Program Notes
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Guest speaker: John Beresford
Dr. John Bereford delivering this talk in 2006 at the conference celebrating Albert Hofmann’s 100th birthday.
Today’s program features a lecture by psychedelic researcher Dr. John Beresford. Here is Erowid’s introduction to him:
“British-born John Beresford began his psychedelic research interests in 1961, and shortly thereafter he resigned his post as an Assistant Professor of Pediatrics at New York Medical College. In 1963 he founded the Agora Scientific Trust, the world’s first research organization devoted to investigating the effects of LSD. In contrast to Leary’s invitation to “tune in, turn on, and drop out”, Beresford initially wanted to keep LSD as a tool of scientifically trained specialists. However, later in his life he adopted a viewpoint that was opposed to the medicalization of psychedelics.”
Of course, the story that he is best known for is the time that he wrote to Sandoz Laboratories and requested one gram of LSD! (If my math is correct, that’s about 4,000 doses of 250 mics each.) Amazingly, Sandoz sent him a gram through the mail and attached a note that read, “Good luck.”
The talk we are about to listen to was given by Dr. Beresford at the conference celebrating Albert Hofmann’s 100th birthday. He titled it: “Psychedelic Agents and the Structure of Consciousness: Stages in a Session Using LSD and DMT”.
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Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Three-dimensional, transforming, musical, linguistic objects.
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Alpha Chains.
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Greetings from cyberdelic space.
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This is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
00:00:23 ►
This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
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And in our pursuit of documenting the early 60s, when interest in psychedelics was again building,
00:00:34 ►
one of the people that we don’t hear enough about is Dr. John Bairdsford.
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And to be honest, I wouldn’t have found this recording had it not been for Dr. Bairdsford’s daughter and son, who are working to ensure that their father’s place in psychedelic history isn’t
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forgotten. And for what it’s worth, I consider John Bairdsford’s contribution to our community
00:00:51 ►
right up there on the same level as Albert Hoffman himself. The talk that we are about to listen to
00:00:57 ►
was given at the event in Basel, Switzerland that celebrated Albert Hoffman’s 100th birthday.
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Switzerland that celebrated Albert Hoffman’s 100th birthday. And for the superstitious among us,
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this talk was given on Friday the 13th in 2006. And about halfway through this talk,
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Dr. Bairdsford says, consciousness is the origin of all appearance. And I think you may want to pause your player when he says that and spend a little time in contemplation of what he’s been talking about. Because if you’ve been listening to our live salons, then you’ll recognize this
00:01:30 ►
idea is something that we’ve also been frequently talking about. Now, here’s Dr. John Bairdsford
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discussing his model for the nature of consciousness. For those of you who are not up on your psychedelic history, this is a rare appearance by Dr.
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John Beresford, who in 1961 became interested in LSD.
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Having had only an experience with mescaline, which takes half a gram for an experience,
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John thought he would write away to Sandoz and conservatively ask for a couple
00:02:05 ►
of doses, four doses. So he asked for two grams of LSD.
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One gram. One gram of LSD, which came to him in a
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package with a note that said, good luck. And this is, I believe, the first presentation
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of his model of consciousness that is derived from supervising many of those sessions.
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So, welcome, John Beresford.
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Okay, thank you, Robert.
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I wanted to start by saying that we heard Dr. Hassler this morning
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speaking about the various approaches to consciousness
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which are currently part of Western thinking.
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And he mentioned four approaches,
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one being the neuropharmacological,
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and he used such expressions as the neurons of consciousness,
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the phenomenology of the brain,
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and he called LSD a pharmacon.
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I don’t think that it is true the homology of the brain and he called LSD a pharmacon.
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I don’t think that it is true that the effect of LSD can be explained by its action on the brain.
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It’s interesting, an interesting approach,
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but I don’t think the brain activity anywhere near covers
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the extent, the range of what we experience in consciousness.
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He then went on to speak in a very interesting way
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of the concept of self-de-boundarization, as he called it,
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meaning the abolition of the boundary between the self and the other
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and the state of consciousness which that propels one into.
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He then went on to two other approaches speaking
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of the political activity that LSD inspires and its effect on culture. I would like to
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introduce two, I believe that all these have their relevant purposes in discussion, but
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I believe that there are two other approaches which are necessary to complete
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our understanding, to hopefully complete our understanding of the effect of LSD.
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And one is what you might call the logical, metaphysical, rational approach.
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And the second is what I would call the moral approach, which requires us to take into consideration
00:04:26 ►
what we do to prisoners,
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people who take LSD,
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as many of us probably would if we were in a position to,
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and find themselves locked up in prison
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for extraordinarily long periods of time,
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especially in the United States.
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I think that the experience of these people
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needs to be taken into account
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when we consider what LSD is doing to us and to our society.
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Okay, on Sunday, I’m going to be presenting to Albert Hoffman
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an album of letters written by people in prison,
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LSD prisoners, who have written to Albert
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to congratulate him on his birthday
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and to wish him a very happy day and to thank him.
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In every case, profusely thank him for what he’s done.
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These are letters written from the depths of prison,
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and they’re going to be illustrated by slides,
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by photographs that these people have sent me
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to give Albert that message.
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And I would hope that as many people as possible
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will be at that presentation in the forum
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on Sunday at 1 o’clock.
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Okay, on to today’s talk.
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In 1961,
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I did a number of experiments with LSD starting in 1961,
00:05:50 ►
and it’s the first of these experiments that I want to discuss today.
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For this first experiment, 28 participants received up to 250 micrograms of LSD, and eight received up to 60 milligrams of DMT.
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The LSD was given by mouth and DMT by intramuscular injection. The experiment resulted in a theory
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of the effect of LSD, which, because it depends on objective findings
00:06:25 ►
and not on people’s descriptions of their experiences,
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belongs in the category of natural science,
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in German Naturwissenschaft,
00:06:35 ►
not Geisteswissenschaft.
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I know that this is a controversial claim,
00:06:40 ►
but I believe it can be backed up.
00:06:42 ►
And because it is a theory of the effect of LSD on consciousness,
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it has a place in philosophy of mind.
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Philosophy of mind, in the analytic tradition,
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which dominates philosophical teaching in every major university
00:06:59 ►
in the English-speaking world,
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is an academic discipline concerned with the meaning of statements made
00:07:06 ►
by neuroscientists, psychologists, and others about such things as the relation of the brain
00:07:12 ►
to consciousness. Now, it’s no secret that the aim of neuroscientists is ultimately to uncover
00:07:20 ►
the nature of consciousness. There have been dozens of books on the subject published in the last 10, 15 years.
00:07:27 ►
Consciousness is said to be the last frontier
00:07:29 ►
which natural science still has to cross once it’s gone that far.
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There’s nothing more for science to discover, is the idea.
00:07:37 ►
Now, if LSD can show us the nature of consciousness,
00:07:42 ►
I would think that crossing that last frontier
00:07:45 ►
will happen sooner than expected.
00:07:49 ►
Okay, now, I think we would tend to agree
00:07:52 ►
that consciousness is a strange animal.
00:07:56 ►
Intuitively, you know it is there,
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but you can’t sense it, you can’t describe it,
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you can’t define it, you can’t describe it. You can’t define it.
00:08:06 ►
You can’t say what it is.
00:08:14 ►
You can’t predict if a computer is or ever will be conscious.
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You can’t state with any degree of certainty if a space alien who descended and is sitting on my right hand here
00:08:22 ►
would be conscious.
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You can’t tell if an animal has the same consciousness
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as a human being,
00:08:28 ►
or even if that statement or question makes sense.
00:08:31 ►
The whole question of consciousness in philosophy is a mess.
00:08:37 ►
Viewing consciousness…
00:08:38 ►
Now, okay.
00:08:40 ►
Against this, the theory that I mentioned
00:08:42 ►
states that LSD can be used as a scientific instrument
00:08:47 ►
to partition consciousness into its component levels
00:08:51 ►
and to show us how to combine these levels,
00:08:56 ►
how these levels combine to form a structure.
00:09:00 ►
Viewing consciousness as a structure
00:09:04 ►
and not as a mixture
00:09:06 ►
containing sensations, feelings, thoughts
00:09:09 ►
intentions, desires
00:09:12 ►
loves, hates and the hundred and other one things
00:09:15 ►
that philosophers like to put into consciousness
00:09:17 ►
doing so allows us to
00:09:22 ►
think of consciousness in a concrete fashion and allows us to think of consciousness in a concrete fashion
00:09:26 ►
and allows us to, using a structural theory of consciousness,
00:09:33 ►
I believe that we can say now what it is.
00:09:37 ►
Anyway, so now I’m going to begin with some remarks
00:09:40 ►
on how I became interested in LSD.
00:09:43 ►
Then I’m going to look at the problem of applying scientific method
00:09:47 ►
to an inquiry into the effect of LSD.
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I’ll relate some observations that came to light
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when the problem of method was resolved.
00:09:59 ►
Then consider how these observations combine to form a theory
00:10:03 ►
of the LSD session,
00:10:05 ►
and end with speculation on the possible relevance of this to philosophy of mind.
00:10:13 ►
In 1961, I had an apartment on the Lower East Side of Manhattan,
00:10:18 ►
where I led kind of a double life.
00:10:21 ►
On weekdays, I was an assistant professor of pediatrics at the New York
00:10:25 ►
Medical College, teaching students and taking care of patients. On weekends, I hung out with
00:10:32 ►
the bohemian crowd in Greenwich Village. In 1961, a story circulated about a mad Harvard professor
00:10:41 ►
who had come down to New York on weekends, dropped some white-coated tablets on the counter of a village bar
00:10:49 ►
and said to anyone who listened,
00:10:51 ►
take one, you’ll learn something.
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No one knew what these white-coated tablets were.
00:10:56 ►
They were called silly sibenes.
00:10:59 ►
And the mad professor, of course, was Tim Leary
00:11:02 ►
on a jaunt from Newton Center
00:11:05 ►
before his first experience with LSD.
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Back then in the village, everybody smoked.
00:11:11 ►
A nickel bag of marijuana lasted a good week.
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Eric Loeb ran a store on 8th Street
00:11:17 ►
with crates of peyote buttons in the window.
00:11:20 ►
My friend Chuck Bick had an apartment
00:11:23 ►
with shelves of interesting chemicals that you could buy.
00:11:27 ►
You felt something revolutionary was in the air,
00:11:30 ►
and if you stayed with it, you could change the world.
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My Aries nature did not let me take this lying down.
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I sent away for items in the Light and Company catalogue in London.
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Hoffman LaRoche was willing to supply mescaline. My
00:11:46 ►
position at the Medical College let me phone Sandoz in New Jersey and request some LSD.
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The LSD came in, as Robert said, in, well, he said in, it came in two half-gram vials.
00:12:01 ►
That weekend I opened one with a file and examined the tan-colored crystals inside.
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I took an amount of crystal that clung to the point of a pin and watched it dissolve in water.
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The experience that followed told me that my life was going to change.
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And it did.
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So I resigned from the medical college and waited to see what would happen.
00:12:28 ►
When you have a relation with LSD,
00:12:30 ►
you can expect the unexpected.
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For me, it started when I had the idea
00:12:35 ►
of the Agora Scientific Trust.
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Agora, because it would be a place
00:12:40 ►
where the effect of LSD could be studied and discussed.
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Scientific, because the study would be scientific.
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Trust was a pun on the meaning of a legal entity and basic trust.
00:12:53 ►
Chance put me in touch with people like Stanley Crane,
00:12:56 ►
a brain scientist at Columbia University,
00:13:00 ►
Jean Houston, just short of her PhD
00:13:03 ►
and brimming with Greek mythology.
00:13:06 ►
Howard Eisenberg, an ex-tax lawyer who did the legal work for Agora.
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A landlord who provided us with a ground floor apartment with a private walled-in garden,
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perfect for doing sessions in and steps from the Metropolitan Museum.
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And a benefactor who donated $5,000, all in the space of a month.
00:13:29 ►
With a place for sessions magically provided, the first question was,
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how was a scientific inquiry into the effect of LSD possible?
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What would constitute the data?
00:13:43 ►
What would count as observations
00:13:45 ►
how would observations be described
00:13:48 ►
so here was a stumbling block
00:13:51 ►
you could describe the effect of LSD on human experience
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or you could describe the effect
00:13:59 ►
on the anatomy and chemistry of the brain
00:14:02 ►
neither of these approaches, in my view,
00:14:06 ►
was sufficient. Experience,
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by definition, is not observable.
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What you observe when someone describes an experience
00:14:14 ►
is not the experience, but an utterance of words and sentences.
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You infer what lies behind the utterance.
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You hope correctly, but you may not be correct.
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How someone describes an experience depends on their choice
00:14:28 ►
of words, their past experience, their wish
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to say the right thing, to please you or otherwise.
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Descriptions of experience do not provide the data for scientific
00:14:40 ►
observations. As for the option of
00:14:43 ►
describing the effect of LSD on brain anatomy and chemistry,
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that might be scientific, but it would not fit the Agora agenda. Also in 1961, Tim was
00:14:55 ►
spreading the idea that set and setting determined the outcome of a session. Sorry, but that
00:15:02 ►
could not be true. Set and setting are variables.
00:15:07 ►
Get the set and setting in a session right and things go well.
00:15:10 ►
Get them wrong and things go horribly.
00:15:13 ►
Set and setting by themselves cannot determine the outcome of a session.
00:15:17 ►
There had to be an effect intrinsic to the molecule
00:15:21 ►
that did not hinge on the effect of variables.
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intrinsic to the molecule that did not hinge on the effect of variables.
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Anyway, a scientific theory depends on findings which can be observed objectively, but it seems you can’t make observations unless you presuppose a theory
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which defines the kind of observations you will make observations are
00:15:47 ►
as it is said theory laden now suppose that such theories as you have in mind are not up to the job
00:15:55 ►
suppose for example that psychoanalytic theory in any of its many variants is not up to the job
00:16:01 ►
of explaining the effect of lsd what do you do then to forge ahead in the job of explaining the effect of LSD.
00:16:06 ►
What do you do then?
00:16:10 ►
To forge ahead in the hope of making valid observations will get nowhere if such observations as you make
00:16:14 ►
reflect a theory which you hold, perhaps unconsciously,
00:16:17 ►
and which happens to be wrong.
00:16:21 ►
What the situation called for was a theory that steered clear…
00:16:24 ►
I’m sorry, what the situation called for was a method that steered clear of theory.
00:16:31 ►
This ruled out thinking, devising a hypothesis and planning an experiment to see if the hypothesis worked.
00:16:43 ►
and planning an experiment to see if the hypothesis worked.
00:16:47 ►
Testing hypotheses would be a waste of time because hypotheses are also theory-laden.
00:16:51 ►
A method was required that did not presuppose a theory,
00:16:54 ►
had no room for hypotheses, assumptions, or predictions,
00:16:58 ►
and left the outcome of a session completely open.
00:17:02 ►
This ideal method I called a-theoretical, no theory. There were some
00:17:08 ►
practical considerations. I wanted a participant to control the extent of his or her experience.
00:17:16 ►
With word getting out about Agora, people approached me with accounts of sessions where
00:17:21 ►
high-dose LSD was used to blast through ego defenses, producing experiences
00:17:27 ►
that these particular people would not want to repeat. The highest dose of LSD I gave,
00:17:33 ►
at least initially, was 250 micrograms for this reason, and this choice of dosage limit
00:17:40 ►
turned out to be a fortuitous one, as I will explain in a minute.
00:17:46 ►
Talking with a participant before a session, I avoided the word therapy. My role was not that
00:17:52 ►
of a therapist. I refrained from suggesting that a session might lead to a spiritual experience
00:17:59 ►
or something on the line of Huxley’s. I tried not to suggest anything. My aim was not to explore creative problem solving
00:18:08 ►
nor sow the seeds of revolution. LSD
00:18:11 ►
was going to do that anyway and didn’t need a push
00:18:15 ►
from me. The only point I will make now
00:18:20 ►
in the time available about the method that I followed
00:18:23 ►
is that I encourage the participant to practice
00:18:27 ►
identifying early in a session
00:18:30 ►
if an opportunity for this arose.
00:18:33 ►
Identifying means projecting the center
00:18:37 ►
or the feeling of the self
00:18:39 ►
onto an object infused with anxiety.
00:18:43 ►
Identifying with the object defuses the anxiety and acts as a
00:18:47 ►
safety measure. Sessions took place in as normal a setup as possible. No artificial gimmicks such
00:18:55 ►
as eye shades to screen out the surroundings. No earphones to feed in music that I could not hear,
00:19:07 ►
no barrier to ordinary conversation
00:19:09 ►
in case something interesting came up.
00:19:12 ►
In the first 20 or so sessions,
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I attended to what I knew had to be going on,
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the intrinsic effect I was looking for
00:19:22 ►
but could not yet take in.
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Meanwhile, staying free from distraction,
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attending to a thought or feeling of my own
00:19:32 ►
could affect the progress of a session.
00:19:35 ►
It’s worth noting that transmission of a thought or feeling of one’s own
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happens readily and is a source of unwanted suggestion in a session.
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You have to be careful.
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Certain observations
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emerged around the 20th
00:19:51 ►
session of the series.
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I remember the moment
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when the scales of ignorance fell from my eyes
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and the effect I had been
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trying not to define
00:20:01 ►
lay before me like uncharted
00:20:03 ►
territory.
00:20:07 ►
Now at this point I’ve got seven observations that I want to
00:20:12 ►
describe and initially I was going to project these on the screen
00:20:15 ►
unfortunately I found that we require a transparency
00:20:19 ►
to work with the machine that does the projection. I wanted
00:20:23 ►
to be able, for you to be able to follow these observations on the screen.
00:20:28 ►
It would be easier to take them in,
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but I’m just going to have to read them out.
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Number one, a session consists of a succession of stages.
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These are periods of a session
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consisting of distinct kinds of stages. These are periods of a session consisting of distinct kinds of experience.
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One following the next
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in a regular sequence.
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The stages may be numbered one through six
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using Roman numerals.
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The regularity of the sequence means
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that you do not find a stage four
00:21:02 ►
preceding a stage three
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or a stage three preceding a stage three or a stage three preceding preceding
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a stage two why not question number two the transition from one stage to another is abrupt
00:21:18 ►
there are no intervening intervals nor does one stage drift into another. What accounts for the abruptness of transitions?
00:21:29 ►
Another question.
00:21:30 ►
Three.
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A session exhibits a certain momentum
00:21:34 ►
as though the participant were pulled
00:21:36 ►
from a stage lower in the hierarchy
00:21:38 ►
to one stage higher.
00:21:40 ►
What is responsible for this pull?
00:21:43 ►
Sessions may be rated positive or negative
00:21:45 ►
according to the quantity of pleasurable affect feeling. An ideal session may be one where
00:21:52 ►
pleasurable affect is continuously present, though this ideal is not always reached. Most
00:21:58 ►
sessions are interrupted by a spell of negative affect, however brief.
00:22:07 ►
What causes the onset of negative affect?
00:22:12 ►
The onset of a stage, this is the fifth observation,
00:22:17 ►
the onset of a stage is marked by a particular kind of transformation.
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What is transformed is the appearance characteristic of the stage. A normal session is one where appearance is continuously transformed.
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I repeat the vital sentence.
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A normal session is one where appearance is continuously transformed.
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Whether this applies to the sixth stage of a session
00:22:41 ►
where there may be no appearance is contentious.
00:22:44 ►
What, I ask,
00:22:46 ►
what is the anatomy of transformation? What is it all about? Six, negative or unpleasant affect
00:22:55 ►
may be counteracted by the use of such maneuvers as identifying with the object on which negative
00:23:01 ►
affect is projected. In the sessions I conducted,
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I found that negative affect coincides
00:23:08 ►
with a rest of the transforming process.
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Everything comes to a standstill.
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From a condition where the objects of appearance
00:23:18 ►
are continuously mobile,
00:23:21 ►
appearance becomes immobile, ominously still. Rigidity replaces plasticity. What
00:23:29 ►
is the connection between mobility of appearance and good feeling? And why is it important
00:23:35 ►
in the conduct of a session to deal with the arrest of transformations expeditiously?
00:23:43 ►
The last is the factor responsible
00:23:45 ►
for arresting transformations and inducing anxiety.
00:23:49 ►
These two things happen together.
00:23:52 ►
It’s resistance to the pull or momentum of a session.
00:23:56 ►
Resistance is uniformly associated
00:23:58 ►
with signs of anxiety.
00:24:00 ►
Resistance lower in the echelon of stages
00:24:02 ►
is associated with a relatively mild degree of anxiety, while resistance higher in the echelon of stages is associated with a relatively mild degree of anxiety,
00:24:06 ►
while resistance higher in the echelon is associated with anxiety of increasingly severe degree,
00:24:13 ►
culminating in panic.
00:24:16 ►
And does this suggest a new etiology of anxiety?
00:24:19 ►
I won’t try to answer these.
00:24:23 ►
Louder?
00:24:37 ►
What do I have to do? Talk like that? I won’t try to answer these questions, but go on to the transformations which characterize each stage.
00:24:44 ►
And I’m not going to spend much time on this because most of you are familiar with what I’m going to be talking about in any case. At the onset of a stage, appearance characteristic of that stage loses its customary stability.
00:24:53 ►
Appearance is de-patterned or destabilized.
00:24:56 ►
At the onset of stage two, for example, sense appearance loses its habitual stability, outlines waver.
00:25:06 ►
Borders shift.
00:25:07 ►
The interior of once stable objects move.
00:25:13 ►
Released from the constraint of maintaining stable appearance,
00:25:18 ►
sensory imagination engages in creative play.
00:25:22 ►
Abstract patterns, Moorish gardens, Egyptian temples,
00:25:26 ►
the repertoire is endless.
00:25:28 ►
All these are transformations of sensory appearance.
00:25:32 ►
Collectively, they are referred to as the transformations of sense.
00:25:37 ►
At the onset of stage three,
00:25:39 ►
thought appearance loses its customary stability.
00:25:44 ►
We live wrapped in a pattern of thought
00:25:46 ►
we call the history of our life.
00:25:49 ►
Stage three
00:25:49 ►
transformations disrupt
00:25:51 ►
this pattern. Thoughts
00:25:53 ►
appear in novel sequences
00:25:55 ►
and combinations, some forgotten
00:25:57 ►
in the usual way, some suppressed
00:25:59 ►
on account of association with
00:26:01 ►
unpleasant affect.
00:26:03 ►
New combinations of thoughts occur with the surprise of creative discovery.
00:26:08 ►
Transformations of the appearance of thought are referred to collectively
00:26:11 ►
as the transformation of thought.
00:26:15 ►
Descriptions of stage four transformations are often based on Jung
00:26:20 ►
and his archetypes of the collective unconscious.
00:26:23 ►
I prefer to think in terms of transformations of form.
00:26:28 ►
The term is borrowed from Plato
00:26:30 ►
and reminds us that existence predates our personal arrival on the planet.
00:26:36 ►
Transformations of form pertain to kinds of appearance not ordinarily accessible.
00:26:43 ►
Karmic appearance is one mode of this kind. Once,
00:26:47 ►
when lying on my back at this stage of a session, my body separated into inner and outer sections.
00:26:56 ►
The inner subtle body rotated through 180 degrees in the outer material body, landing me face down in the sand of an Egyptian desert,
00:27:08 ►
clad as a slave or low-ranked soldier,
00:27:12 ►
a knife in my back and unable to breathe.
00:27:15 ►
I thought, this is interesting.
00:27:18 ►
What do I do now?
00:27:21 ►
I did nothing.
00:27:23 ►
And a reverse rotation
00:27:26 ►
brought me back face up
00:27:28 ►
in the material body
00:27:29 ►
where I lay gazing at the ceiling
00:27:32 ►
letting whatever was happening happen
00:27:35 ►
I was again pressed face down in the sand
00:27:37 ►
and left to suffocate
00:27:39 ►
this time with consequences
00:27:41 ►
related to the asthma I had as a child.
00:27:45 ►
Now, you only have to have this kind of experience once
00:27:48 ►
to know that it is real
00:27:50 ►
and that it has nothing to do with the central nervous system,
00:27:54 ►
with the brain.
00:27:55 ►
It happens independently of anything going on in the central nervous system.
00:28:00 ►
Okay, I don’t mean to play up the subtle body aspect.
00:28:04 ►
Like telepathic communication and out-of-body experience,
00:28:08 ►
this can happen at any stage in a session.
00:28:11 ►
Also, whether you prefer a past incarnation explanation, as I do,
00:28:18 ►
or you think in terms of DEA or cell memory, as Leary used to,
00:28:22 ►
or you stick with Jung’s idea of a collective unconscious,
00:28:27 ►
my slave body representing an archetype of the downtrodden, perhaps,
00:28:33 ►
in the long run does not matter.
00:28:35 ►
However interpreted, stage four transformations
00:28:38 ►
extend beyond the barrier of personal existence
00:28:41 ►
and are felt with a sense of profound significance,
00:28:46 ►
which is probably an understatement.
00:28:48 ►
Note that these kinds of experience so far mentioned are consistent with the fact that
00:28:53 ►
we are beings enclosed in space.
00:28:57 ►
We say that space has not lost its stability.
00:29:02 ►
This changes with the onset of stage five.
00:29:08 ►
lost its stability. This changes with the onset of stage 5. Stage 5 transformations do not always characterize an LSD session, but always characterize a DMT session, which is the reason for including
00:29:15 ►
DMT in the experiment. And I should mention that DMT accounts in 1961 did not refer to elves or other elementals.
00:29:25 ►
That came later.
00:29:28 ►
Within minutes of an injection of DMT,
00:29:31 ►
a disruption of the appearance of space
00:29:34 ►
is felt as an outward rush of being to an infinitely distant point,
00:29:41 ►
where a distinction between being and space is no longer tenable.
00:29:46 ►
The appearance of space
00:29:47 ►
has been destabilized.
00:29:50 ►
At the end of this process
00:29:52 ►
which may take a minute to complete
00:29:54 ►
transformations
00:29:56 ►
consisting of imageless
00:29:58 ►
multicolored multilevel
00:29:59 ►
planes grouping and regrouping
00:30:02 ►
occur in an ever changing
00:30:04 ►
array.
00:30:07 ►
I should mention that an arrest of transformations in stage five creates a potentially dangerous situation. What happens then
00:30:15 ►
is a reduction of the multi-plane of transformations to a rigid circular design,
00:30:21 ►
accompanied by terrifying affect, which may culminate in panic.
00:30:26 ►
Arrest of stage five transformations, and remember that arrest means arrest of the process of continuous change,
00:30:34 ►
may be the origin of the evil eye, and I have a slide maybe to illustrate that.
00:30:39 ►
Now, so far what has happened is loss of stability of the appearance of sense, thought, form, and space in that order.
00:30:50 ►
By now, the feeling of selfhood has lost all but one of the standards by which it measures its identity.
00:31:00 ►
Only the appearance of time remains intact.
00:31:04 ►
With the onset of stage six, this last measure of identity is lost.
00:31:09 ►
Transformation of the appearance of time strips the self of the ability to maintain a consistent identity.
00:31:22 ►
The term transformation of the appearance of time may not be quite correct.
00:31:28 ►
That is time as we experience it.
00:31:31 ►
It might be more appropriate to speak of the transcendence of time
00:31:35 ►
and in turn the transcendence of all appearance,
00:31:39 ►
landing us in a state of pure consciousness,
00:31:42 ►
consciousness perhaps I could say defiled by appearance
00:31:47 ►
of any sort. The terms ultimate, absolute come to mind in this connection and I think
00:31:55 ►
there are perhaps three things that one can say about this state. One being that the loss of the self-other distinction produces the paradox of being one with everything
00:32:11 ►
from the state of being nothing, with losing all identity.
00:32:15 ►
One is in the state of being everything,
00:32:18 ►
being in the state of all identity.
00:32:21 ►
One is, as Albert mentioned this morning,
00:32:24 ►
immersed in a field of light. One is a child of
00:32:28 ►
light, was Albert’s way of expressing it.
00:32:31 ►
And third, perhaps most important,
00:32:35 ►
one comes face to face
00:32:39 ►
with the two injunctions of esoteric religion.
00:32:43 ►
One being the need to extend compassion
00:32:49 ►
to all sentient beings without differentiation
00:32:52 ►
and without distinction.
00:32:55 ►
And not an easy thing to do, of course,
00:32:57 ►
but nevertheless one is confronted by the imperative to do so.
00:33:03 ►
And the second being to stay on top of the idea that
00:33:07 ►
consciousness is the origin of all appearance. Now, I don’t need to make needless comments to
00:33:16 ►
this audience, but I would like to bring our attention to that second point. If consciousness
00:33:21 ►
is the sole origin of appearance, is what appears as sense,
00:33:27 ►
thought, form, space and time, is that all illusory? I don’t think so, but then what
00:33:34 ►
grounds do I have for saying that it is not? Okay, I’m not going to discuss stage
00:33:40 ►
one opinions about that differ. Let’s backtrack. I started with the claim that LSD can be used as a scientific instrument
00:33:48 ►
to separate consciousness into its component levels
00:33:51 ►
and show that they combine to form a structure,
00:33:55 ►
a claim I still have to make good on.
00:33:58 ►
I went into some personal history,
00:34:01 ►
looked at the problem of applying scientific method,
00:34:03 ►
and described some observations
00:34:05 ►
which resulted. Now, the question is, what do these observations add up to? What happens
00:34:12 ►
when they combine to form a theory? Now, this is a little exercise of the imagination that
00:34:20 ►
I like. Compare, if you will, observations to pieces of a jigsaw puzzle.
00:34:27 ►
Spread out on the table, the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle make no sense. They’re meaningless.
00:34:35 ►
Assemble them into a pattern where they make sense, and you have a picture that until now
00:34:40 ►
was invisible, unless the same picture appears on the cover of the box, that is.
00:34:48 ►
Solving the puzzle creates meaning. Assemble your observations into a pattern where they
00:34:55 ►
make sense and you have a theory that until now was unthinkable. Conceiving a theory creates
00:35:02 ►
meaning. The influx of new meaning attendant on creating a theory, on conceiving a theory creates meaning. The influx of new meaning attendant on
00:35:06 ►
creating a theory, on conceiving a theory, we may call semantic gain. Creation of
00:35:13 ►
new meaning is the true function of a theory and distinguishes it from the
00:35:17 ►
mere hypothesis. Now we have reached a crucial stage of the argument.
00:35:26 ►
We have a set of observations relating to the normal LSD session.
00:35:31 ►
The normal session is marked by a succession of stages,
00:35:35 ►
transformations that occur continuously or are briefly arrested.
00:35:39 ►
The consequence of the arrest of transformations is anxiety and so forth.
00:35:44 ►
We have a number of observations related to the normal session.
00:35:49 ►
There is a moment before the observations gel when they don’t make a whole lot of sense.
00:35:55 ►
At the moment when they gel, which is the moment of conception of a theory,
00:36:00 ►
an influx of new meaning or semantic gain is generated. What is the new meaning
00:36:08 ►
a theory of the normal LSD session provides? What do we know that we did not know before?
00:36:15 ►
Well, it’s obvious when you see it. We know that the stages of a session are levels of
00:36:22 ►
consciousness. What happens in a stage is happening at some level of consciousness.
00:36:29 ►
The structure of a session is the structure of consciousness.
00:36:34 ►
The effect of LSD is an effect on consciousness.
00:36:38 ►
The nature of consciousness has been defined.
00:36:42 ►
We can say we know what it is.
00:36:46 ►
That takes a while to sink in.
00:36:50 ►
Let’s go back to philosophy of mind
00:36:52 ►
and see how it applies.
00:36:55 ►
Philosophy of mind
00:36:56 ►
rests on two fundamental beliefs.
00:36:59 ►
One is that consciousness,
00:37:02 ►
whatever it may be,
00:37:03 ►
depends on the brain. Consciousness may be, depends on the brain.
00:37:06 ►
Consciousness is excreted by the brain, like toothpaste from a tube,
00:37:12 ►
or is related to the brain as software is related to hardware,
00:37:19 ►
or it is an epiphenomenon affected by but not affecting the brain.
00:37:26 ►
Or it is a false appearance like a mirage.
00:37:31 ►
Whatever the case, consciousness without the brain is nothing.
00:37:36 ►
The flip side of the coin is that only one kind of thing exists, the material.
00:37:47 ►
exists, the material. Descartes’ idea that two kinds of things exist, matter and consciousness, is dismissed as nonsense. LSD makes both beliefs look shaky. Others have commented on the difficulty
00:37:58 ►
of fitting subtle body experience and the like into the framework of current brain science.
00:38:03 ►
LSD makes things worse.
00:38:06 ►
Nothing in the physiology and anatomy of the brain
00:38:08 ►
accounts or can account for transformations of appearance
00:38:12 ►
and the multilevel structure of human consciousness.
00:38:15 ►
So what do we do?
00:38:18 ►
One thing is to give up the dogma of materialism
00:38:22 ►
and see if dualism works better.
00:38:28 ►
Perhaps matter and consciousness exist jointly,
00:38:31 ►
sometimes relating, sometimes not.
00:38:35 ►
I asked just now if it made sense to say of the appearance of sense, thought, form, space and time
00:38:38 ►
that appearance is real.
00:38:42 ►
If consciousness is the origin of appearance
00:38:46 ►
and consciousness is real,
00:38:48 ►
then appearance is real also.
00:38:51 ►
Paradoxically, appearance,
00:38:53 ►
which is the sum of our experience, is real.
00:38:56 ►
Now, if that can be allowed,
00:38:57 ►
a solution is at hand to the problem
00:39:00 ►
of creative play and representation.
00:39:08 ►
Creative play is the name I gave to transformations of appearance in stage two,
00:39:12 ►
when sensory imagination has been released
00:39:15 ►
from the constraint to maintain stability.
00:39:19 ►
Suppose that creative play is the normal state
00:39:23 ►
of the imagination,
00:39:24 ►
and that only when demands of the environment become pressing
00:39:29 ►
does sense appearance settle down and become constant.
00:39:33 ►
This puts representation in a new perspective.
00:39:38 ►
Ever since Locke and before him Galileo,
00:39:41 ►
philosophy has struggled with the notion
00:39:43 ►
that material objects send out stimuli
00:39:46 ►
which impinge on organs of sensation and set up motions in the brain which turn into experience
00:39:53 ►
and how experience, I’m sorry, set up motions in the brain which turn into experience which
00:40:02 ►
copies or represents the objects.
00:40:06 ►
in the brain which turn into experience which copies or represents the objects. Now, how emotions in the brain turn into experience and how experience copies or represents material
00:40:13 ►
objects has never been explained. It looks impossible. But if consciousness, not material
00:40:20 ►
objects, is the origin of appearance. The problem vanishes.
00:40:27 ►
Imagination engages in creative play until put on notice by the environment to slow down.
00:40:31 ►
Sensory transformations abate.
00:40:33 ►
Appearance regains stability,
00:40:35 ►
and the external world resumes its normal look.
00:40:38 ►
Nothing is or has been represented.
00:40:42 ►
Then there is the embarrassing problem
00:40:44 ►
of the existence of immaterial
00:40:45 ►
entities, for example, entities
00:40:48 ►
that manifest as peaceful or
00:40:50 ►
wrathful deities in meditation.
00:40:52 ►
Or thought forms,
00:40:54 ►
which are images created
00:40:55 ►
with such intensity that they
00:40:57 ►
take on objective appearance.
00:41:00 ►
Or apparitions encountered
00:41:01 ►
after death according to Bardo teaching.
00:41:05 ►
Dogmatic materialism, and with it philosophy of mind,
00:41:09 ►
as currently taught in the universities, has no truck with such notions.
00:41:15 ►
Unshackled from materialism, however,
00:41:18 ►
consciousness is free to create any of these species of appearance
00:41:22 ►
with no need of help from the brain to do so.
00:41:29 ►
There are interesting questions to do with the self and the development of consciousness,
00:41:35 ►
but that is all I have time for today. Let me end with a defense of Descartes. I believe Descartes was right. He was wrong in mistaking matter as dead and mechanical,
00:41:48 ►
but let that pass. He was right in saying that consciousness can exist apart from the body.
00:41:56 ►
That experience of Descartes on the 10th of November, 1619, that threshold date of modern philosophy brought on a spiritual crisis. Descartes’ soul,
00:42:08 ►
his moi, his consciousness separated from his body, showing him that the two could exist
00:42:16 ►
independently. I won’t develop the argument Descartes took 18 years to get a subtly disguised
00:42:23 ►
version of it done on paper. Let’s just say that dualism
00:42:26 ►
is right. Consciousness and body belong together but can divorce. And I hope philosophers of
00:42:33 ►
mind give this some thought. Now I have some slides. These are two profiles of a normal session. At the top there, the 11th of the sessions that I did,
00:42:49 ►
the vertical line marks stages 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6.
00:42:55 ►
The horizontal line marks hours after ingestion of LSD.
00:43:02 ►
So in the session 11, up at the top,
00:43:01 ►
of LSD.
00:43:04 ►
So in the session 11 up at the top you see that
00:43:05 ►
there was a short duration of stage 1,
00:43:10 ►
stage 2,
00:43:11 ►
a fairly long
00:43:13 ►
duration of stage 3,
00:43:17 ►
going up to
00:43:18 ►
stage 4 for a short period of time,
00:43:20 ►
I think it was about 20 minutes, and suddenly a drop
00:43:22 ►
and a complete reversion
00:43:24 ►
to stage one.
00:43:25 ►
There was no activity at all.
00:43:27 ►
But a very short time after that, the participant returned to a stage three appearance.
00:43:35 ►
And then after that, there was a slow decline back to the normal state by about the end of the tenth hour.
00:43:43 ►
At the below, the session 19 below this
00:43:47 ►
is quite interesting. There was
00:43:50 ►
a stage one and a stage two and a very
00:43:55 ►
prolonged stage through. It seemed to have gone for hours.
00:43:59 ►
It looked like about four hours. I got a bit fed up at this point and decided to use
00:44:04 ►
a booster dose. And I
00:44:05 ►
gave a booster dose of another 250 micrograms. And the participant had a very beautiful stage
00:44:14 ►
four experience. And immediately after that, a stage six experience, which is profoundly
00:44:20 ►
beatific and lasted for about three hours. Okay, so anyway I just wanted to show that using this
00:44:28 ►
theory of the session there is some science to it. Things can be plotted and demonstrated.
00:44:34 ►
Next slide please. These are some illustrations of a session done by Stanley, a painter.
00:44:48 ►
This is stage two of his session
00:44:54 ►
where the good brother and the bad brother, as he put it,
00:44:58 ►
were flying in combination
00:45:02 ►
and going through various maneuvers
00:45:06 ►
and re-experiencing
00:45:09 ►
parts of Stanley’s childhood
00:45:11 ►
next slide please
00:45:13 ►
and they continued in this fashion
00:45:17 ►
over the crest of a mountain
00:45:19 ►
to the border of an ocean
00:45:24 ►
where the sun became extraordinarily large and powerful.
00:45:29 ►
Next slide, please.
00:45:31 ►
Then the scene dissolves into a field of blood suddenly,
00:45:36 ►
and this was the onset of a stage four,
00:45:38 ►
and the field of blood transformed into the earth.
00:45:43 ►
And this is the slide that Stanley drew of the earth experience
00:45:47 ►
seeming to represent all fecundity and creativity.
00:45:56 ►
And he spent a number of minutes contemplating this scene,
00:46:01 ►
as he told me, until the next slide, please,
00:46:05 ►
it transformed into the emblem of a sunflower.
00:46:10 ►
And this sunflower was itself replete with meaning for Stanley,
00:46:20 ►
and he described various transformations of the petals and the
00:46:26 ►
stamens that the sunflower went through until next slide the sunflower was
00:46:33 ►
attacked by a what you call it that creature that sea creature I forget the
00:46:39 ►
name of it a crunch station and anyway not a lobster a crayfish
00:46:45 ►
it was threatened by a crayfish
00:46:49 ►
and Stanley freaked
00:46:51 ►
until
00:46:52 ►
we went through the
00:46:54 ►
motion of identifying with the
00:46:57 ►
crayfish as we had
00:46:59 ►
practiced earlier in the session
00:47:00 ►
doing identification
00:47:02 ►
with
00:47:03 ►
at a much lower level of the session.
00:47:07 ►
And the crayfish transformed, next slide, into a succession,
00:47:14 ►
a million tunnels of light which conducted him up to the center.
00:47:22 ►
to be the center of the universe,
00:47:30 ►
which was his sixth stage of the experience.
00:47:33 ►
Now, at another time in a DMT session,
00:47:35 ►
please, next slide,
00:47:40 ►
Stanley himself, this was the best he could do to describe the phenomenology of the transformations of space, the multi-planar, multi-colored
00:47:49 ►
transformations that’s typical of the stage five experience.
00:47:56 ►
And next slide will show us what happens.
00:48:00 ►
Oh, this is, I came across some illustrations of Melanesian art.
00:48:08 ►
This is a Kiwi club, carved in a very fine fashion,
00:48:13 ►
and to my imagination, perhaps, represented a stage five experience. It has that same plethora of walls and
00:48:28 ►
spatiality and seeming to come and go
00:48:32 ►
as you look at it. Next slide then.
00:48:36 ►
This is now going to show the negative aspect.
00:48:40 ►
Next slide please.
00:48:41 ►
The negative aspect.
00:48:44 ►
Next slide, please. The negative aspect. Next slide, please.
00:48:47 ►
Okay, now, this is a very good example
00:48:50 ►
of what people go through
00:48:51 ►
when they can’t stand the transformations of stage five,
00:48:57 ►
and they freeze it.
00:48:59 ►
They freeze what’s going on.
00:49:00 ►
They freeze the motion.
00:49:02 ►
If you remember, I was saying
00:49:03 ►
that it contracts to a circular design.
00:49:06 ►
These designs are always
00:49:08 ►
accompanied by terrifying
00:49:10 ►
affect.
00:49:11 ►
The one on the right has more of a humanoid
00:49:14 ►
appearance than the one
00:49:16 ►
on the left. The one on the left is a more
00:49:18 ►
perfect experience.
00:49:19 ►
This is what made me think that
00:49:21 ►
the rest of transformations
00:49:23 ►
in stage five may be the origin of the evil eye.
00:49:28 ►
Take it or leave it, but that is a suggestion.
00:49:31 ►
Next slide, please.
00:49:34 ►
Yeah, we can leave that, go on to the next one.
00:49:38 ►
I wanted to mention that this whole stage idea did not originate with me.
00:49:44 ►
I mean, my finding of it was original, that this whole stage idea did not originate with me.
00:49:49 ►
I mean, my finding of it was original, but there are others who also represent LSD sessions
00:49:55 ►
in terms of stages.
00:49:57 ►
At the top, you see the very well-known
00:50:00 ►
Bluet and Cholos representation of
00:50:05 ►
an LSD session.
00:50:07 ►
You have to remember that this is
00:50:09 ►
a 1958 publication
00:50:11 ►
when Duncan Blewett and Nick Cholos
00:50:14 ►
came up with this
00:50:15 ►
schema. You have to remember
00:50:18 ►
that this was done in a hospital environment.
00:50:22 ►
Their stages
00:50:24 ►
in the second section
00:50:28 ►
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8
00:50:30 ►
are stages of a therapy
00:50:32 ►
of a therapeutic setup
00:50:35 ►
they’re not phenomenological stages
00:50:38 ►
they’re stages of therapy
00:50:40 ►
and so they go through the pre-onset of symptoms
00:50:44 ►
then you get some ideational effects
00:50:48 ►
and some insight and so forth. But up at the top, you’ve got flight of ideas, flight into symptoms,
00:50:55 ►
and then confusion and a flood of ideas. And this is a frightening experience, and the text that Duncan didn’t publish,
00:51:07 ►
because it hasn’t ever been published, but it’s on the net,
00:51:11 ►
does emphasize the unpleasant aspect of the therapeutic experience in his hands
00:51:19 ►
that one has to go through before one gets to the blissful outcome.
00:51:24 ►
Underneath that, we’ve got Marin Stolarov’s schema.
00:51:29 ►
Again, starting with what is called the evasive stage.
00:51:33 ►
This, again, is a therapeutic layout of stages.
00:51:39 ►
Starting with the evasive stage, which is again frightening, passing on to a very typical, what I would call a stage four experience of symbols
00:51:51 ►
and personal and religious symbols, going on to what I would call a stage six,
00:51:57 ►
the stage of immediate perception of the realm beyond space and time.
00:52:01 ►
beyond space and time.
00:52:04 ►
Underneath that we’ve got this was published in the
00:52:08 ►
Journal of Consciousness Studies
00:52:10 ►
in 1979.
00:52:13 ►
The work was done in 1977
00:52:15 ►
under the direction of Stan Grof
00:52:19 ►
at the Maryland State Institute.
00:52:22 ►
Again, starting with anxiety, fear of the unknown,
00:52:27 ►
fear of surrender,
00:52:29 ►
and having to work through a period of terror
00:52:32 ►
before getting into symbolic representation
00:52:36 ►
of dynamic conflicts, as Margaret Berendis called it.
00:52:42 ►
And then her third stage is the mystical experience. And then her fourth stage
00:52:48 ►
is the stage of coming back down. Next slide, please. Oh my God, not being able to read
00:52:55 ►
it. I’m just going to have to, I’m going to have to describe it. Jean Houston and Robert Masters
00:53:05 ►
produced a schema of stages.
00:53:10 ►
They had four stages,
00:53:12 ►
which I’d better not go into,
00:53:17 ►
except to remark that
00:53:19 ►
Jean’s third stage,
00:53:23 ►
which is her stage of symbolic representation,
00:53:29 ►
her Jungian stage, is, I think, very badly constructed.
00:53:35 ►
Jean used to induce experiences in her subjects, as she called them,
00:53:44 ►
with a lot of suggestion. induce experiences in her subjects, as she called them,
00:53:46 ►
with a lot of suggestion,
00:53:51 ►
and I think that a lot of her book is on very weak grounds on this account.
00:53:54 ►
I needn’t say anything more about that. The slide beneath, the schema beneath that
00:53:57 ►
is the very interesting one produced by Stan Grof,
00:54:01 ►
and I guess a lot of people know enough about that already
00:54:04 ►
without me having to go into it.
00:54:06 ►
So I think I’ll close at that point
00:54:08 ►
and say thank you very much for listening.
00:54:10 ►
Thank you.
00:54:17 ►
I probably should have mentioned in the beginning
00:54:19 ►
that Dr. Bairdsford’s description of his model of consciousness
00:54:23 ►
needs to be listened to at least several times if you’re like me.
00:54:27 ►
There’s so much packed into it that I found myself thinking about something he just said,
00:54:32 ►
and then I missed the beginning of what he was now saying.
00:54:35 ►
So I’ll be going back for at least one or two more listens, I’m sure.
00:54:40 ►
And I’ll bet that I’m not the only one who had a smile on their face
00:54:44 ►
when Dr. Bairdsford was talking about DMT and he said,
00:54:48 ►
I should mention, DMT accounts in 1961 did not refer to elves or other elementals. That came later.
00:54:58 ►
And if you read his listing in the Arrowwood Character Vaults, I think you’re going to find an interesting line in it which reads,
00:55:05 ►
however, later in his life he adopted a viewpoint that was opposed to the medicalization of
00:55:11 ►
psychedelics. And if I’m not mistaken, Dr. Bairdsford died just a year or so after he
00:55:17 ►
delivered this talk, so he must have already been aware of the rapid medicalization of psychedelics
00:55:23 ►
that was already taking place. And in light of the rapid medicalization of psychedelics that was already taking place.
00:55:26 ►
And in light of the current trend to treat psychedelics as medicines,
00:55:30 ►
well, it may be interesting to follow up on some of his ideas.
00:55:34 ►
And for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdelic Space.
00:55:40 ►
Namaste, my friends.