History of My Reading/ Everybody Must Get Stoned

cover of Be Here Now by Baba Ram Dass

I got stoned for the first time in The Temple.  That's what it was called--an otherwise unused room in the attic, where the roof slanted down so the ceiling was very low. There were no windows.  It was dark and snug and safe, illuminated by candles and small lights.  It's sole purpose was to host the ceremonies of the weed.

This was in the house on West First Street in Galesburg where I lived my senior year of college.  I'd unsuccessfully tried cannabis the previous spring, and this setting definitely helped me achieve the desired state.  Once the ritual smoking was over--we sat in a loose circle passing the joint around and talking--I was urged to concentrate on the music playing on the stereo.  I was told to recline, and the two speakers were placed on opposite sides of my head, near my ears.  I knew I was stoned when I seemed to be hearing the music through both ears--basically a physical impossibility in my case (i.e. maybe the bass and drums to some extent.)

The Temple was gradually abandoned that year, as smoking dope became more open in off-campus apartments.  Everyone who smoked dope knew everyone else who did, and they could be trusted not to betray.  To the other operative student divisions was added the suddenly overriding one of Heads and Straights.  There were exceptions (those that hung out with Heads but didn't indulge, those that played it Straight but took a toke in secret) but mostly they were known, too.

Around us the culture was bending.  Songs were full of high points and stoned puns, stoned humor broke out of hiding to start appearing in public (even on television), while Dylan sang "I would not be so alone/ Everybody must get stoned."

We rediscovered our senses, as hearing, vision, smell, touch and taste all seemed enhanced, at least in terms of clarity and presence. At best, time slows and the sensory richness before you fills the moment.  The delicate movement of smoke through light becomes both more fully and beautifully what it is, and a joyful metaphor made real, an insight into the nature of existence.

 We might have experienced some synesthesia as well, in which the senses crossed in some way.  Concepts became experiences: that everything is alive, that it is all one. Before they all became cliches they were vivid perceptions, accompanied by awe and joy: the pure perception of beauty, that beauty is truth and truth beauty, all you need is love.  There would be entire stoned evenings when almost the only words spoken were "Oh wow!"

Mental operations could get a rush, as connections proliferated.  Short term memory couldn't keep up (though it didn't disappear: once when a group of us had a stoned discussion and everybody lost the thread, we successfully reconstructed the entire conversation, back to front), and I especially noticed that I had new access to long-term memories.  It seems strange to me now, but at 20, I was amazed to suddenly remember my childhood.  I recalled radio and television shows, boyhood friends and so on.  Once I not only recited the batting order of the 1960 Pittsburgh Pirates, but demonstrated the batting stances.  I mean, it was only 1968! But it seemed an amazing recovery of what seemed gone forever.  (Although I can pretty much still do this.)

Those I associated with were, like me, uninterested in hard drugs, but curious about psychedelics.  But we were marooned in a small town in the Midwest, and these were hard to come by.  I didn't do any that year--at least not deliberately.  And that was a problem I ran into elsewhere later, one major factor in why I stopped: unless you were wealthy and/or well-connected, you never really knew what you were getting.

That winter of 1967-68 we hosted a big time cannabis dealer from California who called himself Reverend Jim.  He didn't spend much time in the house, as he spread the word all over campus, but as his hosts we got plenty of free product. We smoked it, and made brownies. It was either considerably stronger than we were used to, or it was laced with something else, because once I became a lot more stoned than I intended. I wound up paralyzed in my bed, watching movies in my head. It wasn't unpleasant, but it didn't need repeating.

I remember sitting around one afternoon with one of Reverend Jim's traveling companions who was quoting the wisdom of someone he considered to be "heavy," or enlightened.  "He said, life is a shit sandwich--at best."  Not something that we naive love and peaceniks wanted to hear, even if it came from California.

While seniors like me were just getting our stoned feet wet, some of the incoming first years were already veterans.  I remember being impressed by one who said he didn't smoke tobacco, clearly implying he smoked only something else.  Their culture was already different, and grass was simply part of it.

Our campus culture seemed to change remarkably quickly as well.  I remember once participating in a couples evening that was as conventional as suburban young marrieds except that alcoholic drinks weren't served, only grass.  The main event was an ice cream feast, designed for the blind munchies.

In the next few years, I tried "LSD" a few times, and "mescaline" once.  I place these in quotation marks because I was skeptical even at the time that they were exactly and purely that.  My experiences were mixed.  But taken all together, they did make a difference, and I did gain some lasting insights and memorable experiences.  I dove deep into Abbey Road on "acid" in Berkeley.  In the Colorado mountain countryside on "mescaline" I saw the swirl in wood as liquid and moving, the embodiment of its process over time.  I peered down into microscopic depths, watching microbes and molecules in motion.  Pretty simple visual hallucinations but I nevertheless "saw" profound truths about the substantial but not quite visible support of things.  So when the science started catching up, I was ready for it.

I eventually became discouraged by the unreliability of the product, and by the unreliability of people.  On almost every psychedelic occasion, and quite a few cannabis ones, I had to bring myself down to cope with something or someone gone awry.  Those stoned conversations also began to lose their charm.  Once I listened to two people conversing who were evidently more stoned than I was, because it was very clear to me that they were each talking about something entirely different from what the other person was talking about.  And neither of them noticed.  It was fascinating in its way, but also disconcerting.

Eventually "the scene" also got darker, with darker drugs, violent politics and enabled psychotics.  But before that, in my senior year, we took cannabis and psychedelics seriously as the keys to a new counterculture--more honest, sharing, hip, fun, loving and open to different sensual and internal experiences, for which there seemed to be some precedent in Eastern religions, western exoteria and indigenous cultures.  So in addition to experiencing what we could, we read about it all.

1964 edition

First there was the classic The Doors of Perception by Aldous Huxley.  Originally published in 1956, it was an augmented account of his mescaline experience a few years before.  It introduced me to the idea that the brain functions as a limiting filter to shape the otherwise overwhelming sense data into usable conclusions (though in some ways this resembles Quine's analysis of language.)  Huxley likened it to a "reducing valve."  Today's neuroscientists use the concept of models--that the mind has models of the expected reality that perceptions should match or at least be measured against.  Psychedelics bypass the reducing valve and the models.

Huxley took mescaline several more times, and said he had greater and more profound experiences on LSD, which he took for the first time in 1955.  His support for psychedelics was striking, in light of the role played by the fictional drug soma in his most famous novel, Brave New World.  But he didn't waver, and in the final stage of cancer, fulfilled his intention of dying while on an LSD trip.

Timothy Leary, Richard Alpert and Ralph Metzner were Harvard professors exploring the therapeutic uses of psychedelics in the 50s and early 60s, concentrating finally on LSD.  After being fired from Harvard, Leary became its best known advocate, partly through the enthusiasm of poet Allen Ginsberg.  LSD was technically still legal when I first read this trio's 1964 book, The Psychedelic Experience in my senior year.

 Its most influential sections are about preparing for an LSD trip.  There was already propaganda around about "bad trips" and the potential dangers of LSD, and I knew it was a powerful drug, so I paid attention.  The book recommended having a Guide and perhaps "programming" the trip, and it especially emphasized the importance of set (your mental preparation and attitude) and setting (the place and physical conditions.)  Though we basically only did cannabis together at our place, the Temple was all about set and setting.  Ironically then, when I first did "LSD" about a year later, I tripped with slightly younger people who had no concept of set and setting, but I deferred to their greater experience.  Early on, I found myself in a crowd of people watching a violent movie, while trying to appear normal.  Fortunately, whatever I took wasn't all that strong and I was able to bring myself down to a steadier state.

LSD: The Problem-Solving Psychedelic by P.G. Stafford and B. H. Golightly was a paperback published in 1967.  It is a fascinating compendium of research findings suggesting therapeutic uses for mental disorders and the treatment of alcoholism and other addictions, as well as heightened creativity and life-changing insights among otherwise normal people.  But this was the last year that LSD was legal, even for research.  Medical and other research was basically forbidden and didn't happen for the next fifty years.

Nevertheless I continued to informally monitor related research.  I still have my 1972 copy of Altered States of Consciousness, a collection of research articles edited by Charles T. Tart, and another anthology from that year, Consciousness and Reality (edited by Charles Muses and Arthur M. Young) that has an aura of intellectual excitement and discovery.

 Before he became the gray-bearded guru of natural healing, Andrew Weil was a Harvard student involved (and in some ways implicated) in the Leary experiments and scandal, who published his own take on psychedelics in his book The Natural Mind, also published in 1972.

And then the rest was silence, except for occasional chapters in such arcane texts as the catch-all Alterations of Consciousness by Imants Baruss, which I reviewed for the San Francisco Chronicle in 2003, and the occasional account of a post-60s trip, as Sting's detailed description of taking ayahuasca in Brazil that opens his autobiographical Broken Music.

  That was the situation until the completely unexpected How to Change Your Mind in 2018 by Michael Pollan, best-selling author of The Omnivore's Dilemma.  As research began to cautiously revive around the world, Pollan produced this combination of reportage, interview and personal account that the New York Times named as one of the ten best nonfiction books of that year.

Pollan covers much of the history, including the scare stories about people on LSD going blind from staring at the sun, which 60 years later is exposed as fake news.  He confirms the continuing promise of psychedelics in addressing a range of illnesses and conditions, confirms LSD's power to spur creative re-thinking (many of those Silicon Valley innovators tripped out) and generally updates that 1967 paperback LSD: The Problem-Solving Psychedelic.  I found him most interesting on the plant-derived psychedelics, particularly mushroom-based.  These substances really do have life-changing and even "miraculous" effects.

Every study I've seen since Leary et al has confirmed the determinative importance of set and setting.  Pollan's own trips were conducted very much to that 60s script: he had a  guide, the setting was quiet and had objects to contemplate (though mostly his eyes were masked), music was played and so on.  These have become standard in the new, well-organized tripping, governed by a kind of New Age professionalism.

But the importance of set and setting were established long before Leary. Most plant-based psychedelics were used for many thousands of years by indigenous peoples in serious explorations of the larger reality. These traditional cultures used their psychedelics within ritual settings and with elders as guides--i.e. attention to set and setting.

What Pollan experienced on his trips made it impossible for him to ignore the so-called spiritual dimension, the beyond-ego experiences.  He confirms that the effects of these substances substantiate the descriptions of the mind's workings that have been refined over thousands of years by Buddhist meditators and other Eastern (and a few Western) practitioners.  These also are being confirmed by neuroscientists, and explored over the several decades in the Mind and Life conferences sponsored by the Dali Lama (I reviewed the books resulting from the first seven conferences in 2004, also for the San Francisco Chronicle.)  

This connection has a long history. Practitioners of Eastern religions attain their insights mostly without even plant-based substances, but with fasting and various forms of meditation.  Yet the insights are similar.  In the decades before he took his mescaline trip, Aldous Huxley studied Hindu and other Eastern texts and consulted with well-known gurus.  The Leary/Alpert/ Metzner The Psychedelic Experience was subtitled "A Manual Based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead."

Richard Alpert soon became Baba Ram Dass, and his first book Be Here Now (1971) became a revered text in certain quarters.  But that takes us into the counter-culture, subject of our next installment in this series.

To wind up the more specific elements of the substances themselves and their effects, there is now more of a distinction between cannabis and the psychedelics (LSD, and of increasing interest, psilocybin.)  Cannabis has been legalized in many states in the US through popular vote, but there is not the same acceptance for psychedelics.  In my past experience, at least some of the effects to some extent that are claimed for psychedelics were available with cannabis (assuming that's all I was ingesting.)   There may well be a qualitative difference, and in that sense I'm sorry I missed a true psychedelic experience.  Even in the lap of the cannabis industry, the likelihood that I'll run into a dependable opportunity isn't great.