Sacred Mushroom of Visions

by Ralph Metzner

  1. Feeling of unity, internal and external. Internal unity is described as “the loss of usual sense impressions and loss of self without becoming unconscious.” External unity is “a sense of underlying oneness . . . felt behind the empirical multiplicity.”

  2. Transcendence of Time and Space. The loss of the usual sense of time, personal and impersonal, as well as orientation to the three-dimensional world. Sometimes described as “eternity” or “infinity.”

  3. Deeply Felt Positive Mood. The most universal of these are joy, blessedness, and peace, experienced intensely, even overpoweringly.

  4. Sense of Sacredness. “A non-rational, intuitive, hushed palpitant sense of awe and wonder.”

  5. Objectivity and Reality. “Insightful knowledge or illumination felt at an intuitive, non-rational level and gained by direct experience” with “certainty that such knowledge is truly real.”

  6. Paradoxicality. There is “a loss of all empirical content in an empty unity which is at the same time full and complete.”

  7. Alleged Ineffability. Where words fail, perhaps due to the paradoxical nature of the essential phenomena.

  8. Transiency. The mystical state passes and normal waking reality is restored.

  9. Persisting Positive Changes in Attitude and Behavior—toward self, others, life, and the mystical experience itself.

  Pahnke then set up the experiment using standard personality testing, and psychological and medical exams to select ten pairs of white, male, psychedelically naïve, Protestant divinity students matched for past religious experience, religious background, and general psychological make-up. These subjects met together in groups and were coached by leaders experienced with psilocybin on how to deal with the experience: “go into the unexplored realms of experience during the actual experiment and not try to fight the effects of the drug even if the experience became very unusual or frightening” (Pahnke 1963).

  On Good Friday 1962, these students plus ten group leaders (research assistants) met together in the basement chapel of Boston University’s Marsh Chapel and all were given identical capsules. Half contained an active placebo (subjects and leaders were expecting an inactive placebo) containing nicotinic acid, and half contained psilocybin (30 mg for the subjects and, at the insistence of Leary and over the objections of Pahnke, 15 mg for the assistants). Half an hour later a standard service, actually being conducted in the larger sanctuary upstairs by Rev. Howard Thurman (who was Martin Luther King’s mentor), was piped in to the lower chapel, which had the usual accoutrements of a Protestant chapel, such as stained glass windows, religious symbols, and pews.

  The physical effects of the nicotinic acid (facial flushing and prickly sensations) set in very quickly, leading the controls to believe for a time that they were the ones receiving the psilocybin. Shortly after, when others began remarking on such details as the spectacular candlelight, it became apparent to all who was tripping. This loss of the double blind was anticipated and not considered significant, as the purpose of the experiment was to “determine whether volunteers who received psilocybin within a highly supportive, suggestive environment similar to that found in the ritual use of psychoactive substances by various native cultures would report more elements of a classical mystical experience . . . than volunteers who did not receive psilocybin” (Doblin 1991).

  Immediately after the 2-1/2 hour service, individual reactions of both subjects and controls were taped, as was the group discussion that followed. In the following week, each subject wrote an account of his experience and completed a questionnaire designed to measure the factors listed earlier on a qualitative, numerical scale. Six months later they were interviewed again and completed a follow-up questionnaire.

  The results showed that in all but one of the nine categories, subjects in the experimental group experienced significantly higher scores than the controls. The one exception was the experience of a “positive mood of love,” which was reported by the controls also. The difference between the two groups persisted and even increased slightly in a six-month follow-up interview conducted by Pahnke.

  In short, “The experience of the experimental subjects was certainly more like mystical experience than that of the controls who had the same expectation and suggestion from the preparation and setting. The most striking difference between the experimentals and the controls was the ingestion of thirty milligrams of psilocybin, which, it was concluded, was the facilitating agent responsible for the difference in phenomena experienced” (Pahnke 1966).

  Over the ensuing years, until his death in 1971 from a diving accident, Pahnke maintained his conviction that the various psychedelic drugs held great potential for research into the mystical experience:

  The results of our experiment would indicate that psilocybin (and LSD and mescaline, by analogy) are important tools for the study of the mystical state of consciousness. Experiences previously possible for only a small minority of people, and difficult to study because of their unpredictability and rarity, are now reproducible under suitable conditions. The mystical experience has been called by many names suggestive of areas that are paranormal and not usually considered easily available for investigation (e.g., an experience of transcendence, ecstasy, conversion, or cosmic consciousness); but this is a realm of human experience that should not be rejected as outside the realm of serious scientific study, especially if it can be shown that a practical benefit can result. Our data would suggest that such an overwhelming experience, in which a person existentially encounters basic values such as the meaning of his life (past, present and future), deep and meaningful interpersonal relationships, and insight into the possibility of a personal behavior change, can possibly be therapeutic if approached and worked with in a sensitive and adequate way (Pahnke 1966).

  Pahnke boldly suggested a biochemical commonality with such ascetic practices as breathing and postural exercises, sleep deprivation, fasting, flagellation with subsequent infection, sustained meditation, and sensory deprivation as possible triggers for mystical states. He was careful to emphasize that the drug itself was a facilitating agent, a necessary but not a sufficient condition, to be followed up with sincere work after the experience. He suggested that the drug-induced mystical experience could be regarded as “gratuitous grace,” and indirectly acknowledged the heretical nature of his assertions.

  A quarter century later, researcher Rick Doblin published the results of his long-term follow-up study of the Good Friday Experiment. He located nineteen of the original twenty subjects. With sixteen of them he conducted interviews and readministered the six-month follow-up questionnaire, which Pahnke had designed for the experiment so long ago.

  Doblin found that for the volunteers he was able to test, “the scores of persisting positive and negative changes in attitude and behavior have changed remarkably little for either the controls or the experimentals despite the passage of between twenty-four and twenty-seven years between the two tests” (Doblin 1991). For the experimental group, scores in the mystical categories actually increased by several points, while for the controls, the changes were negligible.

  In the interviews, subjects reported vivid memories of their Good Friday experience and characterized it as one if the high points of their spiritual life. Some compared it to subsequent mystical experiences and found the drug experience more intense and had a wider emotional range than their nondrug experiences. They felt the experience had significantly affected their lives in a positive way, enhancing their appreciations of life and nature and deepening their sense of joy and their commitment to their life’s work. They felt their appreciation of unusual experiences and emotions was deepened, as well as their equanimity in crisis and their solidarity with beings unlike themselves (women, minorities). They reported that the feelings of timelessness they experienced reduced their fear of death and emboldened them to take risks in life and participate in political struggles:

  “When you get a clear vision of what [death] is and have sort of been
there . . . you would also know that marching in the Civil Rights Movement or against the Vietnam War in Washington [is less fearful] . . . because you’ve already been there. You know what it’s about. When people approaching death have an out-of-body experience . . . [you] say, ‘I know what you’re talking about. I’ve been there. Been there and come back. And it’s not terrifying and it doesn’t hurt . . . ’”

  Another subject said:

  “The more that I let go and sort of died, the more I felt this eternal life, saying to myself under my breath perhaps, “It has always been this way . . . O, isn’t it wonderful, there’s nothing to fear, this is what it means to die, or to taste of eternal life . . . ” Just in that one session I . . . gained experience . . . I could never have gotten from a hundred hours of reading or a thousand hours of reading.”

  Some of the subjects in the long-term follow-up reported difficult experiences that were not noted in Pahnke’s reports. One went into a state of paranoia about the darkness in the chapel and the bars on the windows. He went outside and was followed and brought back by a group leader. He attributed his problem to resistance, “reluctance just to flow.” Beyond his emotional struggles, this subject reported strong feelings of authentic oneness “perhaps the same as a classical mystical experience . . . ”

  Another subject who also had difficult moments related his experience of indecision about which of his perceived brilliant color streams to follow out, precipitating a painful existential moment of death. However, afterwards he found he had unconsciously made an important career choice in which he felt great confidence and with which he followed through.

  Doblin stated that the difficult experiences reported by the majority of psilocybin subjects he interviewed “were significantly underemphasized in Pahnke’s thesis and in the subsequent reporting on the experiment.” In fact, Pahnke never reported that one subject was injected with Thorazine as a tranquilizer during the experiment, a grave omission.

  As it happens, the venerable Huston Smith was one of the leadersubjects in the Good Friday Experiment. In a 1996 interview with Tom Roberts he relates his experience (Smith 2002):

  until the Good Friday Experiment, I had had no direct personal encounter with God of the sort that bhakti yogis, Pentecostals, and born-again Christians describe. The Good Friday Experiment changed that . . . the gestalt transformed a routine musical progression into the most powerful cosmic homecoming I have ever experienced . . . that God loves me and I him, in the concrete way that human beings love individuals, each most wanting from the other what the other most wants to give and with everything that might distract from that holy relationship excluded from view—that relation with God I had never before had.

  Smith recalls that the scene inside the chapel was one of:

  a mounting disorder . . . half of our number were in a condition where social decorum meant nothing and the other half were more interested in the spectacle unfolding than in the service proper. In any case, from out of this bizarre mix, one of our number emerged. He arose from his pew, walked up the aisle, and with uncertain steps mounted the chapel’s modest pulpit. Thumbing through its Bible for a few moments, he proceeded to mumble a brief and coherent homily, blessed the congregation with the sign of the cross, and started back to the rear entrance of the chapel and through its door . . . When (the subject’s) guide didn’t respond to his leaving the chapel, I sprang to my feet and followed him out (Smith 2002).

  What followed was a merry chase with this man on a mission, who strode into the campus of Boston University, where Pahnke and Smith shortly blocked the subject’s progress. They walked the subject back to the chapel and Pahnke injected him with Thorazine. This subject’s long-term feelings about the experiment were heavily negative and he adamantly refused to participate in Doblin’s follow-up.

  Doblin guesses: “Pahnke probably did not report his use of the tranquilizer because he was fearful of adding to the ammunition of the opponents of the research. Fears that the negative aspects of the experiment would be taken out of context and exaggerated may have been justified . . . His silence . . . may perhaps have been good politics; certainly it was bad science” (Doblin 1991).

  In his discussion of the long-term follow-up, Doblin notes:

  the experiment’s fascinating and provocative conclusions strongly support the hypothesis that psychedelic drugs can help facilitate mystical experiences when used by religiously inclined people in a religious setting . . . twenty-four to twenty-seven years later . . . all psilocybin subjects participating in the long-term follow-up, but none of the controls, still considered their original experience to have had genuinely mystical elements and to have made a uniquely valuable contribution to their spiritual lives. The positive changes described by the psilocybin subjects at six months . . . had persisted over time and in some cases had deepened . . . The long-term follow-up interviews cast considerable doubt on the assertion that mystical experiences catalyzed by drugs are in any way inferior to non-drug mystical experiences in both their immediate and long-term positive effects . . .

  Coverage of the Good Friday Experiment in both the scholarly and popular media was broad and largely but not universally positive. Doblin speculates that Pahnke’s underemphasis on the difficult psychological struggles of most of the psilocybin subjects may be in part responsible for the unpreparedness of the many subsequent formal and informal experimenters for this aspect of the experience.

  The widespread use of psychedelics, both in medical and nonmedical settings, which began in the 1960s is still currently taking place, apparently largely underground. Such use was partially founded upon an optimism regarding the inherent safety of the psychedelic experience which did not fully acknowledge the complexity and profundity of the psychological issues associated with the psychedelic experiences. With some proponents of psychedelics exaggerating the benefits and minimizing the risks, a backlash against these substances was predictable. With the intriguing connection reported by several psilocybin subjects between mystical experiences and political action, the backlash in retrospect may have been inevitable.

  In the balance, Doblin asserts that despite the above, additional studies utilizing a multidisciplinary team are justified and that “Renewed research can be expected to require patience, courage and wisdom from all concerned.”

  References

  Doblin, R. 1991. Pahnke’s “Good Friday Experiment”: A long-term follow-up and methodological critique, The Journal of Transpersonal Psychology 23 (1).

  ———. 1998. Dr. Leary’s Concord Prison Experiment: Experiment—A thirty-four year follow-up and methodological critique. Journal of Psychoactive Drugs 30 (4):419–26.

  Leary, T. 1968. High Priest. Second Edition, 1995. Berkeley, Calif.: Ronin Press.

  ———. 1969. The effects of consciousness-expanding drugs on prisoner rehabilitation, Psychedelic Review 10:20–44.

  Leary, T., G. Litwin, and R. Metzner. 1963. Reactions to psilocybin in a supportive environment. Journal of Nervous and Mental Diseases 137: 561–73.

  Leary, T, R. Metzner, M. Presnell, G. Weil, R. Schwitzgebel, and S. Kinne. 1965. A new behavior change pattern using psilocybin. Psychotherapy: Theory, Research and Practice 2 (2):61–72.

  Leary, T., and R. Metzner. 1968. Use of psychedelic drugs in prisoner rehabilitation. British Journal of Social Psychiatry 2:27–51.

  Metzner, R. 1998. Reflections on the Concord Prison Project and the follow-up study, Journal of Psychoactive Drugs 30 (4):427–28.

  Pahnke, W. 1963. Drugs and mysticism: An analysis of the relationship between psychedelic drugs and the mystical consciousness. Harvard University: Ph.D. dissertation.

  ———. 1966. Drugs and mysticism. International Journal of Parapsychology 8 (2):295–313.

  Pahnke, W., and W. Richards. 1966. Implications of LSD and experimental mysticism, J. Religion and Health 5 (3):175–208.

  Pahnke, W., and W. Richards. 1969. Implications of LSD and experimental mysticism. Journal of Transperson
al Psychology 1 (2):69–102.

  Smith, H. 2002. The Good Friday Experiment. In Hallucinogens; a reader, ed. C. Grob, 64–71. New York, N.Y.: Tarcher Putnam.

  Stace, W. T. 1960. Mysticism and Philosophy. London: MacMillan.

  Rick Doblin earned his Ph.D. in public policy from Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government. He is the founder and president of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS, www.maps.org), a nonprofit research and educational organization. MAPS’s goal is to help develop legal contexts for the beneficial uses of psychedelics and marijuana.

  7

  A NOTE ON CURRENT PSILOCYBIN RESEARCH PROJECTS

  RICK DOBLIN, PH.D.

  THERAPEUTIC STUDIES

  The first U.S. government-approved scientific investigation in thirty years of the therapeutic potential of psilocybin was concluded in the fall of 2003. At the University of Arizona at Tucson, Dr. Francisco Moreno, with the assistance of Dr. Chris Wiegand, administered psilocybin as a potential therapeutic treatment to ten subjects with treatment-resistant chronic obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). The Tucson study is funded by the Heffter Research Institute and MAPS. This study was initiated after the publication in the medical literature of several case histories in which patients with OCD self-administered psilocybin mushrooms in a nonmedical, recreational context. They reported that their OCD symptoms were reduced or eliminated for varying periods of time after their mushroom experience.