On returning to America [in 1958] I was
introduced to psychiatric adventures of a very different order,
for Aldous Huxley had recently published Doors of Perception
about his experiment with mescaline, and had by this time gone on
to explore the mysteries of LSD. Gerald Heard had joined him in
these investigations, and in my conversations with them I noticed
a marked change of spiritual attitude. To put it briefly, they
had ceased to be Manicheans. Their vision of the divine now
included nature, and they had become more relaxed and humane, so
that I found myself talking to men of my own persuasion. Yet it
struck me as highly improbable that a true spiritual experience
could follow from ingesting a particular chemical. Visions and
ecstasies, yes. A taste of the mystical, like swimming with
waterwings, perhaps. And perhaps a reawakening for someone who
had made the journey before, or an insight for a person well
practiced in something like Yoga or Zen.
Nevertheless, on these "inner planes" I
am of an adventurous nature, and am willing to give most things a
try. Both Aldous and my former student at the Academy,
mathematician John Whittelsey, were in touch with Keith Ditman,
psychiatrist in charge of LSD research at the UCLA department of
neuropsychiatry. John was working with him as statistician in a
project designed both to test the effect of the drug on
alcoholics and to make a map of its effects on the human
organism. So many of their subjects had reported states of
consciousness that read like accounts of mystical experience that
they were interested in trying it out on "experts" in
this field, even though a mystic is never really expert in the
same way as a neurologist or a philologist, for his work is not a
cataloguing of objects. But I qualified as an expert insofar as I
had also a considerable intellectual knowledge of the psychology
and philosophy of religion: a knowledge that subsequently
protected me from the more dangerous aspects of this adventure,
giving me a compass and something of a map for this wild
territory. Furthermore, I trusted Keith Ditman. He wasn't scared,
like so many Jungians, of the unconscious. Nor was he foolhardy,
but seemed level-headed, cautious, tentative in opinion, yet
lively, bright-eyed, and intensely interested in his work.
We made, then, an initial experiment at Keith's
office in Beverly Hills in which I was joined by Edwin Halsey,
formerly private secretary to Ananda Coomaraswamy, and then
teaching comparative religions at Claremont. We each took one
hundred micrograms of d-lysergic acid diethylamide-25, courtesy
of the Sandoz Company, and set out on an eight-hour exploration.
For me the journey was hilariously beautiful—as if I and all
my perceptions had been transformed into a marvelous arabesque or
multidimensional maze in which everything became transparent,
translucent, and reverberant with double and triple meanings.
Every detail of perception became vivid and important, even ums
and ers and throat-clearing when someone read poetry, and time
slowed down in such a way that people going about their business
outside seemed demented in failing to see that the destination of
life is this eternal moment. We walked across the street to a
white, Spanish-style church, surrounded with olive trees and
gleaming in the sun against a sky of absolute, primordial blue,
and saw the grass and the plants as inexplicably geometrized in
every detail so as to suggest that nothing in nature was
disordered. We went back and looked at a volume of Chinese and
Japanese sumi, or black-ink paintings, all of which seemed
to be perfectly accurate photographs. There were even highlights
and shadows on Mu-ch'i's persimmons that were certainly not
intended by the artist. At one time Edwin felt somewhat
overwhelmed and remarked, "I just can't wait until I'm
little old me again, sitting in a bar." In the meantime he
was looking like an incarnation of Apollo in a supernatural
necktie, contemplatively holding an orange lily.
(1)
All in all my first experience was aesthetic rather
than mystical, and then and there—which is, alas, rather
characteristic of me—I made a tape for broadcast saying that
I had looked into this phenomenon and found it most interesting,
but hardly what I would call mystical. This tape was heard by two
psychiatrists at the Langley-Porter Clinic in San Francisco,
Sterling Bunnell and Michael Agron, who thought I should
reconsider my views. After all, I had made only one experiment
and there was something of an art to getting it really working.
It was thus that Bunnell set me off on a series of experiments
which I have recorded in
The Joyous Cosmology, and in the
course of which I was reluctantly compelled to admit that—at
least in my own case—LSD had brought me into an undeniably
mystical state of consciousness. But oddly, considering my
absorption in Zen at the time, the flavor of these experiences
was Hindu rather than Chinese. Somehow the atmosphere of Hindu
mythology and imagery slid into them, suggesting at the same time
that Hindu philosophy was a local form of a sort of undercover
wisdom, inconceivably ancient, which everyone knows in the back
of his mind but will not admit. This wisdom was simultaneously
holy and disreputable, and therefore necessarily esoteric, and it
came in the dress of a totally logical, obvious, and basic common
sense.
In sum I would say that LSD, and such other
psychedelic substances as mescaline, psilocybin, and hashish,
confer polar vision; by which I mean that the basic pairs of
opposites, the positive and the negative, are seen as the
different poles of a single magnet or circuit. This knowledge is
repressed in any culture that accentuates the positive, and is
thus a strict taboo. It carries Gestalt psychology, which insists
on the mutual interdependence of figure and background, to its
logical conclusion in every aspect of life and thought; so that
the voluntary and the involuntary, knowing and the known, birth
and decay, good and evil, outline and inline, self and other,
solid and space, motion and rest, light and darkness, are seen as
aspects of a single and completely perfect process. The
implication of this may be that there is nothing in life to be
gained or attained that is not already here and now, an
implication thoroughly disturbing to any philosophy or culture
which is seriously playing the game which I have called White Must
Win.
Polar vision is thus undoubtedly dangerous—but
so is electricity, so are knives, and so is language. When an
immature person experiences the identity of the voluntary and the
involuntary, he may feel, on the one hand, utterly powerless, or
on the other, equal to the Hebrew-Christian God. If the former,
he may panic from the sense that no one is in charge of things.
If the latter, he may contract offensive megalomania.
Nevertheless, he has had immediate experience of the fact that
each one of us is an organism-environment field, of which the two
aspects, individual and world, can be separated only for purposes
of discussion. If such a person sees thus clearly the mutuality
of good and evil, he may jump to the conclusion that ethical
principles are so relative as to be without validity—which
might be utterly demoralizing for any repressed adolescent.
Fortunately for me, my God was not so much the Hebrew-Christian
autocrat as the Chinese Tao, "which loves and nourishes all
things, but does not lord it over them."
I hesitated a long time before writing The
Joyous Cosmology, considering the dangers of letting the
general public be further aware of this potent alchemy. But since
Aldous had already let the cat out of the bag in Doors of
Perception and Heaven and Hell, and the subject was
already under discussion both in psychiatric journals and in the
public press, I decided that more needed to be said, mainly to
soothe public alarm and to do what I could to forestall the
disasters that would follow from legal repression. For I was
seriously alarmed at the psychedelic equivalents of bathtub gin,
and of the prospect of these chemicals, uncontrolled in dosage
and content, being bootlegged for use in inappropriate settings
without any competent supervision whatsoever. I maintained that,
for lack of any better solution, they should be restricted for
psychiatric prescription. But the state and federal governments
were as stupid as I had feared, and by passing unenforceable laws
against LSD not only drove it underground but prevented proper
research. Such laws are unenforceable because any competent
chemist can manufacture LSD, or a close equivalent, and the
substance can be disguised as anything from aspirin to
blotting-paper. It has been painted on the thin pages of a small
Bible, and eaten sheet by sheet. But as a result of this terror,
the injudicious use of LSD (often mixed with strychnine or
belladonna or quite dangerous psychedelics) has afflicted
uncounted young people with paranoid, megalomanic, and schizoid
symptoms.
I see this disaster in the larger context of
American prohibitionism, which has done more than anything else
to corrupt the police and foster disrespect for law, and which
our economic pressure has, in the special problem of drug abuse,
spread to the rest of the world. Although my views on this matter
may be considered extreme, I feel that in any society where the
powers of Church and State are separate, the State is without
either right or wisdom in enforcing sumptuary laws against crimes
which have no complaining victims. When the police are asked to
be armed clergymen enforcing ecclesiastical codes of morality,
all the proscribed sins of the flesh, of lust and luxury,
become—since we are legislating against human
nature—exceedingly profitable ventures for criminal
organizations which can pay both the police and the politicians
to stay out of trouble. Those who cannot pay constitute about
one-third of the population of our overcrowded and hopelessly
mismanaged prisons, and the business of their trial by due
process delays and over taxes the courts beyond all reason. These
are nomogenic crimes, caused by bad laws, just as iatrogenic
diseases are caused by bad doctoring. The offenders seldom feel
guilty but often positively righteous in their opposition to this
legal hypocrisy, and so emerge from prison loathing and despising
the social order more than ever.
I speak with passion on this problem because I have
often served as a consultant to the staffs of state institutions
for mental and moral deviants, such as the institutional hells
which the State of California maintains at San Quentin,
Vacaville, Atascadero, and Napa—to mention only those I have
visited, and knowing that they are considerably worse in other
parts of the country, and most especially in those states
afflicted with religious fanaticism. Relative to our own times,
the prosecution of sumptuary laws is as tyrannical as any of the
excesses of the Holy Inquisition or the Star Chamber.
My retrospective attitude to LSD is that when one
has received the message, one hangs up the phone. I think I have
learned from it as much as I can, and, for my own sake, would not
be sorry if I could never use it again. But it is not, I believe,
generally known that very many of those who had constructive
experiences with LSD, or other psychedelics, have turned from
drugs to spiritual disciplines—abandoning their water-wings
and learning to swim. Without the catalytic experience of the
drug they might never have come to this point, and thus my
feeling about psychedelic chemicals, as about most other drugs
(despite the vague sense of the word), is that they should serve
as medicine rather than diet.
It was again through Aldous that I first heard of a
Dr. Leary of Harvard University who was doing experimental work
with the drug psilocybin, derived from a mushroom that had long
been used for religious purposes by some of the Indians of
Mexico. From the detached and scholarly flavor of Aldous's
account of this work I was expecting Timothy Leary to be a
formidable pandit, but the man I first met in a New York
restaurant was an extremely charming Irishman who wore a
hearing-aid as stylishly as if it had been a monocle. Nothing
could then have told me that anyone so friendly and intelligent
would become one of the most outlawed people in the world, a
fugitive from justice charged with the sin of Socrates, and all
upon the legal pretext of possessing trivial amounts of
marijuana.
It so happened that Timothy was working under a
department of the University that had long been of interest to
me, the Department of Social Relations, which had been
established by Henry Murray. On several occasions I had visited
Murray's domain, at 7 Divinity Avenue, and been entertained at
luncheons where, as host, he showed a special genius for arousing
intelligent conversation and for making other people appear at
their best. In his company there would turn up—it might
be— I. A. Richards, Mircea Eliade, Clyde Kluckhon, or Jerome
Bruner for such civilized intellectual discourse as is all too
rarely heard in academic circles, where it now seems a point of
honor to keep off one's subject and discuss the trivia of
departmental politics. But these gentlemen were ashamed neither
of their scholarship nor their personalities, and on one
occasion—over an old-fashioned before lunch—I
distinctly heard Richards remarking, "Well, as a matter of
course, I always regard myself as the perfect human being."
I was so delighted with Murray's milieu that, with the assistance
of a wealthy friend, I managed to get myself a two-year
fellowship for travel and study under his and the University's
dispensation—a breather which gave me time to compile The
Two Hands of God and to write Beyond Theology.
The time I could actually spend at Harvard was all
too brief, for this is a university so assured of its
intellectual reputation that its faculty can afford to be
adventurous. But—even at Harvard—you must draw the line
somewhere, and Timothy did not know just where that was. Whenever
I was in Cambridge I kept closely in touch with him and with his
associates Richard Alpert and Ralph Metzner, for—quite aside
from the particular fascinations of chemical mysticism—these
were the most lively and imaginative people in the department
other than Murray himself, who watched their doings with deep and
constructively critical interest even after his official
retirement.
I was also interested in the work of B. F. Skinner,
wondering how so absolute a determinist could write a utopia, Walden
Two, and digging into his beautifully reasoned writings until
I discovered the flaw in his system. This I explained in a
lecture which Skinner, though I had forewarned him in person, did
not attend.(2) I saw that his reasoning was still haunted by the
ghost of man as a something—presumably a conscious
ego—determined by environmental and other forces, for it
makes no sense to speak of a determinism unless there is some
passive object which is determined. But his own reasoning made it
clear, not so much that human behavior was determined by other
forces, but rather that it could not be described apart from
those forces and was, indeed, inseparable from them. It did not
seem to have occurred to him that "cause" and
"effect" are simply two phases of, or two ways of
looking at, one and the same event. It is not, then, that effects
(in this case human behaviors) are determined by their causes.
The point is that when events are fully and properly described
they will be found to involve and contain processes which were at
first thought separate from them, and were thus called causes as
distinct from effects. Taken to his logical conclusion, Skinner
is not saying that man is determined by nature, as something
external to him: he is actually saying that man is nature, and is
describing a process which is neither determined nor determining.
He simply provides reason for the essentially mystical view that
man and universe are inseparable.
Such problems were involved in my attempts to work
out an intellectual structure for what Timothy and his friends
were experiencing in their psychedelic states of consciousness.
For I saw that their enthusiasm for these states was leading them
further and further away from the ideals of rational objectivity
to which the department and the University were committed;
especially as the department had recently acquired a computer and
was going overboard for the statistical approach to psychology.
On the one hand, I was trying to persuade Timothy's clan to keep
command of intellectual rigor, and to express their experiences
in terms that people bending over backward to be scientific would
understand. On the other hand, I was trying to get such
conservatives as David McClelland, Murray's successor, and
Skinner to see that the so-called "transactional"
description of man as an organism-environment field was a
theoretical description of what the nature-mystic experiences
immediately, whereas most scientists continue to experience
themselves as separate and detached observers, determined or
otherwise. Their feelings lag far behind their theoretical views,
for psychologists, in particular, are still under the emotional
sway of Newtonian mechanics, and their personal feelings of
identity have not yet been modified by quantum mechanics and
field theory.
But Timothy could not contain himself, and it
seemed to him more and more that, in practice, the procedures of
scientific objectivity and rigor were simply an academic ritual
designed to convince the university establishment that your work
was dull and trivial enough to be considered "sound."
It so happens that psychedelic chemicals make one curiously
sensitive to pomposity. Anyone talking memorandumese, or
religious or political rhetoric, or anyone waxing enthusiastic
about a product in which he does not believe, sounds so
ridiculous that you cannot keep a straight face: one excellent
reason why no government can tolerate a "turned-on"
populace. Both Timothy and Richard Alpert began to see,
furthermore, that a distinguished academic career was not all
that important, since the university was already an obsolete
institution representing the nineteenth-century mythology of
scientific naturalism. But when one arrives at this point of view
after, if not because of, "taking drugs," it becomes
impossible to maintain rational discourse with the establishment,
even though some of its more distinguished brains are pickled in
alcohol. Thus things came to the point where Timothy and Richard
were as suspect as if they had been lobotomized or become
Jehovah's Witnesses.
I was present at the dinner party where Timothy
finally agreed with David McClelland to withdraw experimentation
with drugs from his work under the department. David was making
the point that they had become too enthusiastic about their work
to preserve scientific integrity, and with this I was in partial
agreement, because to be intellectually honest you must be able
to come to terms with any intelligible criticism of your ideas.
When I have received inspirations during an LSD session, I have
always reviewed them subsequently in the light of cold sobriety,
in which some, but by no means all, of them appear to be
nonsense. But David was going so far as to insist that no one
with a religious commitment could really do scientific work in
psychology, and this so amazed me that I protested, "Now,
David, are you seriously saying that, for example, a very sober,
honest, and devoted Quaker, well educated and straight from
Philadelphia, could not be entrusted with scientific work?"
I do not remember his reaction, but I was unaware at the time
that he himself was a concerned Quaker.
What followed is now a matter of history. Timothy
and Richard continued their experiments unofficially, and
scandalized the University authorities by including
undergraduates in their work. Henry Murray, however, with a wise
look on his face, reminisced about the days when psychoanalysis
first struck Harvard, and what an uproar of indignation had come
to pass when a psychoanalyzed faculty member had committed
suicide. Nevertheless, I myself began to be concerned, if mildly,
at the direction of Timothy's enthusiasm, for to his own circle
of friends and students he had become a charismatic religious
leader who, well trained as he was in psychology, knew very
little about religion and mysticism and their pitfalls. The
uninstructed adventurer with psychedelics, as with Zen or yoga or
any other mystical discipline, is an easy victim of what Jung
calls "inflation," of the messianic megalomania that
comes from misunderstanding the experience of union with God. It
leads to the initial mistake of casting pearls before swine, and,
as time went on, I was dismayed to see Timothy converting himself
into a popular store-front messiah with his name in lights,
advocating psychedelic experience as a new world-religion. He was
moving to a head-on collision with the established religions of
biblical theocracy and scientific mechanism, and simply asking
for martyrdom.
Life with Timothy, as I saw it in his communes at
Newton Center and Millbrook, was never dull, even though it was
hard to understand how people who had witnessed the splendors of
psychedelic vision could be so aesthetically blind as to live in
relative squalor, with perpetually unmade beds, unswept floors,
and hideously decrepit furnishings. It could be, I suppose, that
being turned-on all the time is like looking through a
teleidoscope: it makes far more interesting patterns out of
messes (such as dirty ashtrays) than out of such orderly scenes
as neatly arranged books in shelves. But Timothy was the center
of a vortex which pulled in the intellectually and spiritually
adventurous from all quarters, and in his entourage student
hippies jostled with millionaires and eminent professors, while
to spend an evening with him in New York City or Los Angeles was
to be swept from one exotically sumptuous apartment to another.
Through all this, Timothy himself remained an
essentially humorous, kindly, lovable, and (in some directions)
intellectually brilliant person, and therefore it was utterly
incongruous— however predictable—to become aware of the
grim watchfulness of police in the background. Now nothing so
easily deranges people using psychedelics as a paranoid
atmosphere, so that by their intervention the police created the
very evils from which they were supposed to be protecting us. In
the early days when LSD, psilocybin, and mescaline were used more
or less legitimately among reasonably mature people, there was
little trouble with "bum trips," and episodes of
anxiety were usually turned into occasions for insight. But when
federal and state authorities began their systematic persecution,
the fears invoked to justify it became self-fulfilling
prophecies, and there was now real reason for a paranoid
atmosphere in all experiments conducted outside the sterile and
clinical surroundings of psychiatric hospitals. Although Timothy
won a case in the Supreme Court which technically quashed the
federal law against possessing and using (but not against
importing) marijuana, the state laws remained in force, and he
was harassed wherever he went, until finally imprisoned without
bail with so many technical charges against him that there was
nothing for it but to escape and seek such asylum in exile as he
could find.
Richard Alpert, who in all this had played a much
quieter role, also went into exile, but in another way. While
visiting India he realized that he had come to the end of the
identity as a psychologist which he had thus far played, so much
so that he could not envisage any normal role or career for
himself in the United States. Furthermore, he felt as I did that
he had learned all that he could get from psychedelics, and that
what remained was actually to live out the life of freedom from
worldly games and anxieties. He therefore took the name of Baba
Ram Dass, and came back as a white-robed and bearded sannyasin,
full of laughter and energy, dedicated simply to living in the
eternal now. And, as might be expected, people raised their
eyebrows and shook their heads, saying that the old showman was
playing another game, or, alas, what drugs had done to such a
promising young scientist, or that it was just great to be a sannyasin
with an independent income. But I felt that he had done just the
right thing for himself. I spent many hours with him and sensed
that he was genuinely happy, that his intelligence was as sharp
as ever, and that he was confident enough in what he was doing
not to try to persuade me to follow his example. Certainly he was
having great pleasure in the multitudes of young people who came
to listen to him, but in this respect he and I are alike, for we
enjoy thinking out loud with an appreciative and intelligent
audience just as we enjoy landscape or music. But would he be
going about in a white robe if he were really sincere? Indeed
yes. For in a country where a philosopher's sincerity is measured
by the ordinariness of his dress, I too will sometimes wear a
kimono or sarong in public, lest, like Billy Graham, I should
attract an enormous following of dangerously serious and
humorless people.
Now, in retrospect, it must be said that the
Psychedelic Decade of the sixties has really begun to awaken
psychotherapists from their studiedly pedestrian and reductionist
attitudes to life. Here I am using the word
"psychedelic" to mean all "mind-manifesting"
processes: not only chemicals, but also philosophies,
neurological experiments, and spiritual disciplines. At the
beginning of the decade one felt that so many psychiatrists saw
themselves as guardians of an official reality which might be
described as the world seen on a bleak Monday morning. They saw a
good orientation to reality as coping—as having a normal
heterosexual (and preferably monogamous) sex life, a "mature
adult relationship" as it was called; as being able to drive
a car and hold down a nine-to-five job; as being able to recall
the product of g and 7 without hesitation; and as being able to
participate in group activities and show qualities of initiative
and leadership.
It was, as I remember, in 1959 that I was asked to
speak before a meeting of the American Psychiatric Association in
Los Angeles. Learned statistical papers had dragged on and on,
overtime, and my turn came when we were already late for lunch. I
abandoned my prepared remarks (being what the press calls a
textual deviate) and said:
"Gentlemen, this is not going to be a
scientific paper because I am a simple philosopher, not a
psychiatrist, and you are hungry for lunch. We philosophers are
very grateful to you for showing us the unconscious emotional
bases of some of our ideas, but the time is coming for us to show
you the unconscious intellectual assumptions behind some of
yours. Psychiatric literature is full of unexamined metaphysics.
Even Jung, who is so readily repudiated for his 'mysticism,'
bends over backward to avoid metaphysical considerations on the
pretext that he is strictly a physician and a scientist. This is
impossible. Every human being is a metaphysician just as every
philosopher has appetites and emotions—and by this I mean
that we all have certain basic assumptions about the good life
and the nature of reality. Even the typical businessman who
asserts that he is a practical fellow unconcerned with higher
things declares thereby that he is a pragmatist or a positivist,
and not a very thoughtful one at that.
"I wonder, then, how much consideration you
give to the fact that most of your own assumptions about the good
life and reality come directly from the scientific naturalism of
the nineteenth century, from the strictly metaphysical hypothesis
that the universe is a mechanism obeying Newtonian laws, and that
there is no other god beside it. Psychoanalysis, which is
actually psychohydraulics following Newton's mechanics, begins
from the mystical assertion that the psychosexual energy of the
unconscious is a blind and stupid outrush of pure lust, following
Haeckel's notion that the universe at large is a manifestation of
primordially oafish and undiscriminating energy. It should be
obvious to you that this is an opinion for which there has never
been the least evidence, and which, furthermore, ignores the
evidence that we ourselves, supposedly making intelligent
remarks, are manifestations of that same energy.
"On the basis of this unexamined, derogatory,
and shaky opinion as to the nature of biological and physical
energy, some of your psychoanalytic members have this morning
dubbed all the so-called mystical states of consciousness as
'regressive,' as leading one back to a dissolution of the
individual intelligence in an acid bath of amniotic fluid,
reducing it to featureless identity with this—your First
Cause—mess of blindly libidinous energy. Now, until you have
found some substantial evidence for your metaphysics you will
have to admit that you have no way of knowing which end of your
universe is up, so that in the meantime you should abstain from
easy conclusions as to which directions are progressive and which
regressive. [Laughter]"
It had always seemed to me that, by and large,
psychotherapists lacked the metaphysical dimension; in other
words, that they affected the mentality of insurance clerks and
lived in a world scrubbed and disinfected of all mystery, magic,
color, music, and awe, with no place in the heart for the sound
of a distant gong in a high and hidden valley. This is an
exaggeration from which I will except most of the Jungians and
such occasional freaks as Groddeck, Prinzhorn, G. R. Heyer,
Wilhelm Reich, and others less well known. Thus, writing of
American psychology in 1954, Abraham Maslow remarked that it was
overpragmatic, over-Puritan, and overpurposeful.... No textbooks have chapters on fun and gaiety, on leisure and meditation, on loafing and puttering, on aimless, useless, and purposeless activity.... American psychology is busily occupying itself with only half of life to the neglect of the other—and perhaps most important—half.(3)
The publication of my Psychotherapy East and
West and Joyous Cosmology early in the sixties brought
me into public and private discussion with many leading members
of the psychiatric profession, and I was astonished at what
seemed to be their actual terror of unusual states of
consciousness. I had thought that psychiatrists should have been
as familiar with these wildernesses and unexplored territories of
the mind as Indian guides, but as I perused something like the
two huge volumes of The American Handbook of Psychiatry, I
found only maps of the soul as primitive as ancient maps of the
world. There were vaguely outlined emptinesses called
Schizophrenia, Hysteria, and Catatonia, accompanied with little
more solid information than "Here be dragons and
cameleopards." At a party in New York I fell into
conversation with one of that city's most eminent analysts, and
as soon as he learned that I had experimented with LSD his
personality became surgically professional. He donned his mask
and rubber gloves and addressed me as a specimen, wanting to know
all the surface details of perceptual and kinesthetic
alterations, which I could see him fitting into place zip, pop,
and clunk with his keenly calipered mind. I took part in a
televised debate on "Open End," with David Susskind
trying to moderate between the two factions of psychedelic
enthusiasts and establishment psychiatrists, and in the ensuing
uproar and confusion of passions I found myself flung into the
position of moderator, telling both sides that they had no basis
in evidence for their respective fanaticisms.
In all these contacts I began to feel that the only
psychiatrists who had any solid information were such
neurologists as David Rioch, of Walter Reed, and Karl Pribram, of
Stanford. They could tell me things I didn't know and were the
first to admit how little they knew, for they were realizing the
odd fact that their brains were more intelligent than their minds
or, to say the least, that the human nervous system was of such a
high order of complexity that we were only just beginning to
organize it in terms of conscious thought. I sat in on an
intimate seminar with Pribram in which he explained in most
careful detail how the brain is no mere reflector of the external
world, but how its structure almost creates the forms and
patterns that we see, selecting them from an immeasurable
spectrum of vibrations as the hands of a harpist pluck chords and
melodies from a spectrum of strings. For Karl Pribram is working
on the most delicate epistemological puzzle: how the brain evokes
a world which is simultaneously the world which it is in, and to
wonder, therefore, whether the brain evokes the brain.(4) Put it
in metaphysical terms, psychological terms, physical terms, or
neurological terms: it is always the same. How can we know what
we know without knowing knowing?
This question must be answered, if it can ever be
answered, before it can make any sense at all to say that reality
is material, mental, electrical, spiritual, a fact, a dream, or
anything else. But always, in contemplating this conundrum, a
peculiar feeling comes over me, as if I couldn't remember my own
name which is right on the tip of my tongue. It really does make
one wonder if, after all . . . if . . .
Anyhow, at the end of these ten years I have the
impression that the psychiatric world has opened up to the
possibility that there are more things in heaven and earth than
were dreamed of in its philosophy. Orthodox psychoanalysis has
appeared more and more to be a religious cult and institutional
psychiatry a system of brainwashing. The field is giving way to
movements and techniques increasingly free from the tacit
metaphysics of nineteenth-century mechanism: Humanistic
Psychology, Transpersonal Psychology, Gestalt Therapy,
Transactional Psychology, Encounter Therapy, Psychosynthesis
(Assagioli), Bioenergetics (Reich), and a dozen more interesting
approaches with awkward names.
Historians and social commentators will try to
discover from any autobiographer how much he has influenced the
movements of his time and how much they have influenced him. I
can say only that as I get older I get back into that strange
childlike feeling of not being able to draw any certain line
between the world and my own action upon it, and I wonder if this
is also felt by people who have never been in the public eye or
had any claim to influence. A very ordinary person might have the
impression that there are millions of himself, and that all of
them, as one, are doing just what it is in humanity—that is,
in himself —to do. In this way he could perhaps feel more
important than someone who has taken a particular view and
followed a lonely path.
Part of the problem is that the closer I get to
present time, the harder it is to see things in perspective. The
events of twenty, thirty, and forty years ago are clearer in my
mind, and seem almost closer in time than what has happened quite
recently— in years that seem fantastically and excitingly
crowded with people and happenings. I feel that I must wait
another ten years to find out just what I was doing, in the field
of psychotherapy, with Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert, Fritz
Perls and Ronald Laing, Margaret Rioch and Anthony Sutich,
Bernard Aaronson and Stanley Krippner, Michael Murphy and John
Lilly; in theology with Bishops James Pike and John A. T.
Robinson, Dom Aelred Graham and Huston Smith; and in the
formation of the mystical counterculture with Lama Anagarika
Govinda and Shunryu Suzuki, Allen Ginsberg and Theodore Roszak,
Bernard Gunther and Gia-fu Feng, Ralph Metzner and Claudio
Naranjo, Norman 0. Brown and Nancy Wilson Ross, Lama Chogyam
Trungpa and Ch'ung-liang Huang, Douglas Harding and G. Spencer
Brown, Richard Weaver and Robert Shapiro— to mention only a
few of the names and faces gathering out of the recent past to
tell me that I have hardly begun this story.
1 Several years later he was killed in an
automobile accident on his way to Ajijic in Mexico, where he had
made his home. And so went into obscurity a most extraordinary
and brilliant man, who wrote a book that no one would publish
(his Harvard Ph.D. dissertation) on history as a subjective
illusion, based on the conflicting views of modern critics of the
New Testament. He was both a scholar and an artist in life from
whose conversation and criticism of my work I profited greatly.
However, his liberal views were too much both for Reed College
and for Claremont, where he was refused preferment and
tenure—unless, as he was once told, he would settle down and marry
a nice Episcopalian girl. (back)
2 "The Individual as Man-World," The Psychedelic Review, Vol. 1, No. 1, (Cambridge, Mass.: June 1963).
3 Motivation and Personality (New York Harper & Row, Publishers, 1954), pp. 291-92.
4 see his Languages of the Brain, (Englewood Cliffs, NJ Prentice-Hall, 1971).