More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
July 22 - December 25, 2018
I sat up now and looked out over my desk, through the big window that faced back to the house. When I sited the building, I carefully framed the main view between two very old and venerable trees, a stolidly vertical ash on the right and an elegantly angled and intricately branched white oak on the left.
I was no longer the alienated human observer, gazing at the garden from a distance, whether literal or figural, but rather felt part and parcel of all that was transpiring here.
wonder and immanence.
The psilocin in that mushroom unlocked the 5-hydroxytryptamine 2-A receptors in my brain, causing them to fire wildly and set off a cascade of disordered mental events
“I felt a little like an archaeologist, unearthing a completely buried body of knowledge. Beginning in the early fifties, psychedelics had been used to treat a whole host of conditions,” including addiction, depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder, schizophrenia, autism, and end-of-life anxiety.
Sandoz, the pharmaceutical company for which he worked at the time of his discovery, did something unusual: in effect, it crowd-sourced a worldwide research effort to figure out what in the world Delysid—its brand name for LSD-25—might be good for. Hoping someone somewhere would hit upon a commercial application for its spookily powerful new compound, Sandoz offered to supply, free of charge, however much LSD any researcher requested. The company defined the term “researcher” liberally enough to include any therapist who promised to write up his or her clinical observations. This policy
...more
He credited his own sobriety to a mystical experience he had on belladonna, a plant-derived alkaloid with hallucinogenic properties that was administered to him at Towns Hospital in Manhattan in 1934.
“psycholytic” means “mind loosening,” which is what LSD and psilocybin seem to do—at least at low doses. Therapists who administered doses of LSD as low as 25 micrograms (and seldom higher than 150 micrograms) reported that their patients’ ego defenses relaxed, allowing them to bring up and discuss difficult or repressed material with relative ease. This suggested that the drugs could be used as an aid to talking therapy, because at these doses the patients’ egos remained sufficiently intact to allow them to converse with a therapist and later recall what was discussed.
Microdosing
The idea of a mental reducing valve that constrains our perceptions, for instance, comes from the French philosopher Henri Bergson. Bergson believed that consciousness was not generated by human brains but rather exists in a field outside us, something like electromagnetic waves; our brains, which he likened to radio receivers, can tune in to different frequencies of consciousness.
Huxley also believed that at the base of all the world’s religions there lies a common core of mystical experience he called “the Perennial Philosophy.”
One person’s “depersonalization” could be another’s “sense of oneness”; it was all a matter of perspective and vocabulary.
“It will give that elixir a bad name if it continues to be associated, in the public mind, with schizophrenia symptoms,” Huxley wrote to Osmond in 1955. “People will think they are going mad, when in fact they are beginning, when they take it, to go sane.”
according to Willis Harman, one of a group of Silicon Valley engineers to whom Hubbard would introduce LSD later in the decade.
Seeing himself as “a catalytic agent,” Hubbard would introduce an estimated six thousand people to LSD between 1951 and 1966, in an avowed effort to shift the course of human history.
the barefoot boy from Kentucky was something of a mandarin, choosing as his subjects leading figures in business, government, the arts, religion, and technology. He believed in working from the top down and disdained other psychedelic evangelists, like Timothy Leary, who took a more democratic approach.
IN 1953, not long after his psychedelic epiphany, Hubbard invited Humphry Osmond to lunch at the Vancouver Yacht Club. Like so many others, Osmond was deeply impressed by Hubbard’s worldliness, wealth, connections, and access to seemingly endless supplies of LSD. The lunch led to a collaboration that changed the course of psychedelic research and, in important ways, laid the groundwork for the research taking place today.
Cool
Hubbard was the first researcher to grasp the critical importance of set and setting in shaping the psychedelic experience.
Shamans have understood for millennia that a person in the depths of a trance or under the influence of a powerful plant medicine can be readily manipulated with the help of certain words, special objects, or the right kind of music.
For Hubbard, psychedelic therapy was a form of philanthropy, and he drained his fortune advancing the cause.
Hubbard introduced the author to LSD—and the Hubbard method—in 1955. The experience put the author’s 1953 mescaline trip in the shade. As Huxley wrote to Osmond in its aftermath, “What came through the closed door was the realization . . . the direct, total awareness, from the inside, so to say, of Love as the primary and fundamental cosmic fact.”
Love
As so often seems to happen, the Man of Letters became smitten with the Man of Action.
“And then he began asking me the strangest questions, completely without context. ‘Where do you think you actually came from? What do you think about the cosmos?’ I learned later this was how he checked people out, to decide whether or not you were a worthy candidate.”
Schwartz said that several of the early computer engineers relied on LSD in designing circuit chips, especially in the years before they could be designed on computers. “You had to be able to visualize a staggering complexity in three dimensions, hold it all in your head. They found that LSD could help.”
Schwartz eventually realized that “everyone in that community”—referring to the Bay Area tech crowd in the 1960s and early 1970s, as well as the people in and around Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Network—“had taken Hubbard LSD.”
:D
“problem solving in engineering always involves irreducible complexity. You’re always balancing complex variables you can never get perfect, so you’re desperately searching to find patterns. LSD shows you patterns.
Yes
“I have no doubt that all that Hubbard LSD all of us had taken had a big effect on the birth of Silicon Valley.”
Boom
Stewart Brand received his own baptism in Hubbard LSD at IFAS in 1962, with James Fadiman presiding as his guide.
Stu!
The whole notion of cybernetics, the idea that material reality can be translated into bits of information, may also owe something to the experience of LSD, with its power to collapse matter into spirit.
At a certain point, the drugs weren’t getting any better,” Brand said, “but the computers were.”)
Brand got involved with Ken Kesey and his notorious Acid Tests, which he describes as “a participatory art form that led directly to Burning Man,”
In his view, LSD was a critical ingredient in nourishing the spirit of collaborative experiment, and tolerance of failure, that distinguish the computer culture of the West Coast. “It gave us permi...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
On occasion, the LSD produced gen...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
took a hundred micrograms of acid—Fadiman’s creativity dose.
100micg creativity dose
But what should it say? ‘Let’s have a photo of the earth from space.’ No, it needs to be a question, and maybe a little paranoid—draw on that American resource. ‘Why haven’t we seen a photograph of the whole earth yet?’”
Leary had become disenchanted with science well before psychedelics came into his life. In Kelman’s opinion, even before the psilocybin, “He was already halfway off the deep end.”
an intriguingly titled new seminar showed up in the Harvard course listings: Experimental Expansion of Consciousness The literature describing internally and externally induced changes in awareness will be reviewed. The basic elements of mystical experiences will be studied cross-culturally. The members of the seminar will participate in experiences with consciousness expanding methods and a systematic analysis of attention will be paid to the problems of methodology in this area. This seminar will be limited to advanced graduate students. Admission by consent of the instructor. “Experimental
...more
at his Newton home in December 1960, Leary gave psilocybin to the Beat poet Allen Ginsberg, a man who needed no chemical inducement to play the role of visionary prophet. Toward the end of an ecstatic trip, Ginsberg stumbled downstairs, took off all his clothes, and announced his intention to march naked through the streets of Newton preaching the new gospel. “We’re going to teach people to stop hating,” Ginsberg said, “start a peace and love movement.” You can almost hear in his words the 1960s being born, the still-damp, Day-Glo chick cracking out of its shell.
:D
When Leary managed to persuade Ginsberg not to leave the house (among other issues, it was December), the poet got on the phone and started dialing world leaders, trying to get Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Mao Zedong on the line to work out their differences.
Ginsberg was convinced that Leary, the Harvard professor, was the perfect man to lead the new psychedelic crusade. To Ginsberg, the fact that the new prophet “should emerge from Harvard University,” the alma mater of the newly elected president, was a case of “historic comedy,”
(It is one of the many paradoxes of psychedelics that these drugs can sponsor an ego-dissolving experience that in some people quickly leads to massive ego inflation. Having been let in on a great secret of the universe, the recipient of this knowledge is bound to feel special, chosen for great things.)
Indeeeed
Huxley and Hubbard and Osmond shared Leary’s sense of historical mission, but they had a very different idea of how best to fulfill it. The three were inclined to a more supply-side kind of spiritualism—first you must turn on the elite, and then let the new consciousness filter down to the masses, who might not be ready to absorb such a shattering experience all at once.
Elites first
Their unspoken model was the Eleusinian mysteries, in which the Greek elite gathered in secret to ingest the sacred kykeon and share a night of revelation.
But Leary and Ginsberg, both firmly in the American grain, were determined to democratize the visionary experience, make tran...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
“Psychedelic drugs opened to mass tourism mental territories previously explored only by small parties of particularly intrepid adventurers, mainly religious mystics.”
No doubt the popularity of the Psilocybin Project among the department’s students, as well as its cliquishness, rankled the rest of the faculty, who had to compete with Leary and Alpert and their drugs for a precious academic resource: talented graduate students.
Key
“What most concerns me,” Kelman concluded, “and others who have come to me, is how the hallucinogenic and mental effects of these drugs have been used to form a kind of ‘insider’ sect within the department. Those who choose not to participate are labeled as ‘squares.’ I just don’t think that kind of thing should be encouraged
they were forming something called the International Federation for Internal Freedom (IFIF)
It’s often said that in the 1960s psychedelics “escaped from the laboratory,” but it would probably be more accurate to say they were thrown over the laboratory wall, and never with as much loft or velocity as by Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert at the end of 1962.
Hoping to distance serious research from irresponsible use, and troubled that the counterculture was contaminating his formerly neutral term “psychedelic,” Osmond tried once again to coin a new one: “psychodelytic.” I don’t need to tell you it failed to catch on.
Oh :)
the government, alarmed at his growing influence on the country’s youth, launched a campaign of harassment
Enter socrates
