Articulo Gerald Heard
Articulo Gerald Heard
Articulo Gerald Heard
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THE PSYCHEDELIC
REVIEW
than alcohol, tobacco, or caffeine At the same time one of its leading
students and advocates, Dr. Sidney Cohen remarks: "It is quite posgible that LSD attracts certain unstable individuals in their search
]:or some magical intervention."
Can trance-like insight produced by
chemicals be the source of higher wisdom and creativity, like a kind
of Instant Zenf This remains unproven m especially since so many
persons coming back [rom LSD can describe their experience only as
indescribable.
One of those who can describe it best is the writer of the followlng article, the distinguished philosopher Gerald Heard, author of
The Eternal Gospel, The Doppelgangers,
Is God in History ?, and
other books, and a leading student of psychic research,
"Pharmaceuticals
that change and maintain human personality
at any desired level," was Dr. Seaborg's definition of this major new
possibility of power -- and, he was quick to add, of potential danger
too. He was thinking of such recently introduced drugs as mescaline,
psilocybin, and no doubt particularly of the phenomenal one known
as LSD, about the uses of which much controversy is raging today.
Of them he went on to say: "It
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THE PSYCHEDELICREVIEW
So here may be a major breakthrough that meets the problem of
letting in a free flow of comprehension beyond the everyday threshold
of experience while keeping the mind clear. And this seems to be
accomplished by a confronting of one's self, a standing outside one's
self, a dissolution of the ego-based apprehensions that cloud the sky
of the mind.
The drug was discovered by accident in 1943. Dr. Albert Hofmann of Sandoz Ltd. in Switzerland, while doing research with derivatives of the ergot alkaloids, somehow absorbed synthesized LSD
into his system and found it to have surprising effects on consciousness. It was soon recognized as the most potent and reliable of the
consciousness-changing
drugs. A remarkable
fact about it is the
extreme minuteness of the effective dose. The optimum dosage m
that which produces for the subject the most informative results m
lies between 100 and 150 "gamma";
and 100 "gamma" is approximately one ten-thousandth
of a gram. (Mescaline, another of the
"consciousness-changers,"
has to be taken in a dosage four thousand
times that of LSD to produce similar mental results, and in this
amount it does have physical effects on most subjects -- sometimes
unpleasant ones.)
A good psychiatrist, of course, must be the overseer of all LSD
research. He must, as did the physicians who trained the volunteers
for the ascent of Mount Everest, have "vetted" the subject. He
must know whether this or that particular psyche is likely to function
satisfactorily at these rare altitudes. Then, a person intimately acquainted with LSD should be at the side of the subject as he embarks
on his journey.
It should not be undertaken alone. A companion
should be on call to act as an assistant -- for instance, to play music,
change
the lighting,
answer
any questions,
or write
any or
remarks
the subject
should wish
recorded
_ and also
as a down
monitor,
night
watchman, so to speak, ready to report if possible trouble may be
lurking ahead (in which case the voyage can be called off instantly
by administering a counteracting chemical),
So, though the subject should not be intruded upon, he should
not be left figuratively or literally in the dark. The optimal circumstances are simple, though contrary to present clinical and laboratory
protocol. For the ideal setting is not a hospital or research lab, but
rather an environment that is neither aggressive nor austere, and in
which
by
a garden.he may feel at home, perhaps a quiet house surrounded
The first stage under LSD is surprising in a paradoxical way.
10
Man's Mindl"'
From what he has learned about this research, the subject is of course
expecting a surprise. But during the first hour after swallowing the
tiny pills, he usually experiences nothing at all. He may feel some
relief at finding himself remaining completely normal, and perhaps
a secret sense of superiority at the thought that possibly he is too
strong to give in to a drug that will take him away from reality. An
uncommonly able businessman, the head of a major corporation, who
had much wished to take LSD, in fact waited fully three and one-half
hours for something to "happen."
Although it is uncommon for
LSD to be so long in taking effect, the occasions on which this has
occurred have led some researchers to speculate that the onset of
the experience can be held at bay for an extra hour or two by the
subject's unconscious nervousness or his suspicion that he might
have been given nothing more than an innocuous placebo.
Yet as the first hour wears away, quite a number of subjects
become convinced that they are feeling odd. Some, like the witches
of Macbeth, feel a pricking in their thumbs. Others -- and this, too,
is a common reaction to the weird, the uncanny, the "numinous"
feel chill, with that tightening, or horripilation, of the skin as, in the
vernacular, "a goose goes over one's grave."
They report, "I am
trembling" -- but, putting out their hands, find them steady.
In the second hour, however, most subjects enter upon a stage
which can leave no doubt that a profound change of consciousness
is occurring. For one thing, the attending psychiatrist, or "sitter,"
can see that the pupils of the subject's eyes are now nearly always
dilated. This symptom is the first and often the only undeniable and
visible physical effect of LSD, and it gives the physiologist almost
his only clue as to which area of the brain is now being acted upon.
For the center that controls the pupils' reaction to light is known,
and it lies deep.
During this second hour we can say that the subject is "gaining
altitude." Hove does he record this heightening of consciousness ? By
far the most common remark refers to the growing intensification of
color. Flowers, leaves, grass, trees, are seen with tremendous vividness -- "with the intensity that Van Gogh must have seen them," is
an often-used description.
They seem to pulse and breathe; in fact,
even everyday, fixed objects around the room may take on "flowing,"
"waving" shapes, as if invested with some life force of their own.
Intensification of sounds, too (such as the singing of birds, though
far away), is often commented on with fascinated surprise. Music
frequently becomes an absorbing delight even to the nonmusical
11
THE PSYCHEDELICREVIEW
valuation of all values," this double change of the view of one's self
and one's view of nature, a hand is actually held out to the subject,
he will be able to keep his bearings. If the subject uses this simple
"sea anchor," he may discover that he is not merely "riding the swell"
but has entered a condition of what until then may have been inconceivable. With his consciousness enlarged out of all bounds, he may
-- if all goes well -- find that he no longer feels anxiety about past
or future.
scenery of a drama. Now the whole outside world becomes a cornposition that embraces and interfuses everything. And yet this eomposition, though constantly changing, is also (strange paradox)
all
the while complete and instant in a fathomless peace. At this point
one could say that he crosses a watershed.
In this all-pervading Energy he feels around him, the subject realizes that he cannot be
as it flows through
ocean. He stands outside of and apart from his familiar ego, all its
protective barriers having been shed; and this can lead in some to
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13
THE PSYCHEDELICREVIEW
"Can This Drug Enlarge Man's Mindr'
I doubt it came by horn, my fearful dream m
too good to be true, that, [or my son and me.
What Penelope is saying is that there are two categories, or
channels, of subconscious insight: one, coming in through the "Gate
of Horn," of things that "may be borne out" (that is, having to do
with events, both present and future, in our actual lives) and the
other, through the "Gate of Ivory," of apparently the sheerest fantasy,
And it is certainly recognized by all students of psychical research
that there is a deep current of the mind which brings to the surface
(sometimes by way of dreams, but not necessarily always) raw data
an incoherent babbling, irresponsible glossolalia, sufficiently confusing to justify the epithet "glimmering illusion, fantasies."
Clues
as to this second traffic, when they do appear, are ambiguous; symbols
are so fractured that for a long while they are quite unrecognizable,
Here lies one reason why many decades of modern psychical
research into this anomalous traffic have produced such baffling and
frustrating results. Another is that whereas the flow running through
Penelope's "Gate of Horn" is as constant and copious as the daily
tides, the springs that feed the "Gate of Ivory" seem sporadic and
indeed capricious.
No wonder then that psychoanalysis, which confines itself to the masses of sea wrack brought up through the "Gate
of Horn" and stranded on the beaches of our waking mind, attracts
such an army of deep-sea psychobiologists, while those who wait by
the other water gate have but a few minnows to show after nearly
three generations of research,
Psychoanalysis is concerned mainly with man's conflicts between
his sexual urges and the taboos imposed upon him by society, and
with the effects of these conflicts on his everyday living. But the
traffic we associate with the "Gate of Ivory" deals with data appatently belonging to those higher registers of the mind which very
few researchers outside the psychical field have even noticed. It is
true that mystics and saints have reported, time and again, "out-ofthis-world," indescribable experiences that did change their lives and
bring a "better order" in their living. But these experiences came as
the result of many years of severe mental and physical discipline
carried out within a doctrinal frame of reference, which often brought
them to the brink of insanity. For many the experience was only a
brief flash. For some it came two or three times during a lifetime of
discipline.
For instance Plotinus, so his biographer and disciple
Porphyry tells us, only three times in his long life of striving for it
attained to "the state." But until now there has been no other way
14
of perception,
of keeping
it open
for any length of time, or of doing it at will. How is this free flow
of findings to be obtained ?
We now recognize that our minds have, as oculists say of our
eyes, not one but a number of focal lengths. The aperture of our
understanding alters, in the way that we alter the aperture of our
telescopes and microscopes to bring objects into clear focus at specific
ranges. But, though our minds do shift, though our range of perception will at times change gear, we cannot make that shift deliberately, consciously. Nor when it occurs can we hold on to it. And
when the most common, as well as the most profound shift m that
from waking to sleeping -- takes place, we are not able to observe
it as we experience it. This problem has teased psychologists for
sixty years, and the greatest of them, William James, saw that if it
was tobe solved, the experimenter
must use psychophysical means
on himself. He tried nitrous oxide as a means of enlarging consdousness, only to find that at a certain point communication ceased,
and he came back murmuring,
"The Universe has no opposite."
Then he tried peyotl, the button cactus that grows along the Rio
Grande and is used in the religious rites of Indians in the Southwest
as a sacrament lending lucidity -- only to be daunted by the stumbling
block of severe nausea.
Leave chemicals aside for the moment.
There is an "other"
state of mind, known to and described by poets as well as higher
mathematicians and other scientific geniuses, in which a deeply "insightful" process can take place. The current president of India,
the philosopher Dr. Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan,
has termed this process "integral thought" as against "analytic thought" -- the latter being
the inductive procedure whereby through the patient gathering, analysis, and arranging of data there would at last emerge a general "law."
"Integral thought" is the art of the sudden insight, the brilliant
hypothesis, the truly "creative" leap. To have truly original thought
the mind must throw off its critical guard, its filtering censor. It
must put itself into a state of depersonalization;
and from such histories as Jacques Hadamard's
The Psychology of Invention in the
Mathematical Field we know that the best researchers, when confronting problems and riddles that had defied all solution by ordinary
methods, did employ their minds in an unusual way, did put themselves into a state of egoless "creativity"
which permitted them to
have insights so remarkable that by means of these they were able
to make their greatest and most original discoveries.
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THE PSYCHEDELICREVIEW
of benefit. Intensity of attention is what all talented people must obtain or command if they are to exercise their talent. Ab,otute attention -- as we know from, for example, Isaac Newton's and Johann
Sebastian Bach's descriptions of the state of mind in which they
worked -- is the most evident mark of genius functioning.
On the
other hand, the masterful Sigmund Freud remarked that psychoanalysis, even when exercised by himself, would not work with the
extreme neurotic because of the hypertrophied
ego-attention
which
such a patient had sacrificed his life to build up. The psychotic is
even more absorbed in his distortive, self-obsessed notion of reality.
Give, then, either of these victims of their own egos still greater
capacity to attend, and it is highly unlikely that they will do other
than dig still more deeply the ditch of their delusion and build more
stubbornly the wall of their self-inflicted prison.
But for the truly creative person (and I refer specifically to
that person capable of exercising "integral thought") LSD may be
of some use. It could help him to exercise integral thought with
greater ease and facility, and at will. And for a number of sensitive
people willing to present themselves for a serious experiment in depth,
LSD has shown itself of some help in permeating the ego, in resolving
emotional conflicts, and in reducing those basic fears, the ultimate
of whichis the fear of death. However,the practicalanswer to What
should be done about it? seems to be that LSD remain for the time
being what it is: a "research drug," to be used with greatest care to
explore the minds of those who would volunteer to aid competent
researchers by offering themselves as voyagers to the "Gate of Ivory."
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