The Natural Mind
Andrew Weil
1. What This Book is About
THIS BOOK IS AN EXPOSITION of a theory that can help us. It is
a primer of pharmacology or a program for social reform. Rather,
it is the germ of a new way of thinking about drugs and consciousness—a
way that creates possibilities for solving a problem that divides
us bitterly in our nation, in our schools, and in our homes.
I have been actively interested in drugs that affect the mind
for the past ten years, and during that time I have had many opportunities
to write this book. I have declined to do so until now for a number
of reasons that are pertinent to the ideas I intend to develop
in these pages. Before I discuss them, let me state briefly why
I now wish to write.
The growing presence in our midst of chemicals that seem to alter
consciousness raises questions of the utmost importance for us
as individuals and as social beings. Examples of these questions
are: What do these drugs tell us about the relationship between
mind and body? Are they legitimate tools (in any sense) for changing
the mind in a direction of greater awareness? How can a society
come to terms with the individual urge to alter awareness? These
questions are important because they bear directly on the nature
of consciousness, which is, ultimately, the only problem worthy
of total intellectual effort. It is the concern of all the world's
philosophies and religions, other problems being less precise
statements of the same thing. All of us are working on the problem
of consciousness on some level, and the conclusions we come to
determine what we think about ourselves and the universe, how
we live, and how we act. The complex phenomena associated with
drugs in our country seem to me to be significant pieces of evidence
to be taken into account in this process—clues to help us in
our work whether we use drugs or not. It would be useful to have
this evidence presented clearly and unemotionally.
In directing attention to matters of consciousness, I am not ignoring
or minimizing the very real problems associated with drugs. Our
news media are full of documented reports on the tragic consequences
of the misuse of chemical agents in search of highs. But having
acknowledged the reality of these problems, I propose to find
solutions to them by looking to the positive aspects of drug experience
rather than to the negative ones (which are visible all around
us). By positive I mean simply "tending in the direction
of increase or progress" rather than the reverse, and I will
attempt to justify this methodology in the course of the book.
During my years as a drug expert (a role I now cheerfully abandon)
I have sat through a great many conferences about drugs attended
by all sorts of people, but I have never heard the important questions
given the attention they deserve. Instead, I have listened to
pharmacologists arguing over changes (or possibly no changes)
in the chromosomes of rats exposed to LSD, to users rambling on
about the purely hedonistic aspects of drug experience, to physicians
pretending to themselves that medical science can explain the
subjective effects of drugs, to parents and educators begging
for methods to make youngsters turn away from drugs, and so on
and so on. These discussions have been emotionally charged, but
the intellectual level has been uniformly low, whether the participants
have been psychiatrists or addicts, students or policemen. I have
waited for years for the talk to get around to the interesting
questions, but it never has. Nor does it look as if it will. Consequently,
I have resolved to stop going to drug conferences and to write
instead.
In addition, I have collected an unusual body of information on
this subject that I feel obligated to share with people who are
interested in the meaningful questions. Through a series of coincidences
I have had a chance to look at drugs from the point of view of
a journalist, a user, an ethnobotanist, a physician, a laboratory
pharmacologist, a "drug abuse expert," and a Federal
government employee. No one of these viewpoints by itself enabled
me to understand what I saw or to come to any useful conclusions.
But gradually, from all the experiences I have had in these diverse
positions, certain unifying themes have emerged. And to my great
surprise, the principles that I have begun to discern leave me
profoundly optimistic about the possibility of extricating ourselves
from the desperate situation we now find ourselves in. In the
following chapters I will describe how I have arrived at certain
conclusions and will go into some detail about the reasons for
my optimism.
Among the considerations that have kept me from writing until
now, the emotionalism of the subject has been uppermost in my
mind. Drugs are not an emotionally neutral topic of discourse.
There is no such thing as a disinterested drug expert, despite
the stance of many scientists who claim to be presenting purely
objective information. This is so precisely because the issues
raised by drugs touch so closely upon our profoundest hopes and
fears. Everyone who speaks or writes about drugs (and certainly
all who "investigate" them) together with everyone who
hears or reads what is said and written has an emotional involvement
with the information. The exact nature of this involvement differs
from person to person in both degree and quality, but it is always
there. Consequently, it is extremely difficult to talk about drugs
except in a direct interpersonal situation, where, at least, there
is some possibility of monitoring emotional reactions.
In the course of my writings and lectures I have learned that
people hear what they want to hear and tune out what they do not
want to hear.[1] I have
also observed that the distortions of communication caused by
emotional investments in preconceived notions are most damaging
in groups that regard themselves to be free of such notions, such
as physicians and pharmacologists.
Where a topic provokes emotional reactions, one may expect to
see a closely related process of polarization in which divergent
interpretations of data develop. The controversies that divide
us over drugs illustrate this process well, for they are not so
much battles over observations as battles over the significance
to be attached to observations. No careful observer doubts that
heavy marijuana smoking correlates with an "amotivational
syndrome" characterized by lassitude, indifference, and a
neurotic inability to accomplish things society considers important.
But as soon as we try to interpret that correlation we run into
trouble. Is heavy marijuana smoking a cause of amotivation, as
many psychiatrists tell us, or is it simply another manifestation
of an underlying (and unknown) psychological process? At every
turn in our examination of observations concerned with drugs,
we are forced to choose between rival interpretations. What are
the real facts?
The answer, very simply, is that there are no facts. Or, more
precisely, there are no facts uncontaminated by some degree of
value judgment. Of course, the greater the emotional investments
(or biases) of the participants in this muddle, the greater will
be the degree of contamination. I cannot emphasize too strongly
that everything we hear and read today about drugs is affected
in this way; all facts about drugs are merely masquerading as
such. Nor can I repeat too often that the problem is likely to
be most serious in just those cases where it appears to be absent.
As I shall show in a later chapter, the pharmacologist who "just
gives the facts" about LSD, heroin, and marijuana is often
interpreting data through the distortions of biases so sweeping
and so internally consistent that they remain invisible and unconscious.
These considerations place serious obstacles in the way of anyone
who wants to understand what drugs mean. To get by them, we must
be carefully discriminating about the information we choose to
build theories on. A useful first step is an attempt to estimate
the degree and kind of bias present, a practice that should become
habitual. To check on the extent of conscious bias, one might
ask oneself, Does the person giving me this information have any
special case to make for or against drugs? In most instances today
the answer will be yes. Law enforcement officers have a personal
stake in making drugs look bad; regular users have a personal
stake in making them look good. This is garden-variety bias and
requires no special aptitude to spot; you just have to remember
to ask the question. An affirmative answer does not mean that
one should ignore the information, only that one should be alert
to the possibility that observations have been interpreted one
way rather than another on the basis of relatively meaningless
criteria.
Unconscious bias is harder to detect and much more important to
try to identify. The question to ask is, Does the person giving
this information view the subject from a special perspective that
might limit the validity of his generalizations? Unconscious bias
is as common among proponents of drugs as among opponents. Here
are two glaring examples, one from each pole. When I was conducting
human experiments with marijuana in Boston in 1968, a Federal
Narcotics Bureau agent told me that no matter how my experiments
came out, he would remain convinced that "marijuana makes
people aggressive and violent." My research had nothing to
do with that possibility, but I asked him what his evidence was
for his belief. He had one piece of evidence dating from the early
1950s, when he had been seized by a curiosity to watch people
smoke the drug. (His official duties were exclusively concerned
with large-scale underworld heroin traffic and he had never come
into contact with actual users of marijuana.) Accordingly, he
had disguised himself as a beatnik and made his way to a Greenwich
Village tea party. When he revealed himself as a Narcotics Bureau
agent, "everyone there became aggressive and violent."
Most people laugh when I tell this story because the logical fallacy
is obvious. But when I tried to point it out to this well-meaning
man in Boston, he said, "That's what I saw with my own eyes."
In February 1970 I attended a conference in California at which
a young, radical sociologist presented data on drug use in American
communes. He stated his belief that "marijuana often facilitates
the development of communal life." Asked to give evidence
on this point, he explained that the question of who was going
to wash the dishes was representative of problems encountered
in making communes work. He said he had visited communes where
this problem had been solved "by having everyone get stoned
on marijuana and make a game of dish washing," and he added
that "marijuana is known to aid the performance of repetitive
tasks." When I objected to this last statement, he replied,
"Well, that's what I saw with my own eyes."
Now, suppose we take the trouble to set up formal double-blind
experiments on the relationship between being stoned and the ability
to tolerate dish washing. We might study two groups of subjects:
one would smoke marijuana, the other a placebo, and neither we
nor the subjects would know who was smoking what. We would let
each group wash dishes. I can predict with confidence that some
persons who smoked marijuana would find that dish washing was
never so easy. Others would find it harder than ever. Most would
find it no different from usual. This pattern of data is very
familiar; it comes up again and again in drug research today,
and it is one reason why laboratory experimentation on drugs like
marijuana has been so unhelpful.
When you ask a question in research and the data come back in
this unhelpful way—that is: sometimes yes, sometimes no, most
of the time it makes no difference—there is meaning in that
result. The meaning is: you have asked the wrong question. In
particular, you have tried to make something a causal variable
that is not a causal variable. In the case above, the wrongness
of the question lies in the hypothesis that the drug has anything
causal to do with dish-washing ability. Marijuana smoking and
happy dish washing may travel together in some communes, but there
is no reason to believe they are more than coincidentally related
It is the attempt to impose a causal relationship on their coincidental
association that leads to the framing of a wrongly stated hypothesis.
Experiments based on wrongly stated hypotheses uniformly produce
useless information.
Most of the research now being conducted on psychoactive drugs
is producing useless information at great expense; there is no
end of wrongly stated hypotheses. The reason for this state of
affairs is logical: precisely because drugs are an emotional subject,
drug taking stands out in glowing colors from any complex of behavior
of which it is a part. Consequently, observers (even highly trained
observers) tend to fall into the trap of trying to explain the
entire complex in terms of the drug taking—that is, to make
the drug a causal variable when it is not. The tendency to make
drugs causes of things we see associated with them is strong in
proportion to our emotional involvement, to our unconscious biases.
Often it is so strong that it blinds us to obvious factors that
are much more directly causative of the phenomena we observe (as
in the case of the narcotics agent who was sure that marijuana
makes people aggressive and violent). In other cases the attribution
of causal roles to drugs is an easy way to cover up ignorance
of true causes, which are often more complicated. I suspect, for
example, that the ability of some people to wash dishes happily
in a commune has to do with a great many factors of personal and
social motivation and that the presence or absence of marijuana
makes little difference. But we have no ready explanations for
variations in motivation from person to person and from setting
to setting.
Unconscious biases act like filters between our perceptions and
our intellects. They enable us to screen out observations that
do not fit in with our preconceived notions and to see causal
relationships where none exist. Worst of all, they blind us to
their own presence so that we are quick to defend our erroneous
hypotheses with shouts of "I saw it with my own eyes!"
I have written at some length about the nature of biases toward
drugs in amplification of my contention that it is difficult to
communicate accurate information on the subject. Having said all
this, I now owe the reader some commentary on my own biases, for,
as I have said, there is no such thing as a disinterested drug
expert.
I do not have any special case to make for or against the use
of drugs. In addition, it will become obvious in the course of
the book that my real interest is not drugs at all but consciousness.
As for unconscious biases, I am, by definition, unable to identify
any I hold at present, but I think I have identified and discarded
the commoner ones as I have progressed from one way of looking
at drugs to another. For instance, when I was a journalist I thought
as a journalist and unconsciously selected from among my observations
those that I knew would whet the emotional appetites of my readers.
I can give a specific example from an account I wrote for Look
magazine of the controversy leading to the dismissal of Richard
Alpert and Timothy Leary from Harvard University in 1963. In describing
the increasing popularity of LSD and mescaline in the Harvard
community in the early 1960s, I wrote, "There were stories
of students and others using hallucinogens for seductions, both
heterosexual and homosexual."[2]
Now, there were stories of students and others doing many other
less titillating things with hallucinogens, but I picked that
one for its journalistic value, and Look printed it for
the same reason. When I gave up the point of view of a journalist,
I came to see that it was one of the most distorted ways of interpreting
observations about drugs, and I resolved not to make use of it
again. In my experience the incidence of serious bias in journalistic
accounts of drugs approaches 100 per cent; I do not rate scientific
journalism any better.
Similarly, I have worked through the unconscious biases of the
pharmacologist and the clinician and have come to see them as
equally limiting viewpoints that prevented me from formulating
useful hypotheses about the effects of drugs. I want to stress
the criterion of "usefulness" in evaluating concepts.
The aim of scientific inquiry is not to reveal absolute truth
but to discover more and more useful ways of thinking about phenomena.
As philosophers love to remind us, we do not know anything absolutely.
For example, we don't know that the earth travels around the sun;
that is simply the most useful way we now know of interpreting
what we observe—useful because it simplifies things maximally
and thereby gives us greater accuracy of description and prediction
than any other concept yet proposed. If a more useful one came
along, most of us would probably have as much trouble accepting
it as the Ptolemaists had with the heliocentric theory. But more
useful concepts do catch on, however much they are opposed, because
they confer a greater degree of success in prediction and control
of the phenomenal world on those who accept them. Their adherents
thus become more fit in the Darwinian sense and have a distinct
survival advantage in the intellectual evolution of the race.
Our present ways of thinking about drugs are as useless to us
as a geocentric theory of the solar system. They leave us unable
to describe, predict, or control the phenomena associated with
drugs except in the crudest ways, as the insoluble drug problem
demonstrates. Insoluble problems of this sort are always manifestations
in the physical world of erroneous (that is, useless) conceptual
models. I believe we can literally think our way out of the drug
problem by changing the concepts from which it arises—the outmoded
ways of thinking about consciousness in its ordinary and nonordinary
forms. In essence, then, this book argues that our present ways
of thinking about drugs and their effects on the mind have ceased
being helpful to us and must be abandoned. I write it as a theorist
of consciousness, not as a drug expert, and I will present theories
that not only simplify thinking about drug-induced states but
also open up possibilities for eliminating the negative phenomena
now associated with drugs in our nation.
These theories are original, based entirely on my own observations,
and, especially, on my own experience. I cannot see the value
of trying to understand consciousness through methods that exclude
the most immediately relevant source of information: direct experience
of one's own inner states. I am thus firmly on the side of the
younger generation in its estimation of direct knowledge above
all other kinds of knowledge. Nothing is ever really known
by indirect means, least of all the nature of one's own mind.
My authority for presenting these theories is my own experience,
not the medical degree I received from Harvard. In fact, my medical
education included not one word on the subjects I shall discuss,
and in 1966 my classmates had to petition the chairman of the
Harvard Pharmacology Department for a single extracurricular lecture
on opiate addiction.
The highly personal nature of some of the experiences from which
my ideas have developed has been another source of reluctance
to publish this material until it coalesced into a solid theoretical
structure. In the following pages I have taken pains to be as
frank as possible and to present no hypothesis whose validity
I have not checked rigorously against both external and internal
observations. My methods place me within a tradition once honored
but now disowned by most experimental scientists: that of meticulous
self-observation. If the reader will look up a work like Sir Humphry
Davy's researches on nitrous oxide ( laughing gas) from 1799,
he will find a superb representation of this tradition. Davy uncovered
a wealth of useful information about an unknown substance, and
he did it with careful intelligence and a spirit of wonder that
seems to have vanished from our modern laboratories.[3]
Much research today—especially in the areas covered by this
book—has become mechanical and dull, more concerned with getting
and spending and publishing for the sake of publishing. Real science
presses forward on the frontiers of knowledge with a sense of
excitement and personal involvement.
Like investigators of previous centuries, I have no desire to
make my speculations inaccessible to nonscientists. Consciousness
is everybody's business because we all carry it about in our heads.
I hope that what I am going to say about it will be of as much
interest to musicians as to psychopharmacologists; consequently,
I have tried to avoid technical language to present these theories
in the form of readable chapters built around personal recollections.
For example, in the next chapter I will explore the question of
why people take drugs and will introduce the notion of an innate
human drive to experience periodic episodes of nonordinary consciousness—a
postulate that underlies much of what follows. I have included
in this chapter memories of Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1961,
when Alpert and Leary started giving and taking psilocybin. The
excitement these experiments generated in the university community
and the following that gathered about the two psychologists were
clear signs of what was to happen in the nation as a whole within
ten years, although few interpreted those signs correctly in 1961.
I am not writing history or autobiography. These recollections
are merely a starting point for talking about altered states of
consciousness— what they are, what their importance may be to
us as a species, and what role drugs play in making them available
to us. The conclusion I come to in the chapter is that altered
states of consciousness have a clear potential for positive psychic
development. The drug question can then be restated as a question
about methods rather than goals: are drugs the right or wrong
means to a desirable end?
Accordingly, the chapter that follows is a discussion of arguments
that can be made against the choice of drugs as a means to alter
consciousness. Certainly, a number of such arguments have been
made. Many of them first came to public attention in 1963 following
the dismissal of Alpert and Leary from Harvard, an event that
generated considerable national publicity. But we shall see that
most of the arguments that have been marshaled against drugs have
little basis in logic. It is easy to see why authorities like
college administrators get upset at the thought of young people
turning on with chemicals; it is more interesting and much more
important to try to understand why exponents of systems that value
alteration of consciousness (like yoga and Buddhism) take similar
positions.
The fourth chapter in this book, "What No One Wants to Know
about Marijuana," is a specific illustration of the ideas
developed in Chapter 3. It focuses on the inability of current
models of pharmacology and psychology to make sense of the effects
of the drug that is becoming the younger generation's intoxicant
of choice. As a jumping-off point I have used a short account
of my attempts in 1967-68 to set up in Boston the first well-controlled
human experiments with marijuana.
In the fifth chapter I will take the reader on an excursion to
the Amazon basin for a brief look at societies that use drugs
but do not appear to have problems with them. I offer this cross-cultural
comparison as evidence for my contention that the problems we
have with drugs are not inherent in the drugs but rather in our
ways of thinking about them and about the states of consciousness
people seek in them. I believe these South American "primitives"
have hit upon basic principles of drug use that are eminently
rational and therefore universally applicable, and I will suggest
ways in which they might be translated into terms relevant to
our own situation.
"The Topography of Straightland" summarizes conclusions
I have drawn about the nature of ordinary thinking during my years
as a physician and drug specialist, including a year with the
National Institute of Mental Health. In these positions I have
had a chance to observe firsthand the shortcomings of a way of
thinking that I believe to be the true source of the problems
that seem to be caused by the use of drugs.
"A Trip to Stonesville" is a companion chapter about
a very different kind of thinking that all of us have available
to us all the time. If we learn to use it, many problems, including
the drug problem, will begin to disappear. In this chapter I shall
discuss more fully the positive aspects of altered states of consciousness
to which I allude in Chapter 2, as well as the implications of
these theories for other fields of inquiry, particularly medicine
and psychiatry.
The eighth chapter is an attempt to use the conceptions developed
in earlier chapters and the method of nonordinary thinking to
come up with general suggestions as to how we might proceed as
a society to come to terms with the drugs that are here to stay.
The final chapter is a brief conclusion that considers the present
revolution in consciousness and where it might lead.
I hope this format will allow the reader to trace the evolution
of my ideas from the experiences that are their basis. The conclusions
I have arrived at did not require any special mental equipment,
and I believe their logic will be apparent to anyone who considers
the same evidence I have had a chance to go over. I do not regard
these ideas as my property in any sense; in fact, I publish them
now to make them available to all who care to try them out. Conceptual
models are designed for use; after all, that is the only way we
will find out how well they work.
I would conclude this introduction with a friendly word of caution.
The ideas in this book are revolutionary in the fullest sense
of the word. In their underlying optimism and their insistent
assignment of a higher priority to consciousness than to the material
correlates of consciousness, they diverge 180° from current
scientific orthodoxy. The reader who accepts my invitation to
step through the looking glass may find himself unwilling to go
back, for the paths that open up are many, and they lead to wonders
all of us can discover for ourselves.
Footnotes
1. Here is one example of what I mean. In
April 1970 Dr. Norman Zinberg and I published in the British journal
Nature a paper titled "A Comparison of Marijuana Users
and Non-users," based on interviews with students we had
conducted in the Boston area in 1968. The point of the article
was that no personality differences were detectable between people
who used marijuana recreationally and people who did not in the
student communities we studied. We took this finding as an indication
of how widespread use of the drug had become—so much so that
it cut across all categories; in other words, students who used
marijuana could not be differentiated from other students except
by their use of marijuana. By way of comparison we included data
on a group of "chronic users" of drugs—that is, young
men who identified themselves as members of the drug subculture.
Here, we did find distinguishing characteristics (such as a sense
of alienation from the dominant culture ) . In a paragraph of
minor importance to the whole paper, we wrote of these chronic
users: "There were no signs of overt intellectual deterioration."
As a result of a typographical error, the word no was omitted
in the article as it appeared in Nature. Despite the fact
that the sentence as printed made no sense, contradicted the rest
of the paragraph and had nothing to do with the paper as a whole,
the Washington Post ran a major story the following day
under the headline: DAILY POT-SMOKERS ERODE IN INTELLECT, RESEARCHERS
CLAIM. (back)
2. A.T. Weil, "The Strange Case of the
Harvard Drug Scandal," Look 27: 22 (5 November
1963), p.46 (back)
3. Sir Humphrey Davy, Researches, Chemical
and Philosophical, Chiefly Concerning Nitrous Oxide, or Dephlogisticated
Nitrous Air, and Its Respiration, London: 1839. (Accounts
of experiments performed in 1799.) (back)
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