ETC.: A Review of General Semantics
S. I. Hayakawa, editor
December 1965, "Special Issue on the Psychedelic Experience"
MEANING AND THE MIND-DRUGS
RICHARD P. MARSH
MANY READERS of the Sunday supplements are familiar with the
names, if not the operational characteristics, of at least three
of the new "brain-changing" drugs: LSD-25, psilocybin
(popularized as "the magic mushroom"), and mescaline, a
derivative of the now-notorious peyote plant used by members of
the Native American (Indian) Church in their religious
ceremonies. These three drugs have been publicized, often in
lurid prose, by journalists more interested in their news value
than in their chemical properties.
The sensation-seeking reader has been told that a cult of
suburban intellectuals and city-dwelling beatniks has grown up
around these drugs. He knows that the drugs have the power of
producing strange visions, and he suspects them of producing
strange forms of behavior. What he does not suspect is that there
is a serious possibility that the drugs will one day be a boon to
mankind.
Whether they will or not remains to be seen. Meanwhile, among
serious students of the drugs, a war rages over the question
which may prove to be among the most critical in history.
One group claims big things. Thanks to the drugs and their
capacity for expanding human consciousness, they say, psychiatry
is at a turning point, and Utopia itself may be upon us before we
know it. 1
Another group is darkly dubious. The new drugs will lead us, they
fear, not into Utopia but into psychosis, and in a pinch could be
used by a future dictator as an insidious adjunct to thought
control. 2
This division of opinion, as so often happens, is reflected
in a division of terminology. Early experimenters with the drugs,
hypothesizing that they had the power of inducing in an ingestant
a short-term model psychosis complete with hallucinations and
paranoid delusions of grandeur and persecution, dubbed them
"psychotomimetic." Experience showed, however, that
some ingestants persistently refused to retreat into psychosis,
even on a short-term basis, but instead blossomed out with a
variety of positively healthy symptoms and began to report
extraordinary spontaneous increases in self-insight. So
eventually the word "psychedelic" was coined3 as an
alternative to "psychotomimetic."
"Psychedelic," by way of its Greek origins, means
simply "mind-manifesting." It implies that the new
drugs do not so much drive an ingestant into a state of psychosis
as to open out his mind, whatever its characteristics, making it
available for inspection.
Whether the new drugs are psychotomimetic or psychedelic,
then—whether they diminish or enlarge—is the issue. If
they reduce us to the condition of crazy men, they may possess
limited value in carefully controlled psychiatric research, but
they are scarcely promising as a vehicle for mass liberation. If,
however, they endow us with self-knowledge, manifesting to us our
own minds, their promise is great.
Broadly, the commentators on the new drugs have tended to be
either psychotomimeticists or psychedelicists. They have tended
either to view the drugs with suspicion as potentially dangerous
sources of mental disturbance or to view them optimistically as
useful, almost magical means to self-discovery and
self-actualization. In-between positions have been taken, of
course, but perhaps not so frequently as the facts warrant.
THERE ARE at least three reasons, all of them semantic, for
the prevalence of this two-valued attitude. First, there is the
fact that the language available for talking about the drug
experience is simply not equal to the task. Dr. Timothy Leary has
written about this elsewhere in this issue of ETC. The
essence of the problem, in the opinion of the present writer, is
that a process cannot be stored in a box. The static,
subject-predicate, thing-and-properties language we have
inherited from our culture does not easily contain the shifting,
dynamic, flowing experience undergone by the drug ingestant. The
experience is nondual and infinitely valued. Language is
dualistic and two-valued. Attempting to express the drug
experience in language is like trying to stuff the cosmos into a
trunk.
Then there is the prevailing Western attitude toward the
body, one of Puritan distrust. We tend to feel that things of the
mind and spirit should be somehow remote and unbodied. To suggest
that the mind is a function of the brain and can therefore be
unlocked by a drug is to suggest the vaguely indecent. What is
good for us should not be come by too easily and should not be
quite pleasant. Furthermore, the spirit should be kept clear of
the body or else ignored altogether.
Finally, we are confronted by a special form of
guilt-by-association. A certain number of "far out,
beat" people have obtained black market supplies of the new
brain-changing drugs and taken them for kicks. Some have then
talked about their experiences in a jazzy, flippant way. As a
result many responsible people have felt both repelled and
threatened, consequently falling into the semantic trap of
imputing to the drugs the characteristics of the consumers and
condemning the drugs themselves as intrinsically bad.
For these three reasons and others, objectivity about the
drugs is difficult. The drugs are extraordinarily difficult to
talk about. This is unfortunate, since the way they are talked
about determines to a large extent the way they operate, whether
they are positively psychedelic or negatively psychotomimetic.
MANY responsible investigators emphasize the importance of
"set and setting" in determining the effects of the
drugs.4 The subject's expectations, his mood at the
time of drug ingestion, and the physical and social environment
apparently determine, to a considerable extent, the nature of the
subjective experience. If the experience is approached in an
attitude of scientific curiosity combined with a sort of
reverence for the possibilities of human inwardness, the results
will be quite different from what they will be if one takes the
drug as though he were going on a binge. Since one's attitudes
are shaped so much by one's language and may even be inseparable
from it, it matters how one chooses to speak about the experience
before, during, and afterward.5 It matters also
whether one takes the drug with the half-guilty expectation of
going out of his mind or in the serene confidence that he will be
brought to himself.
In short, the drug experience is like any experience: its
meaning lies primarily within the person, not within the drug,
which merely liberates. What it liberates into, insanity or
ecstatic insight, depends on the subject and the circumstances.
Thus the drug experience is a semantic experience. It is the
experience of creating and discovering meanings. There is perhaps
no more fruitful way of looking at it than this: that it sheds a
good deal of light on the communication process and on the
discipline of general semantics. There is an extraordinary number
of ways in which it does this, but, owing to lack of space, only
seven will be discussed.
1. The release of the symbolizing function. The
incredible human capacity for symbol and image production is
driven home forcibly to many people who consume one of the drugs
or browse in the literature. Huxley, Watts, Leary, Dunlap,
Newland, and others have written vividly and sometimes eloquently
about this. The present author, at the time of his first
LSD-ingestion, was stunned to discover the fantastic fertility of
his own image- and symbol-producing centers under the impact of
the drug. He underwent the experience of birth, felt himself
transformed into mythological persons, floated graciously through
lovely caverns of sparkling ice and splendid gold-encrusted
Gothic cathedrals, and watched in awe as jeweled patterns formed
and reformed in an endless variety of living mandalar shapes,
fourfold marvels of incredible beauty modulating into endless
variations of themselves, dissolving into spinning galaxies of
infinite dimension and significance, or lapsing into marvelously
unique free-forms dancing in total spontaneity through
unpredictable patterns of absolute wonder.
Above all, there was the experience of light. This appeared
in many forms: as a "diamond center" of incredible
luster (and somehow, too, of incredible significance); as
patterned living flame, shaping itself into fourfold
configurations in a sort of visual equivalent to the music coming
from the phonograph; as music itself visible, apprehended
directly by the inner eye in the form of three-dimensional shapes
glowing from within; and as shining fields, banks, walls,
fortresses, trees and rivers of living gems and jewels.
We are here led directly into the problem of intensionality.
Obviously, this internal splendor was not, as Korzybski would
say, extensional. It was not available for public inspection and
verification. No one except the author looked on to confirm the
reality of the spectacle. And yet its reality seemed beyond
dispute; it seemed even to be a reality of a higher order than
the extensional reality of the public world. It seemed, too, to
have a higher meaning—or rather to be meaning itself, to be
not so much a symbolization of another reality as the very act of
symbolization; not precisely to mean something, but actually to
mean meaning as such.
KENNETH BOULDING has said that man's capacity to proliferate
internal images is at once his chief glory and his greatest
hazard.6 It enables him to elaborate those roadmaps
which get him through life meaningfully, but also those deceptive
roadmaps which lose him in the jungle. In other words, it helps
him to extensionalize as well as to intensionalize.
Extensionalization and intensionalization, the public and the
private, play into each other. The raw, given facts of the
universe are chaotic and meaningless until some sort of structure
is imposed on them, and then they take on meaning and order.7
Then they serve as a useful roadmap to get us through life in a
sufficiently rewarding way.
The meaning of things, however, lies not in the things nor
entirely in us, but rather in a fluent traffic between inner and
outer—with particular emphasis on the inner. More precisely,
meanings appear to be discovered but in fact are manufactured.
Under LSD, we seem to come up against that part of our inner
world where meanings are made, where the patterning process
operates in its pure form. It is a startling experience. One who
has known it is not likely to forget it, and we may speculate
that, having once seen his own intensionality in an isolated
form, one will thereafter be better equipped to persuade it to
serve him and less likely to be misled by it to create maps for
which there are no territories.
2. The experience of unity. One of the most startling
features of the drug experience is that, while one remembers the
names of things with perfect clarity, they no longer seem to him
appropriate. This object is called a table and that one is called
a chair, just as before, but there is now seen to be something
richly amusing about the process of labeling them. One's eyes are
opened. The difference between the table and the chair is still
perceived as real enough, but it is also perceived as entirely
arbitrary, a conventional distinction that could well be replaced
by an infinity of other distinctions equally conventional.
The unity of all things becomes suddenly apparent with
blazing simplicity. The opposites rush together like a clap of
thunder. Each separate quality, normally perceptible only by
contrast with its opposite, is still perceptible as a separate
quality, only now the illusoriness of its separateness is
apparent. Big and little, wet and dry, pain and pleasure are no
longer seen as polar pairs but rather as points on a continuum.
So, likewise, are ugliness and beauty, love and hate, femininity
and masculinity, and all the rest. So, most particularly, are
sameness and otherness, the LSD experient discovering to his
amazement and joy that the separateness that divides him from
others is a masquerade for the identity that connects him
This may be interpreted as a mystical doctrine, to be sure
and as such it will be sufficiently annoying or meaningless to
the more rigidly positivistic. But the more flexibly inclined
will recognize the semantic soundness of the perception that the
things and qualities which fill our lives are, to some extent at
least, verbal constructions that are capable of passing away with
the passing away of the names that gave them birth.
3. Seeing through the game. Of all the benefits of the
drug experience, this is perhaps the greatest and the most
long-lasting. The author, a college professor, remembers during
his third LSD experience staring at the physician who had
administered the drug with the awed and liberating awareness that
the man was no more a doctor than he himself was a professor.
Both the "professor" and the "doctor,"
although duly certificated by the proper authorities, were, it
now appeared, manifestly frauds. What's more, the discovery
proved liberating and refreshing in the extreme. Two
game-players, one hiding behind the doctor role, the other
playing at being a professor, had come out from their costumes,
abandoned the game, and, thanks to LSD, now sat confronting each
other in a condition of headlong and naked reality. The feeling
of lightness and release was incredible.
TIMOTHY LEARY is among those who have emphasized the
game-like nature of most human behavior as well as LSD's capacity
for liberating one from the tyranny of games. He has defined a
game as an acquired cultural sequence characterized by roles,
rules, goals, rituals, language, values, and strategies.8 This is a
very comprehensive definition which covers virtually every form
of human behavior, especially those not shared with other
animals. Leary has been attacked for this by critics who object
that to abandon one's games would be to abandon most meaningful
human activity including, for example, the "game" of
science.
Actually, of course, one does not abandon the
"scientific game" or any other "acquired cultural
sequence" provided it is serviceable. But, if he is wise,
one does attempt to see through the games he plays and
continually to ask the question: Is this game now
the best one to play in order to actualize my human
possibilities? To reject all games, to reject all "roles,
rules, goals, rituals, language, values, and strategies," is
to reject civilization itself, along with sanity, maturity,
meaning, and all possibility of being human instead of merely
animal. But to take them all seriously is equally destructive or
more so. There are arguments for both conservatism and
liberalism, and one can choose between dying the death of
ossification and dying the death of formlessness. On the whole,
however, the first seems the more terrifying prospect.
In any case, six hours' freedom from the tyranny of the ego,
a holiday enjoyed by many who have consumed LSD, is likely to
predispose one unfavorably against ever again granting it the
absolute sway to which it is accustomed. The ego is the social
game par excellence, absolutely necessary to our survival
and yet tyrannously opposed to our growth and our deepest
satisfaction. Jay Haley has amusingly yet incisively exposed its
infinitely subtle maneuvers in that ongoing game of one-
upmanship called psychoanalysis.9 The ego, he says, is
the organ of one-upmanship, always striving to get one-up or stay
one-up, and hence always restless and anxious. Following an
anonymous English scholar, Haley suggests that the analysis will
be spontaneously and successfully terminated when the patient
reaches the "point where he doesn't really care whether the
analyst is in control of the relationship or whether he is in
control."10 At that point the patient is cured.
He has seen through the game, and though his ego still functions
as the integrative principle which holds his personality
together, it has become transparent and no longer dominates the
self.
Prolonged psychotherapy is no doubt necessary before the ego
will permanently accept its role as servant instead of master of
the self. The LSD experience, however, can give the ingestant a
startling glimpse of what life would be like if the ego could be
persuaded to relax its grip. This might well facilitate the
process of therapy, just as the process of therapy serves to make
the LSD experience richer and deeper. In any case the game-like,
linguistic, and conventional nature of the ego is often lucidly
apparent to the LSD ingestant.
4. Receptivity. All points in the communication cycle
are important, but perhaps in our anxious age it is the reception
of messages which gives particular trouble. Most of us encode
willingly enough, but we are not, as a rule particularly
interested in decoding. We talk, but we don't listen. We turn on
the radio, then ignore it. We are eager to impress others, but
not to hear them.
Under LSD many people learn, for the first time, what it
means to be absolutely present. Since they have temporarily
renounced their games and seen through their own need to be
one-up, they can afford to be aware of whatever the environment,
external or internal, may happen to present without wishing to
change it. For the moment, at least, they have nothing to lose by
listening. They may even dare listen to themselves, perhaps for
the first time.
Under these conditions, extraordinary things can occur. Other
people may be seen as precious, infinitely complex, and quite
miraculous. The physical environment may become altogether
startling. One may feel that he is looking not at a book, a
table, or a chair, but at The Book, The Table, or The Chair. To
paraphrase Aldous Huxley, the Absolute seems to blaze forth from
all around one.11 Music becomes incredible: Old
warhorses like Beethoven's Fifth Symphony become fresh and
powerful again. A record of a choir hunched around a microphone
in a remote recording studio quite literally fills the room with
angels. The music becomes textured and alive. It may even become
visible and glow with an inner light.
Paintings move and open up to reveal new dimensions. Colors
become intense and preternaturally vibrant. Objects in nature,
such as mountains and trees, shine with beauty and drip with
significance. One's internal world opens up to one, both the
repressed world of the personal unconscious and the pre-existent,
archetypal realm of the collective unconscious. One looks in upon
what Huxley calls the "antipodes of the mind," i.e.,
the world of Visionary Experience.12 The creatures,
the gardens, the pools of light he sees there fill him with awe
and peace.
SEMANTICALLY, the condition of being absolutely present to
the outer and the inner reality has at least two advantages.
First, it allows a person to tune in on that feedback, both
external and internal, which enables him to correct his own
errors in encoding. He is able to reduce the noise level in the
various communication systems in which he is involved by
re-encoding his message streams until they convey the meanings
that he intends them to convey. Secondly, it allows a person to
inhabit the world of the actual, the world of fact, instead of
the unreal and empty world of the prefabricated abstraction. It
allows him to experience the world instead of merely thinking
about it and hence, perhaps, to begin to live in it at last. In
Huxley's words:
To be shaken out of the ruts of ordinary perception, to be
shown for a few timeless hours the outer and the inner world,
not as they appear to an animal obsessed with words and
notions, but as they are apprehended, directly and
unconditionally . . . this is an experience of inestimable
value to everyone and especially to the intellectual.13
5. Awareness of the shadow. This Jungian expression is
used because of its vividness. In Jung's conception, the shadow
is the repressed, dark side of the personality, a countertype of
the collective, adapted side, which is bathed in the
"light" of consciousness, so to speak. It is the source
of much that is awkward and "evil" in human behavior,
although paradoxically its liberation may result in a certain
amount of "good." This is because the shadow contains
within it not only the destructive and vicious elements of the
personality but also much that only appears wicked and Satanic
but which is, in fact, merely unknown, untried, and unaccepted.
In theological symbolism, God is at a loss without the eager, if
fiery, cooperation of Satan, as Genesis, the Book of
Job, the story of Jesus' temptations, that of the temptation
of Buddha by Mara, and other religious myths and documents
attest.
Under LSD, the shadow may be explosively liberated. Indeed,
this is one of the hazards of the drug, and it is one reason why
its administration should be selective and controlled. The few
recorded instances in which LSD has been harmful, precipitating
severe depression, psychosis, and even suicide, are probably
cases in which either there has been a "shadow
problem," or something has been amiss with set and setting,
or both. If the shadow is poorly integrated with the ego and the
rest of the personality, its liberation—the upsurge of
repressed materials from the unconscious—may cause a more or
less irreversible panic leading to the disintegration of the
self. On the other hand, if the subject's expectations are
unhealthy or if the environment contains threatening or
forbidding elements, then the release of the shadow even in a
reasonably well integrated person may be more than he can cope
with.
But if all candidates for LSD consumption are carefully
screened, and if the drug is administered under optimum
conditions, there appears to be virtually no danger. In any case,
one who has experienced a conscious uprush of shadow material
will not soon forget it, whether it be mild or fierce. The
author's reliving of the birth experience (an event which, in
Jung's language, may have been an archetypal experience as well
as a shadow experience) is a case in point: It was mild in the
sense of not being unduly alarming, and yet it was quite
unforgettable. Similarly impressed on the author's memory is the
transformation by which a physician monitoring the LSD experiment
became alternately brutal devil and shining saint and, on another
occasion, that by which a handsome middle-aged woman became
alternately a dewy young virgin and a menacing, toothless witch.
The confrontation with the shadow, however, may be fierce
rather than mild. It may produce intense anxiety or even wild
terror.14 The subject may feel helplessly cut off from
the rest of the world, or he may people it with monsters of his
own creation. Perfectly benign companions who have only the
welfare of the subject in mind may appear to be degenerate
criminals from whom there is no escape. One may feel as though he
is trapped in some diabolical plot engineered by malevolent
Beings in a corrupt back alley of the universe. It is not
surprising that under these circumstances subjects have been
known to attempt violence or flight.
And yet, from the semantic standpoint at least, there is
genuine value in such paranoid experiences, provided they are
successfully lived through. This value lies in the confirmation
they provide for the reality of projection. The dramatic
alteration in appearance undergone by the physician and the woman
previously mentioned was a purely semantic phenomenon. The
changes in no sense occurred within the two people but rather in
him who experienced the change. They were entirely changes in the
meaning of the people as that meaning was created and then
externalized by their observer. Similarly, the more alarming
kinds of experience alluded to, such as the transformation of
friendly helpers into degenerate monsters, are likewise purely
the result of projection, a fact which becomes dazzlingly
apparent after the effects of the drug recede.
A CURIOUS PROPERTY of LSD and the other new drugs is that the
perceptual alterations they produce do not ordinarily reach the
level of hallucination. The ingestant typically retains awareness
throughout of the altered nature of his perceptions. Public
reality continues to be his reference point. Thus he is able to
inspect his own projections as they occur. In extreme cases,
however, the ingestant may move in and out of hallucination so
that recognition of his own projections must be deferred. In
either case the ingestant normally completes the experience with
a heightened awareness of his own capacity for creating meanings
that superficially appear to be external to him.
In addition, of course, there are the changes of meaning one
discovers in one's inner world. The retrieval of unconscious
material by psychoanalytical methods may be easily interpreted as
a semantic process, a clarification of inner awareness and
evaluation. For permanence of results, the psychoanalytical
method may be superior to the method of LSD—though this is
far from certain—but the method of LSD is vastly superior in
the respect that the uprush of imagery it provokes is so dramatic
and startling as to be unforgettable.
6. The discovery of love. People who have taken LSD do
not "know all the answers," nor have they automatically
solved all their problems by virtue of having consumed the drug.
But they often feel peculiarly at ease in one another's
presence—a phenomenon which, when perceived by others, is
sometimes a source of annoyance because it is liable to be
mistakenly interpreted as a sign of clannishness. The reason for
the easiness frequently felt by LSD-ingesters in one another's
company is simply this: Because they have seen through the game,
briefly at least, and because they sense that they are in the
presence of others who have seen through the game, they feel not
only less impelled to attack but also relatively immune from
attack. They feel relatively free to drop their defenses and the
other claptrap supporting the ego and simply stand freely and
openly in one another's presence.
But there is more than this. Under LSD they have felt
love—perhaps for the first time. The quality of the love
they have felt is unusual. Thanks to their experience with the
shadow and the uprush of forbidden material from that realm, they
have seen the continuity, the essential unity, of love and hate,
and they have (ideally, at least) accepted that unity. In short,
they have accepted their feelings—not the "nice"
ones only, but the awkward, "bad," embarrassing
feelings as well—and they are comfortable about it. Because
they have allowed themselves to hate, they can now allow
themselves to love. Because they have admitted that they are
afraid, they can now stand quietly secure in each other's
presence. Still more remarkable than this, however, is the fact
that they remember what it is like to feel love without jealousy
or the necessity of possession. Having seen through the game and
having found out that bare-faced liar, the ego, they have, at
least a little, renounced the need to be one-up and junked at
least some of the apparatus by which the ego maintains itself.
The ego dies hard, of course, but he is perversely
intelligent and his aid may be enlisted in the campaign to subdue
himself. People do not consciously wish to suffer, and so the ego
may let go its grip a little when it is convinced that to do so
is in its own best interests. The ego, having seen its own
unreality, begins to relax: How can I feel jealous of you or
rejected by you, how can I wish to possess you, or be possessed
by you, if I am you? If my separateness from you is a name
and my identity with you the reality, what do I fear?
7. The attainment of the Self. Implicit in the
foregoing is a rudimentary theory of personality. Grossly
oversimplified its main features would be these: Some
LSD-ingestants feel that they have acquired knowledge, through
direct experience, of an aspect of the self other than the one
they are familiar with. It is as though they had discovered a
second self. This second self is perceived as a kind of Unitary
Self, while the familiar, daily self could be called the game-
self.
The Unitary Self quite literally shimmers and dazzles. It
consists of a set of apparently endless dimensions not evident to
ordinary consciousness but sometimes awesomely present to the
consciousness liberated by LSD. Because of its apparent
endlessness, the ingestant may feel that it connects him with all
other people and creatures. Hence the term Unitary.
The game-self, on the other hand, consists of the accumulated
roles, rules, rituals, goals, language systems, values, and
strategies inherited from one's culture Instead of being unitary
in its action, the game-self tends to be separative. It is the
organ of one-upmanship. While the Unitary Self unites the
individual with other individuals, the game-self sets him against
them in a subtle contest for social supremacy.
When the ingestant discovers his game-self he is liable to be
somewhat contemptuous of it. He may feel, under the influence of
the drug, that he wishes to devote his life to the service of the
Unitary Self. Yet, as the effects of the drug ebb away he feels
the game-self slowly reassert itself. The chief effects of the
LSD experience are perhaps due to the interplay of these two
selves.
If, following a drug session, the game-self reasserts itself
totally, then the LSD experience has provided kicks and a rather
haunting memory, but little more. If the game-self does not
reassert itself sufficiently, then the ingestant is lost to
society or he has slipped over into psychosis. If, however, the
game-self and the Unitary Self have to some extent
interpenetrated, so to speak, producing a degree of
transformation in the ingestant's self-concept, then the
ingestant has taken a step toward that condition of
individuality-within-relationship which is the true meaning of
psychological maturity. An ingestant who achieves this feels
himself to be part of society as a whole, even part of the total
cosmos, and yet uniquely himself and valuable in his uniqueness.
THE BLISS experienced by some LSD-ingestants results from the
experience of unity with the cosmos. The ingestant feels
essentially one with what he sees as an incredibly glorious
whole. On the other hand, the terror experienced by some
ingestants results from their clinging to the game-self, whose
partly fraudulent nature has been exposed by the action of the
drug and whose continued existence in its present form has been
threatened.
This is a point at which psychosis may seem imminent. Let us,
therefore, ask our central question once again, the answer to
which may be so crucial to the future of the race: Are the new
drugs psychotomimetic or are they psychedelic, psychosis
mimicking or mind-manifesting? Which?
The answer is conditional on circumstances. Whoever has
experienced the expansion of consciousness and the unveiling of
the Unitary Self resulting from one of the drugs can have no
doubts: They are unmistakably psychedelic in their effects. But
whoever has skirted a psychotic episode—with its
accompaniments of paranoid terror, violence, flight, and suicidal
depression—knows that the drugs are quite capable of being
psychotomimetic (and suspects that perhaps they may even be
psychotogenetic or psychosis-producing) in their impact.
But, as usual, a two-valued orientation is inadequate to the
facts. Not "either-or" but "both-and"
expresses the truth of the matter. It is essential to be
multi-valued in approaching the new drugs, which are so profound
and subtle in their operations within the psyche. Not only are
they psychedelic, but also they are psychotomimetic. Even more,
they are psychedelic because they are psychotomimetic, and
psychotomimetic because they are psychedelic. To be shown
the truth about ourselves, to be shown that we are all, to some
extent, frauds and pretenders, strategy-ridden game-players
intent on getting one-up on our fellow game-players, is an
alarming experience. And this is the experience the new drugs may
give us. They psychedelically show us what we are, and we may
psychotomimetically react with terror. In such a case the terror
results from the fact that to cease identifying exclusively with
the game-self and instead to identify a little more with the
Unitary Self is, in a psychological sense, to die to what we have
been in order to be born to what we are capable of becoming. It
is not surprising that some ingestants, in the face of this
threat of imminent death, suddenly panic.
And yet there is value even in panic, psychedelic benefit in
psychotomimetic terror. "Hell," as Joe K. Adams has
pointed out, "is at least as instructive as heaven."15
One who has been surprised in the act of furtively playing with
his own excrements might as well relax and stop putting on airs
in public. Having been exposed as a confirmed coprophiliac, he
need have no further fear of detection. Similarly, the public
disclosure, as the result of a drug session, that one harbors
within oneself not only a field of shining jewels but also a nest
of scorpions is most liberating. One's defenses drop away. There
is no longer any need to pretend. It becomes easier to admit
publicly that one is aggressive, hostile, fearful, competitive,
slightly paranoid, and utterly addicted to the game of
one-upmanship. And this in turn opens up the possibility that one
may take steps to bring about a change.
IT IS a medical truism that sometimes the patient must get
worse in order to get better. Many people in psychotherapy report
increased anxiety as a prelude to decreased anxiety. One reason
for this is that psychotherapy is, in part, a shock treatment for
forcing the patient to see through his own faulty assumptions
about the meaning of his behavior, to drop his defenses. The
treatment hurts, but it is essential to growth. LSD and the other
new drugs may accomplish similar results in a startling way and
with incredible speed.
They may also, of course, fail to do so. They may even,
unless their administration is properly managed, be harmful to
the ingestant. The chief problem appears to be to bring about the
conditions that create trust. If this trust falters, the
ingestant may perceive the temporary loss of the game-self as a
loss of identity and so slip into panic. On the other hand, if
there is no loss of trust he may feel that he has come into his
own true identity at last.
This "true identity," this Self, is what lies
beyond all names and games. Nameless and unknowable, it is felt
simply as that which knows, a kind of totally uncategorized,
spontaneously integrating principle of creative unity. It is
consciousness itself: the Tao, the Nameless, the Way that cannot
be "wayed," the Name that cannot be named, the "I
Am" that cannot be conjugated. Whatever it is that moves
spontaneously and freely to give shape and pattern and
meaning—this is what the LSD-ingestant may perceive himself
to be.
Without trust, on the other hand, without confidence in
himself, in his immediate situation, and even in the cosmos as a
whole, he may see himself and others as monstrous and
threatening. His situation then will be, in a heightened form,
that of the ordinary man under ordinary circumstances: He must
achieve faith in the processes of life or perish.
References
1. The operations of the
International Federation for Internal Freedom at Zihuatanejo,
Mexico, which terminated abruptly on June 16 1963, and which were
luridly but inaccurately reported by much of the Mexican and
American press, were perhaps utopian in goal but not, at first,
in form. Until the final, confused weeks, when the operations of
the Federation were interfered with by an alarmed and threatened
community, a rather systematic attempt was made by the members of
IFIF to work out, pragmatically, a sensible, controlled modus
operandi for investigating the social and psychological
usefulness, if any, of LSD-ingestion under suitable conditions.
The author was present in Zihuatanejo during the concluding days
of the experiment and was involved in events which qualify him to
offer the foregoing opinion as well as opinions asserted in this
paper. (back)
2. Cf. Aldous Huxley, Brave New
World Revisited (New York: Bantam, 1960), Chapter VIII,
"Chemical Persuasion." A more skeptical scholar
pooh-poohs the use of LSD as a mind- manipulant: J. A. C. Brown, Techniques
of Persuasion (London: Penguin, 1964) Chapter 8,
"Scientific Mind-Changing," especially pp. 211-212. The
terrifying prospect that LSD may be an effective military weapon
is examined in: Sidney Cohen, M.D., The Beyond Within (New
York: Atheneum, 1964), Chapter 11, "War Without Death."
(back)
3. Humphry Osmond, DPM, in "A
Review of the Clinical Effects of Psychotomimetic Agents," LSD:
The Consciousness-Expanding Drug ed. David Solomon (New York:
Putnam, 1964), tells why he felt impelled to coin the word
psychedelic. (back)
4. Harold A. Abramson, M.D., "Psychoanalytic
Psychotherapy with LSD,' The Use of LSD in Psychotherapy,
ed. Harold A. Abramson, M.D. (New York: Josiah Macy, Jr.
Foundation, 1960). Also Cohen, op. cit., pp. 84-85 and
99-101.
5. Languages Thought and Reality: Selected Writings of B.
L. Whorf, ed. John B. Carroll (New York: Wiley, 1956).
6. Kenneth Boulding, The Image: Knowledge in Life and
Society (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1961), p. 26.
7. David K. Berlo, The Process of Communication (New
York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1960), Chapters 7-10.
8. Dr. Leary's definitions of the
word vary slightly. This represents an average of several and
contains the most frequently recurring elements. More extended
definitions are found in "How to Change Behavior,"
Solomon, op. cit., and in Timothy Leary, Ralph Metzner, and
Richard Alpert, The Psychedelic Experience (New Hyde Park:
University Books, 1964), p. 13 et passim. (back)
9. Jay Haley, "The Art of Psychoanalysis," The
Use and Misuse of Language, ed. S. I. Hayakawa (New York:
Fawcett, 1962).
10. Ibid.
11. Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception (New York:
Harper, 1963), P 40
12. Aldous Huxley, Heaven and Hell (New York: Harper,
1963), p. 85.
13. Huxley, The Doors of Perception, p. 73.
14. Cohen, op. cit., Chapter 10, "The Dangers to
the Patient—and the Therapist."
15. Joe K. Adams, "Psychosis: 'Experimental' and
Real," The Psychedelic Review, I (Fall 1963), p. 129.