--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Our interest [in psychotomimetic drugs], so far,
has been psychiatric and pathological, with only a hint that any other
viewpoint is possible; yet our predecessors were interested in these things
from quite different points of view. In the perspective of history, our
psychiatric and pathological bias is the unusual one. By means of a variety
of techniques, from dervish dancing to prayerful contemplation, from solitary
confinement in darkness to sniffing the carbonated air at the Delphic oracle,
from chewing peyote to prolonged starvation, men have pursued, down the
centuries, certain experiences that they considered valuable above all
others.
The great William James endured much uncalled-for
criticism for suggesting that in some people inhalations of nitrous oxide
allowed a psychic disposition that is always potentially present to manifest
itself briefly. Has our comparative neglect of these experiences, recognized
by James and Bergson as being of great value, rendered psychology stale
and savorless? Our preoccupation with behavior, because it is measurable,
has led us to assume that what can be measured must be valuable and vice
versa. During the twentieth century we have seen, except for a few notables
such as Carl Jung, an abandoning of the psyche by psychologists and psychiatrists.
Recently they have been joined by certain philosophers. Pavlov, Binet,
Freud, and a host of distinguished followers legitimately limited the field
to fit their requirements, but later expanded their formulations from a
limited inquiry to embrace the whole of existence. An emphasis on the measurable
and the reductive has resulted in the limitation of interest by psychiatrists
and psychologists to aspects of experience that fit in with this concept.
There was and is another stream of psychological
thought in Europe and in the United States that is more suitable for the
work that I shall discuss next. James, in the United States, Sedgwick,
Myers, and Gurney in Britain, and Carl Jung in Switzerland are among its
great figures. Bergson is its philosopher and Harrison its prophet. These
and many others have said that in this work, as in any other, science is
applicable if one defines it in Dingle's term, "the rational ordering of
the facts of experience." We must not fall into the pitfall of supposing
that any explanation, however, ingenious, can be a substitute for observation
and experiment. The experience must be there before the rational ordering.
Work on the potentialities of mescaline and the
rest of these agents fell on the stony ground of behaviorism and doctrinaire
psychoanalysis. Over the years we have been deluged with explanations,
while observation has become less sharp. This will doubtless continue to
be the case as long as the observer and the observed do not realize that
splendor, terror, wonder, and beauty, far from being the epiphenomena of
"objective" happenings, may be of central importance.
Accounts of the effect of these agents, ranging
in time from that of Havelock Ellis in 1897 to the more recent reports
of Aldous Huxley are many, and they emphasize the unique quality of the
experience. One or more sensory modalities combined with mood, thinking
and, often to a marked degree, empathy, usually change. Most subjects find
the experience valuable, some find it frightening, and many say that it
is uniquely lovely. All, from Slotkin's unsophisticated Indians to men
of great learning, agree that much of it is beyond verbal description.
Our subjects, who include many who have drunk deep of life, including authors,
artists, a junior cabinet minister, scientists, a hero, philosophers, and
businessmen, are nearly all in agreement in this respect. For myself, my
experiences with these substances have been the most strange, most awesome,
and among the most beautiful things in a varied and fortunate life. These
are not escapes from but enlargements, burgeonings of reality. Insofar
as I can judge they occur in violation of Hughlings Jackson's principle,
because the brain, although its functioning is impaired, acts more subtly
and complexly than when it is normal. Yet surely, when poisoned, the brain's
actions should be less complex, rather than more so! I cannot argue about
this because one must undergo the experience himself. Those who have had
these experiences know, and those who have not had them cannot know and,
what is more, the latter are in no position to offer a useful explanation.
Is this phenomenon of chemically induced mental
aberration something wholly new? It is not, as I have suggested earlier.
It has been sought and studied since the earliest times and has played
a notable part in the development of religion, art, philosophy, and even
science. Systems such as yoga have sprung from it. Enormous effort has
been expended to induce these states easily so as to put them to use. Although
occasionally trivial and sometimes frightening, their like seems to have
been at least part of the experience of visionaries and mystics the world
over. These states deserve thought and pondering because until we understand
them no account of the mind can be accurate. It is foolish to expect a
single exploration to bring back as much information as twenty of them.
It is equally foolish to expect an untrained, inept, or sick person to
play the combined part of observer, experienced and recorder as well as
a trained and skilled individual. Those who have no taste for this work
can help by freely admitting their shortcomings rather than disguising
them by some imposing ascription.
This may seem mere nonsense but, before closing
his mind, the reader should reflect that something unusual ought to seem
irrational because it transcends those fashionable ruts of thinking that
we dignify by calling them logic and reason. We prefer such rationalized
explanations because they provide an illusory sense of predictability.
Little harm is done so long as we do not let our sybaritism blind us to
the primacy of experience. especially in psychology.
Psychoanalysts claim that their ideas cannot be
fully understood without a personal analysis. Not everyone accepts this
claim, but can one ever understand something one has never done? A eunuch
could write an authoritative book on sexual behavior, but a book on sexual
experience by the same author would inspire less confidence. Working with
these substances, as in psychoanalysis, we must often be our own instruments.
Psychoanalysis resembles Galileo's telescope, which
lets one see a somewhat magnified image of an object the wrong way round
and upside down. The telescope changed our whole idea of the solar system
and revolutionized navigation. Psychotomimetic agents, whose collective
name is still undecided, are more like the radar telescopes now being built
to scan the deeps of outer, invisible space. They are not convenient. One
cannot go bird watching with them. They explore a tiny portion of an enormous
void. They raise more questions than answers, and to understand those answers
we must invent new languages. What we learn is not reassuring or even always
comprehensible. Like astronomers, however, we must change our thinking
to use the potentialities of our new instruments.
Freud has told us much about many important matters.
However, I believe that he and his pupils tried illegitimately to extrapolate
from his data far beyond their proper limits in an attempt to account for
the whole of human endeavor and, beyond this, into the nature of man and
God. This was magnificent bravado. It is not science, for it is as vain
to use Freud's system for these greatest questions as it is to search for
the galaxies with Galileo's hand telescope. Jung, using what I consider
the very inadequate tools of dream and myth, has shown such skill and dexterity
that he has penetrated as deep into these mysteries as his equipment allows.
Our newer instruments, employed with skill and reverence, allow us to explore
a greater range of experience more intensively.
There have always been risks in discovery. Splendid
rashness such as John Hunter's should be avoided, yet we must be prepared
for calculated risks such as those that Walter Reed and his colleagues
took in their conquest of yellow fever. The mind cannot be explored by
proxy. To deepen our understanding, not simply to great madnesses but of
the nature of mind itself, we must use our instruments as coolly and boldly
as those who force their aircraft through other invisible barriers. Disaster
may overtake the most skilled. Today and in the past, for much lesser prizes,
men have taken much greater risks.
How Should We Name Them?
If mimicking mental illness were the main characteristic
of these agents, "psychotomimetics" would indeed be a suitable generic
term. It is true that they do so, but they do much more. Why are we always
preoccupied with the pathological, the negative? Is health only the lack
of sickness? Is good merely the absence of evil? Is pathology the only
yardstick? Must we ape Freud's gloomier moods that persuaded him that a
happy man is a self-deceiver evading the heartache for which there is no
anodyne? Is not a child infinitely potential rather than polymorphously
perverse?
I have tried to find an appropriate name for the
agents under discussion: a name that will include the concepts of enriching
the mind and enlarging the vision. Some possibilities are: psychephoric,
mind moving; psychehormic, mind rousing; and psycheplastic, mind molding.
Psychezynic, mind fermenting, is indeed appropriate. Psycherhexic, mind
bursting forth, though difficult, is memorable. Psychelytic, mind releasing,
is satisfactory. My choice, because it is clear, euphonious, and uncontaminated
by other associations, is psychedelic, mind manifesting. One of these terms
should serve.
Epilogue
This, then is how one clinician sees these psychedelics.
I believe that these agents have a part to play in our survival as a species,
for that survival depends as much on our opinion of our fellows and ourselves
as on any other single thing. The psychedelics help us to explore and fathom
our own nature.
We can perceive ourselves as the stampings of an
automatic socioeconomic process, as highly plastic and conditionable animals,
as congeries of instinctive strivings ending in loss of sexual drive and
death, as cybernetic gadgets, or even as semantic conundrums. All of these
concepts have their supporters and they all have some degree of truth in
them. We may also be something more, "a part of the main," a striving sliver
of a creative process, a manifestation of Brahma in Atman, an aspect t
of an infinite God imminent and transcendent within and with; out us. These
very different valuings of the self and of other people's selves have all
been held sincerely by men and women. I expect that even what seem the
most extreme notions are held by some contributors to these pages. Can
one doubt that the views of the world derived from such differing concepts
are likely to differ greatly, and that the courses of action determined
by those views will differ?
Our briefs, what we assume, as the Ames demonstrations
in perception* show, greatly influence the world in which we live. That
world is in part, at least, what we make of it. Once our mold for world
making is formed it most strongly resists change. The psychedelics allow
us, for a little while, to divest ourselves of these acquired assumptions
and to see the universe again with an innocent eye. In T. H. Huxley's words,
we may, if we wish, "sit down in front of the facts like a child" or as
Thomas Traherne, a seventeenth-century English mystic, puts it, "to unlearn
the dirty devices of the world and become as it were a little child again."**
Mystic and scientist have the same recipe for those who seek truth. Perhaps,
if we can do this, we shall learn how to rebuild our world in another and
better image, for the breakneck advance of science is forcing change on
us whether we like it or not. Our old faults, however, persisting in our
new edifice, are far more dangerous to us than they were in the old structure.
The old world perishes and, unless we are to perish in its ruins, we must
leave our old assumptions to die with it. "Let the dead bury their dead"
tells us what we must do.
While we are learning, we may hope that dogmatic
religion and authoritarian science will keep away from each other's throats.
We need not put out the visionary's eyes because we do not share his vision.
We need not shout down the voice of the mystic because we cannot hear it,
or force our rationalizations on him for our own reassurance. Few of us
can accept or understand the mind that emerges from these studies. Kant
once said of Swedenborg, "Philosophy is often much embarrassed when she
encounters certain facts she dare not doubt yet will not believe for fear
of ridicule." Sixty years ago orthodox physicists knew that the atom was
incompressible and indivisible. Only a few cranks doubted this. Yet who
believes in the billiard-ball atom now?
In a few years, I expect, the psychedelics that
I have mentioned will seem as crude as our ways of using them. Yet even
though many of them are gleanings from Stone Age peoples they can enlarge
our experience greatly. Whether we employ these substances for good or
ill, whether we use them with skill and deftness or with blundering ineptitude
depends not a little on the courage, intelligence, and humanity of many
of us who are working in the field today.
Recently I was asked by a senior colleague if this
area of investigation lies within the scope of science and, if it does
not, should not religion, philosophy, or politics take the responsibility
for it? But politics, philosophy, religion, and even art are dancing more
and more to the tune of science, and, as scientists, it is our responsibility
to see that our tune does not become a death march, either physical or
spiritual. We cannot evade our responsibilities.
So far as I can judge, spontaneous experience of
the kind we are discussing has always been infrequent, and the techniques
for developing it are often faulty, uncertain, clumsy, objectionable, and
even dangerous. Our increasingly excellent physical health, with the steady
elimination of both acute and chronic infections, the tranquilizers that
enable us to neutralize unusual chemoelectrical brain activity, our diet,
rich in protein and, especially, B-complex vitamins whose antagonism to
LSD I have already discussed-all of these, combined with a society whose
whole emphasis is on material possession in a brightly lit and brilliantly
colored synthetic world, will make spontaneous experiences of the sort
I have mentioned ever fewer. As we grow healthier and healthier, every
millimeter that we budge from an allotted norm will be checked.
I believe that the psychedelics provide a chance,
perhaps only a slender one, for homo faber, the cunning, ruthless, foolhardy,
pleasure-greedy toolmaker to merge into that other creature whose presence
we have so rashly presumed, homo sapiens, the wise, the understanding,
the compassionate, in whose fourfold vision art, politics science, and
religion are one. Surely we must seize that chance.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
*". . . the principle that what we are aware of is
not determined entirely by the nature of what is out there or by our sensory
processes, but that the assumptions we bring from past experience, because
they have generally proved reliable, are involved in every perception we
have." (back)
** Also Francis Bacon, the father of modern scientific
method, in Novum Organum, wrote, "The entrance into the Kingdom of man,
founded on the sciences, being not much other than the entrance into the
Kingdom of Heaven, whereinto none may enter except as a little child."