New Florence reader,
The seven posts that follow this one will be chapters from my new novel, Above All Shadows Rides the Sun, that deal directly with psychedelics or intertwine with psychedelics. Before sharing these with you, I thought I should share a few of my thoughts about psychedelics and associated experiences.
As best as I can tell from three major surveys, about 40 million living Americans have done a psychedelic drug. About 30 million of us have done psilocybin mushrooms.
If you live in a Western or Northeastern American city, are age 21 to 64, and have a graduate degree and/or a family income of at least $100,000, the odds are about 50-50 that you’ve done a psychedelic. If you haven’t, some of your closest friends, relatives, neighbors, and professional colleagues have.
(Interesting fact: for some reason, a Catholic is almost twice as likely to do a psychedelic than a Protestant.)
I’ll write about the mild but therapeutic psychedelic MDMA down the road. (I have no plans to write about any of the other “strong psychedelics”: mescaline / peyote, ketamine, DMT, or salvia.)
I’ll focus here on shrooms and LSD. Millions of us know the basic story since the 1940s:
LSD was invented by Albert Hoffmann in a Swiss laboratory in 1943. In the following decade, J.P. Morgan executive Gordon Wasson became the first White Westerner to publicly advocate for the use of psilocybin mushrooms.
Also in the 1950s, Aldous Huxley became the first major Western intellectual to do psychedelics and write books about his experiences. The Los Angeles psychiatrist Oscar Janiger introduced Huxley to LSD and conducted LSD sessions during therapy with a number of actors and other Hollywood figures, including Cary Grant, who raved about his personal transformation in a public interview or two.
Then came Harvard psychology professor Timothy Leary and, in the early 1960s, the use of LSD and shrooms by Harvard professors and students. Especially well known was the small “experiment” with Harvard Divinity students, who had profound experiences on shrooms at Marsh Chapel on Good Friday 1962.
Harvard fired Leary in 1963 and he then became an LSD evangelist, which led to many millions of people doing LSD or psilocybin mushrooms over the next decade or so. This had both transformational and disturbing results, with millions of people having various kinds of cognitive and psychological breakthroughs and millions burning out or otherwise ending up with acute, short-term, or long-term neuropsychological problems.
Along came the hippies. Along came the 1967 Summer of Love in Haight-Asbury. Along came Woodstock. Along came one rock band after another with a psychedelic edge or influence.
There were people who seemed to make real-world breakthroughs on psychedelics, as well. Best known, in the Bay Area in the mid-1970s: two teenagers named Steve Jobs and Steven Wozniak, who dreamed up the first Apple computers with a little help from LSD.
Psychedelics were more of a private, personal matter from the 1980s to the decade of the 2000s. Something people tended to keep quiet about. The big exceptions were Grateful Dead concerts and 1990s raves, attended by millions of second-wave GenXers born in the 1970s.
In the 2010s and 2020s, it has become acceptable to talk about psilocybin mushrooms (and MDMA) openly and publicly, and shrooms are often touted in headlines and news accounts for increasing brain synapses, enhancing our capacity for cognitive complexity, resolving some psychological problems, and delivering other benefits. These articles often, irresponsibly, ignore the risks.
As for my personal experience . . .
I did psilocybin mushrooms about 40 times between age 19 and age 25 — from 1984 to 1990 — and haven’t done them again since.
(Most of the people I know who did shrooms in their college years have never done them again since their mid-twenties. They generally don’t regret doing them but consider them too risky.)
Before doing psychedelics for the first time, I knew the history — Hoffman, Wasson, Huxley, Leary, etc. I’d read, multiple times, the 1965 book by Robert Masters and Jean Houston, The Varieties of Psychedelic Experience. It wasn’t long before I began reading the books of Stanislav Grof: LSD Psychotherapy, Beyond the Brain, and especially my favorite by him, The Adventure of Self-Discovery.
Conversely, I’d seen plenty of burnt-out hippies here in northern New Mexico. Colorado and Santa Fe and Taos had a special draw to consciousness-expanding Boomers in the 1970s.
I was determined to only use psychedelics for insights and breakthroughs and becoming a better human being. I wasn’t interested in anything druggy or trippy per se. I remained heavily rooted in positive psychology (yes, even Tony Robbins) and in the quest for human efficacy and optimal performance. Most importantly, I wanted to be a spiritually good person. I didn’t want any drug getting in the way of any of these things.
The primary benefit for me was the awakening of my imagination. I appreciated art on a whole new level, and have done so ever since. My love for the Italian Renaissance began during these years, and my keen interest in the causes and sources of the broader cultural, intellectual, and social Renaissance — that Golden Age from Petrarch in the mid-1300s to Mozart in the late 1700s.
What I most remember from my 40 shroom experiences is leafing through Omni magazines and looking at all the paintings, photographs, and graphic art. It was quite a visual feast, with a futuristic edge. I also looked at paintings, mostly in books of art.
I appreciated nature — especially the aesthetic beauty of sunrises and sunsets and flowers and rivers and lakes and the ocean — with new awe and wonder.
I began having more vivid dreams, and have had them ever since. I began having lucid dreams — where you know you are dreaming while you’re dreaming — and flying dreams. And, best of all, lucid flying dreams.
So, primarily, shrooms opened up input from my right hemisphere and stimulated my sensory, visual, and aesthetic perception, awareness, and creative imagination. And most of this benefit was permanent.
Cognitively they were useful. I was already a budding futurist by the time I first did a psychedelic at age 19 — an avid reader of Toffler and Naisbitt — and interested in media, technology, business (devouring every issue of Inc. and Entrepreneur), history, politics, science, psychology, neuroscience, consciousness, and spirituality. My shroom experiences deepened my interest in all these things and enhanced my awareness of them in certain ways.
Psychologically, I sensed more of my potential, more of my capacities, and I got in touch with things that were wrong with me — including the roots of some personal problems as well as the evolutionary baggage shared by all of us.
My mind traveled back to moments in history that suddenly came totally alive. I “walked into” 20th Century events like FDR and Churchill and Stalin at Yalta. I “walked around”, kinesthetically, in buildings in ancient Rome and Athens.
Moments in the development of early humans came alive. I danced a number of times while on shrooms to the song “A Different Drum” on Peter Gabriel’s Passion CD, vividly imagining — even directly experiencing — what tribal life and the life of hominids was like. And I certainly experienced a sense of awe about the universe, beyond anything I’d experienced before in my life.
I can’t say I had a true spiritual experience while on shrooms, although I probably resisted having one and wouldn’t have trusted it if I did. I did, however, have transpersonal experiences. And I became even more interested in metaphysical questions, as do so many people who do psychedelics.
Finally, I could sense and often appreciate the experiences that other people had, including the continuum of experiences described by Dr. Grof. And this expanded my awareness of the range of capacities of human consciousness.
By age 25, by 1991, I’d turned exclusively to using the brain machine (the light-and-sound device) — for half an hour each day — and to periodic deep breathing sessions lasting from two to five hours. I found both of these to be powerful but risk-free and thus safe. Almost all of my psychological breakthroughs occurred during sessions with the brain machine or deep breathing, and plenty of my spiritual or other transpersonal experiences.
(I observed in a previous chapter that there are a wide range of non-psychedelic approaches to mind expansion.)
Three of the seven chapters I post over the next month will be dialogues that my novel’s main character, Dylan Steffan, has in the 1970s with Dr. Stanislav Grof. Grof began exploring psychedelic sessions with patients as a psychiatry student in Czechoslovakia in 1954 — and personally in 1956 — and then explored both psychedelics and deep breathing sessions after he migrated to the U.S. in the late 1960s.
I find enormous value in the way Grof approaches internal experiences. I consider him to be the greatest thinker in the history of both psychiatry and psychology and one of the world’s two most indispensable thinkers about human consciousness (along with Ken Wilber).
I have to admit to being a bit of an elitist about psychedelics. I don’t think anyone should do a significant dose of psilocybin mushrooms without being familiar with Grof’s map to the terrain.
I should also note that of the thousand-or-so significant spiritual and transpersonal experiences I’ve had in my life, about a hundred were transpersonal experiences and about nine hundred would fit into experiences had by many millions of Christians over the past 2,000 years (usually during contemplative prayer). While I never experienced Christ while on psychedelics, millions of other people did.
In the last analysis, I cannot recommend to anyone that they do psilocybin mushrooms. The risks are significant. The same benefits can be gained with a brain machine (try to get down to theta brainwaves and even delta brainwaves) and with deep breathing — just breathing faster and deeper than usual for at least an hour. And, again, there are many other ways to experience psychospiritual and cognitive breakthroughs and personal transformations.
I simply hope that my seven fictional accounts set in the 1970s — and the incredible map to psychodynamic, perinatal, and transpersonal experiences provided to us by Stan Grof — are beneficial to you as you continue along your own path.
All my best,
Mike