Allene Symons's Blog, page 2

Riding and Writing the Toad

Well, I’m taking the liberty to twist the title of Michael Pollan’s December 30 essay in the NY Times Book Review called “Smoking the Toad,” about the challenge of putting a drug trip into words. His latest book Changing Your Mind ranked as one of the top nonfiction books in 2018, and I’m glad to be what might be call a distant literary relative because of my own 2015 title, Aldous Huxley’s Hands, on a similar topic. Bravo, Michael, and I hope you stay in the limelight because some of your reflected glory spills over onto me. It also got me thinking about my own early attempts to write down impressions when under the influence of LSD in 1965, and turns out I still have those sheets of nearly illegible scrawl. Not bad curlicues, though. Maybe I’ll post the artifact someday, though at the risk of publicly looking as foolish as Pollan admits privately happened to him.

Tripping Toward the Mainstream

Psychedelics are having more than a Moment. Michael Pollan’s
new book – about how science is harnessing the power of a trip – hit No. 1 on
the New York Times bestseller list this weekend, a flashing sign that the
altered-state substance psilocybin (found in psychoactive mushrooms) is going
Mainstream.

The turning point is a pending Stage III clinical trial of
psilocybin-assisted therapy for anxiety in terminal cancer patients. Yes,
that’s a mouthful of a story, but not when told by a master of weaving facts
and experience together like Michael Pollan. He achieves this heady blend in How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches
Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence.

 Pollan blends history, current research, and immersive
journalism in his own vivid trip reports – the interactive how-to heart of the
book. One incident involves taking mushrooms on his own, another time he ingests
LSD, then on a separate occasion he downs bits of a psychoactive Sonoran
Dessert Toad, and finally in a group gathering he is introduced to the
Amazonian plant brew ayahuasca.

True to the sweep of the topic, he credits trailblazers like
LSD discoverer Albert Hofmann, renegade researcher Timothy Leary, and Doors of Perception author Aldous Huxley,
the literary godfather of psychedelics and the subject of my own recent book, Aldous Huxley’s Hands: His Quest for
Perception and the Origin and Return of Psychedelic Science.

Those three and others like Stan Grof were active prior to
the 1970s ban. Bridging to the present, Pollan interviews key figures in the
science of psychedelics (which some prefer to call entheogens or hallucinogens),
including Stephen Ross of NYU, Roland Griffiths of Johns Hopkins, Charles Grob
of Harbor-UCLA, Robin Carhart-Harris of Imperial College, London, and others.
Pollan’s is not the first book to pull all this together but clearly the most accessible
and timely.

One big takeaway is his lucid account of how psychedelic-assisted
therapy works: In a clinical setting, after taking a dose of psilocybin, the
subject experiences a radical disruption of habitual thinking, the latter known
as the default mode network (DMN), and this disruption allows a change of mind.
Patients often report undergoing a spiritual experience. Multiple studies are showing
how a marked percentage of patients break through mental constraints of
depression or obsession or alcoholism. On the other hand, legalization of wellness
applications such as for enhancing creativity remains on the far horizon, while
recreational use thrives underground.

Which brings me back to the immersive part of the book. Except
for his first mild solo trip, Pollan is shepherded by underground guides of
good repute. This is another important takeaway. I’d compare it to any risk
sport (here, risky not in terms of addiction but behavior) because, especially
if you are a novice, it’s important to trek with an experienced guide.

Speaking personally, I am a veteran of the first-wave of
psychedelic users, having taken LSD several times in the early ‘60s during
college in San Francisco. Usually I tripped with a friend who was an
experienced guide, but one time I took a dubious dose alone with an almost
disastrous result when I ended behind the wheel of a car. Luckily, I went on to
indulge in other acid trips without incident.

Reading How to Change
Your Mind, I found Pollan (who has written several bestsellers about food
and the botanical world) most excellent company. I came away with new insights about
a field I covered in my own book published three years ago, Aldous Huxley’s Hands. Above all, I was
struck by how, in the hands of an author like Pollan, the subject of
psychedelics is roaring into the mainstream.

Hofmann’s LSD Bike Ride

This
month marks the 75th anniversary of Albert Hoffman’s landmark bike ride –his
self-experiment on a ride home from the Sandoz lab after ingesting lysergic
acid diethylamide, aka LSD.

 Rarely
mentioned in this 1943 birth story of LSD (it was synthesized for another
purpose in 1938) is the fact that after taking it on April 19, 1943 Albert Hofmann
asked a lab assistant to follow him home on another bike, just in case.

 Which
brings me to the image of  someone keeping an eye on you, covering your back.

 But
before I riff on this metaphor, I’d like to offer a capsule cultural
history. LSD migrated from an initial psychiatric application and turned massively
mainstream in the mid-1960s. This viral effect coincided with the huge youth
wave of baby boomers and merged with widespread resistance to the war in
Vietnam. In reaction to all this, LSD became illegal when it was designated as
a Schedule I drug (meaning of no medical beneft, with a high risk of potential
harm, thus illegal even for institutional research). Eventually other drugs
would be added to the Schedule I list including psilocybin, the potent
substance in psychoactive mushrooms.

 Ever
since the infamous Schedule I came into effect, this decades-old crackdown on
LSD etc. has been summed up as the War on Drugs.

But
during the past decade-plus, this war has seen pockets of negotiated peace, allowing
medical schools to resume research suspended
decades ago. Such experimentation mainly involves psilocybin and MDMA (avoiding
LSD’s bad rep as a once-socially out-of-control substance).

The
results, so far, have been positive in two approved areas of psychedelic or
hallucinogen research. One is medical (such as assisted therapy for depression and
PTSD, and reducing anxiety in late stage cancer patients), and another  is related to study of religious or spiritual
experience. A third is going on illegally but with a wink-wink, apparently because it is
deemed too small to crack down on and that is “microdosing,” such as with LSD
or with an older psychedelic made famous by Aldous Huxley called mescaline.
Microdosing, reportedly popular in Silicon Valley, relates to the third reason
psychedelics are reportedly beneficial: for fostering moments
of break-through creativity.

 Here
is where the psychedelic uphill bike ride gets steeper, and it is not likely to level out
any time soon.

 Yes,
the popular view is growing (along with acceptance of cannabis) that the war on
psychedelic drugs should end, meaning reduce or eliminate penalties. There are two camps, both generally agreeing that
such drugs, with or without limits, should be available for various uses.

One camp makes the libertarian argument of pure cognitive freedom—the right of
any adult to use a substance whether or not it will benefit or harm their own mind or
body.

 The
other camp argues that, yes, psychedelics should be available but under
professional or at least certified/tech supervision or guides, or at least
regulated in some way, to reduce the chance of harmful outcomes to oneself and
others.

 I
fall into the second camp. And it reminds me of Albert Hofmann’s bike ride in
April of 1943, when his lab assistant, just to be safe, followed him home.

I’ll Have Mushrooms with That

  Cannabis led the way. Mushrooms
could be next. Colorado is again in the vanguard, this time pushing for a local
ballot measure in Denver to “free the fungi” – meaning, of course, psychedelic
‘shrooms. The advocates are making a cognitive freedom argument (one’s right to
self-experiment if not harming others).

   Apart from legalities (like
finding yourself with a felony conviction for possession), mushrooms can be
grown at home or produced commercially, eaten fresh (“wet”) or dried for
storage, with the latter bringing down harsher penalties because dried ‘shrooms
are less like produce and more like product. The Colorado movement aims to
start by downsizing possession from a felony to a misdemeanor.

  Moving from basement or backyard
to lab, the psychoactive ingredient in ‘shrooms is psilocybin. Illegal for any
use for decades, this changed in the past 20 years because psilocybin has
become acceptable in university medical research. Studies are looking at
applications for afflictions ranging from depression and addiction to anxiety
in the last stage of cancer.

  Psilocybin is found in many
species of mushrooms, though not all mushrooms have psychedelic properties –
just as not all are edible, and many are lethal. Some are deadly plus
psychedelic, in which case dosage becomes a matter of tripping in life vs.
tripping off to eternity.

 The usual ‘shrooms are brownish
and skinny. A variant is the perky looking red and white-dotted fly agaric
(amanita muscaria), shown here Mary Blair’s 1951 preliminary design for Disney’s
Alice in Wonderland. (The original “Caterpillar Sitting on a Mushroom,” in
gouache on board, is in the Hilbert Collection, and it recently caught my eye when
it was on display at the Hilbert Museum. )

Well, back to the magic in
magic mushrooms. Psilocybin has a research history dating to the middle of the
last century, around the time of Aldous Huxley’s breakthrough book, The Doors
of Perception.

  Huxley famously experimented
with mescaline, LSD, Morning Glory seeds, etc., and later on with psilocybin.
The first three were home-style experiments, but was introduced to psilocybin
in the early 1960s when he briefly participated in a study conducted by
then-Harvard professor Timothy Leary.

    As far as the experience
itself, those who have experimented with psychedelic mushrooms often report a
spiritual sense of wonder, a realization of oneness with the universe. Huxley’s
experiments were a quest to induce a mystical experience, which he describes this
way:

    “In the final stage of egolessness there is an “obscure
knowledge” that All is in all—that All is actually each. This is as near, I
take it, as a finite mind can ever come to “perceiving everything that is
happening everywhere in the universe.”   –Aldous Huxley, The Doors
of Perception

  That was Aldous writing in 1953
(the book was published in 1954). Many books have been written about both
Huxley and psychedelics since then, including my own book, Aldous Huxley’s
Hands: His Quest for Perception and the Origin and Return of Psychedelic
Science.

   Now, two new books on
psychedelics are forthcoming in May. One is Trip: Psychedelics, Alienation, and
Change by Tao Lin. The other is Michael Pollan’s How to Change Your Mind: What
the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying,
Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence. I hope to take a look at these two and
write about them in a future blog.

   Meanwhile, here is an afterthought.
When a plant with psychoactive properties grows naturally, whether a weed or a
fungus springing from the soil, isn’t fungus already free? Can nature truly be
contained?

Huxley and Tech come to Esalen

  Picture it: the golden glow of late afternoon, and you, immersed
in a hot tub on a cliff overlooking the Pacific….

 Now cut to 1962. That’s when Aldous Huxley was among the
first visitors at a then-new retreat center called Esalen. Within months, this
hippie hotel in Big Sur became the capital of the human potential movement and
a center for spiritual techniques of all stripes.

  Enter
the new and unlikely occupants of Esalen: the denizens of Silicon Valley. Workshops for the first “cohort,” as described on the new website, will take place next
month, in March of 2018. More
about how this came about in a minute.

  Since 1962, seekers and tourists have been drawn to this 27-acre
site overlooking the Pacific, located a three-hour drive south of San Francisco.
They have come to practice meditation and yoga and bathe in its natural hot
springs, ideally at sunset. And let’s not forget Esalen’s history as a magnet
for experimentation with psychedelic drugs.

  Such techniques were dear to Huxley in his life and work, as
seen in three of his many books: The Perennial Philosophy, his expansive survey
of world mysticism; The Doors of Perception, his personal interpretation of
mescaline and LSD, and Island, his utopian final novel.

  About the time Esalen opened its doors Huxley had finished
writing Island, in which he shows how the human potential movement might play
out on an isolated Pacific Island society he calls Pala. By the end, though, Pala
is taken over by a neighboring country eager to exploit it.

  Cultures thereby come and go. The locale of Esalen has a
history dating back about six thousand years, and before hippies arrived, before
software engineers arrived, it was the site of a spring sacred to a Native
American people called the Esselen.

  Now back
to the new overlords of Esalen. After
a hiatus, the institute resumed operation
in fall of  2017 with a new
director and a new agenda, primarily as a retreat for workers in the I.T.
field. Apparently they, and their big tech employers, see a need for life-code balance.
Goodbye funky, hello optimization. Goodbye spiritual techniques, hello spiritual technology. Enter tech-plus-yoga,
along with plenty of Tesla chargers.

  How did
this change come about? Well, nature brought about an economic disruption and that
ushered in change. It happened when spring storms in 2017 triggered landslides
and wrecked the two-lane Highway 1 south of Carmel. Esalen was shuttered for
many months. This wiped out the revenue from paying guests, making it
vulnerable to a take-over.

  Looking
back on Huxley’s life, as I did in my recent book Aldous Huxley’s Hands, I
reflect on his sojourns to Esalen, In the latter part of his life he lived in
southern California, but he was a visiting professor at UC Berkeley in the
spring of 1962 – the year Esalen was founded. He also took part in a conference on Technology in the Modern World at UC
Santa Barbara that same March. Those gigs placed him in reach of Esalen. I also
know from records of his university talks that he cast a wary eye on the unintended
consequences of technology.

  As I
write today about the birth of Esalen in the early 1960s, I think about how I might
have crossed paths with Huxley. I missed him by two years. In 1964, as a
student at San Francisco State, I drove my VW bug south on Highway 1 to Big Sur and spent a
weekend at Esalen. I tried to cast off inhibitions in a workshop, and I immersed
myself in the steamy, sulfuric waters from the springs. Had it been two years earlier,
I might have glanced over and seen Aldous, perhaps submerged to his shoulders,
soaking in one of the individual hot tubs, watching the sun set over the
Pacific.

Photo: esalen.org

Also see story in New York  Times Dec. 4, 2017

Aldous Huxley at Davos

Aldous
Huxley spun a darkly satirical portrait of technology as a tool for social
control in his 1932 dystopian novel Brave New World. In Island, his 1962
utopian novel, all good things come to an end when a powerful neighboring
country seeks to capture Pala’s untapped resource, oil.

We
know oil is a perennial trophy in the game of war, but a fought-over prize Huxley
didn’t reckon with is looming on the horizon now — correction, it’s already here.

Last
week in Davos, Switzerland at the World Economic Summit, billionaire
philanthropist George Soros invoked Huxley’s name in connection with what he
called a “global problem: the rise and monopolistic behavior of the giant
I.T.-platform companies” such as Facebook and Google “which have caused a
variety of problems of which we are only now beginning to become aware.”

Soros
predicted that, apart from interfering in the 2016 U.S. presidential election,
a profit-driven alliance could arise between data-rich I.T. monopolies and authoritarian
states that “may well result in a web of totalitarian control the likes of
which not even Aldous Huxley or George Orwell could have imagined.”

Huxley
expressed opinions about the perils of technology for social engineering long
before social media was a glint in a programmer’s eye.

Considering
his wariness and George Soros’s prediction of a dystopian I.T.-captured future, it
seems ironic that I am about to post this essay with a Google image on my
Tumblr blog and on my Facebook page (the latter the FB page for my book Aldous Huxleys
Hands).

Because
you are reading this – and thanks for taking the time – I suppose that
makes both of us part of a surging problem.

Sources:

https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/how-george-soros-upstaged-donald-trump-at-davos

Virgin birth a la Aldous Huxley

It was a fantastical idea at the time, decades before the
birth control pill and in vitro fertilization, when Aldous Huxley severed sex
from procreation in Brave New World. In
this novel he portrays a global society where sex is purely recreational and
human babies are conceived not in the womb but —from conception to birth along
with social caste pre-conditioning in between—developed entirely in laboratory containers,
after which they are “decanted.” Bye-bye, mamma and daddy.

Since this is a December blog, let’s set aside for a moment
the iconic image of the couple and babe in the manger, that glorious icon of
virgin birth that coincides every year with the winter solstice.

 Enter the latest research from Children’s Hospital of
Philadelphia, which has created an artificial womb capable of sustaining a
premature lamb during the equivalent of 24 weeks’ gestation in humans. That is,
a lamb not carried to term in a female sheep but within a bag-like
artificial womb.

 I don’t mean to be irreligious but I can’t resist conjuring
the phrase ‘lamb of god,’ and I don’t mean a lingering reference to
pre-Christian sacrifice.

 Initially, this new device is designed to increase the
chance of survival for a premature human baby and not for “extogenesis” (where
conception and gestation takes place outside the body) – but it sounds like a
wise-man’s camel has thrust its nose under the proverbial tent.

I’m referring to an article by Sara Talpos in undark.org
(September 29, 2017) where she cites an NPR interview with Dena Davis, a
bioethicist at Lehigh University, who invoked Huxley’s Brave New World, and in the same interview another bioethicist
expressed concern that to avoid maternity leave employers might require female
employees to use artificial wombs.

Part of Brave New
World ‘s staying power is its serpentine foreshadowing, rather like dipping
into the I Ching or the quatrains of Nostradamus, because if you open almost
any page of Huxley’s novel you’ll land on a prediction that uncannily applies
to the nexus of society and science today. Huxley’s famous tome provides plenty of room for playful puns, too, such as Scientific American’s article about the lab lambkin which read: “Brave New Wool.”

 Citations:

 www.nature.com article
published April 25, 2017 “An extra-uterine system to physiologically support
the extreme premature lamb” by Emily A. Partridge, et. al.

 Here is a link to the CNN video

http://www.cnn.com/videos/health/2017/04/26/lamb-artificial-womb-study-jnd-orig-vstan.cnn

and Scientific Americanhttps://www.scientificamerican.com/ar...

 and the undark piece

https://undark.org/article/artificial-womb-ectogenesis/

Illustrations:

 Cover of audiobook-BBC full dramatization of Brave New
World.

Molly Meets Brave New World

Well… hello, Molly.

 Though I’ve been tracking you in the media for years, personally
I’ve not yet made your acquaintance. Kudos on your debut in Scientific American
this month under the headline: MDMA’s Journey from Molly to Medicine (the link
is below).

 But I’d take issue with this headline because it makes your junket
look one way. Really, it’s been a round trip. Ok, that’s a pun. You began life as
a chemical tool used by therapists for delving into the psychological issues of
their client-patients, then you morphed into a trippy and occasionally risky club
drug. Now you are back on the scene as a likely-to-be-approved prescription medication.
Once sanctioned, it will again be given by therapists to patients and primarily
those with post-traumatic stress disorder or PTSD.

 You are not my type, I guess. For one thing, you are a from-scratch
synthetic psychedelic, not plant-based like the classic psychedelics Aldous
Huxley wrote about – after all, mescaline was copied from the active ingredient
in peyote cactus, and LSD was derived from a mold discovered in a
pharmaceutical lab. Rounding out this celebrated trio is psilocybin, also known
as ‘shrooms, its origin being psychoactive mushrooms used in shamanic
ceremonies.

 Since this blog is about Aldous Huxley, here come two
connections:

 1. Huxley, of course, played a role in popularizing the
psychedelic mescaline in the 1950s with his nonfiction book The Doors of
Perception. Two decades earlier, he wrote the dystopian-SF novel Brave New
World. These days, dystopia is converging with drug legalization like a pair of
strange bedfellows, but Huxley saw it coming. When describing his fictional
society, he portrayed “soma” as a legal drug widely available, a drug that
induces fantastical journeys – a drug used for escape from trauma or boredom
or both.

 In his final novel Island he imagined a culture where psychoactive
mushrooms are available for inner realization and playful recreation as well as
for profound healing, even unto one’s final hours. (I write about all this and
more in my book, Aldous Huxley’s Hands: His Quest for Perception and the Origin
and Return of Psychedelic Science).

2. Well, here is the other connection. Brave New World not
only projects a time of widespread use of recreational-therapeutic drugs, but a
society where both fetuses and adults are brainwashed by slogans, where trivial
(or dare I say tweeted) distractions swamp any attempt to unspool a dystopic
society’s ills.

All of which resonates. This may be why Brave New World was No.
1 in the Top 10 Audio books sold during the week ending November 3, 2017, according
to the Associated Press. The reader of this 2008 audio edition is actor Michael
York. The “cover” is the illustration shown here. Maybe it could have used a
few pills or vials or babies in tubes or hallucinatory swirls.

Which brings me back to MDMA. So, Molly – as I said before– I have not
yet met you personally, though we might meet up some day. Who knows what other unlikely
convergences the passage of time will bring? In the meantime, following you on
your journey is of interest to me and to millions of others. 

 https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/mdmas-journey-from-molly-to-medicine/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=mind&utm_content=link&utm_term=2017-11-08_featured-this-week

A Virtual Visit to Huxley’s Grave

Aldous Huxley’s ashes were interred on October 27,
almost half a century ago, near his childhood home in the village cemetery of
Compton in Surrey, England. Symbolically speaking, he rests for all time in the
grave of his parents, along with his brothers and his first wife, Maria.

 It may seem strange to some people, but not to me,
that it took eight years after Huxley’s 1963 demise in Los Angles before
arrangements were made for his final resting place in England.

For some of us, ashes of a loved one are kept at
home by choice or the default of indecision until we are ready to finally let
go. It has been twelve years since my mother’s passing. Three weeks ago, in an
uncanny flash of resolve, I knew the ideal place to scatter her ashes for a
final goodbye.

Scattering ashes is not for sissies, but it was more
sweet than bitter because I dispersed them on a bright day in a beautiful place
we had both loved.

I’d like to add another dimension to this account.
When I was a child, my mother and father were friends of Aldous and Maria Huxley
(which I write about in my book Aldous
Huxley’s Hands.)

Halloween is a time of carnival merriment, but
behind the costumes and lawn decorations lurk the bitter-sweet messages of loss
and remembrance. 

Today I mark the October remembrance of both my
mother and Aldous Huxley.

Links below take you to the source of this image:

https://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GRid=8707127

Here are links to images from the cemetery and lovely
Watts Cemetery Chapel in the village of Compton in Surrey, England.

http://bit.ly/2gWjvZG

Brave New World’s dystopia suits us today

Start with the inauguration of a divisive
president then add a dollop of deceptive slogans. Stir in the commercial success
of Hulu’s “Handmaid’s Tale,” recently awarded an Emmy for best drama.

Mix these ingredients and you
have the recipe for a fresh take on Aldous Huxley’s dystopian novel, Brave New World. Such a series is currently
in the works and expected to screen on the Syfy network (part of NBC television)
in 2018.

As
reported last week by The Times, the adaptation is in the hands of Grant
Morrison – who reworked Batman, Superman and the X-Men. Morrison, a Scott who
was born in Glasgow, is said to have been working on an adaptation in the U.S. for
much of this year.

It
looks like the project is in supple hands (which gives me a shameless plug for
my own book, Aldous Huxley’s Hands).
The BNW book covers have changed over time, with the original shown here along
with a post-war paperback and the latest design looking weirdly robotic.
Aldous, who was anything but stuffy, would likely welcome an imaginative
interpretation from a master adapter like Morrison.

For my part as a Huxleyphile, I’ve
been eager to see a new visual interpretation whether a television or
theatrical release. Now I am glad it was delayed. In the past several months,
mention of the word dystopia (the opposite of utopia, the latter meaning an
ideal society) has become commonplace. “Brave New World” has become a household
phrase, and BNW is often paired with George Orwell’s 1984.

Between the two visions when it
comes to a fit, as well as engaging possibilities for film, Huxley’s imagined
society is the better choice. Its scientific-commercial predictions, including
virtual reality, have come to pass. So has its hook-up sexuality and drug-induced
getaways.

Since publication in 1932, BNW
has been adapted as a few sub-memorable plays and films. More recently, Leonardo
DiCaprio and Ridley Scott were mentioned as likely to produce a 21st century version
but perhaps that project stalled for lacking urgency.

Then along came the election of
2016.

Huxley often borrowed from Shakespeare
for his book titles. The phrase Brave New World is taken from The Tempest.

My point about the fit of BNW
with where we stand today brings to mind a line from King Lear:

 Ripeness is all.