(NOTE: I wrote most of this blog between July, 2006 and election day, 2008. Some media references, then, may be outdated or unavailable.)
It's been two weeks since the World Psychedelic Forum in Basel, Switzerland that began on March 24, 2008. I've not written about my impressions of it until now because--like a psychedelic experience--I wanted to assimilate what I learned from it.
As a boy growing up in Iowa in the 60's, I was far enough away from the psychedelic centers of the United States--San Francisco and Harvard--that everything I learned about the LSD phenomenon came from the media; a wholly inadequate source for honest, objective information to be sure.
I still recall sitting in my high school library reading Life magazine's article on "San Francisco's Summer of Love" in 1967.
But my exposure to that lifestyle over the next few years would extend no further than listening to "psychedelic" music from sources like Jefferson Airplane, Jimi Hendrix, Quicksilver Messenger Service and the tribal-rock musical "Hair"; to reading the epochal book about one "happening" of those high times, "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test", by Tom Wolfe.
Instead, I was on my own path where I would graduate high school and go on to study Pre-Med at Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
By the time, I arrived at Marquette, I'd yet to even try marijuana, much less LSD. By the fall of 1969, some of what I knew about the LSD experience came from the the Wolfe book; but more importantly it came from the lurid tales about the drug that were becoming more frequent in the media. The most significant event to the ignorati like myself, was our shock when we learned how the daughter of one of America's favorite television personalities, Art Linkletter, threw herself out a window to her death while high on Acid...or so the story went. The controversy over what really happened to 20-year old Diane Linkletter continues to this day. According to Wikipedia's entry about this incident:
"There is...no proof that Linkletter took LSD on the day she died. All available evidence suggests that she was a despondent woman and that her death was a suicide rather than a drug-related accident. An investigation was conducted by the Los Angeles Coroner's Office determined that Linkletter died from "multiple traumatic injuries" sustained from the fall and that she had no drugs in her system at the time of her death."
But the damage had been done. America had something new to fear for its children. And America's new war on drugs was easier to fight with laws and propaganda than its costly and destructive war in Vietnam.
Another issue in my life was that I simply never had friends who had the desire or access to LSD so that I could find out at least second hand if the stories about it were true or not. It would be another year before I first got stoned on pot, then went on to enjoy opiated hashish fairly frequently, but that has been the extent of my wicked druggy ways.
I got married a few years later and only infrequently smoked pot as other things in my life became more important than getting high. In fact, I seldom sought an altered state; even the universally-acceptable--but much more destructive--one brought about by alcohol.
Fast-forward nearly four decades and I'm in "the autumn of my years". My kids are now adults, my wife and I have grown comfortable together and my life has a sense of stability even if it is fairly unexciting. Yet I know--like I have known since I was a young man--that there is much more to be learned about this existence; about this reality, but I don't know what it is or how to achieve it.
Actually that last statement is untrue, since I learned in the early 70's that one way to achieve a certain esoteric knowledge is by practicing meditation, which I learned to do. But my lack of discipline and determination has prevented me from establishing a regular routine and my stop-start pattern of meditating extends even to this day.
Then one day, while at a bookstore in Madison where she was a student, my daughter pointed out a book called "The Cosmic Serpent" by Jeremy Narby and suggested that I read it.
I don't know if this could be called a synchronicity or not, but that book turned my life on its heels and became the impetus to search for that "something" I knew was missing in my life. I call it possibly synchronistic because I found out later that my daughter hadn't even read it before suggesting it to me. She had simply heard about it and thought I might be interested. But synchronicities aren't a common part of my life, so I'm not sure how yet to evaluate or recognize them.
When I first saw the notice of the World Psychedelic Forum on the MAPS website, I knew I had to attend. The author of the book that started me on my journey, Jeremy Narby, would be there, as would so many others I've learned of since then.
I am fortunate to have as a son-in-law a man who has spent his adult life as a scientist researching the mysteries of DNA. His intelligence and his curiosity have led him from his growing up in rough and tumble Alaska to working at the European Molecular Biology Lab in Heidelberg, Germany. Then as a post-doc at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, he met my daughter--a grad student--and the rest is history.
When I decided I wanted to attend the World Psychedelic Forum, I immediately thought of Scott and wrote him an email--part of which is quoted in the previous post--asking him if he would go with me. Not only did I know that he was interested in these same subjects, but his knowledge of German would be invaluable as we traveled from the Frankfurt airport to Basel, Switzerland. To my surprise and delight, he agreed to go with me.
As it turned out, my trip to Basel in March of 2008 would be just the first of two parts of a wider European trip. After the Forum ended and Scott returned to Austin, Texas where he and my daughter now lived, I had the wonderful opportunity of traveling with my younger daughter in Germany for about five days before I returned to the United States. She, however, would now begin her own adventure, which would include a month of traveling around Europe before flying on to India for a five-month work/travel experience culminating with a visit to Dharamsala, which is where the Dalai Lama resides as Tibetan leader-in-exile.
My greatest hope is that she will have the opportunity of experiencing the magical aspects of this existence while she can, since what I learned most from my time at the World Psychedelic Forum is that the mysteries that have been experienced by shamans, artists, mystics, holy men--and yes--psychedelic trippers, are really just aspects of the same experience--and are wholly accessible to us using a number of different time-honored methods.
The unity and transpersonal nature of this expanded state of consciousness is called many different things in many different contexts, but as neuroscience is discovering, the experiences all have the same physiological bases; that is, they all work on specific neurotransmitter pathways in the brain. This has been scientifically proven only fairly recently.
The resultant experience itself, however, is subject to a great deal of discussion and controversy. While some view the experience as merely epiphenomena of normal brain activity, others see the experience as much more profound and even transcendental.
The emphasis of the conference in this regard is that the psychedelic experience, as well as the others mentioned, is in fact a gateway to The Other; the expanded state of reality spoken of by so many enlightened beings throughout history. This state has been termed another dimension, cosmic consciousness, the Godhead, many things. But to the people at World Psychedelic Forum and many others throughout the world, this state is most definitely not just an epiphenomenon of brain activity.
Which means to me that man has developed and evolved to this point because of the occasional dip into this other realm. I've mentioned that Terence McKenna and others even believe that man's current state of conscious self-awareness came from his ingestion of "magic" mushrooms which grew naturally in the dung of ungulates, which man had started to husband some 10,000 years ago.
There are so many sociological questions that come from this idea. The most pressing is that while it is obvious that there are--and have been highly-evolved, even enlightened beings on the earth, why has the vast majority of the world's population not evolved? If substances have existed since the dawn of man that allow him to enter more evolved states of existence, why have they not been employed more universally?
What is it all about, Alfie?
I didn't expect the World Psychedelic Forum to answer all my questions, but it did answer some of them. I'll get into these as I go.
The opening to the event was an aural experience presented by a man named Barnim Schultze, who as Akasha Project uses synthetic sound and mathematics to create fairly amazing sound displays. For the conference, he played--according to the program--"the LSD-25 molecule's octave analogous frequencies and rhthyms measured within the ultraviolet spectrum." I'm not sure what all that means, but it was certainly fascinating to listen to. So interesting, in fact, that a few seats away from me, a man was quietly vibrating and making strange movements as he became part of the sound itself. I'd recently seen a video of people having a Kundalini "rush" up their bodies and what this man was doing seemed like it could have been the same phenomenon.
I wasn't sure what to expect when I went into the first Panorama session, which provided an overview of the morning's talks. What I heard was a a man speaking German at a podium and a dais that included the two Swiss heads of Gaia Media--the organization that hosted the Forum-- as well as Thomas Roberts, Stanislov Grof, Ralph Metzner, Rick Doblin and Carolyn Garcia. The "inventor" of LSD, 102 year-old Albert Hofmann--in whose honor the Forum was presented--was supposed to be at this Panorama, but instead appeared at the afternoon one.
Once inside, I recalled that there were headphones available for the translation from German to English, but when I went downstairs to get a set, I found out that the deposit for them would be 100 Swiss Francs, of which I had yet to purchase any. So, figuring that most of the speakers were English-speaking anyway, I wasn't too upset at not getting a set. In retrospect, I wish I had foreseen this and had the Francs, but I did rent them later in the day, so I had them for the rest of the conference.
I was most interested in seeing Stan Grof at this Panorama since I'd just purchased his book "When Impossible Things Happen" and was interested in his professional and personal experience with psychedelics and with his own method of achieving the "psychedelic" altered states called Holotropic Breathwork. His credentials in the area of psychedelics are very impressive as is his HB technique and I am seriously considering HB as a substitute to psychedelics--at least initially.
Ralph Metzner is one of the original Harvard clique of psychologists, along with Tim Leary, Richard Alpert and others, who helped popularize the use of LSD and was one of the authors of "The Psychedelic Experience", which apparently compared the LSD trip with the teachings of "The Tibetan Book of the Dead".
Rick Doblin is a person who, after he tried LSD (illegally, of course) in the early 80's, was so impressed with it's potential that he decided that he would make it his life's work to make the use of LSD legal once again. His organization, MAPS, has been instrumental in initiating a number of groundbreaking research projects using psychoactive and psychedelic substances. A visit to their website shows the important work in this area that they are doing.
Carolyn "Mountain Girl" Garcia, is the widow of Grateful Dead's Jerry Garcia and earlier was an original Merry Prankster who traveled with Ken Kesey and his band of Acid Heads in the fabled bus, Furthur. As a member of the Pranksters tribe, she was one of the pioneers of LSD's more outrageous recreational uses. In her talk, she showed photographs of the Merry Pranksters on their cross-country epic journey as well as more recent photos of Ken Kesey before he died and of the final resting place of Furthur as it rusts back to the earth on Kesey's Oregon farm.
Tom Roberts is an educational psychologist and co-editor of the book "Psychedelic Medicine" along with physician and anthropologist, Dr. Michael Winkelman.
For lunch, Scott and I left the Congress Center and walked a few blocks to a small pub run by a couple of young Eastern European women. It began to rain while we were at the pub and we were pretty chilled by the time we got back to our room. I decided to get the translation headset at this time, so I purchased my Swiss Francs and stood in line to rent them. By the time we got this done, they were well into the afternoon Panorama, which was unfortunate because this was the one at which I'd heard that Albert Hofmann would speak, and I'd wanted to see the man we were all honoring. As it turned out, he didn't appear at this year's event because of his fragile health. But his spirit was much in evidence and a letter was read by his grandson.
Albert Hoffman's life as a research chemist, inventor of LSD-25, first Acid tripper and as a subsequent proponent of the serious use of psychedelics, wrote a book about his professional and personal experience with the drug called "LSD: My Problem Child". Wikipedia says this in its article about him: "Hofmann calls LSD 'medicine for the soul and is frustrated by the worldwide prohibition that has pushed it underground. 'It was used very successfully for 10 years in psychoanalysis,' he said, adding that the drug was hijacked by the youth movement of the 1960's and then unfairly demonized by the establishment that the movement opposed.
"He became director of the natural products department at Sandoz [Pharmaceutical Company] and went on studying hallucinogenic substances found in Mexican mushrooms and other plants used by the aboriginal people. This led to the synthesis of psilocybin, the active agent of many 'magic mushrooms'.'
"Hofmann also became interested in the seeds of the Mexican morning glory species Rivea corymbosa, the seeds of which are called Ololiuhqui by the natives. He was surprised to find the active compound of Ololiuhqui, ergine (lysergic acid amide), to be closely related to LSD.
"In 1962, he and his wife Anita traveled to southern Mexico to search for the plant 'Ska Maria Pastora' (Leaves of Mary the Shepherdess), later known as Salvia divinorum. He was able to obtain samples of this plant but never succeeded in identifying its active chemicals which science has now identified as the diterpenoid Salvinorin A."
Many of the artifacts on display at the Forum were from his own personal collection of pro and anti-LSD media; including magazines, newspapers, documents, music albums, buttons, posters and other very interesting and nostalgic items.
One of the philosophical underpinnings of the World Psychedelic Forum is Hofmann's statement: "I think that in human evolution it has never been as necessary to have this substance LSD. It is just a tool to turn us into what we are supposed to be."
Two other scheduled attendees that I'd wanted to see couldn't attend: the Shulgins, whose books" Tihkal" and "Pihkal" are fascinating documents about the chemistry underlying psychedelics and of their intrepid engineering of molecules for the express purpose of experimenting with them themselves and then writing about their experiences.
During one of the presentations at the Forum, a video by Ann and Sasha Shulgin was shown in which they told the audience that Sasha is scheduled for heart valve surgery soon and that this was the reason they couldn't attend.
As it turned out, my trip to Basel in March of 2008 would be just the first of two parts of a wider European trip. After the Forum ended and Scott returned to Austin, Texas where he and my daughter now lived, I had the wonderful opportunity of traveling with my younger daughter in Germany for about five days before I returned to the United States. She, however, would now begin her own adventure, which would include a month of traveling around Europe before flying on to India for a five-month work/travel experience culminating with a visit to Dharamsala, which is where the Dalai Lama resides as Tibetan leader-in-exile.
My greatest hope is that she will have the opportunity of experiencing the magical aspects of this existence while she can, since what I learned most from my time at the World Psychedelic Forum is that the mysteries that have been experienced by shamans, artists, mystics, holy men--and yes--psychedelic trippers, are really just aspects of the same experience--and are wholly accessible to us using a number of different time-honored methods.
The unity and transpersonal nature of this expanded state of consciousness is called many different things in many different contexts, but as neuroscience is discovering, the experiences all have the same physiological bases; that is, they all work on specific neurotransmitter pathways in the brain. This has been scientifically proven only fairly recently.
The resultant experience itself, however, is subject to a great deal of discussion and controversy. While some view the experience as merely epiphenomena of normal brain activity, others see the experience as much more profound and even transcendental.
The emphasis of the conference in this regard is that the psychedelic experience, as well as the others mentioned, is in fact a gateway to The Other; the expanded state of reality spoken of by so many enlightened beings throughout history. This state has been termed another dimension, cosmic consciousness, the Godhead, many things. But to the people at World Psychedelic Forum and many others throughout the world, this state is most definitely not just an epiphenomenon of brain activity.
Which means to me that man has developed and evolved to this point because of the occasional dip into this other realm. I've mentioned that Terence McKenna and others even believe that man's current state of conscious self-awareness came from his ingestion of "magic" mushrooms which grew naturally in the dung of ungulates, which man had started to husband some 10,000 years ago.
There are so many sociological questions that come from this idea. The most pressing is that while it is obvious that there are--and have been highly-evolved, even enlightened beings on the earth, why has the vast majority of the world's population not evolved? If substances have existed since the dawn of man that allow him to enter more evolved states of existence, why have they not been employed more universally?
What is it all about, Alfie?
I didn't expect the World Psychedelic Forum to answer all my questions, but it did answer some of them. I'll get into these as I go.
The opening to the event was an aural experience presented by a man named Barnim Schultze, who as Akasha Project uses synthetic sound and mathematics to create fairly amazing sound displays. For the conference, he played--according to the program--"the LSD-25 molecule's octave analogous frequencies and rhthyms measured within the ultraviolet spectrum." I'm not sure what all that means, but it was certainly fascinating to listen to. So interesting, in fact, that a few seats away from me, a man was quietly vibrating and making strange movements as he became part of the sound itself. I'd recently seen a video of people having a Kundalini "rush" up their bodies and what this man was doing seemed like it could have been the same phenomenon.
I wasn't sure what to expect when I went into the first Panorama session, which provided an overview of the morning's talks. What I heard was a a man speaking German at a podium and a dais that included the two Swiss heads of Gaia Media--the organization that hosted the Forum-- as well as Thomas Roberts, Stanislov Grof, Ralph Metzner, Rick Doblin and Carolyn Garcia. The "inventor" of LSD, 102 year-old Albert Hofmann--in whose honor the Forum was presented--was supposed to be at this Panorama, but instead appeared at the afternoon one.
Once inside, I recalled that there were headphones available for the translation from German to English, but when I went downstairs to get a set, I found out that the deposit for them would be 100 Swiss Francs, of which I had yet to purchase any. So, figuring that most of the speakers were English-speaking anyway, I wasn't too upset at not getting a set. In retrospect, I wish I had foreseen this and had the Francs, but I did rent them later in the day, so I had them for the rest of the conference.
I was most interested in seeing Stan Grof at this Panorama since I'd just purchased his book "When Impossible Things Happen" and was interested in his professional and personal experience with psychedelics and with his own method of achieving the "psychedelic" altered states called Holotropic Breathwork. His credentials in the area of psychedelics are very impressive as is his HB technique and I am seriously considering HB as a substitute to psychedelics--at least initially.
Ralph Metzner is one of the original Harvard clique of psychologists, along with Tim Leary, Richard Alpert and others, who helped popularize the use of LSD and was one of the authors of "The Psychedelic Experience", which apparently compared the LSD trip with the teachings of "The Tibetan Book of the Dead".
Rick Doblin is a person who, after he tried LSD (illegally, of course) in the early 80's, was so impressed with it's potential that he decided that he would make it his life's work to make the use of LSD legal once again. His organization, MAPS, has been instrumental in initiating a number of groundbreaking research projects using psychoactive and psychedelic substances. A visit to their website shows the important work in this area that they are doing.
Carolyn "Mountain Girl" Garcia, is the widow of Grateful Dead's Jerry Garcia and earlier was an original Merry Prankster who traveled with Ken Kesey and his band of Acid Heads in the fabled bus, Furthur. As a member of the Pranksters tribe, she was one of the pioneers of LSD's more outrageous recreational uses. In her talk, she showed photographs of the Merry Pranksters on their cross-country epic journey as well as more recent photos of Ken Kesey before he died and of the final resting place of Furthur as it rusts back to the earth on Kesey's Oregon farm.
Tom Roberts is an educational psychologist and co-editor of the book "Psychedelic Medicine" along with physician and anthropologist, Dr. Michael Winkelman.
For lunch, Scott and I left the Congress Center and walked a few blocks to a small pub run by a couple of young Eastern European women. It began to rain while we were at the pub and we were pretty chilled by the time we got back to our room. I decided to get the translation headset at this time, so I purchased my Swiss Francs and stood in line to rent them. By the time we got this done, they were well into the afternoon Panorama, which was unfortunate because this was the one at which I'd heard that Albert Hofmann would speak, and I'd wanted to see the man we were all honoring. As it turned out, he didn't appear at this year's event because of his fragile health. But his spirit was much in evidence and a letter was read by his grandson.
Albert Hoffman's life as a research chemist, inventor of LSD-25, first Acid tripper and as a subsequent proponent of the serious use of psychedelics, wrote a book about his professional and personal experience with the drug called "LSD: My Problem Child". Wikipedia says this in its article about him: "Hofmann calls LSD 'medicine for the soul and is frustrated by the worldwide prohibition that has pushed it underground. 'It was used very successfully for 10 years in psychoanalysis,' he said, adding that the drug was hijacked by the youth movement of the 1960's and then unfairly demonized by the establishment that the movement opposed."He became director of the natural products department at Sandoz [Pharmaceutical Company] and went on studying hallucinogenic substances found in Mexican mushrooms and other plants used by the aboriginal people. This led to the synthesis of psilocybin, the active agent of many 'magic mushrooms'.'
"Hofmann also became interested in the seeds of the Mexican morning glory species Rivea corymbosa, the seeds of which are called Ololiuhqui by the natives. He was surprised to find the active compound of Ololiuhqui, ergine (lysergic acid amide), to be closely related to LSD.
"In 1962, he and his wife Anita traveled to southern Mexico to search for the plant 'Ska Maria Pastora' (Leaves of Mary the Shepherdess), later known as Salvia divinorum. He was able to obtain samples of this plant but never succeeded in identifying its active chemicals which science has now identified as the diterpenoid Salvinorin A."
Many of the artifacts on display at the Forum were from his own personal collection of pro and anti-LSD media; including magazines, newspapers, documents, music albums, buttons, posters and other very interesting and nostalgic items.
One of the philosophical underpinnings of the World Psychedelic Forum is Hofmann's statement: "I think that in human evolution it has never been as necessary to have this substance LSD. It is just a tool to turn us into what we are supposed to be."
Two other scheduled attendees that I'd wanted to see couldn't attend: the Shulgins, whose books" Tihkal" and "Pihkal" are fascinating documents about the chemistry underlying psychedelics and of their intrepid engineering of molecules for the express purpose of experimenting with them themselves and then writing about their experiences.
During one of the presentations at the Forum, a video by Ann and Sasha Shulgin was shown in which they told the audience that Sasha is scheduled for heart valve surgery soon and that this was the reason they couldn't attend.