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At a certain point, the drugs weren’t getting any better,” Brand said, “but the computers were.”)
The university placed one condition on the research: Leary and Alpert could give the new drugs to graduate students, but not to undergraduates.
(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.
“Psychedelic drugs cause panic and temporary insanity in people who have not taken them.”
(Huxley would die in Los Angeles in November 1963, on the same day as John F. Kennedy),
“the critical figure for blowing the mind of the American society would be four million LSD users and this would happen by 1969.”
‘Will you excuse me for a moment? There’s someone in the next room who has a serious problem.’
these chemicals are what today we would call disruptive technologies.
Where Leary and the counterculture ultimately parted ways with the first generation of researchers was in deciding that no such container—whether medical, religious, or scientific—was needed and that an unguided, do-it-yourself approach to psychedelics was just fine.
Other societies have had long and productive experience with psychedelics, and their examples might have saved us a lot of trouble had we only known and paid attention. The fact that we regard many of these societies as “backward” probably kept us from learning from them.
the great lesson of the 1960s experiment with psychedelics: the importance of finding the proper context, or container, for these powerful chemicals and experiences.
at what other time in history did a society’s young undergo a searing rite of passage with which the previous generation was utterly unfamiliar?
Did I really want to go there? No!—to be perfectly honest.
R. D. Laing once said there are three things human beings are afraid of: death, other people, and their own minds.
Virtually all of the underground guides I met are descended in one way or another from the generation of psychedelic therapists working on the West Coast and around Cambridge during the 1950s and 1960s when this work was still legal.
“recreational” doesn’t necessarily mean frivolous, careless, or lacking in intention.
if they are to do more good than harm, they require a cultural vessel of some kind: protocols, rules, and rituals that together form a kind of Apollonian counterweight to contain and channel their sheer Dionysian force.
“I help people find out who they are so they can live their lives fully.
‘What do you do if someone dies?’” I don’t know what I expected him to say, but Andrei’s reply, delivered with one of his most matter-of-fact shrugs, was not it. “You bury him with all the other dead people.” I told Andrei I would be in touch.
ONE NOTABLE DIFFERENCE about doing psychedelics at sixty, as opposed to when you’re eighteen or twenty, is that at sixty you’re more likely to have a cardiologist you might want to consult in advance of your trip.
“It condenses years of psychotherapy into an afternoon.”)
For some people, the privilege of having had a mystical experience tends to massively inflate the ego, convincing them they’ve been granted sole possession of a key to the universe. This is an excellent recipe for creating a guru.
instead of turning away from any monster that appears, move toward it, stand your ground, and demand to know, “What are you doing in my mind? What do you have to teach me?”
the literal meaning of the word is to wander in one’s mind, and that was exactly what I was doing, with the same desultory indifference to agency the wanderer feels.
the music formed a vertical architecture of wooden timbers, horizontals and verticals and diagonals that were being magically craned into place,
warm tears—of what? I didn’t know!—sliding down my cheeks.
“I don’t want to be so stingy with my feelings.” And, “All this time spent worrying about my heart. What about all the other hearts in my life?”
This is a failure of my language, no doubt, but perhaps it is not only that. Psychedelic experiences are notoriously hard to render in words; to try is necessarily to do violence to what has been seen and felt, which is in some fundamental way pre- or post-linguistic or, as students of mysticism say, ineffable.
Love is everything. Okay, but what else did you learn? No—you must not have heard me: it’s everything!
Is a platitude so deeply felt still just a platitude? No, I decided. A platitude is precisely what is left of a truth after it has been drained of all emotion.
Psychedelics can make even the most cynical of us into fervent evangelists of the obvious.
If we are ever to get through the day, we need to put most of what we perceive into boxes neatly labeled “Known,” to be quickly shelved with little thought to the marvels therein, and “Novel,” to which, understandably, we pay more attention, at least until it isn’t that anymore. A psychedelic is liable to take all the boxes off the shelf, open and remove even the most familiar items, turning them over and imaginatively scrubbing them until they shine once again with the light of first sight. Is this reclassification of the familiar a waste of time? If it is, then so is a lot of art.
It seems to me there is great value in such renovation, the more so as we grow older and come to think we’ve seen and felt it all before.
It reminded me of the pleasantly bizarre mental space that sometimes opens up at night in bed when we’re poised between the states of being awake and falling asleep—so-called hypnagogic consciousness.
For me it felt less like a drug experience—the LSD feels completely transparent, with none of the physiological noise I associate with other psychoactive drugs—than a novel mode of cognition, falling somewhere between intellection and feeling.
All that day and well into the next, a high-pressure system of well-being dominated my psychological weather.
Is it possible that the perceptions of schizophrenics, people tripping on psychedelics, and young children are, at least in certain instances, more accurate—less influenced by expectation and therefore more faithful to reality—than those of sane and sober adults?
Whoever I now was was fine with whatever happened. No more ego?
And although there was no self left to feel, exactly, there was a feeling tone, which was calm, unburdened, content. There was life after the death of the ego. This was big news.
To put words to an experience that was in fact ineffable at the time, and then to shape them into sentences and then a story, is inevitably to do it a kind of violence. But the alternative is, literally, unthinkable.
(Can a recognition of one’s shallowness qualify as a profound insight?)
“negative capability”—the ability to exist amid doubts and mysteries without reflexively reaching for certainty.
widen its circle so far that it takes in, besides ourselves, other people and, beyond that, all of nature.
Though this perspective is not something a chemical can sustain for more than a few hours, those hours can give us an opportunity to see how it might go. And perhaps to practice being there.
It is so obscure, in fact, that the federal government did not list 5-MeO-DMT as a controlled substance until 2011.
before you’ve had a chance to exhale, you are gone. “The toad comes on quickly, and at first it can be unbelievably intense.”
these snuffs are known as the “semen of the sun.”
Whatever this was, it was not a hallucination. A hallucination implies a reality and a point of reference and an entity to have it. None of those things remained.
“Is this what death feels like? Could this be it?” That was the thought, though there was no longer a thinker to have it.
In the event, there was no coherent thought, just pure and terrible sensation.
