Cactus of Mystery

by Ross Heaven

  It is highly likely that all altered states of consciousness, including potentially ESP-conducive states, involve alterations in brain chemistry and so psychedelics like mescaline have an important part to play in helping us understand the neurochemistry underlying those states. Taking this further into the realm of parapsychology, several psychedelic-neurochemical models have been proposed based on the specific neurochemical action and the subjective paranormal experiences occurring with certain substances, such as ketamine and DMT (e.g., Jansen, 1997; Roney-Dougal, 2001; Strassman, 2001). Advancing on these models it is entirely feasible that genuine paranormal phenomena are mediated in the brain through the action of specific endogenous psychedelic molecules such as DMT (Roney-Dougal, 2001). This does not simply imply that neurochemicals are the sole cause of paranormal phenomena, but they may rather just be a part of the process. As the novelist Aldous Huxley once said in relation to mystical experiences and the use of psychedelics—they are the occasion rather than the cause.

  CLEANSING THE DOORS OF (EXTRASENSORY) PERCEPTION

  Aldous Huxley was also prominent in promoting the influential French philosopher Henri Bergson’s (1896) nascent parapsychological theory of the brain as a filter of memory and sensory experience.

  In this model the brain acts to reduce the wealth of information available to our awareness lest we become overwhelmed by this mass of largely useless data, which is irrelevant to the survival of the organism. Bergson suggested that if the filter was bypassed people would be capable of remembering everything they had ever experienced and able to perceive everything that is happening everywhere in the universe (i.e., clairvoyance).

  After being given mescaline by the pioneering psychedelic researcher Humphry Osmond (who coined the term psychedelic in correspondence with Huxley), in 1953 Huxley then applied Bergson’s theory to psychedelics by suggesting that these mind-manifesting drugs override the reducing valve of the brain, allowing man access to both psychic and mystic states. A notion that Huxley (1954) eruditely paraphrased with the quote by the English poet and mystic, William Blake, “If the doors of perception were cleansed, every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite.”

  Huxley’s rather basic conception of the influence of psychedelics on the paranormal function of the brain never received a more formal operationalization of the specific drug action involved, but recent research into the neurochemistry of psychedelics lends some support to this simple notion. For instance, Vollenweider and Geyer (2001) propose that information processing in cortico-striato-thalamo-cortical (CSTC) feedback loops in the brain is disrupted by psychedelics, thereby inhibiting the “gating” of extraneous sensory stimuli and subsequently inhibiting the ability to attend selectively to salient environmental features. Furthermore, psychedelics are also thought to induce a simultaneous neurochemical overload of internal information in the cortex. It is thought that these combined overload effects, of information coming from both inside and outside the organism, are at least partly responsible for the psychedelic experience with these drugs, which are known to induce greatly altered or amplified incoming sensory information (Vollenweider, 2001).

  Research into the neurobiology of psychedelics in humans has only just resumed after decades of dormancy, so the current understanding of the action of these substances in the brain is limited. One of the few studies to have been conducted, however, also offers some unexpected support for Huxley’s reducing valve theory.

  Looking at the blood flow around the brain following the ingestion of psilocybin, it was expected that certain regions of the brain would have more activity given the overwhelming intenseness of strong psychedelic experiences, and yet, counterintuitively, there was no single brain region that increased in activity and the brain’s activity was reduced overall (Carhart-Harris, 2011).

  This disruption of the sensory gating function by psychedelics and their reduction in brain activity could also underpin the neurochemistry of ESP (Luke and Friedman, 2010). Indeed, like psychedelics, psi experiences and psi phenomena have variously been conceptualized in relation to an inhibition of the ordinary sensory inhibition system, often related to states of elevated psychosis and creativity, such as with the psychological concepts of latent disinhibition (Holt, Simmonds-Moore, and Moore, 2008), transliminality (Thalbourne, 2000) and boundary thinness and schizotypy (Simmonds and Roe, 2000). It may be noted that psychedelics have also been long associated theoretically with both creativity (e.g., Dobkin de Rios and Janiger, 2003) and temporary psychosis (e.g., Osmond and Smythies, 1952).

  That the special neurochemistry of psychedelics is central to psi is supported by a wealth of collectively compelling personal accounts from users as well as anthropological, clinical, and survey reports. There is also a body of preliminary experimental research that presently remains equivocal and generally methodologically flawed but is nevertheless promising (for a review see Luke, 2008). Of these numerous psychedelics mescaline is one substance in particular that according to the historical, anthropological, and personal accounts to follow, is known to induce psi experiences.

  Putting the “Psi” back in Psychedelics

  Traditionally, the sacramental use of mescaline-containing cacti was restricted to the New World (i.e., the Americas) where these plants are endemic and included the use of peyote among the Kiowa and Comanche people of the southern United States, through to parts of northern Mexico where the Tarahumara people of the state of Chihuahua and the Huichol people, originally of the state of San Luis Potasi, make use of peyote and other putative mescaline-containing cacti (Schultes and Hofmann, 1992). Archaeological evidence suggests that the use of peyote has continued for at least five thousand years (El-Seedi et al., 2005) and ever since the use of peyote was first documented in the mid-sixteenth century by the personal physician of King Philip II of Spain, Dr. Francisco Hernández, it has been reputed to induce prophetic qualities. “It causes those devouring it to be able to foresee and to predict things” (quoted in Schultes and Hofmann, 1992, p. 134).

  Further south, San Pedro has been used traditionally by the indigenous people of Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, and even Argentina for the same type of magico-religious practices, such as divination, as those of their northern American cactus-using “cousins” (Schultes and Hofmann, 1992), as discussed earlier.

  More recently, anthropological research also attests to the capacity of San Pedro, and therefore probably mescaline too, to induce or facilitate psychic abilities. Sharon (1978, p. 45) reports that a Peruvian folk healer (curandero) he studied and studied with used San Pedro, like other curanderos, to induce what the healer called “the sixth sense, the telepathic sense of transmitting oneself across time and matter. . . . It develops the power of perception . . . in the sense that when one wants to see something far away . . . he can distinguish powers or problems or disturbances at great distance, so as to deal with them.” This psychic enhancement apparently occurs because “San Pedro is the catalyst that activates all the complex forces at work in a folk healing session, especially the visionary and divinatory powers of the curandero himself” (Sharon, 1990, p. 117).

  Similar reports of actively using other mescaline-containing cacti for “psi” (e.g., clairvoyance) also appear in the historical and anthropological literature, as with the use of peyote among the Huichol (Slotkin, 1956), Chichimeca, Zacatecan, Tamaulipecan, and Tarahumari people of Mexico and among the Apache, Comanche, and Kiowa in the United States (for a review see Le Barre, 1938). This literature is backed up by experiential reports from nonindigenous mescaline users like that of the French researchers who gave mescaline to six subjects, one of whom temporarily developed very detailed and accurate clairvoyant abilities and was able to describe the contents of a nearby room (Rouhier, 1925, 1927). Similar reports exist among parapsychology researchers themselves, such as Rosalind Heywood (1961) who, after taking the mescaline given to her by psychical researcher John Smythies, believed that psychedelics could help researchers understand spontaneous psi exper
iences.

  The same sentiment was reported by the man who coined the term psychedelic, Humphry Osmond, after his own mescaline experiences in 1951. Osmond (1961) also reported that in 1957 he and his fellow researcher Duncan Blewett, both under the influence of mescaline, successfully transmitted telepathic information in an informal experiment to such a degree that an independent observer became acutely panicky at the uncanniness of the event.

  Similarly, during mescaline self-experimentation Langdon-Davies (1961) claimed to have demonstrated traveling clairvoyance and successfully identified thirteen correct targets from a pack of twenty-five zener cards where each pack contains an equal mixture of five distinct symbols, the odds of correctly identifying thirteen or more symbols by chance alone being 1 in 2,500, which is truly quite improbable.

  Reflecting the growing popularity of psychedelics in 1960s alternative culture, a member of the Byrds musical group claimed to have experienced telepathy with other band members under the influence of mescaline (Krippner and Davidson, 1970).

  Nevertheless, merely consuming mescaline is no guarantee that an experience of ESP will follow, as the Oxford philosophy professor H. H. Price (1964) demonstrated in a self-experimentation guided by Humphry Osmond. Similarly, parapsychologist Charles Tart described in a letter how, when he was given 500 mg of mescaline (a reasonably large dose) by Austrian psychologist Ivo Kohler in 1959 and was supposed to perform an ESP card guessing test, he was far too absorbed in cosmic revelations and the overwhelming beauty of the universe to actually engage seriously with the task (Tart, personal communication, May 13, 2011). Nevertheless, other parapsychologists have reported personal ESP experiences with the use of mescaline (e.g., Millay, 2001).

  Despite there being a good body of survey research to substantiate the induction of paranormal experiences with psychedelics generally (for a review see Luke, 2008) all but one of these surveys omitted to investigate the effects of mescaline in particular. One in-depth drug and experience survey, however, revealed that mescaline did indeed give rise to reports of telepathy and precognition among those using it, yet the primary “transpersonal” experiential features of ingesting mescaline cacti were the perception of auras (as also reported by Tart, 1972), the experience of encountering the plant’s spirit, and a sense of unity (Luke and Kittenis, 2005). Other less common experiences reported included dissolving into energy, powerful long-lasting religious awakenings, outof-body experiences, clairvoyance, death-and-rebirth experiences and/ or past-life memories, psychokinesis (influencing objects or people with one’s mind), encountering a divine being, encountering a (nonanimal) intelligent entity, and the sense of the loss of causality (where A causes B) (Luke, 2009). Many of these experiences have also been reported elsewhere under the influence of San Pedro (Heaven, 2009).

  Individual reports and surveys of people having psychic experiences with mescaline under nonexperimental conditions may be provocative and interesting but are scientifically limited given what is known about the ways in which individual experiences do not necessarily indicate genuine paranormal phenomena. This is because individual experiences may be prone to misperception, misreporting, memory errors such as confabulation, or may be merely chance coincidences (Pekala and Cardeña, 2000). Nevertheless, the various individual reports collected may be actual cases of genuine psychic phenomena occurring under the influence of mescaline, but without controlled experimental testing there can be no certainty.

  Reviewing the extremely scant experimental literature, then, there are few studies that have been conducted that can be considered. Humphry Osmond’s co-worker John Smythies (1960, 1987) reported a preliminary study with one volunteer using mescaline in a psychometry experiment whereby the task is to describe the unknown owner and their environment when given a personal object belonging to them. Although the participant was unable to discern the targets under adequate blind, “remote-viewing” style conditions, informal questioning about the target location typical of psychometry tasks elicited promising responses. Similarly using mescaline, a series of pilot studies with three participants “failed in card-guessing tests but showed encouraging success in tests with free material, particularly token objects” (Rush and Cahn, 1958, p. 300). Likewise with mescaline, presumably in self-experiments, Breederveld (1976, 2001) reported success in consistently winning above chance at roulette experiments in casinos using real money, although the mescaline condition was only one of several mostly successful methods, perhaps indicating that either Breederveld’s methodology was flawed or that he had some psychic talents anyway.

  Nevertheless, Breederveld’s success echoes informal reports concerning the pioneer psychedelic researcher, Al Hubbard, who after supposedly developing his psychic ability through the use of LSD (Osmond, 1961; Stevens, 1988) became somewhat notorious for winning on gaming machines in casinos, his reputation being such that he was politely escorted out by the management when he reached a certain limit of earning (Krippner, 2006). Overall, it can be said that the research literature is very positive about the informal use of mescaline for inducing ESP; however, there are as yet no clear reports of well-controlled and statistically sound formal experiments so it certainly begs further investigation.

  UNCORKING THE GENIE’S BOTTLE

  It’s thus that I found myself some weeks later, rather than testing twenty other people for their possible psychic abilities, holed up in room alone sat in front of a computer for eight hours, deeply nauseous and in a definite altered state of consciousness, doggedly running twenty psychic tests on myself.

  I had prepared about 30 grams of dried slices of San Pedro by powdering them in a coffee grinder. The actual mescaline content must have been somewhere between about 100 and 700 mg, according to the concentrations reported for Trichocereus pachanoi (Erowid, 2001), with about 200 to 400 mg of mescaline considered to be a standard dose (Shulgin and Shulgin, 1991). Effective doses are thought to be in the 150 to 1,500 mg range, although the maximum safe dose is proposed to be 1,000 mg (Ott, 1996). Once the effects took hold I was quite pleased that the actual dosage was probably at the weaker end of the possible mescaline content range due to the necessity to be able to function in this state enough to run my experiment on myself and yet still have a visionary experience.

  Having prepared the cactus I then also prepared myself and the experiment. I had fasted since the previous evening to reduce nausea or vomiting and to maximize the potency of the plant. I had also organized all the materials I would need for the ESP tests: a pile of questionnaires, a clock, a Dictaphone, and a laptop with a large collection of preformulated video clips.

  The procedure was fairly straightforward: once I was under the influence of San Pedro I would close my eyes and attempt to visualize “the target,” then write down anything that appeared in my mental imagery and any feelings or insights associated with it. At this point I had no idea what the target actually was, of course. Once I had written down my impressions of the target I would then complete a series of standard scales relating to my state of consciousness: how easy it was to visualize, how confused I was, how paranoid I was, whether I saw bright colors, that sort of thing. I would then turn to the computer, on which I had a large collection of one-minute video clips from films, none of which I had seen before and which were arranged into a number of pools, each of which contained four clips that an independent researcher had previously selected so they were as different from each other as possible. I had twenty of these pools lined up and so aimed to run twenty trials of the ESP task. Under the influence of mescaline it really would be a trial too.

  After writing down my impressions of the target from my mescaline-enhanced visualization process, it was planned that I would then watch a pool of four video clips for the first time, having no idea what the clips were beforehand. Once I had watched all four it was then necessary to rank them according to how closely they corresponded to the mental images I had just had. Then comes the weird bit: I would then select which of the four film clips was t
o be the actual target by running a random number generator that would choose a number between one and four in a manner that, according to ordinary linear conceptions of reality, cannot be predicted. Thus one of the four clips would become the target after I had made my selection, but also completely independently of my selection. Making the target selection after my attempted divination of it made this psi task a test of precognition rather than telepathy or clairvoyance—which if successful would demonstrate the ability to access information from the future without recourse to inference or other ordinary means of prediction.

  This precognitive ability might also be also called prophecy, premonition, or prescience. Ordinarily, attempting to guess the randomly selected target from one of four clips would produce a success rate of 25 percent by chance alone so that only one in every four of the clips I selected would be ranked as the most similar to my mental imagery if purely random processes where at work. Over a series of twenty trials like this it is therefore expected that the correct target would be selected just five times by chance alone.

  The Experiment

  Skipping breakfast in the morning, I prepared the 30 grams of San Pedro for consumption by powdering it. Like peyote, San Pedro is known to taste extremely bitter and be very difficult to eat or drink without wanting to vomit. Nature has a way of ensuring that you have to be pretty serious if you want to eat these cacti.

  Having prepared myself mentally and made my propitiations to the spirits in my own way, I poured the emetic powder straight to the back of my throat in 5-gram batches every five minutes or so and washed it down with orange juice as quickly as possible, taking care to get as little of the repulsive pulverulent anywhere near my taste buds. I started at 10:15 a.m. and within half an hour I had consumed an entire handful of the green-grey dust without any tears, but was beginning to feel increasingly nauseous. The nausea continued in waves, getting worse for a while and then finally abating so that by 2:30 p.m., more than four hours in, I finally noted “less sick now and actually enjoying this at last.”