My first reaction was lassitude. I lay down on the floor and stretched out, feeling very relaxed and yet very alert. Tim had said there would be a period like a decompression or slight disorientation. My body seemed for a while to be in a strange sort of limbo. All of a sudden, I found myself in a completely new and magical world. The little green strands of the shag rug were writhing and undulating like a mass of worms, yet in a most delightful way. The lights reflecting off the glass coffee table top sparkled with a kind of moist luminescence. The furniture, the walls, the floor were all pulsing and undulating in slow waves, as if the whole room was breathing. I felt I was inside a living structure, like a vast cell. The rate of the waving motion seemed to be coordinated with my breathing.
This extraordinary sensory fluidity was not at all disturbing; in fact, it was extremely pleasurable. There was clear rational awareness that this was a room with solid walls and a floor, etc. The ordinary world was not erased—it was expanded, enlivened, and made infinitely more interesting. For example, I became totally engrossed in contemplating the fascinating edges of things, the curiously beautiful patterns of light and energy weaving around and radiating out from them. The telephone was a veritable marvel of diamond-studded, gem-encrusted, crystalline sculpture—yet also moving, breathing, and changing as if it were alive.
Simultaneously with this unbelievable sensory feasting, Gunther and I were engaged in a kind of verbal interplay, a mock-serious philosophic exchange that had us both convulsed with laughter. Words and concepts exploded in my brain with multilevel ripples of meanings that set off cascades of feeling and physical sensations. Deep philosophic questions arose and dissipated in a stream of paradoxes and absurd riddles punctuated by convulsive giggles.
When I closed my eyes, fantastically beautiful and intricate geometric depth patterns were interweaving behind my eyelids, washing, colliding, and streaming by at great speed. Occasionally, there would be images of precious stones or different parts of bodies, but nothing stood still long enough to congeal into anything definite. It felt as if my eyes were giving off a white-hot radiance; my mouth and the sense organs in my face and the rest of the body were glowing, flashing, oozing with liquid light; my nerve fibers crackling with white lightning; my blood stream felt like a seething stream of lava. My skin was embracing me, enwrapping me, in an alternately wet and dry, hot and cool almost unendurably pleasurable embrace . . .
A moment of panic occurred that illustrated the fantastic amplifying power of the psychedelic. When I looked at the faces of the others, they were bright and strong and clear. I thought, “This is how archangels look.” They were somehow naked, shed of a fog of dissimulations, anxieties and hypocrisies. Everyone was true to his or her own self and not ashamed. I looked at them without shyness and with frank admiration. At one time all the faces were suffused with a soft greenish light.
I looked at Karin across the room and told her she was beautiful, and I loved her. She just looked back without saying anything. Then she got up and started to leave the room (probably to go to the bathroom). I began to panic. I implored her not to leave, that dreadful things would happen if she did. Lyn, who was sitting next to me, said it would be all right, but I got more and more upset and terrified, pleading with Karin not to leave. Karin said she would be back, but I said, “No, no, don’t leave!” She asked, “What will happen if I leave?” I replied, in a tone of desperation, “Something terrible will happen . . . the music will stop.”
When she got up and walked through the door, somehow I identified that action with all the feelings of abandonment and loss I had ever experienced. It was a moment of acute anguish. But when she was gone, I felt fine, amazed, and relieved. I said to Lyn, “She left, and it was all right.” And Lyn said, “Yes, it was all right.”
Then, holding Lyn close, I suddenly felt myself shrinking in size . . . I was very rapidly regressing into childhood consciousness. I actually felt for brief moments what I had felt as an infant, even to the feel of a baby bottle in my mouth. Then, just as rapidly, I was shuttled back to my adult awareness.
At a certain point I noticed that the intensity of the experiences began to diminish, like a slow gliding down. My body felt very warm and relaxed. I understood how my normal perception of the world was constricted and limited by many prohibitions I had somehow accepted. For example, I went outside and on the porch was a box. I looked inside and saw that it was garbage and immediately turned away. Then I realized I didn’t have to turn away, that it was okay to look at it, that I had a choice and was not bound by a set of rules regarding what could or could not be experienced and perceived.
This was to me perhaps the most significant revelation of this experience: that I was basically in charge of what I could perceive and think about, that I was not bound by external forces but rather made choices that determined the extent and quality of my awareness. To exercise my newfound freedom, I made some snowballs and threw them at the screened window of the room in which the group was sitting. I felt greatly exhilarated. Tim must have sensed my expansive mood because, with a grin on his face, he picked up some pillows and tossed them gently at the window from the inside toward me. The brief interchange had an edge of freshness and spontaneous clarity that made me feel superbly happy.
That first experience with psilocybin had an immeasurable effect on my life. It was radically and totally different, yet during the course of the experience I felt closer to my true self than I had ever been, more aware of my innermost feelings and thoughts. I had also been fully and intensely aware of people and things around me and did not lose the reality perceptions that govern our ordinary world. Rather, ordinary perception was enriched and enlivened beyond comparison. It was clearly false that these drugs were “hallucinogenic” in the sense of hallucinating something that isn’t there.
I could see how much sensory phenomena could be attributed to a temporary suspension of the perceptual constancies, those mechanisms that keep the visible shapes and sizes of things constant, even though the optical image is obviously changing. An illustration of that happened during this session when I was lying on my side on the ground and Gunther rolled a ball toward me. As the ball approached me, it grew enormously in size, as the retinal image would. Also, I could trace the constant slight rhythmic oscillations I noticed to the moving of my eyes, which, under the drug, became magnified. All the mechanisms that filter, screen, and regulate perception seemed to have been suspended. As Huxley put it, the mind’s “reducing valve” had been inactivated.
The week after that initial session, we began the prison project. My second exposure to the drug took place behind prison walls. We wanted to avoid giving the convicts the feeling that they were to be guinea pigs in the drug experiments of a mad professor, so we decided that some members of the project would always take the drug with them. My first trip in the prison environment, among convicts, was a visit to hell. My anxiety was magnified to terror, loneliness to profound abandonment, and discomfort to agonizing despair, all accompanied by horror visions of devouring machine-monsters. Then, while feeling trapped in the depths of isolation:
From a very long way off I heard a tiny voice saying quietly, “I get this feeling of being alone in the universe, just the self.” It was a human voice and there were others! Cautiously, incredulously, I opened my eyes. A scene of incredible peace and serenity presented itself. Gunther and two of the men were sitting quietly, talking, bathed in a stream of afternoon sunlight coming through the window. One of the convicts was lying on the bed peaceful and relaxed, smoking and reading a paper. Two others were sitting silently, playing chess. A wave of relief washed over me. The prison walls were down; the whole world was wide open. Objects again had that extraordinary depth-dimension, as if there were soft crystalline formations in the space between them and me. People had mellow greenish faces and shining eyes. Someone said, “There is one of everything.” In some strange way this oneness of everything is the essence, the essence of feelings: one joy, one sadnes
s, one terror, one pleasure.
Suddenly, there was chaos as the prison psychiatrist burst in. “Everybody back to prison routine, change of guards, out of this room!” There was a mad scramble as everyone put together their belongings, straightened their clothes, and tried to force peacefully dissolved identities back into the mold required in prison life. As we walked out through the prison yard, I could feel the guards watching us. “Control, easy now,” I said to myself. As the heavy doors clanged shut behind us with loud rattling of keys, the grim strangeness of it all sobered our thoughts.
The revelations of this experience were perhaps even more far-reaching than those of the first session. I began to see how the suggestibility factor operated: feelings of fear or guilt or blame could be triggered by chance remarks, and these negative emotions could drastically alter the course of the experience. Conversely, a warm word or a reassuring touch of the hand could provide instant comfort to someone racked by inner pain.
We entered into a contract with each of the convicts who volunteered for the study. We told them what little we knew about the drug, about our own experiences, and stated the goal was to facilitate insight that would enable them to make a noncriminal adjustment to life outside once they were paroled. The agreement also called for psychiatric interviews and psychological tests before and after the sessions and written reports on each experience.
The results of this work with about thirty convicts were published. They showed that there were profound, measurable personality changes in the men and an apparent, though ambiguous, reduction in the rate of recidivism. Subjectively, the men almost always regarded the sessions as beneficial, even those that were painful. Contrary to dire warnings of many professionals, there was never a moment of violence. Actually, in our research we found that the most violence-prone subjects were psychiatrists and theologians, who had massive repression systems that could be exposed by the drug experience.
As a result of my work in the prison, I grew to like and respect some of the men very much. Al was a man of somber mien and the enormous heavy muscles of a weight lifter. In one session, all in the group were touched as we saw him enter totally, incongruously, into the consciousness of a little boy, expressing wide-eyed, innocent wonder and delight at the photographs in a Family of Man book, or the feel of water running over his hands and the look of intense inner searching that came over his face when he saw his arm turn into an eagle’s talon.
Donald was in his fifties, serving a twenty-year sentence for armed robbery. In one of his sessions, he had visions of lines and patterns that he traced with careful, probing eyes as he saw in them the patterns of his life. “Does it have any meaning?” he asked, and after a long silence, answered his own question, slowly and haltingly, but deliberately: “Is ego our god? Do we do things so as to have a good image of ourselves in our own eyes?”
We talked for a long time. Those of the group that were on longer sentences or were not to be released organized a study group after the project was terminated. They continued to meet on a regular basis for years after, working on self-help, self-understanding, becoming guides and helpers for younger convicts. Such was the power of those few initial revelations.
A high-dose experimental session with psilocybin that we ran in 1963 exemplified some of these complex dynamics (and risks), as well as illustrating Tim Leary’s laid-back, humorous, and yet caring style of supporting our explorations. Tim gave us a lot of leeway in setting up the sessions. Several of us, with two years of experience, had decided to explore the effects of a higher dosage of psilocybin, to see if it would compare to LSD, which we had also started to use by that time. Some took 40 mg, I took 60 mg, and George Litwin, with his pioneering spirit, had decided to take 80 mg. These dosages, though higher than any we usually took, were still well below toxic levels. However, it was in this session that I came closest to suicide than I ever did in the years of working with psychedelics.
When the drug began to work, George was shaking violently. As I looked at him, his face looked strangely distorted and seemed to be coming apart in layers, like one of M. C. Escher’s weird paintings. When he spoke, his voice sounded nonhuman, as if his mouth was filled with metallic mud. He was talking about finding the button that made his heart stop or go.
As I looked around the room I saw great bands of moving streams of energy particles traversing the space, passing through and between myself and the other people. We all seemed to be part of these moving, everchanging bands of energy. They were familiar to me from mushroom sessions, when I had seen them as luminous vibrating filigree networks. But this time the intensity frightened me. As my fear level increased, the energy bands congealed and stopped moving; they took on a grayish hue, like prison bars. All at once I felt immobilized and trapped, like a fly in a gigantic metallic spider’s web. I couldn’t even talk and explain what was happening to me; my voice felt paralyzed.
Everyone, including George (who was no longer shaking), seemed to be frozen into immobility by these metallic web-cages. I felt my mind was paralyzed too. I couldn’t think or understand what was happening. I couldn’t tell whether what I was experiencing was real or a drug-induced hallucination, an experience psychiatry refers to as “derealization.”
I did, however, decide I should try to call Tim for help, on the telephone. Gunther Weil, who seemed to sense my dilemma, accompanied me to help with the dialing. The telephone set was wiggling and jiggling like a demented jellyfish. Somehow, we managed to reach Tim on the line. Since I felt so totally unreal, I wanted his help to establish some kind of “reality.” I said, “Tell me something real, Tim, what’s happening over there?”
Tim immediately got the message and started to tell me, “Well, Jack’s sitting at the table eating a hamburger. Susie’s watching television with her hair in curlers. Michael’s drinking a beer . . . ” I started to feel a little better. These were messages from “reality.” Nevertheless, I told him we needed help and would he come over.
While waiting for Tim to arrive, I was holding on to my sanity with the thought that when he got here, he would free us all from this monstrous spider’s web we were caught in, which also had the effect of making us speechless. At least, it felt like I couldn’t hear, say, or understand anything. I felt completely dehumanized, not even like a biological organism, more like a mechanical puppet or device.
I was so relieved when Tim came through the door. I could see him moving freely through the sticky web of gray steel bands. But then, after a few minutes, as I watched in horror, he too became trapped in them: his movements slowed down, became mechanical, robotlike, his voice thickened and slurred, and I plunged into despair as I realized he, too, was helplessly caught. Near the apartment building was a train track, on which a high-speed train rumbled by with thunderous noise every now and again. Such was the depth of my despair that I remember wishing that the train would crash through the building and I would be killed, thereby releasing me from this hellish torment of feeling “dead.”
This was before we learned how to take someone through a really deep psychotic experience, how to reach them in consciousness, set up communication, and bring them back. Tim and the others simply laid me out on a bed and hoped for the best.
After some hours of objective time and a hellish eternity in subjective time, I noticed the intensity of the experience beginning to diminish somewhat. I remembered I had taken a drug and knew the effect was beginning to wear off. I felt like a living human being again, though thoroughly shaken by what I had gone through. We needed to learn how to bring a person back from psychotic hell-states, as well as preparing for ecstatic heaven-states.
I learned to understand the experience of constricting energy bands years later, when I read Stanislav Grof’s account of experiences in the Basic Perinatal Matrix II, in which the fetus experiences the mother’s powerful uterine contractions, but there is as yet no cervical opening, hence no possibility of moving through and out of this position. Grof relates this perinatal stage to
subsequent psychedelic experiences of feeling trapped, bound, crushed, “no exit,” eternal stuckness, and the like.
As we proceeded with our explorations, still under the aegis of the Harvard University Psilocybin Research Project, we were increasingly moving into the consideration of religious and mystical concepts and images. Such ideas were foreign to our humanist psychological orientation but were thrust upon us by the nature of the experiences. Sometimes when Tim was talking to groups about these kinds of experiences, he seemed inspired by an almost messianic fervor that made a powerful impact on his listeners. At the same time the issue of leadership, with its associated complex of idealization and disappointment, was beginning to rear its ugly head.
One strange and moving session on a cold November night in 1961 was particularly memorable for its focus on these issues. Six of us assembled in Dick Alpert’s apartment: Dick, Tim, Michael Kahn, George Litwin and his wife Corky, and myself. Gunther Weil had said he would join us later, as would Maynard Ferguson, the musician, and his wife, Flo. Everyone was in excellent spirits. We had never all taken psychedelics together and were looking forward to it.
On the way to the session, Mike and I had been talking about the idea of the sin against the Holy Ghost, the one unpardonable sin. We had discussed it as a kind of universal projective test in the Middle Ages, revealing what you considered your greatest failing. Theologically, it was the attribution to the devil that really came from the Holy Ghost, thus cutting oneself off from the source of grace and redemption.
During the session, Mike returned to this topic and related our earlier thoughts. George, who had a marvelous sense for practical detail, was wondering about borderline sins. He asked Tim, as the only Catholic present. “What did the Church do with those rare cases which the existing rules didn’t cover? How did it handle totally new events or occurrences? For example, take a peasant who comes to the priest and says, ‘I took these pills last night, and I met Christ, and we shook hands and spent a wonderful evening together, but somehow everybody goes around telling me I’m bad.’ How would the Church handle that? What would the priest say?”
Sacred Mushroom of Visions Page 20
