds will have to…
LSD and ego dissolution
These drugs reliably induce states of altered consciousness, much like dreams or religious ecstasy. Daniel X. Freedman, a pioneer of psychedelic research on LSD, wrote that LSD enables “portentousness” of the mind, so that it can perceive more than it can tell, experience more…
LSD and the Summer of Love
The decade’s radical movements that were influenced by LSD helped with the expansion of women’s and minority rights, with the most effective anti-war movement in American history, and with new genres of literature and music. The cultural, psychedelic, and geographical locus was…
LSD and rejecting traditional mores
LSD influenced users to embrace the new counter-culture and reject traditional mores, jobs, and relationships.
Hofmann's lament over recreational LSD
Albert Hofmann lamented the use of LSD as an inebriating drug rather than a therapeutic
LSD deserves indigenous reverence
treatment or spiritual tool, which made serious research on the drug impossible. He called the recreational use of LSD “careless and irresponsible” and felt it to be a tragic misunderstanding of the nature and meaning of these kinds of substances. He believed that we should…
Hofmann on the West's spiritual crisis
Hofmann strongly believed that there was a spiritual crisis in Western civilization, and argued that society must shift from “the materialistic, dualistic belief that people and their environment are separate, toward a new consciousness of an all-encompassing reality, which…
LSD reveals consciousness as part of the universe
Hofmann thought LSD could do is allow us to become aware of the ontologically objective existence of consciousness as part of the universe.
The feeling of being separate from the world
This is in contrast to how we normally perceive the world; which is that the world exists outside of us and that we are separate from it.
Reality became a problem after LSD
Hofmann says: “Reality became for me a problem after my experience with LSD. Before, I had believed there was only one reality, the reality of everyday life. Just one true reality and the rest was imagination and was not real. But under the influence of LSD, I entered into…
Can LSD glimpse the view from nowhere?
There is no doubt that we each have private, uniquely subjective experiences that exist only in our heads. Furthermore, we can only perceive the world from our first-person perspectives, as separate from the world. This may follow from the fact that consciousness and its…
Bicycle Day and the origin of the trip
Soon after he ingested the drug, his entire world began to transform—the colors, the forms—and he felt his ego begin to dissolve. Hofmann grew afraid he had taken too much, and asked his assistant to help him home by bicycle. While trying to bike home, Hofmann pedaled and…
Leary and the polarization over LSD
The late 1960s made the drug controversial because of the hippie movement and its mass unsupervised drug experimentation. The public controversy, and Leary’s popularity in the media, contributed to a polarized view about the drug. People like Leary, who felt it was his historic…
Sandoz stops sponsoring LSD research
The controversial status of the drug led Sandoz to stop sponsoring clinical trials in 1966. Researchers found it more and more difficult to obtain grants to study LSD. Supplies of the drug for research also became scarce and prohibitively expensive.
LSD is less harmful than alcohol
The law did not ban the use of LSD in research, but now researchers would be required to receive approval from the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, which would later become the DEA. Following suit, the UN classified several mind-altering drugs as Schedule I in 1971…
Psychedelics as tools to study consciousness
Despite revolutionary advancements in brain imaging over the last twenty years, there exist few studies on LSD and hallucinogens using modern neuroscience techniques. Researchers are now able to measure various aspects of the neural mechanisms of LSD action using objective…
The Acid Diaries (Christopher Gray)
We need the diaries of explorers
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…
LSD as a breakthrough for psychotherapy
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…
Psycholytic versus psychedelic therapy
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…
Janiger studies LSD in healthy people
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.
Mind at Large and the reducing valve
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…
The best history of the sixties counterculture
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…
Politics as psychopolitics
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…
Four levels of the psychedelic experience
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…
Never really trusting LSD
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…
Rereading Grof on the unconscious
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…
Living in the light of death
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;
Blindfold, earphones and the psychedelic language
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…
Serial sessions unfold deeper layers
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…
Ego loss in the bath
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…
LSD and the right hemisphere
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…
The apartment looked wrong
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…
LSD's power to terrify
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…
Huxley's chair like the Last Judgment
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…
Grof's Basic Perinatal Matrices
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…
Uncovering a buried sense of worthlessness
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…
Nothing lived up to the promise of childhood
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…
Resistance to feeling on acid
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…
The Secret Chief's clandestine network
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…
Love has to be reinvented
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…
Revolution needs psychotherapy at its heart
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…
Hijacked by a seventeenth-century Protestant
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…
God, the world and the self
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…
Looking for a second opinion on self-experiment
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…
Seeking the magic mushroom
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…
Mushrooms and the origins of religion
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…
Shamanic flight between three worlds
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…
Schultes finds natural LSD in morning glories
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…
Schultes puts ayahuasca on the map
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.
How ayahuasca makes DMT work
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…
Shamanism is about healing
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…
Blacking out in the bath
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…
Not-two with my underpants
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…
Ego death and the risk of psychosis
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…
Resistance on psychedelics
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…
Learning to read the story of my own life
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…
Life review and dissociation from the self
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…
Acid outflanking my defenses against religion
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…
Houston Smith's essay on drugs and religion
During my reading spree I had run across an essay by Houston Smith titled “Do Drugs Have
Religious experiences versus religious lives
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…
Acid as an intelligent entity
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…
Letting go into beauty
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…
Tripping quietly in the woods
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.
Grof's dual unity
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…
Tuning in to one station loud and clear
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…
Becoming the daffodil
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…
A mescaline trip filmed by the BBC
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…
We imagine the truth
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…
A seventeenth-century prayer as set for a trip
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…
Becoming one with the midges
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…
Problems can only be transcended
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…
The death instinct and the Nirvana Principle
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…
Provocative and integrative halves of a trip
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…
Underhill's five stages of mysticism
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…
Drowning in collective pain
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…
Illusory sobering up
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…
Peak during third hour
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…
The present moment as the only place without suffering
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…
Meltdown in God
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…
Can a drug vision equal a saint's?
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…
Neem Karoli Baba takes LSD
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…
Toddlers radiating silver light
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…
Somatic symptoms take center stage
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…
Acid doubles back to dig out trauma
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…
Psychedelics culturally vindicated
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…
The Psychedelic Resource List
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…
Ecstasy before a first acid trip
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.
Osho's fourth body
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…
Visionary versus mystical experience
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…
Losing all personal identity
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
I was everything
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…
Seeing sight itself
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…
Beauty is the beginning of terror
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…
The Clear Light of the Void
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 . …
BPM 4 was Flower Power
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…
Why some trips are good and others bad
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…
Psychedelics as door openers
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…
Love as the primary cosmic fact
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…
Eleusis and Plato's Forms
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?…
Where to find first-hand trip reports
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…