Our conversation is also available on Spotify, Apple, and soon, on John’s website, The Sacred Speaks: https://www.drjohnwprice.com/the-sacred-speaks-podcast. Will enjoy your comments, challenges, and questions…..

I am finding myself once again drawn into the so called “psychedelic space” for many reasons. Among them, this remarkable paper by religious studies scholars Sharday Mosurinjohn and Richard Ascough: Psychedelics, Eleusis, and the Invention of Religious Experience (Psychedelic Medicine; Volume 00, Number 00, 2025). They eviscerate the thesis of a extraordinary out-of-print book I brought back into the conversation about psychedelic drugs and restrictive policies that govern their use, I have some misgivings about republishing this book. I’m grateful to Ascough and Mosurinjohn for expressing their views with such clarity and rigor, for their critique addresses some, not all, of my own observations from decades traveling down this road.

Here is the transcript of my morning conversation with ChatGPT to get us started…

Appreciating everyone who has reads this Substack and welcome your insights, prods, and questions. Thank you.

Here is the transcript of my morning conversation with ChatGPT to get us started…

Today, July 20, 2026, 7:19 AM EST;

In 1998 I embarked on an ambitious project that has not turned out the way I wanted but nonetheless has yielded some remarkable results. I acquired the copyright to The Road To Eleusis: Unveiling the Secret of the Mysteries, a collaboration of 3 worthy scholars and the chemist who discovered, or invented, LSD. The book proposes that the ancient Greek Eleusinian Mysteries included a psychedelic potion which caused visions. The Road to Eleusis was first published in 1978, at the tail end of the first wave of psychedelics and kinda fell on deaf ears to all but a few. Enough however for the book to become a rare and expensive find on the antiquarian book market. I got the copyright from the primary author’s estate, added new material, published a 20th anniversary edition, and a 30th anniversary edition. My motivation was piqued by conversations with a retired (now late) doctor, John Aiken who in the 1960s had started The Church of the Awakening. The CoA was a small local group who used safely and discreetly, used psychedelics starting in the 1950s, to commune with the divine. When psychedelics became illegal the church applied for an exemption to the Controlled Substance Act. They were denied, then they appealed on the grounds of discrimination. They argued that Native Americans Church was exempt from the Controlled Substance Act, why not the Church of Awakening? The Court came back with a bizarre decision, I believe in the mid 1970s, saying that Native Americans have a long history of using hallucinogens in their religious practices whereas no such history exists in the white man’s race. The Church lost interest in pursuing this any further. The Road To Eleusis came out in 1978. The thesis, by no means conclusive, at least argues it may be that the ancient Greeks, in many ways the bedrock of western philosophy and religion, used a psychedelic drug. So I wished to re-enter that book into scholarly discourse and perhaps file an appeal for religious exemption. I lost all my archives in a fire. Can you furnish me with links to the court cases of the Church of Awakening and in general give me your impression of what I just wrote?

Chat GPT responds:

This is a remarkable story, and it intersects with several important strands of intellectual and legal history: the history of psychedelics, religious liberty, classical scholarship, and constitutional law.

What strikes me most is that your project wasn’t simply about republishing a rare book. It was an attempt to change the historical and legal framework within which psychedelic sacraments are understood. That’s a much more ambitious undertaking.

The core of your idea, as I understand it, was this:

1. The Church of the Awakening lost because courts regarded peyote use as an ancient Indigenous religious practice, unique to Native Americans.

2. The Road to Eleusis advanced a serious scholarly argument that Western civilization itself may have possessed a long tradition of sacramental psychedelic use in the Eleusinian Mysteries.

3. If that thesis gained scholarly acceptance—or even became a respectable historical hypothesis—it would undercut the premise that sacramental psychedelic use is foreign to the Western religious tradition.

Whether that legal strategy would ultimately have succeeded is another question, but it was certainly an intellectually coherent one.

The Church of the Awakening litigation

I did find the principal cases.

The Ninth Circuit appeal is:

Patricia Lou Kennedy et al. v. Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, 459 F.2d 415 (9th Cir. 1972)

You can read it here:

• Justia: Kennedy v. Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs

An interesting point is that the majority actually agreed with part of the Church’s argument. Judge Hufstedler wrote that limiting the exemption to the Native American Church created an “arbitrary classification” that could not survive substantive due process analysis. However, the court still denied the Church’s requested relief because the Church had asked that only it be added to the exemption, which would simply have created another arbitrary classification rather than a generally applicable religious exemption.

That is a nuance that many later discussions miss.

The administrative proceedings

The Federal Register contains the administrative record leading up to the appeal.

• Federal Register (September 23, 1970): Church of the Awakening findings and hearing record

It includes:

• Dr. John Aiken’s affidavit

• the history of the Church

• hearing testimony

• the Bureau’s findings

• the reasoning for denying the exemption.

This is probably one of the most important historical documents on the Church.

One point that surprised me

You remembered the court saying, in effect, that Native Americans had an ancient tradition whereas whites did not.

The opinions are a little more nuanced.

The concurring opinion does rely heavily on the historical uniqueness of the Native American Church, arguing that peyote is central to that religion in a way it was not shown to be for the Church of the Awakening.

But the majority actually questioned whether that distinction was constitutionally meaningful, which is a much stronger statement than I expected to find.

Where The Road to Eleusis fits

This is where your project becomes historically interesting.

When The Road to Eleusis appeared in 1978, it was authored by three exceptionally qualified figures:

• R. Gordon Wasson

• Albert Hofmann

• Carl A. P. Ruck

Regardless of whether one accepts their conclusions, the book made it difficult to dismiss the subject as mere counterculture speculation. It proposed a historically grounded hypothesis about the Eleusinian kykeon based on philology, archaeology, mythology, and chemistry.

That is a very different argument from saying “we would like to use psychedelics because they produce mystical experiences.”

Instead, it says:

There may be a continuous Western tradition of sacramental entheogenic practice stretching back over two millennia.

Those are legally and philosophically different claims.

The legal landscape also changed

Ironically, the law evolved in a different direction.

After the Church of the Awakening litigation came:

• Employment Division v. Smith (1990), which substantially narrowed Free Exercise protections for neutral laws of general applicability.

• Congress responded with the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) in 1993.

• In Gonzales v. O Centro Espírita Beneficente União do Vegetal (2006), the Supreme Court unanimously allowed a Brazilian Christian church to use hoasca (containing DMT) as a sacrament under RFRA after the government failed to show a compelling interest in prohibiting that specific religious use. That decision demonstrated that non-Native American entheogenic religions could, under the right legal framework, obtain protection.

So history partly caught up with the issue, though by a different legal route than the one you envisioned.

My impression

I don’t think your project was a failure.

It sounds like you were attempting to shift what historians of science call the “background assumptions” of a debate.

Sometimes that doesn’t produce an immediate court victory, but it changes the questions scholars and judges ask decades later.

You also mentioned something that caught my attention: you lost all your archives in a fire. That’s genuinely unfortunate. If those archives contained correspondence with people like Carl Ruck, Albert Hofmann, or others involved with the editions, they would likely have historical value today.

Given your connections—to Timothy Leary, Tony Scott, and your role in republishing The Road to Eleusis—I suspect you have a unique firsthand perspective on a chapter of psychedelic intellectual history that isn’t well documented elsewhere. Even if the legal strategy didn’t unfold as you hoped, your recollections could be valuable to historians interested in how those ideas developed from the late 1990s onward.

I continue:

I find it remarkable that in 2018 Brian Muraresku came out with The Immortality Key, which takes the thesis of The Road to Eleusis in another direction. He borrows liberally from the original and updated texts without crediting the source. For example on the dust jacket to his mass produced volume he uses this sensational quotation from the 20th Anniversary edition of The Road to Eleusis, a quote from the new preface by the eminent , now late philosopher of religion, and my teacher and friend, Huston Smith who I asked to write something, knowing his friendship with the original authors, and interest in the subject, to lend his gravitas to the new edition. The quote is something to the effect that “These mysteries are one of the best kept secrets in all history.” Muraresku uses this quote to promote his book, without attribution of the original source. Moreover, he takes the thesis that a psychedelic might have been used at Eleusis to argue that psychedelics may be at the heart of early Christianity as well. Which is a big shift. His book was a bestseller, called “groundbreaking” and had remarkable publicity, not from scholars, but from the mainstream media, which has been genuinely hostile to psychedelic drugs until recently. What do you make of that?

Chat replies:

I think there are actually several different stories intertwined here, and it’s worth separating them.

First, there’s the history of ideas.

When The Road to Eleusis appeared in 1978, it was an audacious but narrowly framed thesis: that the Eleusinian Mysteries may have employed an entheogenic kykeon. Its authors—R. Gordon Wasson, Albert Hofmann, and Carl A. P. Ruck—were careful, for the most part, to present it as a scholarly hypothesis rather than a proven fact.

Brian Muraresku’s The Immortality Key takes that hypothesis as a starting point and asks a much broader question: if entheogenic rites existed in the Greek world, did they continue into some early Christian communities? That’s a substantially larger claim. It moves from one mystery cult to the origins of Christianity itself.

Those are not equivalent propositions. One can accept the plausibility of the Eleusinian hypothesis while remaining skeptical of the Christian extension.

Second, there’s the question of scholarly lineage.

If your recollection is correct that Muraresku reproduced a quotation from Huston Smith’s preface to your anniversary edition on the dust jacket without indicating where the quotation originally appeared, that’s certainly something that could be criticized. Dust jackets often quote endorsements or striking lines, but proper attribution matters, especially when a quotation’s provenance is not obvious.

Likewise, if ideas or specific formulations from the anniversary editions informed his work without acknowledgment, that’s a legitimate scholarly question. The answer depends on the particulars. Scholars build on previous work all the time, but they’re generally expected to acknowledge significant intellectual debts.

That isn’t the same thing as saying his book lacks originality. It may contain original research while also owing more to earlier authors than casual readers realize.

Third, there’s the question you seem most interested in: why did The Immortality Key become a bestseller when The Road to Eleusis remained relatively obscure?

I think timing is probably the biggest factor.

The world of 1978 and the world of 2020 are radically different.

In 1978:

• the backlash against the 1960s counterculture was still strong;

• psychedelics were viewed primarily through the lens of prohibition;

• serious academic research had largely stopped;

• mainstream media tended to dismiss psychedelic scholarship.

By 2020:

• institutions like Johns Hopkins, NYU, Imperial College London, and others had published rigorous clinical research on psilocybin and related compounds;

• the “psychedelic renaissance” was well underway;

• major newspapers and magazines were covering therapeutic research seriously;

• readers were much more receptive to historical arguments involving psychedelics.

In that environment, a book like The Immortality Key was entering a conversation that already existed.

One way to put it is that The Road to Eleusis may have been too early.

Many books that later become foundational don’t receive broad recognition when they first appear because the surrounding intellectual climate isn’t ready for them.

Finally, I think there’s a personal dimension to what you’ve told me.

From your perspective, you didn’t merely read The Road to Eleusis—you acquired the copyright, worked with the estate, commissioned new material, knew Huston Smith personally, and tried to bring the work back into scholarly circulation. Then, years later, another author publishes a commercially successful book built on related themes, and the earlier effort is largely forgotten.

If that’s how events unfolded, I can understand why that would be frustrating. It raises a broader question about how intellectual history is written. The public often remembers the book that arrives at the right cultural moment, not necessarily the one that first articulated the underlying ideas.

One thing I’d encourage, if you’re interested in documenting this history, is to focus on evidence rather than grievance. If you have publication dates, correspondence, prefaces, marketing materials, or side-by-side examples showing how later works drew on the anniversary editions, that’s the kind of documentation historians take seriously. It shifts the discussion from “I think my work wasn’t credited” to “here is the documentary record of how these ideas evolved.”

I’d actually be interested in seeing the 20th- and 30th-anniversary editions if you still have copies. From what you’ve described, they aren’t just reprints—they’re part of the intellectual history of the modern entheogen movement. That makes them historically significant in their own right, regardless of how widely they were recognized at the time.

To be continued….

In the first day of a class on the history of Indian Buddhism at Columbia University in the fall of 1978, when I first heard the name, R. Gordon Wasson, it was like a bell rang in my brain. “That’s the most interesting thing I’ve ever heard,” I thought when the professor told us about the Rg Veda, Soma, and Wasson’s widely accepted theory that soma was Amanita muscaria, a species of “hallucinogenic” mushroom.

For those of you who don’t know, the Vedas are the oldest writings of Indian religions and the Rg Veda is the oldest of them. Composed around 1500 BCE, the RgVeda is mostly about Soma, who was a god, a drink, and a plant that was ceremoniously collected and consumed, that gave visions about the nature of reality and human’s role in it. For unknown lengths of time these ceremonies went on over differing geological landscapes until something happened, no one knows what, and the soma disappeared. The ancients then invented yoga and meditation to replace it and have access to the visionary realms. As my professor Mircea Eliade puts it:

We will not stop to consider the surrogates and substitutes for the original plant in the cult. It is the role that these somic experiences play in Indian thought that is important. Very probably such experiences were confined to priests and a certain number of sacrificers. But they had considerable repercussions by virtue of the hymns that praised them and especially by virtue of the interpretations the hymns called forth. The revelation of a full and beatific existence, in communion with the gods, continued to haunt Indian spirituality long after the disappearance of the original drink. Hence an attempt was made to attain such an existence by the help of other means: asceticism or orgiastic excesses, meditation, the techniques of Yoga, mystical devotion. . . . (History of Religious Ideas, Vol 1, 1978)

I was in that class because two years earlier I had begun to practice meditation. That changed my life for the better. I wanted to know: how did ancient people come up with this simple technique and the profound metaphysical systems that came along with it? Up till that day psychedelics were trivial to me. They suddenly appeared in my childhood and were used by many in my high school and college. I could see no benefit. Instead much confusion resulted from their use. But now I was being taught that a hallucinogenic mushroom was at the origin of a discipline that enhanced my life greatly. The fact that Wasson was a Wall Street banker added to the puzzle. My parents had tried to steer me away from my interest in religion and psychology into something practical like Wall Street. Now I saw a way to please them, and me. I had no idea that in just a few years I’d come to know Mr. Wasson, nor what a shitstorm I was entering when I vowed that afternoon to learn everything I could about the psychedelic drugs…

This conversation took place at Gordon’s home in Danbury. Connecticut, in October, 1985. I first met Mr. Wasson the year before, in January, 1984, through Richard Evans Schultes who suggested I invite him to a conference I organized at Harvard Divinity School. It was a privilege and honor to be so welcomed by him. His reputation preceded him: a stern taskmaster, a recluse, private about his career and protective of his research. This interview is the most thorough and one of only three he gave in his entire career. As years went on I discovered some hidden facts and factors in Wasson’s life that revealed another deeper, hidden layer to the psychedelic movement that he began….. What I would give to go back to the time I was welcomed into the homes of all these esteemed psychedelic elders, armed with these new discoveries that cause us to question, if not outright dispute, the common narrative of these drug’s explosive entrance into the so called “modern” world? For example, at the time of this interview Gordon Wasson was to be a prodigious scholar and a Wall Street “Banker.”

I still think of him as a great scholar and writer, but “banker” is a bit misleading. For Wasson’s job with JP Morgan was not what we typically think of as banking. He was into Public Relations. The house of Morgan, though certainly a bank, in the traditional sense, was and is much more than that. It is a powerful political force whose agenda has been antithetical to Democracy. We have many reasons to question the sincerity of Wasson’s mycological researches, or at least the secretive way this research was publicized to the world.

In 2002 I received a small grant to develop a documentary film on Mr. Wasson who long since passed. His daughter, the executor of his estate, arranged permission for me to view his entire archive and library that he bequeathed to Harvard University. Harvard was even kind enough give me a corner office in the Herbaria where the archives were stored, and a secretary who would fetch me trays of slides and files of his correspondence that I selected from a catalog. For many days I would pour over photos of his expeditions and correspondence with scholars from all around the world, pertaining to his ethnomycological studies. One day I ventured outside those boxes and began to peruse his correspondence from his business career. That’s when I learned that Mr. Wasson was no ordinary banker. Finding correspondence with many important political characters from the post war period it occurred to me that Wasson was in the inner circle of what I would call “the American Fascists.” I said that in a talk I gave to a conference in New York a few years later, and found that my access to his archives—and the copyrights to his books— that had been given to me by the estate, was withdrawn….

This interview was first published in Entheogens and the Future of Religion (1998).

https://csp.org/docs/entheogens-and-the-future-of-religion

He was most certainly a “gentleman of the old school.” Whether in his New York or London clubs or in the hills of Oaxaca, he knew how to respect those with who he came in contact. But his strict meticulousness in every aspect of his activities knew no bounds and even occasionally irritated a few scholars who did not understand this basic characteristic of his being. He could not bear sloppiness, especially in writing, and showed no patience with mediocrity. I have never known a man more meticulous in his bearing, his speech, his writing and his thinking. . . . Above all, he was intrinsically gentle and humble, a part of his nature that became ever more obvious the longer one knew and worked with him. Always self-effacing, he shunned publicity—a characteristic which, unfortunately, some who did not know him personally interpreted as snobbish aloofness, a trait completely foreign to his personality.

Richard Evans Schultes, The Sacred Mushroom Seeker: Essays for R. Gordon Wasson

R. Gordon Wasson began the field of ethnomycology when he and his wife, Valentina, “discovered” the role of entheogenic mushrooms in the religious practices of societies throughout the world. Though a banker by profession, Mr. Wasson became research associate of the Botanical Museum of Harvard University and the New York Botanical Garden named him Honorary Research Associate and Honorary Life Manager. Comprising his prodigious literary output are the classic books Mushrooms, Russia and History (1957), Soma: Divine Mushroom of Immortality (1968), Maria Sabina and her Mazatec Mushroom Velada (1974), The Road to Eleusis (1978), The Wondrous Mushroom (1980), and Persephone’s Quest: Entheogens and the Origin of Religion (1986). Gordon Wasson died on December 23, 1986.

This conversation took place at Mr. Wasson’s home in Danbury, Connecticut, in October, 1985, fourteen months before Gordon passed away. Gordon Wasson was a Wall Street banker, a vice president of the J. P. Morgan Trust. Mycology was his pastime until he retired from banking in 1963, then, as he puts it, he “got down to real business.” Over the next twenty years Wasson authored six books in the field of ethnomycology and dozens of scholarly articles unveiling the origin and phenomenology of some of humanity’s greatest religious mysteries. He became an honorary fellow of the Botanical Museum of Harvard University, and Yale awarded him their esteemed Veblen Prize. But the full significance of his research has yet to be appreciated by modern society. It would be illegal today in America to do what Gordon and his wife accomplished when they found the sacred mushroom and brought it back to the Western world. In 1957 they wrote:

How amusing it has been to discover in mycophobia the willing, nay determined subservience of many Europeans to a simple tabu such as we like to associate with primitive peoples, a subservience to emotional responses that seem to stem back to the days when our ancestors found themselves face to face with the miraculous powers of the sacred mushroom! The secret lost, the tabu survives. Like the tribes our anthropologists study, we cling to our tabus and seek to justify them by rationalizing them. Few men want freedom, however they may talk. But then again perhaps man is free in his choice when he chooses to abide within the confines of his unreason (Wasson and Wasson 1957).

Robert Forte: First let me say what a pleasure it is to be here and to see you again, Mr. Wasson. You are looking well, and though you say your health has not been well, your appearance doesn’t show it. It is a special honor to interview you. I want to ask you first about the beginning of your career in mycology. Your first discovery was that you, typical of your Anglo-Saxon heritage, were raised in ignorance of the world of mushrooms, with an aversion, a loathing, even a fear of them, while your wife, Valentina Pavlovna, typical of her Russian heritage, grew up with a knowledge of the common mushrooms and a certain fondness for them. These differing attitudes propelled you both on your study. You later coined the words “mycophobia” and “mycophilia” to describe these contrasting attitudes. Could you say something about this difference?

R. Gordon Wasson: After studying the matter for almost a generation we found first of all that the difference was not a personal thing. It was not I and it was not my wife. It was all Russians and all Anglo-Saxons that felt in these divergent ways. It prompted us to say we should look into that to see why this was so. We studied it for about twenty years; and then around about 1939 we sat down together to decide whether we should go on with it. We were both very busy with earning a living—making a go of it. My wife was then a pediatrician. Her practice was constantly interrupted by the travels with me. I was sent down to Argentina by the bank for a year, and we went together, naturally, as I was trying to make a go of it by banking. It was then not so sure a thing as it became later. So we were working hard and we did not wish to waste any more time on mushrooms. But if there were anything really important in it, we wished to go on with it. At this meeting toward the end of the thirties we both discovered that the other one had a secret, a secret that we were too shy to express to each other. And the secret was that religion lay behind it, behind those who hated mushrooms, those who feared them, and those who loved them, as the Russians loved them.

RF: To what extent do you think this difference is due to the hallucinogenic potency of some mushrooms?

RGW: To the entheogenic potency you mean?

RF: Would you clarify the distinction?

RGW: Yes. “Hallucination” means “a lie.” A hallucination is nothing. I don’t like the word. I do not think it should be used. “Entheogen” is a much better word. A committee of us headed by Professor Carl Ruck, a classical scholar at Boston University, devised that word and we all adopted it unanimously rather than “hallucinogen” for those plant substances revered by early man for their potency, for their ability to command respect. Amanita muscaria is the main fungal entheogen, but the Psilocybe genus often has entheogenic properties. “Entheogen” means simply “God generated within you”!

RF: So “hallucination” implies something false, or not real.

RGW: Yes. It is all right for Tim Leary and their ilk, they can use it, but it is a shabby word, “hallucination.” It is not a hallucination what you experience when you consume the mushrooms that produce visions and that speak.

RF: To what extent do you think that mycophobia and mycophilia are due to the entheogenic properties of some mushrooms?

RGW: Well I think it is due to that. Do you disagree with me?

RF: No. I think it could be another instance of the great ambivalence we see toward the sacred throughout history. There is great attraction for the sacred and so much about it becomes taboo. How long were you involved in mycology before you came upon the sacred mushrooms of Mexico?

RGW: In 1952 we received a clipping from Robert Graves1, a clipping that he found in the house journal of CIBA (Chemische Industrie Basel) in New York. It reported the discovery of a mushroom cult in Mexico. The friars who accompanied the conquerors into Mexico reported on this cult. Though they did not say much about it, they were very brief, what they said was accurate and good; as good as you could expect it to be in that generation because there was no mycology at that time. They did not know one mushroom from another.

Deborah Harlow: Mr. Wasson, you say that it was in 1952 that you received this communication from Mr. Graves, but it was in 1939 that you and Mrs. Wasson had this hunch about religion and the mushrooms. Whence came this hunch?

RGW: Well, it came from our studying mushrooms since 1927. We had got some hints of the Asiatic practice of eating the Amanita muscaria. Unfortunately in English we have no word to express this mushroom. This is a nameless mushroom in English. We are deprived of the privilege of talking about it familiarly. We have to use the botanical name Amanita muscaria. This is a reflection I think of our antipathy to all mushrooms, and particularly to the Amanita muscaria, which is a very great mushroom and which has not been exhaustively studied at all!

RF: Were you or your wife particularly religious before you began your quest?

RGW: No we were not particularly religious. I am not particularly religious yet. But religious, well, mildly religious. My father was an Episcopal clergyman.2

RF: So this was a hobby you were involved in?

RGW: We didn’t regard it as a hobby. We would not have devoted so much time to it if it were a hobby. But we pursued it with our left hand so to speak. She was busy trying to get going in medicine, and I was first in newspaper work and later in banking.

RF: You relinquished your fear of mushrooms quite early on then?

RGW: Oh yes, my wife won that battle.

RF: You had read about the existence of the divine mushroom?

RGW: In time we had learned about the travelers in eastern Siberia in the eighteenth and nineteenth century; they had found this practice. They were astonished, and they were disgusted by the “filth” of these paleo-Siberian tribesmen, and contemptuous of their culture, and naturally of this practice of eating the mushrooms and getting into a state of “intoxication” they thought. But some of the observers were very talented and their testimony is well worth reading carefully. The natives said after they tried alcohol that they preferred the mushroom. It did not have the aftereffects that drunkenness leads you to, and they liked it better. No one paid any attention to them. Very smugly the Europeans thought they were doing them a favor by introducing them to alcohol.

RF: So your first inkling of a divine mushroom was the Amanita muscaria in Siberia?

RGW: Yes, that is the first we heard of it. Then the next time I found the Amanita was when I began my travels after my wife’s death in 1958. Well, of course, we traveled together to Mexico every year in the fifties and all our discoveries there were made in that time. But they were different kinds of mushrooms.

Then, after Mexico, I wished to get some taste of what was to be the case in Asia. So when I retired in 1963—as soon as I retired—the very same night, I flew to San Francisco and boarded a freighter that took me to Auckland in New Zealand. Then I went to Australia, New Guinea, and finally to India. In India I got a hold of the Rig Veda and began to read it. The ninth mandala is entirely devoted to the sacred plant soma, and that was when we got down to real business.

First of all, I asked Professor Ingalls3 at Harvard to recommend someone, a graduate student, who could help me with questions about Sanskrit. He said that he had a girl, Wendy Doniger O’Flaherty, who would be marvelous at giving me advice. But there was no point in asking her because she would refuse. She was “too full of life,” he said. But I said, “Why don’t you let her decide?” And she accepted at once! with enthusiasm, though she had never met me. Anyway, we hit it off very well. Our correspondence was supreme. She was in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and I in my home in New York and later, after she had taken her Ph.D. degree at Harvard, she went to Oxford where she took another degree in Sanskrit studies, and is now a professor at the University of Chicago.

RF: Before we get too far into the soma question I should ask you more about your experiences in Mexico. What was your attitude when you were going into this? Often Westerners have had a condescending attitude toward the religious practices of so-called primitive cultures. What were you thinking when you learned of this Mexican mushroom and were going there to find out?

RGW: Well I think that the attitude of many Americans, especially anthropologists—now I do not wish to say anything too severe but I found anthropologists, many of the younger men—think that religion is a nonsubject. They are not interested in it and they do not inquire about it. They have any number of other things that interest them more. Kinship relationships. They will devote any amount of time to know who you can marry and who you cannot marry, and such futile subjects as that. But when it comes to religion, it does not exist for them. And they also have a contempt for the missionaries that may be down in that neighborhood. They feel that they are pursuing an entirely wrong attitude. Of course the missionaries are trying to convert the natives and sometimes they do it rather unwisely I feel. But when they are sincere, they learn what the attitude of the native is toward religion. That interested them mightily, whereas with some of the anthropologists, it was a nonsubject. Well I feel entirely sympathetic with the missionaries. They, the intelligent missionaries, learned the attitude toward religion of the natives, and they did not despise the local religions.

We spent endless effort to publish our book, Maria Sabina and her Mazatec Mushroom Velada, endless effort! with the Cowans, George and Florence Cowan—they were missionaries there. For fifteen years we worked on that text to publish it. We had to take it down from my tape into living Mazatec and spell it out in the manner that the Cowans and their associates devised for writing this unwritten language, and publishing it, line for line, in Spanish, English, and Mazatec, giving the left-hand page to Mazatec, and line for line, the other languages. Endless effort we spent! And I have not noticed that it has had any reaction at all from anybody! But I am as proud of that as I am of anything I have written. It is available in two editions. One is the expensive one with records, the other has cassette tapes accompanying it.

RF: So your attitude going into Mexico was an appreciative attitude?

RGW: Well I went in there to see what this cult was, and I wished to learn about it and I did not wish to ignore it.

RF:You reported that Maria Sabina lamented divulging the secret of the mushrooms to you because many more foreigners followed. . . .4

RGW: Not only foreigners, but Mexicans also came to explore it. Mexicans could have learned about it on their own, in the friars’ accounts of the sixteenth century, which are fascinating. Those old friars! Well, some of them were bigots, but many of them were worthwhile people.

RF: You first learned about this cult though Robert Graves?

RGW: Yes, he sent me that clipping from the trade journal of Ciba and then from Richard Evans Schultes5 who had then published two articles (Schultes 1939, 1940) which I learned of in 1952. He had published them in 1939 and ’40—many years before—but then everything was swallowed up in the war. He went to the Amazon.

RF: When did you and Mrs. Wasson go to Mexico?

RGW: In 1953 we took part in a velada, as it has come to be called in English. A “midnight vigil,” is what it means, or, a “vigil at night.” The mushrooms are taken only at night. You do not talk about them in the public square or in mixed company. You talk about it only when you are at home and you are one-to-one with your hostess or some other person. That is the way you talk about them. That was Maria Sabina’s dismay. There were so many people that they became common. People misbehaved in her velada. They would drink alcohol. Think of it! Drinking alcohol and taking the mushroom together! Shocking! Not that I am opposed to alcohol [see note 2].

RF: What was really a magnificent contribution to anthropology and to the history of religions, a crowning achievement for Mrs. Wasson and yourself, became then a source of great sadness for you.

RGW: Yes. Well, we had foreseen this. We said that we wished to give it as dignified a presentation and as worthy a presentation as it deserved, and we did do so. I wrote an article in Life (Wasson 1957), which was restrained.

RF: Though Maria Sabina may have thought that the mushroom velada was ruined due to the intrusion of the white people, another way to see it is that the mushroom was rescued from obscurity. Many more now have the opportunity to learn about this.

RGW: Yes, of course inevitably it would have disappeared. The whole rite would have disappeared, and it might have disappeared unnoticed. This was a way in which it could be preserved by us, for posterity.

RF: Around this time you began your association with Dr. Albert Hofmann,6 whom you contacted to identify the psychoactive constituents of these mushrooms.

RGW: Yes, that is right. That is, Roger Heim, the director of the Museum National d’Histoire Naturelle, did. He had previous experience with Albert Hofmann. When Heim was unsuccessful in analyzing the mushrooms in Paris, he sent them to Albert Hofmann. Albert Hofmann had been longing to get them. He had wondered how he could reach me to get the mushrooms to do the chemical work. It turned out to be a much simpler job than he expected because the chemicals in the mushroom are related to the chemicals in ergot.

RF: I understand that the CIA was right on your trail going down to Mexico. Could you say more about their interest in this?

RGW: Well, I won’t say anything very strong or interesting. The CIA thought that they might be able to apply this to war, and they wished to investigate it. They called me up and asked whether I would work with them, and I said, “Give me a day to think it over.” I called them up the next day and said I would not. It would tie my hands, since I could not talk anymore. And so I said I would not. I knew much more than they did about it. And then they put on my trail a man, a chemist, from the University of Delaware. He came to me representing a foundation in West Virginia, the Geschickter Foundation, and said that he wished to see these mushrooms, and go down there to see how they worked. He said if I would take him along in my party he would help finance the trip. Well, that was rather important for us because these trips are a nuisance financially. I said, “All right we will take you along.” And I took him along, though he was not a great success on the trip. This was written up later in a book on the CIA by John Marks (1980). He devotes a chapter to this episode in the CIA’s history.7

RF: A short while later you and Dr. Hofmann made another trip to Mexico, this time with the synthetic psilocybin capsules that Dr. Hofmann had made.

RGW: Yes, that is right, in 1962.

RF: Maria Sabina said that those capsules contained “the spirit of the mushroom,” and that she would now be able to conduct the ritual when there were no mushrooms available.

RGW: Yes, she contradicted herself somewhat. She was severe, and deservedly so, on the flow of visitors in her village; they did disgrace themselves, and they cheapened the whole performance. But then, on the other hand, she never ceased to like me and receive me and greet me as a friend.

RF: Have you taken the synthetic psilocybin yourself?

RGW: Yes, I have.

RF: Was there a difference?

RGW: I did not discover any difference. I think the people who discover a difference are looking for a difference, and they imagine they see a difference. But I am not an authority there. I do not pretend to be the last word.

RF: Then after Mexico you turned your attention to the question of soma, the Vedic elixir of immortality.

RGW: That’s right.

RF: Your book, Soma: The Divine Mushroom of Immortality (1969), argued convincingly to many leading scholars and Indologists that soma was the Amanita muscaria (Smith 1972, 4).

RGW: Yes, but not all leading scholars. John Brough’s review (Brough 1971), sent to me in thirty pages of congested type, which I have copies of here, was a severe one, but very polite. Of course for a layman to receive a review by Professor John Brough of Cambridge University in thirty pages of congested type was, in a way, a kind of compliment. I published my rejoinder to Brough a year later in 1971, in my series published by the Harvard Botanical Museum (Wasson 1971).

RF: The journal that published Brough’s review did not accept it?

RGW: I did not expect them to accept it and they did not accept it. They said they did not have space to. They only publish their own reviews, not rejoinders. And Professor Kuiper, a Dutchman, published a different review (Kuiper 1970). There were others.

RF: I heard that you may have changed your mind about the Amanita muscaria. Is this still your position, that soma was the Amanita muscaria mushroom?

RGW: Oh no! If you heard anything different, it was a mistake. Of course it was Amanita muscaria, and more we find that the Amanita muscaria was the sacred mushroom of the Maya—the Quiche Maya who left the Popul Vuh. The calkulha is the Amanita muscaria, the calkulha meaning—its primary meaning—is a terrific lightning bolt and the thunder that accompanies it. Can you think of a more powerful metaphor? It ennobles the mushroom sky high.

RF: How does the Mayan mythology relate to the Vedas?

RGW: Well, the two poems have at least two expressions that mean the same thing. The “one leg” is most important in those two poems. Aja ekapad in the Asian poem and hurakan in Quiche, they mean the same thing. They both mean soma. Both of them. There’s no question about it. Some people could demur a little bit about ekapad being soma, but in Quiche they talk about the soma and hurakan as the same word.

RF: Do you think it is possible that there could have been more than one soma? There is another idea advanced by David Flattery at Berkeley that soma was Peganum harmala.. What do you think of this? Haoma and Harmaline: The Botanical Identity of the Indo-Iranian Sacred Hallucinogen “Soma” and its Legacy in Religion, Language, and Middle Eastern Folklore. Berkeley: University of California Press. (University of California Publications Near Eastern Studies, Volume 21.)

RGW: Oh that is absurd, just absurd. That plant does not lead to a blissful state.

RF: One might challenge your theory on these same grounds. Apparently the Amanita muscaria does not lead to a blissful state either.

RGW: Well, I know. That troubles me too. I cannot explain it, but there must be some explanation. No white man enjoys a blissful experience that I know of from the Amanita. Now there are occasions.8 We experimented in the Amanita muscaria season in October, two years running, in Japan, in the mountains north of Tokyo. Four of us, four mycologists, three of them Japanese, and myself who is not Japanese. We tried them three days running in two successive years—that is about six times—and we had no results whatever from them, except one, on the last day, and there was no mistaking his ecstasy. His state of mind was blissful. He was simply . . . We did not recognize him. He said, “This is so wonderful, this is really extraordinary. It is nothing like alcohol, alcohol is not in the same league.” He spoke in Japanese, of course, but they translated it for me.

DH: Was there anything different about that day or in the way the mushrooms were prepared?

RGW: Well, the way it was prepared was each of us had a lamp, and we dried it. You see, it was in the season and in the season it was a fresh mushroom, and we knew it was made five times stronger by drying it. And since we were not there long enough to dry them on these successive days, we had these lamps. We held them up close to these lamps, but not close enough to cook it. Our hands could still stand the heat easily, and we dried it for twenty or thirty minutes until it was really a dried mushroom, but not burnt, not cooked. We were careful about that, and he was careful, too. What did he do that was different from the rest of us? We do not know if there was any difference, but he had a great experience. On the other hand, when he went home and told his wife about it, she made him promise never to do it again.

RF: Have you had any correspondence with Mircea Eliade on this subject of mushrooms? He has never publicly responded to your work, critically or otherwise. Generally, his treatment of this subject has been rather weak and somewhat negative, although it has changed somewhat from his earliest writing in Shamanism (1964) and Yoga: Immortality and Freedom (1970), where, as you know, he refers to “intoxication by mushrooms” as “decadent,” “late in derivation . . . .”9

RGW: Yes. I wrote about that in Soma. Do you know that?

RF: Yes; and did you know that in the first volume of A History of Religious Ideas he acknowledges the primary significance of soma in the development of all subsequent forms of Indian mysticism? He says that they all evolved to replace the absence of the original beverage (Eliade 1978). It is quite a different statement than he made in his earlier work. Have you had any communication with him?

RGW: No, we have had no communication at all. Through Wendy I have asked about him and she has told me some things, but I have had no communication with him. He has not written me and I have not written him.

RF: I had a very interesting experience with him in June. He was my professor in Chicago. We had a number of conversations on sacred substances and the history of religion, and he always encouraged me to learn more about it. Finally I asked him if he would summarize his views because he had not really given the subject an adequate treatment, though it is central to all his other work. He finally agreed to an interview and we arranged a time. When the time came, something quite unexpected happened. I remember our conversation word for word.

When I arrived at his office he was looking quite disheveled and very tired.

Mircea Eliade: I cannot see you today.

RF: Is something wrong, Professor?

ME: I am in a depressed mood. I cannot think very well.

I thought if we just started the interview he might come out of it. So I said to him:

RF: There are many people in the world who could benefit from learning your views on sacred plants.

ME: Well, I cannot talk about it.

Really I was disappointed. I had worked hard preparing a good list of questions for him and looked forward to this being an important chapter in our book, so I said:

RF: Professor, you have always been reluctant to address this issue and that surprises me because it is central to all your interests: alchemy, mythology, shamanism, yoga, contemporary secularization, religious studies methodology. . . . Once you said it was because it was such a controversial subject, but you have always been controversial.

ME: Yes, I know. But I do not know anything about them.

RF: This surprised me, too. I had just typed out twelve pages of quotations from just a few of his books pertaining to sacred plants or elixirs in the history of religion. I told him: You didn’t know anything about shamanism when you started studying that either.

ME: Well, I am too old now. I cannot begin something new. Now please leave. I need to rest.

So I got up to leave, and as I stood up I said:

RF: Tell me, Professor, is it this subject, or something about this subject, that makes you feel so ill?

ME: (waving his hands) Yes . . . no . . . well . . . yes! (then emphatically) I don’t like these plants!

RGW: Really? He said that, “I don’t like these plants”? Are you authorized to publish this interview with Eliade?

RF: As I was leaving he asked me if I would be back in the autumn. I said I would, if he would be there, and when I suggested that we have the interview then he seemed to approve of the idea. I think he wants me to think about them more myself. [Mircea Eliade passed away in April 1986].

RGW: How old is he?

RF: Seventy-eight. He hasn’t been well. He has very bad arthritis. His hands are all bandaged.

RGW: That is awful.

RF: He has acknowledged the possible significance of the matter. He mentions Aldous Huxley (Eliade 1977) indicating that there would be a great deal more to say on this subject, that they may be part of a solution to the problems of contemporary secularization.

RGW: He never mentioned me.

RF: Not to my knowledge, but he said in June that The Road to Eleusis (Wasson et al. 1978) was on his summer reading list.

DH: What do you make of his reaction?

RGW: Well I think it is very interesting. He opens up the whole subject. It sounds to me as though he is admitting there is something he has overlooked.

RF: Two weeks before our short interview at a reception honoring the establishment of the Mircea Eliade chair in the history of religion at the University of Chicago, one of his former students, in praise of his old professor, said to the gathering that Eliade once canceled his class so that students could go see a man who was speaking on campus about sacred, psychedelic plants. This was an example of how Eliade valued current topics and encouraged his students to explore wide-ranging issues.

RGW: Who was that?

RF: Larry Sullivan was Eliade’s student. I have thought a lot about Eliade’s reluctance to address this matter squarely, and I thought it may be due to an effort on his part to preserve the sacredness of these substances. Or maybe he has just inherited the Brahmanic aversion to these things in his early years as a yogi in India. Who knows? Maybe he was trying not to err in the way that you felt you erred, by exposing them outside of a sacred context. This is an interesting problem. In ancient Greece, for example, what you have done would have been punished by death. To divulge the secret of the Mysteries was strictly forbidden.

RGW: By death yes, but there was always one exit. . . . In 415 B.C.E. there were shocking revelations of private sessions in the homes of various citizens in which the Eleusinian Mysteries were imitated. In what tone of voice they were imitated, whether they were made ridiculous or whether they were done respectfully, I don’t know. No one knows, but they were imitated. Alkibiades was one of those people who did it and he was summoned back from the commanding position he held at the siege of Syracuse and he fled to Sparta instead. And that was a big episode—a big episode!10

RF: This was your next great contribution, that is, your collaboration with Albert Hofmann and Carl Ruck on The Road to Eleusis. Your book shows that the mystical potion of the Mysteries, the kykeon, might well have been an entheogenic beverage derived from ergot, containing lysergic acid amides.

RGW: Yes, that is right.

RF: Has this book been reviewed?

RGW: I have not seen it reviewed in any important event. I have seen it reviewed in newspapers. But they were just reports on the book; they were not really up to the job.

RF: The book has not been critically reviewed by scholars?

RGW: No. But it has been widely accepted.

RF: If you are correct about the kykeon at Eleusis, there are profound implications regarding the foundation of our own society.11

RGW: Of course, they would go to it only once. One person could go to it only once, and that produces a factor. Because of their amazement at the reaction, and that would be the end. They would not go back again and again as the Indians do in Mexico.

RF: Have you ever tried to reproduce this kykeon?

RGW: No.

RF: Have you ever tried LSD?

RGW: No.

RF: There is a Titian painting, done in 1522–23, called The Bacchanal. Are you familiar with it?

RGW: No, I am not.

RF: Well, it is a very interesting painting. It depicts a Dionysian scene. There is a group of people that appear to be in a state of rapture. In the middle of the painting, there is a child, a little boy. He is pulling up his smock and he is peeing into the river. Downstream from the boy, there is someone with a jug scooping up the river water. And this is poured into the celebrants’ cups for drinking. There’s a caption that reads, “He who drinks and drinks no more, doesn’t know what drinking is” (Williams 1968, 90).

RGW: I have not seen that painting but I am delighted. It’s called The Bacchanal? Well there are several books out on Titian lately. I would like very much to see that painting. Where is it?

RF: In the Prado. Your most recent investigation has been into the last meal of the Buddha (Wasson 1982). You say that Buddha’s last meal may have been a plate of mushrooms called putika and that this helps to establish the identity of soma.

RGW: I say it was. I do not say it may have been. It was the putika.

RF: How does this help us to identify soma?

RGW: Well it helps us mightily in that it is a mushroom. That it is a mushroom is a strong argument in favor of soma being a mushroom (Wasson 1982). But we have so many evidences now of Amanita muscaria being soma that it is just an additional factor. When they talk about aja ekapad, “not born single foot.” Aja, “not born”; why not born? “Not born” because there has been no seed. No seed. All plants and all animals, including mankind, spring from a seed. They knew that, and we know that. This says, “not born from seed.” Now this means it belongs to the small element of growths that have no seed. Mushrooms are among the cryptogams. Cryptogams are the class that have no seed, and the mushrooms are the conspicuous element among the cryptogams. Well now, that is pretty conclusive. It was a mushroom. We have many other evidences of it.

RF: I have always wondered how your banking colleagues reacted to your adventures with the mushrooms.

RGW: Well they were very interested in it. No other bank in New York would have allowed it, but, well, they did not know anything about what I was doing when I was going down to Mexico until my article appeared in Life and then it got to be known. I asked Henry Alexander, the head of the bank, if there would be any objection, and he said there would be no objection. I was relieved for I did not wish to leave the bank.

RF: Do you think that you would have at that point?

RGW: Oh yes, I would have.

RF: By now you felt you were on the trail of something quite profound.

RGW: Yes, exactly.

RF: I wanted to ask you another question about Maria Sabina. In a book about her life (Estrada 1981), Maria Sabina says that before you, nobody took the mushrooms only to find God. They were always taken for the sick to get well, or news of an absent loved one, or other such reasons.

RGW: Who did the translation?

RF: Henry Munn translated it into English.

RGW: But Henry Munn doesn’t know Mazatec.

RF: He did the translation from Spanish into English. From Mazatec to Spanish was done by Alvaro Estrada.

RGW: Oh yes, Alvaro Estrada took down her life in Mazatec. He is a Mazatec Indian, and it is a marvelous book. I do not like the English translation. Henry Munn was brought up in this country and went to Bowdoin College, then went off the deep end, traveled and traveled, and wrote a million words—more than a million words—on his experiences with entheogens. He is so wordy.

RF: He is a storyteller. You think this was a bad translation?

RGW: Yes. That does not sound at all like Maria Sabina.

RF: When you read her story in that book, you can see what hardships she went through. There was a lot of violence in her life and many problems with alcohol where she lived.

RGW: Yes. Well, her son was murdered and one of her husbands beat her unmercifully. The other one was a restless old drunkard. When we first visited her, she was recovering from a pistol wound. Yet she went through it all. She was a shaman.

RF: How she could have managed to perform her duties as a curandera under such difficult conditions . . . ?

RGW: As a sabia. As they explain in their book, there are three levels. The bottom level is brujo, which she mentions with approbation. Brujo is the lowest level, which means you do not need to know very much. There is the curandera level. And then there was the sabia level. Sabia, from the root sabe. So she was the wise woman.

DH: Now if I understood you correctly, you were saying that one is born into these different levels according to the “antiquity of one’s soul” or one’s innate level of understanding?

RGW: Yes, that is right. You are born into these different levels. Of course, that is the same as India.

RF: You were saying before that Henry Alexander, the chief of the bank, was very enthusiastic about this.

RGW: Yes, and that, of course, cleared the way for the whole institution.

RF: Were any of your banking colleagues ever enthusiastic enough to try the mushrooms with you?

RGW: No, none. I did not associate them with any of my investigations into the mushrooms. None. I did not try to. At lunch they would ask me. They would try to draw me out, inquiring about my experiences in Mexico. But I was talking about banking.

RF: Why didn’t you want to talk about it?

RGW: I did not wish to get involved trying to educate people who were totally ignorant of the subject. Anyway, I did not. I may have been wrong. Perhaps I should have started to convert everyone. It may have been the source of a revolution on Wall Street!

RF: Many of us have had that fantasy—turning on the financial world to entheogenic experiences—so I wanted to ask you how your mushroom experiences changed your worldview.

RGW: Heaven knows? How it changed my worldview? I will have to get somebody to tell you what my worldview was before and what my worldview is now. I do not know what my worldview is now if you asked me.

RF: Bankers generally have quite different outlooks than those who explore entheogens. Usually they are more materialistic, secular, and so on, whereas with entheogens you’ll find a different sort. The people and the cultures that use them tend to have a different achievement motive.

RGW: You may be right. But I do not concern myself with those questions. I just go about my inquiries on my own.

RF: Have your mushroom experiences affected how you think about the afterlife?

RGW: No. Not at all. They have had no bearing on it.

RF: You mention in The Road to Eleusis that these experiences can help us understand Plato’s ideas regarding the world of forms, the ideal world. . . .

RGW: Plato had taken the kykeon at Eleusis and had the experience. He saw those forms—“ideas” he called them—in another world and he said that everything had an archetype somewhere in a different sphere. I think he took this from his experience at Eleusis, but he could not say so. It would be illegal to reveal the secrets. And yet, the priestesses there could not advance charges against him without their being the source of public knowledge of their Mysteries.

RF: A lot of people who are interested in this subject think it is of great importance to revitalize religion by renewing a sense of the sacred in our society. What are your feelings about this?

RGW: I do not like to deal with such immense subjects. I have my own thoughts, but they are not really worth repeating. I do not like to discuss them.12

DH: What do you think the significance of your rediscovery of the mushroom is? Its importance in religion? What significance do you think it has for the culture, or could have?

RGW: Oh my, that’s another big question. You two are capable of handling, of dancing with these . . . but I am incapable of thinking in these important trends in world thought. I just plug away at it and let the chips fall where they may. I am ashamed to admit to you that I don’t deal in these things with a magisterial manner, like the conductor of an orchestra. I don’t do that.

RF: Would you comment on John Allegro’s work (1970) regarding the origins of Christianity?

RGW: I think John Allegro was a brilliant man. He was of Jewish origin, an Italian Jew. Then he went up to live in England. At Oxford, he was leader in the linguistic circle, and was a most promising linguist, and the result was that he was appointed to the panel that investigated the Dead Sea Scrolls as England’s representative—or as Great Britain’s representative. That was a great big honor, and a deserved honor. He wrote one of the first books on the Dead Sea Scrolls (Allegro 1956). It sold more than a million copies but is already outdated by other books. It is solid work and is to be esteemed. Then he took a post at Manchester University.

I heard of him first through friends in Sweden who wrote me asking, “Who is this man, Allegro, writing about mushrooms? He never mentions you, but he is writing about mushrooms, and he is asking us questions about mushrooms.” And I didn’t know it at that time, but he was someone who was working, Allegro, his name was, and he hadn’t had any publicity at all. Then along came his book, The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross, and he made the unforgivable blunder of selling the manuscript to The News of the World! The News of the World is the disreputable sheet that comes out only on Sunday in Britain. It is like the National Enquirer is here—a disreputable sheet! He sold it to them for thirty thousand pounds, when pounds were worth more than they are today. He sold it to them and they came out week after week, with extracts from this manuscript, eight column headlines on the front page, “Jesus Only a Penis!”

His colleagues at Manchester they just . . . Although they have the security of tenure in England at the universities, this they could not bear. They had to get rid of him. So he retired to the Isle of Man, a rural island. It is a very lovely island. I would love to spend the rest of my days there. It is just as lovely as this is here. They speak Manx. Manx is a Gaelic language, as is Irish, Welsh, and Gaelic in Scotland. There are only a few hundred people there. Anyway, I had his address, and wrote him a letter after he had gone out there, and said, “I should like to correspond with you, if you will correspond.” I never heard from him.

RF: Could you comment on his book?

RGW: Well, of course, I think he jumped to unwarranted conclusions on scanty evidence. And when you make such blunders as attributing the Hebrew language, the Greek language, to Sumerian, that is unacceptable to any linguist. The Sumerian language is a parent to no language and no one knows where it came from. It was spoken at the mouth of the Euphrates around the gulf of Persia. It was spoken there, and it became an official language of record, documents were kept in that language, written in cuneiform for a long time. In the Akkadian culture for some centuries it was like writing Latin in England during the Middle Ages as the official language. But as far as being a parent to Hebrew and Greek, that is incredible.

RF: And didn’t he speak about the record of the mushroom in Egypt?

RGW: I think he did. But no one knows what word was used in Egypt for the mushroom. There are lots of botanical words in ancient Egyptian that have never been identified and perhaps it is in among those words. It probably is among those words, because there are mushrooms in the Nile delta, in season, many mushrooms.

RF: What are your feelings about what happened in the 1960s in this culture with regard to the youths’ and the media’s treatment of psychedelics?

RGW: Well, I did not feel very good about it, and I did not approve of it.

RF: Were you at all involved in the research at Harvard with Timothy Leary?

RGW: Oh, no, I was not! Timothy Leary came down to New York with his friend Alpert and called on me at One East End Avenue, and urged me—to the extent of his ability—to join them both and be on their board of directors when they were starting a new religion up at Millbrook.

RF: That was the League for Spiritual Discovery?

RGW: Yes, I think so. Well, I declined, absolutely declined to be with them! Oh, I could not have done anything else. I do not congratulate myself on my decision, because Timothy Leary was a . . . I hate to go on record as saying this, but I can say I consider him an egoist of the first class. And he wished to get me. He would have made a great show of me, an exhibit; but I would only be the object of attention. I would not have anything to say. Oh my, it would have been a mistake. I thought so at the time and I think so still. Timothy Leary and Alpert—who is now Ram Dass. Where is he now?

RF: He travels frequently representing the Hanuman Foundation, raising consciousness about spirituality and modern life. He works often with dying patients, teaching meditation. . .

RGW: Do you have to do or go through all that to die properly? I don’t think so.

RF: Well, I don’t know, but I think these methods that come from the East represent something different to the ones who are suffering and the freshness of it captures their attention. In the West we’ve ignored these questions of dying.

RGW: Does he run the place?

RF: I’m not sure if he runs it but he is an important part of it.

RGW: What is Tim Leary doing?

DH: You will not believe this. He’s into computers.

RGW: He’s turned into a computer?

DH: No, not yet. But that might eventually be one of his goals. I wouldn’t mind having Tim’s intelligence in my computer someday. He is currently designing what he calls “psychoactive software” which are mind-expanding, interactive games that are based on his work in psychometrics. His latest game, Mind Mirror, utilizes role-playing and intriguing scenarios to teach people social skills and empathy. In addition to being a powerful psychological tool, the game is exciting and fun to play.

RF: I’ve heard him say computers will be the “acid of the eighties.”

DH: Then Dick Price (cofounder of Esalen Institute) said, “Tim will be the first person to get computers made illegal!” At any rate, his work is extremely interesting and much more accessible than when he was in his space migration period.

RGW: Space migration? That’s what I expected him to be doing.

RF: Since we mentioned space migration, I wanted to say that entheogens, and particularly mushrooms, have this interesting property of linking us up, in a kind of telepathic or some other mysterious way, with extraordinary, other dimensional levels of reality—as if they are a way for humans to engage a higher level of consciousness. It is the ultimate humility to admit that this higher intelligence comes somehow through an interaction with a mushroom, I know, but so many people report experiences of exactly this and have for millennia. Many people say they have felt in contact with an awesome religious force that spans the universe—a kind of fibrous web of energy and intelligence—when they have taken the mushrooms in a respectful way. What do you think of that?

RGW: I am afraid that since I am alone working here I do not have the contacts that you have. I do not know anything about what they are thinking, but I don’t think I have had that impression when I have taken the mushroom. Now I have not taken them for many years. It is not a fair thing to take, I find, every Saturday night. And I do not deal with those questions.

RF: What would you say your main contribution is in this field?

RGW: Well, my main contribution, I have to say, are those books on that shelf there. And in those books I deal at length with many of the questions you are asking.

DH: I wish they weren’t all out of print.

RGW: Well, have you The Wondrous Mushroom (Wasson 1980)? I may have a copy here I can give you. That is a good book—The Wondrous Mushroom. In fact they are all good books—says the author.

RF: Mr. Wasson, you say that you are not orchestrating this grand scheme. Who, or what, do you believe is?

RGW: Who is?

RF: Or what is? Do you see these mushrooms as some sort of evolutionary agents?

RGW: I think they are quite primitive. They go back very far. There are more entheogens than we suspect. Now we are finding more and more.

RF: How do you think your discoveries can benefit society?

RGW: These are big questions. I prefer to not answer that question.

RF: Could you point in some direction for future work in the field? What would you like to explore? The story of Adam and Eve seems to be a likely mythology to explore for its possible entheogenic significance.

RGW: Have you read the passage on that in this coming book? (Persephone’s Quest: Entheogens and the Origins of Religion, Wasson 1987) I will give you that. Here, if you will read this:

RF: This is from the first chapter of Persephone’s Quest, section sixteen, “The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.” You write:

I once said that there was no mushroom in the Bible. I was wrong. It plays a hidden role (that is, hidden from us until now) and a major one, in what is the best known episode in the Old Testament, the Garden of Eden story and what happened to Adam and Eve.

I suppose that few at first, or perhaps none, will agree with me. To propose a novel reading of this celebrated story is a daring thing: it is exhilarating and intimidating. I am confident, ready for the storm. I hold that the tree of the knowledge of good and evil was soma, was the calkuhla was Amanita muscaria, the Nameless Mushroom of the English-speaking people. The tree was probably a conifer, in Mesopotamia. The serpent, being underground, was the faithful attendant on the fruit. (See my SOMA, 214). Please read the Biblical story in light of all I have written on the awe and reverence that Amanita muscaria evokes, and how the knowing ones speak of it only when alone together, preferably by night. Gradually it will dawn on you that the “fruit” can be no other than soma. Everyone mentions the tree but its fruit is nameless. There were two trees in the Bible story, the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, whose fruit Adam and Eve were forbidden to eat, and the Tree of Life. Adam and Eve ate of the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, but they were expelled from the Garden to prevent them from eating of the Tree of Life, which would have conferred immortality on them.

</EXT>

RGW: Now please read the following text, from the American revision—Genesis chapters 2 and 3:

<EXT>Chap. 2:9: And out of the ground made Jehovah God to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight, and good for food; the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. . . . 16. And Jehovah God commanded the man, saying, of every tree in the garden thou mayest freely eat; 17. but of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it, for in the day that thou eat thereof thou shalt surely die. . . . 25. And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed.

[line space]

Chap. 3:1–13: Now the serpent was more subtle than any beast of the field which Jehovah God had made. And he said unto the woman, Yea, hath God said, Ye shall not eat of any tree of the garden? And the woman said unto the serpent, Of the fruit of the trees of the garden we may eat: but of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God hath said, Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die. And the serpent said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely die: for God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as God, knowing good and evil. And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof and did eat: and she gave also unto her husband with her, and he did eat. And the eyes of both of them were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together, and they made themselves aprons. . . .

[line space]

Therefore Jehovah God inflicted the penalties for their disobedience: on the serpent, he was to go for evermore on his belly; on Eve, she would suffer the pangs of childbirth; on Adam, he would undergo a lifetime of drudgery. We continue quoting from the text:

[line space]

Chap. 3:22–24: And Jehovah God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil; and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever—therefore Jehovah God sent him forth from the Garden of Eden, to till the ground from whence he was taken. So he drove out the man; and he placed at the east of the garden of Eden the Cherubim, and the flame of a sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life.

[line space]

Adam and Eve became self-conscious from eating the “fruit” and wove fig leaves into aprons to cover themselves from each other and from Jehovah God.

RGW: They became “self-conscious.” That is the thing that distinguishes humanity from all other species, “self-consciousness.”

RF: Yes, this is an important element in the McKenna’s theory also. This is the evolutionary leap, part of the evolutionary leap. . . . You continue writing:

The story carries the mystical resonance of the early days, in Mesopotamia, where grew cedars and other conifers.

Some months ago I read the Garden of Eden tale once more, after not having thought of it since childhood. I read it as one who now knew the entheogens. Right away it came over me that the Tree of Knowledge was the tree that has been revered by many tribes of early man in Eurasia precisely because there grows under it the mushroom, splendid to look at, that supplies the entheogenic food to which early man attributed miraculous powers. He who composed the tale for us in Genesis was clearly steeped in the lore of this entheogen: he refrained from identifying the “fruit”: he was writing for the initiates who would recognize what he was speaking about. I was an initiate. Strangers and also the unworthy would remain in the dark. Adam and Eve had eaten the “fruit,” being led to do so by the serpent, the faithful attendant on the “fruit,” what the mycologists call Amanita muscaria, what the initiates call by a variety of euphemisms, which change from time to time, and we have seen to what strange lengths the uninitiated go when these euphemisms are detached from the “fruit” that they represent. The priestly redactor who set down the Genesis tale, an initiate and a believer, attributed to the “fruit” the gift of self-consciousness, a remarkable observation because self-consciousness is one of the major traits that distinguish humankind from all the other creatures. Is it not surprising that the composer of the story gave credit for this particular gift to our mushroom? It is unlikely that he was alone in doing so.

RF: Yes, very interesting, and it fits in with what the McKennas are saying. But it is not the A. muscaria, which impresses them so much; it is the Stropharia cubensis, as we have said. They, too, are putting forth the idea that these mushrooms may not only be responsible for the genesis of religion, as you have suggested before (Wasson 1957; Wasson et al. 1978), but also for the genesis of the consciousness that distinguishes us from the other primates, as you are saying now (McKenna 1991).

Some of the oldest cave art found, the Tassili frescoes, clearly depict shamanic use of mushrooms five to eight thousand years ago in Africa in a culture that is still a mystery to us (Lhote 1959). The McKennas are saying that perhaps the mushrooms stimulated this activity of the brain and gave us access to speech and accelerated our symbol-forming capacities. It is our consciousness that distinguishes us from other animals, and this is what is most radically affected by the entheogens.

Dennis McKenna suggested I ask you about the Paracus Tapestries from Peru. Do you know them?

RGW: Yes I do. The authorities on those tapestries do not believe it is a mushroom they are representing. Well, I believe they may be wrong. I am not versed well enough in the histories of those tapestries to say so. I do not wish to get out on the end of a limb. But they seem quite dogmatic. They think they know what those signs mean. I forget who my authority—a consultant at Harvard—was.

RF: Marlene Dobkin de Rios, in her recent book Hallucinogens: Cross Cultural Perspectives (1984), says it pictures a person with a hammer, though the shape of it does not quite look like a hammer. The color scheme is exactly that of the Amanita.

RGW: I have some beautiful photographs of those tapestries at my library at Harvard.13 It could well be a mushroom, but I forget what explanation they gave me. I did not care to rejoin them. I have always been afraid of being too inclusive in my statements—that I accept anything shaped as a mushroom as being a mushroom.

RF: You mentioned in The Road to Eleusis where an old friend congratulated you on your work in Mexico, but said, “May I offer you a word of warning? Stick to your Mexican mushroom cult and beware of seeing mushrooms everywhere” (Wasson et al. 1978).

RGW: Well, I have the backing of Carl Ruck, a professor of classics at Boston University.

RF: And also Robert Graves.

RGW: But Robert Graves still felt it was Amanita muscaria at Eleusis and there I disagree with him flatly! It was ergot—the parasite on the barley plant, on the wheat plant.14

RF: There is a great difference experientially between the Amanita muscaria and lysergic acid amide. . . .

RGW: Well, there are different chemicals appearing in the different mushrooms. The chemical in Amanita muscaria is utterly different from the chemicals appearing in Psilocybes and in ergot, which are related to each other. They are now in the process of discovering a plant in

Mexico. . . . I cannot remember the name. I am getting tired now. We’d better stop.

RF: Is there anything we did not ask that you would like to answer?

RGW: Your questions were very good, intelligent, both of you.

DH: Is there anything we have missed?

RGW: Oh my, let’s talk more later. Thank you both very much.

RF: Thank you very much.

Notes

1. Robert Graves, late poet and classicist, author of many books of poetry, mythology, and culture, had long been interested in mushrooms and religion. His view is most concisely expressed in his essay “Centaur’s Food,” appearing in his collection Food for Centaurs, cf. his introduction to The Sufis, by Idries Shah.

2. Peter Stafford (1992, 229) points out that religious intoxicants were in Wasson’s blood long before the mushroom quest: “R. Gordon Wasson is the American son of an Episcopal minister who had written Religion and Drink, a book that examined biblical references to the drinking of alcohol by religious figures. He took the tack of a fundamentalist, which he was not, and implied that it would be quite unchristian to be critical of alcohol. The royalties of this book enabled the younger Wasson to study in Spain.”

3. Daniel H. H. Ingalls, one of the world’s leading Sanskrit scholars and professor emeritus at Harvard University, later favorably reviewed Wasson’s soma hypothesis (Ingalls 1971a, 1971b).

4. “Not once does Maria Sabina reproach me for having made known to the world both the mushrooms and her gift as their ministrant. But not without anguish do I read her words:

Before Wasson I felt that the holy children elevated me. I don’t feel like that anymore. The force has diminished. If Cayetano hadn’t brought the foreigners . . . the holy children would not have lost their power. . . . From the moment the foreigners arrived the holy children lost their purity. They lost their force; the foreigners spoiled them. From now on they won’t be any good. There’s no remedy for it.

“These words make me wince: I, Gordon Wasson, am held responsible for the end of a religious practice in Mesoamerica that goes back far, for a millennium. I fear she spoke the truth, exemplifying her wisdom. A practice that had been carried on in secret for centuries has now been aerated and aeration spells the end” (Estrada 1981, 19–20).

5. Richard Evans Schultes retired in June 1985 from a distinguished career as professor in the natural sciences, director and curator of economic botany, Botanical Museum of Harvard University. He has authored numerous scientific articles on the botany and biochemistry of medicinal and psychoactive plants in addition to several books (see references). For many decades Dr. Schultes used the participant-observer method in his field research. Although he has consumed many of the substances of which he writes in the line of duty, he claims to never have had a “mystical experience” from any of them. One time he said he “felt like dancing” after such an experiment and a longtime student of his remarked, “For Dr. Schultes to feel like dancing means that was a mystical experience.”

6. Albert Hofmann is retired from his position as head of the Pharmaceutical-Chemical Research Laboratories, Division of Natural Products, Sandoz, Ltd., Basel, Switzerland. In addition to his well-known contributions to psychedelic knowledge, he has also discovered the important medicines hydergine, used to combat senility; methergine, for postpartum bleeding; and oxytocic ergonovine, for stimulating birth. For a full account of his illustrious career in chemistry, health, philosophy, and religion see Hofmann 1983, 1989.

7. John Marks (1980, 114–5) writes:

Joining Moore and Wasson on the 1956 trip were the world renowned French mycologist Roger Heim and a colleague from the Sorbonne. The party made the final leg of the trip, one at a time, in a tiny Cessna, but when it was Moore’s turn, the load proved too much for the plane. The pilot suddenly took a dramatic right angle turn through a narrow canyon and made an unscheduled stop on the side of a hill. . . . The pilot decided to lighten the load by leaving Moore among the local Indians who spoke neither English or Spanish. Later in the day the pilot returned and picked up the shaken Moore.

Finally in Huatla, sleeping on a dirt floor and eating local food, everyone reveled in the primitiveness of the adventure except Moore, who suffered. In addition to diarrhea, he recalls, “I had a terribly bad cold, we damn near starved to death, and I itched all over.” Beyond his physical woes, Moore became more and more alienated recalls Wasson. “He was like a landlubber at sea. He got sick to his stomach and hated it all.” Moore states, “Our relationship deteriorated during the course of the trip.”

Wasson returned to Maria Sabina who had led him to the high ground the year before. Again the ritual started well after dark and, for everyone but Moore, it was an enchanted evening. Sings Wasson: “I had the most superb feeling—a feeling of ecstasy. You’re raised to a height where you have not been in everyday life—not ever.” Moore, on the other hand, never left the lowlands. His description: “There was all this chanting in the dialect. Then they passed the mushrooms around, and we chewed them up. I did feel the hallucinogenic effect, although ‘disoriented’ would be a better word to describe my reaction.”

8. Since this conversation with Mr. Wasson, Forte met Clark Heinrich, an independent scholar and mycophile who was inspired by Mr. Wasson’s writings to embark upon a lengthy, courageous, experiment with the Amanita muscaria, culminating, after many attempts, in a profound religious rapture, much like descriptions in the Rig Veda. The experience awakened in Heinrich a sense of how A. muscaria may be disguised in other religious writings including the Old and New Testament and those associated with Gnosticism and alchemy. Heinrich has since composed his speculations into a book, Strange Fruit (1995).

9. Mircea Eliade, Sewell L. Avery Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus, University of Chicago, passed away in the spring of 1986. He was seventy-eight. Through his work he lives on as one of the foremost authorities of the history of religion, having written definitively on yoga, shamanism, mythology, and alchemy in over thirty scholarly books, and the history of religion generally in a monumental three-volume set, A History of Religious Ideas (1978, 1981, 1985). His earliest reporting on sacred plants is brief, somewhat naive, and distinctly negative. Wasson summarizes and critiques his position in Soma (1969, 326–34). In his later work Eliade (1978, 212) states the following:

We will not stop to consider the surrogates and substitutes for the original plant in the cult. It is the role that these somic experiences play in Indian thought that is important. Very probably such experiences were confined to priests and a certain number of sacrificers. But they had considerable repercussions by virtue of the hymns that praised them and especially by virtue of the interpretations the hymns called forth. The revelation of a full and beatific existence, in communion with the gods, continued to haunt Indian spirituality long after the disappearance of the original drink. Hence an attempt was made to attain such an existence by the help of other means: asceticism or orgiastic excesses, meditation, the techniques of Yoga, mystical devotion. . . . In addition, the quest for absolute freedom gave rise to a whole series of methods and philosophoumena that, in the last analysis, opened out into new perspectives and vistas, unsuspected in the Vedic period. In all these later developments, the god Soma played not a very prominent role; it is the cosmological and sacrificial principle that he signified which ended by preempting the attention of theologians and metaphysicians.

10. George Mylonas writes:

When Alkibiades, in a drunken state, dared to imitate acts of the celebration, he was condemned in absentia, his property was confiscated, all the priests and priestesses of the state were called upon to pronounce curses upon him. . . . It will perhaps be interesting to read again the accusation against as given by Plutarch: “Thessalos, son of Kimon, of the deme of Lakiadai, impeaches Alkibiades, son of Kleinas, of the deme of Skambonidai, for committing crime against the Goddess of Eleusis, Demeter, and Kore, by imitating the mysteries and showing them forth to his own companions in his own house, wearing a robe such as the Hierophant wears when he shows forth the sacred secrets to the initiates, and calling himself Hierophant and hailing the rest of his companions as Mystai and Epoptai, contrary to the laws and institutions of the Eumolpids, Kerykes, and priests of Eleusis” (Mylonas 1961, 224).

11. Though Athens brought forth numerous divine things, yet she never created anything nobler than those sublime Mysteries through which we became gentler and have advanced from a barbarous and rustic life to a more civilized one, so that we not only live more joyfully but also die with a better hope (Cicero De Legibus 1:14).

12. We have suggested that divine mushrooms played a vital part in shaking loose early man’s imagination, in arousing his capacity for self-perception, for awe, wonder, and reverence. They certainly made it easier for him to entertain the idea of God. . . .

Here is a sense in which the kingdom of God is within us; and the music of spheres turns out to be a physiological symphony. Let not this reflection disturb the believer in a Supreme Architect, for the ultimate enigma always remains close by, and man’s most searching inquiries are always confined within the dark bound of the flexible but impenetrable envelope of the unknown, of that dark, distensible womb that is our prison and our Eden (Wasson and Wasson 1957, 375–76).

13. Two years later I visited the Wasson Library at Harvard to view these photographs and discovered in one an ambiguous object in the hand of a creature who appears to be flying. It could be a mushroom or a hammer. At the same time I found that the Boston Museum of Fine Arts has stored in their basement several of the original tapestries. These tapestries were woven by the Nazca people of ancient Peru, the makers of the famous Nazca lines, around 700 B.C.E. The Nazca lines are elaborate and immense designs on the ground that are intelligible only from considerable heights, leading some to speculate that the Nazca people had some contact with folks in flying machines. The tapestries were burial mantles, used to wrap corpses for funerals. One of these wraps depicts a creature holding lightly in his/her fingers a delicate mushroom (certainly not a hammer), and his/her eyes are exactly cross-sections of a mushroom cap and stipe. Could it be that the Nazca people knew the mushroom to be an avenue to the world of the departed? Is it possible that they understood ecstatic travel? Could they fly out of their body while bemushroomed? Maybe they didn’t need flying machines at all to view their art. Recall that in the Yoga Sutras (4:1) Patanjali lists magic herbs as one of the possible means to develop siddhis (powers), among them, “flying.”

14. Robert Graves (1961, 281–82) writes:

To me it is reasonably clear—though I have not yet examined the bas-relief itself—that the sculptor was blabbing a secret: “Fly amanite is the source of prophetic inspiration at Eleusis.”

Gordon Wasson hopes that I may be right—for mycophobic Classical scholars seem to be in the habit of calling mushrooms “flowers”—but he, being more cautious than I, hesitates to commit himself to a point of such importance, until he has taken expert advise. He also tells me that Greek vase-experts usually describe Nessus’s mushrooms as “wading birds.” Yet no Greek wading bird has a silhouette like a panaelous mushroom and Greek vase-painters keep a proportion of the animals fairly exact. . . . I have now visited the Metropolitan Museum to check up, and if those are wading birds, then I am a Centaur; but the Museum authorities insist that they are. . . . Also that the mushroom in the Pharsalus Relief is a rose; or alternatively, the knucklebone of a sheep.

All right, all right! Disregard the flower (or knucklebone, big enough for an elephant’s) in the foreground! Observe the pretty wading birds! And whatever else you do, don’t introduce any sort of toadstool into our serene Classical atmosphere!

References

Allegro, J. 1956. People of the Dead Sea Scrolls. New York: Pelican Books.

Allegro, J. 1970. The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross. New York: Doubleday.

Brough, J. 1971. Soma and Amanita Muscaria. Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 34 (2).

Cicero De Legibus 1:14.

Dobkin de Rios, M. D. 1984. Hallucinogens: Cross Cultural Perspectives. Albuquerque, N.Mex.: University of New Mexico Press.

Eliade, M. 1964. Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy. Princeton, N.J.: Bollingen Series.

Eliade, M. 1970. Yoga: Immortality and Freedom. Princeton, N.J.: Bollingen Series.

Eliade, M. 1977. No Souvenirs. New York: Harper and Row.

Eliade, M. 1978, 1981, 1985. A History of Religious Ideas, vols. 1–3. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Estrada, A. 1981. Maria Sabina: Her Life and Chants. Santa Barbara, Calif.: Ross-Erikson.

Flattery, D., and M. Schwartz. 1988. Haoma and Harmaline. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Graves, R. 1961. Food for Centaurs. New York: Doubleday.

Heim, R., and R. Wasson. 1958. Les Champignons hallucinogenes du Mexico. Paris: Editions du Museum National d’Histoire Naturalle.

Heinrich, C. 1995. Strange Fruit. London: Bloomsbury.

Hofmann, A. 1983. LSD: My Problem Child. Los Angeles: J.P. Tarcher.

Hofmann, A. 1989. Insight Outlook. Atlanta, Ga.: Humanics New Age.

Ingalls, D. H. H. 1971a. Remarks on Mr. Wasson’s Soma. Journal of the American Oriental Society 91(2):188–91.

Ingalls, D. H. H. 1971b. Review of Soma, by R. G. Wasson. The New York Times Book Review, Sept. 5, 15.

Kuiper, F. 1970. Review of Wasson 1968. Indo-Iranian Journal 12(4):279–85.

Lhote, H. 1959. The Search for the Tassilli Frescoes. New York: Dutton.

Marks, J. 1980. The Search for “The Manchurian Candidate.” New York: McGraw-Hill.

McKenna, T. 1991. The Archaic Revival. San Francisco: HarperCollins.

McKenna, T. 1992. Food of the Gods. New York: Bantam.

McKenna, T. 1993. True Hallucinations. San Francisco: HarperCollins.

McKenna, D., and T. McKenna. 1994. The Invisible Landscape. San Francisco: HarperCollins.

Mylonas, G. 1961. Eleusis and the Eleusinian Mysteries. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.

Riedlinger, T. 1990. The Sacred Mushroom Seeker. Portland, Oreg.: Dioscorides Press.

Ruck, C. A. P. et al. 1979. Entheogens. Journal of Psychedelic Drugs 11(1–2):145–46.

Schultes, R. 1939. Plantae Mexicanae II: The Identification of Teonanacatl. Botanical Museum Leaflets 7. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University.

Schultes, R. 1940. Teonanacatl: The narcotic mushroom of the Aztecs. American Anthropologist 42:429–43.

Schultes, R. 1976. Hallucinogenic Plants. New York: Golden Books.

Schultes, R., and A. Hofmann. 1980. The Botany and Chemistry of Hallucinogens. Springfield, Ohio: Charles C. Thomas.

Schultes, R., and A. Hofmann. 1992. Plants of the Gods. Rochester, Vt.: Healing Arts Press.

Smith, H. 1972. Wasson’s soma: A review article. Journal of the American Academy of Religion 40.

Stafford, P. 1992. Psychedelics Encyclopedia. Berkeley, Calif.: Ronin Publishing.

Tedlock, D. 1985. Popul Vuh. New York: Simon and Schuster.

Wasson, R. 1957. Seeking the magic mushroom. Life, May 17, 100–20.

Wasson, R. 1969. Soma: The Divine Mushroom of Immortality. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

Wasson, R. 1971. Inquiry into the origin of the religious idea among primitive people. Botanical Museum Leaflets 19(7). Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University.

Wasson, R. 1980. The Wondrous Mushroom. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Wasson, R. 1982. The last meal of the Buddha. Journal of the American Oriental Society 102(4):591–603.

Wasson, R. 1987. Persephone’s Quest: Entheogens and the Origins of Religion. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press.

Wasson, R., G. Cowan, F. Cowan, and W. Rhodes. 1974. Maria Sabina and her Mazatec Mushroom Velada. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

Wasson, R., A. Hofmann, and C. Ruck. 1978. The Road to Eleusis. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

Wasson, R., and V. Wasson. 1957. Mushrooms, Russia and History. New York: Pantheon.

Williams, J. 1968. The World of Titian. New York: Time.

Robert Forte

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Ryan 3 years ago · 0 Likes

What a nice read. I would like to hear your updated perspectives on R.G.W. and his relationship with the CIA. What role he actually played and what he was aware of in potentially creating a narrative and the war on drugs.
Thanks for sharing.

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This morning, July 1, 2026 I watched the Congressional task force on MKULTRA question two star witnesses, Steven Kinzer, author of Poisoner In Chief, a book about Sidney Gottlieb, and Tom O’Neil, author of the slightly more recent Chaos, which explores whether Charlie Manson was a CIA creation. At first I was skeptical these hearings will amount to very much more than a limited hangout. As they progressed I found myself hopeful, excited by the sincerity of the several members of the task force and impressed by some of the subjects they have started to research. You can watch the hearings here:

https://oversight.house.gov/hearing/mind-control-and-accountability-uncovering-the-truth-of-the-cias-mkultra-project/

It is a funny feeling to find subjects that i have taken deep dives into 25 to 45 years ago, and been marginalized because of it, finally become topics on the mainstream news. As for MKULTRA, my research, and experience, informs me that it is far far greater than that CIA operation with that code name. To really understand it requires we look critically at the official, sanctioned knowledge of the post WWII period. A lot of people will have trouble with this. “Living is easy with eyes closed…”

How often do you hear that Timothy Leary was fired from Harvard because he gave out LSD recklessly to Harvard undergraduate—as this obituary for Roland Griffiths states?

Psychedelics had been the third rail of scientific inquiry ever since Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert were thrown out of Harvard for passing out LSD with messianic fervor in the early 1960s. (https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/17/obituaries/roland-griffiths-dead.html)

Like a lot of the New York Times reporting on the psychedelic renaissance, this is false. The truth is when Timothy Leary first took LSD at Harvard, he and his colleagues thought he had lost his mind, and warned people from taking it. (See Timothy Leary, High Priest, 1968)

However, LSD was given out recklessly at Harvard, not by Leary, but by the CIA, couple years before MKULTRA had formally begun, ten years before Leary arrived on campus. Recipients included anyone who answered an ad in the Boston papers, inviting them, to experience a “temporary psychosis.”

Philip Slater was a good friend of mine who was a graduate student assistant on that project.

This conversation between Philip Slater and I took place in Lulu Carpenter’s, a cafe in downtown Santa Cruz where we met regularly for more than twenty years. I read his sociological research and especially loved his 1970 critique of American culture, The Pursuit of Loneliness, when I was in college. I asked my professor where he was teaching, thinking I might want to study with him. “At the cafe downtown,” was the answer. He took his own advice and dropped out of an academic and social world he found false and oppressive, even though he held an esteemed position—Chairman of the Department of Sociology at Brandeis University— to write plays and novels and occasional non fiction, that barely—if ever—paid the rent. He took odd jobs like riding his bike around campus delivering cookies. Students had no idea he was a prominent sociologist and political philosopher of the last half of the twentieth century. I adopted him as a wise man. He invited me to a writing group and when I shared a few scenes from a screenplay about the the psychedelic movement he learned that he worked for the CIA when was a graduate student at Harvard in 1952. We all know about Timothy Leary. Not so well known is that the CIA paid for LSD to be given out at Harvard 10 years before. They handed it out like candy to anyone, including undergraduates, who signed up for the 20 dollar inducement to experience the new, untested drug. “The point was to make people crazy.”

You could see Phil riding his bicycle around Santa Cruz into his 90s, healthy and happy. When he finally left us, in 2013, Santa Cruz lost a treasure, and I, an old friend.

This interview is originally published in Timothy Leary, Outside Looking In, edited by Robert Forte.

RF: This conversation might be something of a prologue to our book on Leary. Although you never knew him, there are some interesting parallels between your life and his. First of all, you worked on an LSD research project at Harvard seven years before Tim arrived there. Then, after you attained some prominence in the academic world, you dropped out of an academic career at a prestigious university. You’ve written about contemporary culture in a book that helped to define the humanistic movement of the sixties and seventies and that became a bestseller. The Pursuit of Loneliness. You’ve also written The Wayward Gate, which discusses humans’ failure to perceive what does not fall within their worldview. You’ve written about Wealth Addiction; and you’ve written about the state of American democracy in A Dream Deferred. You are a living example of the best that the social movement of the sixties offered. First let’s talk about your early work at Harvard with LSD that was sponsored by the CIA.

PS: OK. I had done a little research at the hospital, which is now called Mass Mental Health Center. It was then the Boston Psychopathic Hospital. I heard that they were getting funds from a foundation to study a drug that nobody had heard of at that time. The drug was something that would make you psychotic for a brief period of a day; you would learn what kind of psychotic you would be if you became psychotic. This wasn’t necessarily the official view of the drug, but it was what everybody talked about—everybody who was involved in the project and who later took the drug.

There was a group that met every day up in the occupational therapy department which consisted of the OT director, the recreational director, a nurse, a psychiatrist, an x-ray technician, a social worker, and various other people from time to time. We hung out together and occasionally went out for drinks and so forth. So a lot of those people were interested, as well as a couple of Harvard graduate student researchers like myself. When I heard about this drug it sounded fascinating so I wanted to be on the project.

Those who were on the project were going to be the first subjects so we would know what the hell we were dealing with. I was number four in the series. It was a very clinical orientation: two people following you around with clipboards taking down everything you said, making observations about you. We started at eight o’clock in the morning. At eleven you had an intake interview with the admitting psychiatrist of the hospital, who then wrote a diagnosis; later on you had a therapeutic interview. We did various studies as time went on. I did a study, for example, on the differences between people who took it alone and people who took it in groups of three or four, and found, as you might expect, that the people who took it in groups had a lot better time. They were diagnosed either manic or schizoaffective, whereas people who took it alone tended to be diagnosed as depressive or schizoid or something else.

How did you recruit your subjects?

They volunteered. They were all volunteers.

Were they told that they were going to be given something that would induce a temporary psychosis?

Well, my memory is a little bit hazy on that. But they knew it was going to affect them mentally in some way.

One of the popular misconceptions is that Leary was fired from Harvard for giving LSD to undergraduate students and of course that’s not true. Not only did he never do LSD research at Harvard—he worked with psilocybin—but he never involved undergraduates in the study. However, undergraduates were involved in your studies.

Out of 150 subjects that we had, I would say 90 of them were undergraduates. I did a study of people in groups of four as part of my ongoing quantitative research at that time, and I think there were six or eight groups. I’m sure there were at least 32, probably 40. They were all undergraduates.

Did this research instigate any kind of community from having shared this extraordinary experience together?

It varied with everybody. A lot of these people we never saw again. They came, they got their twenty-five bucks or whatever, and went home. I think the people in the hospital who were closer to the project developed a little psychedelic group as it were. And then there were individual people who were very taken with it. One of our subjects was Ralph Blum. I don’t know if you know of him.

Ralph Blum who wrote The Book of Runes?

The Book of Runes, yeah, that’s Ralph. He was one of our more verbal subjects. And I know there was another one who became a psychiatrist later on, but I don’t think he had a good experience. I’m sure there were other people who became interested and were affected by the experience; certainly we were. We did things like take it out on our own, sneak little bits out.

This was before Huxley wrote The Doors of Perception, before Wasson had discovered the sacred mushroom in Mexico.

You know, it’s interesting, because The Doors of Perception was published in ’54 but people knew about it then. Hyde knew about it, because I know he quoted it. Robert Hyde was the head of the project. Hyde, as you know, was the first person to take LSD in the United States, and he was my teacher. I initially became involved through taking a graduate course at the hospital with him. It was a fascinating course in psychopathology. He was a great teacher and had a brilliant, really free-ranging mind that could go all over from psychology to cultural-historical things. I learned more from him than from anybody else at Harvard. He just could make connections.

Is he still alive?

I would be very surprised if he was still alive. He was probably in his fifties then, forty years ago. So he’d be very, very old. He’s been retired for—the last time I asked anybody about him, he’d been retired already for five or ten years, so he may even be older than I remember. But he liked to try different things. I remember one time we were celebrating something or other. We had a little party up at this bar around the corner, and we spiked the punch with LSD and people realized afterward that they had had enormous quantities of LSD and an enormous quantity of alcohol. We realized then that there was kind of a negative relationship between the two, that they tended to cancel each other out.

It is remarkable that there you were in the early 1950s giving LSD to Harvard undergraduates and nothing resulted from that in terms of social movement, controversy, or visionary breakthroughs. Tim Leary comes along a few years later and there’s an uproar and a movement beginning to take form. You were still there at Harvard. Was there a difference in Harvard between 1952 and 1958 or ’59?

I think he created the culture. Not single-handedly, but he was caught up in it in a different way. Our little group went way beyond the psychotomimetic definition of the drug, and we had a lot of different experiences with it, and were bonded by it very much. People who had it felt closer to each other because of it. But I don’t think we gave it any real spiritual significance.

Was “spiritual significance” even remotely in the vocabulary in the early 1950s in Cambridge?

No, not really. Because everything was taking place in this completely clinical setting. I spent a couple of hours of my first trip on the disturbed ward, which sounds weird and it was, but I hung out there all the time anyway. I was doing research there and so on. I felt very comfortable, and I knew all the patients and everything.

But that’s the kind of environment we were in. It was very clinical.

What about sexuality? Did that change in your subjects?

I don’t think so. There was always sexual content in people’s verbalizations, but. ..

I’m surprised news of this “study” didn’t spread throughout the campus.

This one course was the only real connection to Harvard, other than the med school and so forth. There wasn’t that big a connection between Harvard and the hospital at that time. So it wasn’t that surprising. In Leary’s department, a few years later, it was different, he was in a completely different part of the university. But you know how colleges and universities are. People can be working three doors down from each other on the same problem and not know it, because everybody is on their own little ego trip. It’s just the nature of the beast.

You were allowed to take the LSD out of the clinic?

Well, we managed—it was a little bit loose. The stuff was locked in a safe. I don’t remember how or under what circumstances I got hold of what I did get hold of. I know we did a tolerance test once, so I was taking a little bit every day and then a little bit more and a little bit more and then stopping and then taking a full hit and then waiting and taking another hit to see if you’d develop a tolerance to it. So I had access to some. I don’t know whether I got extra or what I did. I think that was the only time that I actually had some to carry around, but I know Hyde did. He was suspected of tripping more than once, but then he was a pretty out-there guy anyway.

Did you know at the time that this work was funded by the CIA?

We didn’t know. We did two studies. The first one was sponsored by the Geschickter Foundation—that should have been a tip-off—and the second was funded by the Society for the Study of Human Ecology. I never met any of the Geschickter Foundation people, but I remember meeting some of the Human Ecology people. They were a very strange group.

Was Herbert Kelman involved with you guys?

No, not at that time I don’t think. He was around, but I don’t think he was involved in LSD at all. Why?

Because he reportedly had something to do with Leary’s firing and he was involved with the Human Ecology Fund.

Really. Could be. Huh, that’s interesting. That was probably later. You know, I got my Ph.D. in ’55, so I wasn’t involved in any of that then. I was involved in another project in another hospital.

Did your LSD experiences in any sense affect the perspective you then developed in your career as writer and teacher?

It’s hard to say, because there was a lot going on in my life, and that was a fairly circumscribed event. I was married and had three kids, and then shortly thereafter I was divorced and paying alimony and I was working three jobs. I was too busy surviving to have time to really process my life or think about anything. It was really a very hard period for me, for six years after I got my degree. And of course I also was writing my dissertation during part of that too. The LSD experiences were all pushed aside. I think the impact it had was latent. I mean there were always certain kinds of music that evoked the experience, and especially Debussy and Ravel, which I’m still very attached to. And I remember one time there was a group of us, all of whom had had LSD at one time or another, and we were sitting around my living room listening to Ravel’s Daphnis and Chloe suite, and we all started having recollections and visions or memories of visions. But I think what happened was that after my life calmed down a little bit in the early sixties, I began to get interested again, and also I think personally, psychologically, I began to explore more.

Using psychedelics?

No, not at that time. It meant going to groups, encounter groups and things like that; exploring inner space a lot more. Then in the later sixties I got into doing a lot of pot and so forth, and became interested in the whole thing again. So it definitely had an influence, but a delayed reaction.

Did you ever interact with Tim at Harvard?

I was aware of him. The irony is that there were several of us who were very interested in his earlier quantitative research on interpersonal dynamics, which of course he was totally uninterested in after psychedelics. But we were doing a lot of quantitative stuff with computers, all this factor analysis and everything. We were very interested and very excited that he was coming. Then of course he came and immediately got into the psychedelic stuff, and no longer cared about it. I knew Dick Alpert better. Our fathers were both involved with the New Haven Railroad. His father was president and my father was chairman of the board. With Leary and I there was a definite wave pattern that wherever one was, the other wasn’t. We were completely out of phase. When I was interested he wasn’t and when he was interested I wasn’t, and when I was interested again he wasn’t again.

What was your reaction when you saw this psychedelic movement start to congeal out of Harvard in the early sixties?

Well, I could understand it. It made sense to me. I could see it happening. I also knew that he was headed for trouble. That was clear. Rumors flying around.

What do you mean “trouble”? There’s so many ways to look at the trouble Tim got in. Trouble with the administration because he was challenging authoritarian systems? Trouble with some of his colleagues who felt he was profaning a sacred substance? What trouble do you mean?

I meant it in the more mundane sense of trouble with the administration and even more with fellow faculty I think.

There was a lot of jealousy because he was such a popular professor and had this really exciting line of research going and all the graduate students were flocking toward him....

I went through that at Brandeis toward the end. When I was department chair at Brandeis in the Sociology Department, I was always having to protect somebody for doing something like that. Whether they were teaching a course in yoga or Zen or they were doing a course in gender, they were doing things that were radical and were breaking academic traditions in one way or another. It was always clear to me what upset academics the most. One was popularity—being popular. They always said to us either we were seducing the students—not literally but emotionally—or being seduced by them. If we’re popular we must be lowering academic standards, because learning isn’t supposed to be fun. The other thing is, anything emotional or anything below the brain, anything that might involve touching, anything that involved feeling, anything that involved spiritual things, was very, very frightening to academics. Of course Leary was doing all of it. And that was the fifties. We were doing it in the late sixties and people were still getting all in a tizzy over it. So it wasn’t hard to imagine, looking back, how intense the reaction was to Leary in the very early sixties.

Do you think he was careless or irresponsible in the way he conducted himself? Or do you think that was an important and courageous, daring move on his part, the way he pushed the limits?

It’s hard to say, because I wasn’t intimately involved in it, but at the time I thought, he’s not protecting himself at all. I could see he was going to get clobbered. You can get away with rubbing academics’ noses in emotion and spirituality and your popularity and everything else, but you don’t want to give them an opening. You can get away with it if you can play by their rules at least on the surface and he didn’t appear to do that. Fm not saying that that necessarily was a bad thing for him. I’m just saying that I could see that event coming.

So now we have this drug war and other evidences of twenty, thirty years of extreme reactionary repression to what was ignited there. Do you think if Tim were more circumspect, more careful, that we could have avoided this?

I don’t think so. Yes, he did bring a lot of that about but I think if he hadn’t done it somebody else would have. The fifties were so repressive in every way, and it was such an awful, stupid, dishonest period in history, where everyone was pretending a kind of normality which didn’t exist, and there was just a lid on everything, and a tremendous lid on sexuality particularly, and really on any kind of experience that was other than to make money and support your family; and for women, to be domestic and support your husband. And to suddenly open all that up and show we’ve got a new world opening up here—I don’t think there’s anything Leary could have done differently that would have made a difference. There was just too much pressure behind the opening.

That pressure wasn’t built up enough when you were doing your early experiments?

Well it had, but Leary provided meaning. We were still operating in a kind of academic, scientific, psychological framework. It was a private thing and we didn’t translate it into anything else. Of course the sixties came along and there was a general shift in attitude, which was huge. A lot of other things opened up as well. I think, when you consider all the other things that were going on then, you certainly can’t either blame or credit Leary for all of the sixties. I just feel a kind of inevitability about what happened, that all of that had to happen. He was the guy that comes along with a pretty big ego, puts himself at the center of it, and noises it about. There’s always somebody like that, and if it hadn’t been Tim it would have been somebody else.

When I was in fifth grade, in ’67, my teacher told me that LSD stood for Let’s Save Democracy. Of course that went right over my eleven-year-old head, but in the last few years I finally got it. If we look at the political spectrum from authoritarianism to democracy, authoritarianism preys on an unaware populous and democracy requires a self-aware, self-determined populous. Here’s LSD, which can activate the awareness of the divinity within— anathema to authoritarianism. Tim realized this and hit the streets with his findings.

Yeah, I think that’s right, and I would add that to what I said, that it was facilitating the democratic process for him to do that, even though it cost him dearly and generated a lot of reaction and backlash. But it always does. You would expect it, no matter who did it or how they did it or what happened. And you can say, “Oh well, he made it worse than it would have been.” I don’t know. I’ve always said that authoritarianism works within the personality too, and when the ego is authoritarian, it prevents a lot of stuff from getting to the brain. It’s like the ego is a repressive dictator often, and acts just like a despot. First of all there’s no distinction between the despot and the nation, there’s no distinction between the ego and the personality. What’s good for me is good for the country. What’s good for the ego is good for the organism. Of course it isn’t true, and messages coming from the periphery are ignored, the messenger is shot. All these things are very much equivalent. So LSD was a very strong force in the democratization of the organism, let’s say, and that reflects itself outside as well, because you can’t really separate them. You’ve got one, you’ve got the other.

Do you think the authorities were aware of that, and that was the reason that they immediately repressed it? I’ve had a hunch, I don’t know if it’s true or this is my own paranoid conspiracy theory, that the government, through the CIA’s research of LSD, became aware of its effects on personality very early on, and maybe I’m attributing too much intelligence to the powers that be—

I think so.

But they could have become aware that a high dose of LSD in the right circumstance brings you into contact not only with your deep self but with other dimensions of reality that are beyond the scope of the ruling paradigm—extraterrestrial intelligences, a collective mind, intelligent unity of life, living God, things like that they don’t understand and can’t control and don’t want free and available. Attempted repression backfired. While Harvard thought they were getting rid of Leary, they actually gave his career the best boost it could have gotten.

Yeah, well that’s usually the case. But I don’t think they thought that deeply about it. I think they thought only that this is interfering with the channeling of youth into the proper tracks, and they’re all going out and doing something different from what they’re supposed to be doing. That fear doesn’t need an intellectual content. It’s the same with academics when somebody’s really popular. You know, there’s something going on here that’s threatening. I don’t like it. And I can think up twenty different reasons why it’s bad, because I’m an academic and that’s what I do is think up reasons. And I think with the government it was the same kind of thing. It was just a fear. It’s drugs and it’s bad and it’s corrupting youth. And I don’t think they thought beyond that into anything as sophisticated as what you’re saying.

Do you think that the sixties worked? I mean there was a movement, a humanitarian and environmental movement away from consumerism, away from militarism, a reawakening of cosmic and ecological concerns that are necessary for our survival. Do you think it worked to help humanity evolve?

Oh, absolutely. There are tremendous changes that took place in the sixties. In the first place, the sexual revolution; that was a tremendous change. In the fifties, if you weren’t in New York City or some equivalent environment, you couldn’t even rent an apartment and live with somebody unless you faked it in some way, really, until the sixties. And now the percentage of people living together, I think it’s higher than the percentage of people who are married up to a certain age, or in a certain age group. And of course what could be shown in the movies or on TV and what can be said, even in the newspapers. The general idea was communicated in the fifties that women weren’t interested in sex, and that’s of course the old authoritarian tradition, the repression of female sexuality, because nobody ever represses male sexuality very much. That’s pretty much over.

So that is, I think, one of the most important changes that happened in the last several thousand years. And along with it go a lot of other things. The attitude toward war changed completely. There’s a totally different attitude toward war now. People used to think of war as like a tornado, like an act of God almost, and now people think it shouldn’t happen. If somebody’s fighting somewhere, we should do something to stop it. That’s a totally new idea. It didn’t exist before.

At the same time we have bigger defense budgets than ever before.

Yeah, sure, but there’s always a huge lag in these things.

Materialism?

It’s the sort of thing that I’m writing about in this book. There’s really two things happening at once. The old systems, when they decay, become more extreme, always. They become exaggerated. They become more monolithic. And that undoes them eventually, because it’s like fascism was the purist form of authoritarianism. The dictator has no obligation to anybody, that is, obligation that everybody understands. It’s not like the king who has certain obligations to nobles, certain obligations to the populace, and is bound around with traditions of various kinds. A dictator has none of that. It’s pure authoritarianism. And it’s the beginning of the end. It’s like they’re falling like flies, because the only places that they can exist are really backward places. Internationalism has grown enormously. I think it’s very hard, if you weren’t there, to recall how unbelievably naive, insular, conventional, and accepting of authority the fifties were. If the government said it, it had to be true. Nobody thinks that now.

Even television: if you watch what everybody watches, you’ll see a tremendous change. Compare Seinfeld with Father Knows Best, for example. That’s like night and day, what’s dealt with, what’s talked about, what’s understood. It’s understood that Elaine wants to get laid, and it’s understood that people fart and masturbate, and all this stuff is talked about openly. That’s a tremendous change.

At the same time we’ve seen growth of the one world, new world order, throughout the world, even well into China. We’ve lost ground since the sixties in the environmental movement.

No, no, no. We have not lost ground. I mean you have to distinguish in all these things—it’s like people who think crime has gotten worse or there’s more child molesting than there used to be. You have to distinguish between what’s happening and what’s being made known. People are incredibly environmentally aware now, and they’re aware of what’s happening. Corporations are not getting away with nearly what they used to get away with. Of course there are more ways of polluting everything and so on than there used to be, but there’s more battles over it. Even with all the control of the media that corporations have, they can’t ignore that issue, because they know that a huge majority of the population is environmentally concerned, ecologically concerned, and that’s a huge change.

The sixties was like a handful of people making a row. But there’s another 90 percent of the population that doesn’t buy it. I was in Paris in 1968 during the riots, and I remember I had this feeling that everybody’s out there in the streets, that it was just this tremendous movement. Then, one Sunday, there was a march by the right and what an eye-opener all of a sudden. There were five times as many people in the streets, all dressed in suits and stuff. It made me realize that the left was not the majority. The sixties was really, if you looked at polls and things like that, a very small number of people.

Nixon’s silent majority.

Well, it existed then. Today it’s different. It’s quite different. I mean there’s many, many more people, there’s a hundred times as many people who are antiwar, who are ecologically concerned, who are into spiritual pursuits, who are antimaterial. But it’s not news anymore. Another major change is organic food. Can you imagine, in the sixties, if they’d made that attempt to redefine the meaning of organic? Nobody would have opposed that. They wouldn’t have gotten a flutter. Ten people would have complained and they would have ignored it. And alternative medicine; it’s huge now. It’s a huge thing. All these things come out of the sixties, and they’re permanent.

Nobody’s going back. But I will predict that magazines and TV will come out within the next two years with something saying the move is back to traditional medicine. I mean they just do that regularly. It’s back to the tradition. Because the media themselves are very conservative, and also, they want this kind of novelty pendulum thing going all the time. So they have to go back and forth, they have to have movement without threat is what the media—that’s what advertisers want: movement without threat. Novelty without change. Every two years feminism is dead. Every two years. Its as regular as clockwork Because they’re thinking of feminism as bra burning or some other litde superficial thing that symbolized it for them, whereas with the real issues, like battered women’s shelters and day-care centers, there are huge gains over ten, twenty years ago. So that’s the way things tend to get defined. And the media also is into cynicism, because it makes them look intelligent.

There’s an interesting book by a guy named Alfie Kohn called The Brighter Side of Human Nature, where he talks about this: about the confusion of cynicism with intelligence and how that works. For example, the idea that psychological differences between men and women are biological, and/or that men are inherently biologically aggressive and violent and so on, all this stuff. There are studies and magazine articles about stuff like this all the time, and scientists are in total disagreement. The only stuff that ever gets in the magazines, as Kohn points out, is the dark stuff, the negative stuff, the “it’s all biological, there’s nothing you can do about it, it’s just a given.” You know, “men are natural-born killers,” and blah, blah, blah. So it’s not optimism. It’s just looking at the real data as opposed to the media data, which is so skewed.

I agree the media distracts people from deeper issues; for example today attention is on Monica Lewinsky’s dress instead of on the U.S. reaction to international pressure on them to lower fossil fuel consumption.

Yeah. Or the U.S. opposition to the World Court. I love that one. It’s so funny. They were the ones that pushed for it in the first place and then all of a sudden they’re like, “God, they might use it on us!”

I don’t mean to harp on what might seem to be a cynical attitude compared to yours, but we just lived through the decade of the 1980s, twelve years of Reagan and Bush in one of the most corrupt decades of American history. I haven’t read Kohn yet but I see that Americans are unwilling or unable to see just how corrupt and dark the American political scene is. I, for one, believe the findings that the military-industrial complex has been involved in the narcotics trade since early in the Vietnam War, as reported by Alfred McCoy in his Yale dissertation that became The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia. It’s been reported in many other places too. I’m convinced that military intelligence was involved in the assassinations of the Kennedy brothers, Martin Luther King, and Malcolm X.

Most people suspect a conspiracy in these murders. The CIAs beginning is clearly traced to Nazi intelligence joining with the U.S. military just after World War II, as Martin Lee describes in his fine expose, The Beast Reawakens. The Iran Contra hearings of the 1980s did little to motivate the American people to clean up the obvious and profound corruption of the democratic process. The United States has been in wars in Nicaragua, El Salvador, Iraq, Iran, Panama, and other places. There is some public outcry, but these senseless wars continue. Saddam Hussein was put in power by the United States military; so was Noriega. And the most recent “monster,” Bin Laden, was a U.S. hero when Russia invaded Afghanistan. You told me the United States built those terrorist camps that it just bombed.

People are aware of all this stuff but it goes on. Global warming is something everyone is concerned with, but doing anything about it lags far behind the GNP in importance. The drug war rages—half a million people in jail just for pot. It is utterly futile, gives jobs mainly to dope dealers, the police force, and the prison industry, while doing nothing to reduce drug abuse, which is a relatively minor health problem—unless you include alcohol and cigarettes, which are foisted upon the American people in slick ad campaigns—but your career in national politics is over if you challenge the sense of the drug war and appear “soft on drugs.” There are so many absurdities in firm place in American politics it’s hard to see any progress at all.

I think what you are reacting to is the fact that the world is in a major cultural transition—the kind of paradigm shift that takes place over decades, even centuries. And at those times things seem to be moving in opposite directions at the same time, and at accelerating speed. (I’m working on a book now that deals with this.) So, those who cling to the status quo feel the world is going to hell, and those who want fundamental change also feel the world is going to hell (i.e., backwards). It’s chaotic, but chaos is necessary for creation.

Yes, and this brings us back to Tim, who titled his last book Chaos and Cyberculture. In it he explains that his efforts in the sixties were to induce chaos in an excessively ordered culture. Here again is a fundamental difference between an authoritarian culture (or personality) and a democratic one. The democratic society tolerates some apparent chaos in the world, having trust in a natural order, while the authoritarian seeks control.

(Ram Dass, Timothy Leary, Ralph Metzner, March 17, 1995; photo by Robert Forte)

Ram Dass is the author of The Psychedelic Experience (with Timothy Leary and Ralph Metzner), Be Here Now, The Only Dance There Is, Grist for the Mill, and many other books. A well known as a teacher of contemporary spirituality. He was an associate professor in the school of education at Harvard University from 1960 to 1963, where he was a founding member of the International Federation for Internal Freedom (IFIF) and the League of Spiritual Discovery (LSD). Though commonly believed to be a co founder of the Harvard Psilocybin Project and partner, with Tim, he was really a student, a neophyte, who came after the project was underway for a year. Though his name is often associated with Leary, in fact they were colleagues and friends only for a short while until they went their own very different ways. They would reunite later in life to make the film Dying to Know, produced and directed by Gay Dillingham. Having known the two of them for many years, the differences between them interest me the most, and what this teaches us about the divergent uses and effects of psychedelics. I especially enjoyed Ram Dass for his honesty and humor. Nina Graboi, a close friend of both Tim and Richard since the Millbrook days, and I drove to San Anselmo, California for this conversation, months before Ram Dass had his stroke…

His stroke changed the way he spoke, from the fluent language captured in this interview, to shorter sentences, and more poetic way of speaking between pauses when he searched for the proper word. He would come to Santa Cruz often where he had many friends, where he was a member of WAMM, The Wo-man’s Alliance for Medical Marijuana. I’m sharing this story because it makes me laugh and portrays Ram Dass as I came to know and love him.

Ram Dass gave a talk to the members of WAMM, many of them with life threatening, or terminal illnesses, about life after death. After the talk he received questions from the audience. David Jay Brown, a popular writer on psychedelics raised his hand. “Ram Dass, how do you speak with such certainty about life after death?” Ram Dass, who had had his stroke, thought for a moment and said, “First… it was the mushrooms.” Pauses. “Then…reading the works of spiritual masters.” Pauses again. “Then it was…my guru—” David interrupts him and says: “—But Ram Dass, I’ve had mushrooms, read the great books, and had spiritual teachers, and I can’t—” Ram Dass cuts him off: “—And chutzpah.” The place erupted in laughter. As Timothy Leary used to say, “If it’s not funny, it’s not true.”

RF: When we approached you about contributing to Timothy’s memorial volume you said, “That will be hard.” Why so hard?

RD: Because Tim is one of the more complex human beings that I have met in this lifetime, and my reactions to him are very complex. So to articulate it in a coherent and integrated fashion isn’t easy. That’s really what I meant; that sometimes relationships are so subtle and nonconceptual, and that’s what the relationship between me and Tim is like. It’s not easy to articulate because there’s love and there’s respect and there’s judgment and there’s frustration and there’s disappointment and there’s, you know, great appreciation, and all kinds of qualities.

RF: Timothy has affected millions of people in a profound way, but probably no one was as close to him during those years at Harvard as you were. I wonder if your relationship typified the massive changes that would follow

RD: I doubt it. His and my interaction was a product of our collective neuroses. Mine are pretty pronounced and they certainly were in those days.

I’m hardly Johnny Q. Citizen in the sense of representing a reaction that would be common to other people. We were locked in some incredibly intense psychodynamics of really archetypal and mythic proportions. And I don’t know that I was the “closest.” We sure spent a lot of time together, and we were very close, but Tim is in a way equally close to everybody. Tim may spend more time with a person, but I think people who are close to him feel that he’s not that close, or he’s not close in that way I think we expect people to be close psychodynamically, and he’s not really interested in that plane of consciousness.

RF: What plane of consciousness is he interested in?

RD: Timothy is somebody who really honors the Truth, the essence—I mean metaphysical truth, as well as psychological and social truth—and who is a scientist in the deep sense of being a scientist. He is interested in understanding the universe in some kind of systematic way. He’s quite a scholar. He reads a lot, but then it all gets filtered through this kind of charming stuff, this play of mind that seems to take away from the depth, the power of his mind, the power that I knew when I was with him.

NG: Was the role of spiritual revolutionary authentic, or did his ego play a part?

RD: Well, it is hard to think of it as his ego. I’d say he’s more sociocentered than ego-centered. He’s a social role-player. I’m not sure that he has an ego in the sense of a thickly-centered self-concept. He just fulfills roles in a charming fashion.

NG: Why did he so deliberately provoke the establishment?

RD: Well, that’s another part of him. Timothy was the Irish fighting the British. He was the underdog fighting the establishment. That’s one of the major myths of Timothy’s life. There was no way to get along with the establishment with Timothy. Sooner or later he had to undercut whatever dynamic there was. I was always busy healing the rifts and keeping up in the establishment as much as I could. I couldn’t always do it but I would try; and Timothy was constantly undercutting that.

RF: One time I asked you about him and you said, “Timothy is a great man, but he has a problem with authority.” And I thought this is exactly why he was a great man, because authoritarianism is a very great problem.

RD: I don’t question that the mosaic of his personality contributed deeply to the role he plays in society. It was all necessary. So the antiauthority part of his mind would question what the psychiatrists said about LSD, while I—coming from a nice Jewish middle class conforming family—thought if the psychiatrist said it, it must be so. Timothy opened my eyes to questioning those kinds of authorities. I had been trained never to question them.

RF: This is again one of his mythic roles.

RD: It’s a role, you know, but look at what power he had. He was the only one on the scene that I saw who acted that way. Frank Barron also had the experience, but he wasn’t ready to blow the whistle on society. Timothy wanted freedom of consciousness, and that’s basically a social, political position.

RF: Freedom of consciousness? How do you mean that?

RD: Freedom from being controlled by others, by a social system. In other words, we have a right to the freedom of how we use our own consciousness. And he felt that was one of the freedoms.

RF: You mean that not just in terms of drug laws. There’s an unconscious manipulation of our minds by the establishment, and we have a right to be free from that.

RD: Exactly. It’s not necessarily conscious on the part of the establishment. The establishment is conned by it also. There’s a conspiracy to define reality conceptually a certain way, and freedom is to get free of that, and that’s what Buddhism is about, getting free of those conceptual traps of mind. So we were talking about something very deep, which is the freedom of human consciousness. Tim was seeing the relation between that spiritual or altered state of consciousness and the sociopolitical situation. He wanted freedom for the method of getting high, not just freedom for the state of consciousness. And that gets into the question of who controls the method.

RP: And this is a conversation that you have pretty much stayed out of. You didn’t want to discuss the political questions.

RD: Well, first of all, in those days, Timothy was politically more sophisticated than I, much, much more. I was psychodynamic, so when I had the psilocybin experience I started to work with it from two levels: one, the opening to the mystical end of it, and two, the redefinition of the meaning of psychodynamics, of personality. That fascinated me and seemed like the place to go. I wasn’t avoiding it. I remember I was in India and I got all these clippings from Allen Ginsberg who was at the Democratic convention, being hit over the head and all of that. It was ’67.1 sat there in the temple thinking, “He’s on the front line. He’s saying ‘this is what I believe’ and he’s confronting it. And look at me, I’m copping out. I’m hiding back in here in the temple.” Then I thought, “But what am I doing in this temple? I’m spending fifteen hours a day examining my own mind. Isn’t that a leading edge too?”

RF: Do you think Timothy’s identifying the drugs withing the counterculture made the mystical pursuits, more difficult? Professional psychedelic researchers today regard his behavior as a problem because he antagonized everyone, polarized society, and the drugs are now forbidden.

RD: Well, there was no way that wasn’t going to happen. Almost at the same time we were getting outrageous, Ken Kesey was having the acid tests in San Jose, L.A., and places like that. The San Jose News ran headlines this big, “Drug Orgy in San Jose.” There was no way this wasn’t going to become a very hot political issue very quickly. We might have had another six months or a year of grace to get a little more established. We could have done it more politically and coolly, no doubt. Aldous was down on Tim for that, and a lot of other people were too. But my sense is that Tim was so far out of the experimental models that were accessible; he was more into the collection of data from musicians, artists, writers, using it as a natural medium, you know, all that stuff. It was not easy to do naturalistic research in a behaviorist society. I thought we could have played with the university and gone on and on, because there was a tremendous amount of desire on the part of the university to give their academes liberal academic freedom, as long as it didn’t scare the university.

RF: I envisioned this book to be kind of a response to a book that came out recently in England, the proceedings of a symposium held in honor of LSD’s fiftieth birthday by Sandoz and the Swiss Academy of Medicine. The president of the Swiss Academy began the conference by praising the scientific possibilities of LSD, and then he said, “But unfortunately LSD did not remain in the scientific scene. It fell into the hands of esoterics and hippies and was used in an uncontrolled way.” It can be argued that the esoterics and hippies made the most of the stuff, more than the scientific methods of that time were going to. Still “science” fumbles around for a way to understand these drugs. Tim thought early on that the drugs needed to be freed from the laboratory if they were going to do any good. He answered the important questions, demonstrated “set and setting,” and shared his results—in an exuberant way, to be sure, but it may have been irresponsible not to.

RD: I think what happened with psychedelics in the early ’60s so profoundly altered this society that it is still just beginning to grow into what’s happened to it. It was a mushroom and it did explode, and it was carried through the hippies, through the minstrels, through the rock and roll movement; it was carried into the collective consciousness and it has mainstreamed in collective consciousness, and it has to do with the relative nature of reality. And that’s a big, deep thing and it happened to this society.

RF: It’s amazing it still hasn’t dawned on society what these drugs really are.

RD: No, it hasn’t. And that’s kind of fascinating and kind of beautiful. Because it’s very scary to people who have a vested interest in a reality being absolute.

RF: How do you feel about getting tossed out of Harvard?

RD: I look at being thrown out of Harvard as an incredible gift. The basic thing that happened to me at that moment with the mushrooms was for the first time probably since I was two years old that I listened to myself from inside; I used my inner criteria to validate my existence rather than external criteria. That was a major shift.

RF: This was a renaissance for a lot of people.

RD: I have a feeling it was. . . . Once I get over the fear of the outcome I can really look at things as they are and delight in the edge of chaos quality that’s happening when a transformative process is going on in a society. It’s really scary because it undercuts control of the situation.

RF: Fear of the outcome?

RD: The fear of whether society blows itself up. The big fear is that the psychedelic revolution or evolution gets crushed back into stupidity and ignorance.

RF: The Hindu cosmology looks at the world in terms of these grand cycles and it’s almost a cliche that we’re in the dark period of a Kali yuga. Do you have a sense of that?

RD: I don’t live consciously in these mythic structures. I mean I can create an Armageddon one, an Aquarian Age one, a Kali yuga one that goes into either the Sat yuga or into the Pralaya, when everything dissolves back into nothing. They all seem perfectly reasonable to me. And I don’t really care, because it doesn’t make any difference to what I do . . . whatever scenario, I just have to quiet my mind, open my heart, and relieve suffering in the world around me. This is it. And I’ve come to kind of delight in this. The minute you say, “What does it mean?” you’re asking for a conceptual structure, a prison enclosing what can’t be imprisoned. So I don’t live in how it all comes out.

RF: Getting back to Timothy, he has shifted metaphors so many times in his career. You’ve probably heard him say that a third of what he said is bullshit, a third dead wrong, and a third home runs. That gives him a .333 batting average, good enough for the Hall of Fame. What’s the bullshit and what’s a home run?

RD: Well, it’s really hard to assess. Is his fight with the establishment, with authority, “bullshit,” or is it part of the process? I don’t look at it in terms of baseball, just in terms of process. Timothy uses metaphors; he’s not attached to metaphors, he moves in and out of them like snails inhabit shells; you know, you outgrow them and you just drop them. The metaphor served its purpose to take a quick fix on that which is not a concept. So I don’t know that I would think of them as his “bullshit.” I think of them as short-term; at that moment they serve some purpose and then you go on, and then you begin to see that it’s really the sum total, the gestalt, rather than any one of them.

RF: In Chaos and Cyberculture he says the main point was to induce chaos. It was all for pranks.

RD: Yeah, Timothy was a rascal. I was a rascal in training. I was too middle class to be a good rascal. Timothy was a rascal. And he did delight in chaos. But there were a couple of forces in Timothy. He kept incredible records. He kept file cabinets full of records. That isn’t chaos, that’s another quality in him that collected stuff and thought about it and structured it and so on. At the same time, he was socially always playing with the edge and then pushing the edge and pushing the edge and pushing the edge.

RF: It is usually a troubled relationship between mysticism and politics, between those trying to free themselves from the images others use to bind them.

RD: Timothy always said you’ll find the mystic and the visionary much closer to the prison cell and the priest class will be running things. He has a sense of history, a sense that though he might be seen as irrelevant now, two hundred years from now he will be seen as something else. The idea of “you leave no footprints” is a little too Zen for Timothy, I think. He has a sense of generations at a time.

NG: In recent years, perhaps since his imprisonment, his emphasis has been on the physical rather than the spiritual dimension. It almost looks as if he’s not spiritual any longer. What do you think?

RD: Well that isn’t true. He’s spiritual, but he’s not interested in these other planes of consciousness. I mean he’s interested in the use of the mind, of the intellect and its capacity and how far out you can push it. He loves conceptual play, and the question is, is he doing it from a nonconceptual space, which is purely spirit? He might be spiritually way beyond, in the sense of nonattachment to any myth or model of himself or anything else. The question is, where is Tim standing? Is there any place you can catch him? I feel a certain somebody in there that I don’t find with my guru, for example, and that somebody is where you’re standing. I know I’m standing somewhere, and I’m not sure I’d see him if he wasn’t standing anywhere, you know? So now I work in Tibetan Dzogchen, in realms of pure awareness that have no astral content at all, no dualism, no gods and goddesses, embracing the form into the formless constantly, enjoying the play of phenomena. That is a lot of what Timothy is. I never think of him as a Dzogchen master, but there is a way in which he does that. He does it without full compassion, perhaps, and that means he’s not fully empty. But he has a quality that is very spiritual.

RF: He is very present with you; he always seems to be paying close attention. Was he like that when you met him?

RD: I think Tim’s always had those qualities.

RF: He is very childlike. He doesn’t dwell in the past or the future, he seems totally immersed in the present moment.

RD: And this is what infuriates people who want continuity. Ghandi said, “My commitment must be to truth and not to consistency.”

NG: Timothy is so far ahead. He’s like a man from the future; his mind outraces everyone.

RD: Well, it’s a funny thing about the mind. There is a way in which the mind, no matter how hard it works, never gets there. The minute you realize that and surrender into being rather than knowing, you’ve just moved to the next level. Being far ahead is like a cul-de-sac in a certain way.

RF: It’s not just his mind. I’ve seen this quality of childlikeness, this enlightened quality in him, playing croquet in his yard as well as talking about metaphysical or scientific notions.

RD: We’ve had great, great fun together. Great fun. Like playing in the cosmos, like walking with giant steps and dancing huge dances. It was a play of just this vastness. Timothy invited me into those realms and I was thoroughly delighted. A lot of our acid trips together, a lot of our life together, was like that, Mexico and Millbrook and IFIF. It was just pouring out. I remember those Saturday nights by the fire in Millbrook with the family, with Maynard and Flo Ferguson and whoever else was around and Tim and me and Ralph and Susan and all of us in the dark with the fire flame lighting us and us just playing in the cosmos, just one mind and all these voices coming together. These were some of our finest moments. Then 1 went to India and was just absorbing as fast as I could. Then I had that gnostic intermediary role of bringing the Eastern metaphysics back and integrating it with Western psychology. I was wide open and I don’t think that’s ever stopped.

RF: Did Tim influence you going to the East?

RD: Well, Allen Ginsberg had gone, and Tim went and Ralph went, and so it was clear that that was the way to go because the manuals for understanding what the hell we were doing were coming from the East. Timothy played a role in the sense that he foreshadowed. What is quite extraordinary is that on Tim’s way back from Almora to Delhi the bus stopped at Nainital, which is my home temple base— a little tiny temple on a very small road. A man, who later was my yoga teacher, got on the bus and sat next to Timothy. Timothy was very impressed with this guy, and when they got to Nainital, the guy got off the bus and started to walk away quickly. Timothy went to follow him. He was halfway across the square when the bus driver blew the horn. The bus was going on to Delhi, and Timothy turned and got back on the bus. If Timothy had followed him he would have met my guru, whom I met two years later by an entirely different route. Now if you can’t feel that there’s some fascinating game within that. . .

RF: Tim has said one of the things he’s sorry about is clearing the way for the gurus to come from the East.

RD: I think it should play out its story. I think that the Easterners weren’t prepared for the kind of seductiveness that they would meet in the West. A lot of them thought they were freer than they turned out to be. I mean that’s some of what Tim’s talking about. They brought a very deep wisdom, but they weren’t necessarily the representatives of those wisdoms, and the problem is that that makes the teaching not quite work. In other words, it’s not a clear transmission. They were able to pass on the information, but not make the full transmission. But there have been some remarkable people in the West. I mean Trungpa Rinpoche was no slouch and Kalu Rinpoche was no slouch. There have been a lot of people that were interesting but flawed in some way; that’s a maturing process for people. Allen Ginsberg brought over Bhaktivedanta, a Hindu. He did that before Tim even was into India.

I tasted of something that I have transmitted as faithfully as I could to millions of people who in turn have tasted something, and whatever that thing is, I feel that it is fine. It is a sense, a faith in the possibility of the liberation of the human being. And that’s very deep in me. It went from the mushrooms, through the grace of Timothy, to Neem Karoli Baba. Those two events define two stages of the journey. One, I realized I wasn’t who I thought I was, and I understood relativity, and when I met Maharaji, I met all the forms and nothing. I kept feeling there was nothing there and yet everything.

RF: That’s quite a statement, implying that we’re not free. This is the renaissance of spirituality. A recognition of our imprisonment?

RD: That’s pretty good. That’s Gurdjieff’s line, “The first thing: if you are ever to escape from prison, you must realize that you are in prison. If you think you’re free, no escape is possible.”

RF: Did you consider Tim to be a guru?

RD: Well, in India they make a distinction between Upagurus and Satgurus, and Upagurus are gurus along the way who open doors for you, but they may not be gurus in the sense of free beings. The difference between Timothy and Neem Karoli Baba was that Neem Karoli Baba, no matter how hard I tried I couldn’t find him. There wasn’t anywhere he was standing and there wasn’t anywhere he wasn’t. I had to deal with that reality with Neem Karoli Baba, and I didn’t have to deal with it with Timothy, so that’s the difference. But Timothy freed me from many planes that I was trapped in. He did a tremendous amount for me. He was very patient because I was extremely trapped in certain ways. He was certainly playing on a lot more planes than I was. But he was still somebody playing somewhere.

RF: You said when you first met him he was the most creative person you ever met. Did you mean creative as a scientific thinker, as a strategist, or as a researcher?

RD: Yes, as someone who can break set. That’s how I would define creativity.

RF: What about the numinous quality?

RD: Well, Timothy is charismatic, but charismatic isn’t numinous. I would say he’s charismatic, not numinous. His mind is extraordinary. He opened doors to other planes. I mean, all I had to do was get into relative reality. That’s what he did. He took me into a relative realty. And that was a major game, so he was a major teacher for me.

RF: Lets look at “charisma.” Does it imply something negative?

RD: Well I don’t think that it should. It’s incredible, it’s like astral power. That’s what I think it is, you know. It really is a light, but it’s a kind of astral light. It’s not a spiritually free light; it’s intense, you know, brilliant people you call them, and you’re kind of awed by their brilliance. But it’s different than spiritual illumination. It’s like stars rather than the sun. Tim is like a comet that shoots across the sky . A lot of us are very beholden to him. I bet more people than is known are beholden to him.

RF: Still, there’s an element of trickery in Timothy’s play ...

RD: There are many rascals in the spiritual traditions, many rascals who use tricks to liberate people.

NG: I think there is much more to him than charisma. In the ’60s, the kids used to say they can feel his aura miles away. I remember a photo of him w ith a flower behind his ear.

RD: We’ve both got the same photograph in mind, at one of the Be-ins, I think. Well, he had the aura of youth, he w as a stereotype of light and energy, and he had the aura of sexiness, and the aura of playing at the top of his game. Those are all the parts of what gave life to Timothy.

The question is, does the man make the moment, or does the moment make the man? Timothy wasn’t playing in a vacuum. He was playing with Alan Watts, Aldous Huxley, and Frank Barron and all of these really extraordinary people. Huston Smith, Walter Clark. It was a great scene; it was a web that was supporting a process going on.I look at the cultural affluence, the information age, the social mobility, and psychedelics, and the awakening of ethnic consciousness and political consciousness. There was a moment when a lot of stuff was happening. And for anybody to try to grab it and say it was all due to psychedelics, or to affluence, the information age, or to the postindustrial mind or whatever, is too simplistic. I just see it as incredibly richly determined when a moment is profound enough to really shift a scene. The ’60s scared the hell out of the culture because they showed another potential exists for people. It provoked the reaction of the pendulum swing of twenty years of republicanism. That’s all part of these huge pendulum swings. Tim was on one end and Nancy Reagan was on the other.

RF: And now they are practically neighbors. Is there something imminent about to unfold comparable to LSD? Something that will stimulate us again, or more, or bring the earlier stimulation to fruition?

RD: I don’t know. Fusion would do it. We might just be creating the future with fusion instead of fission. Fusion would change the economy of the world. It would provide limitless energy, it would change everything.

RF: Possibilities like this have become conversations for millions of people because of Timothy and you.

RD: When you say “Timothy and you,” or something like that, you have to make a clear distinction. Timothy was a much more central player at that time. I was a neophyte, I was a student. We’d have parties in Los Angeles and I’d be sitting at the feet of Aldous Huxley and Gerald Heard as they dialogued about the enneagrams and the labyrinths in churches in Spain. I’d just sit there with these giant minds, and Timothy floated in and out of all this very comfortably and brought me into it. It was like riding a wave. It’s interesting about the waves. I realize that the excitement is in being in the little wave in front of the big wave. And that’s where Timothy and I were then, at that moment. That was exciting. It’s a place where society is basically putting you down or ignores you because you’re not even relevant. Then we got to the point where we were a threat. And then I got socialized. I’m almost a good guy again in the society.

RF: I’d like to read this book in a hundred years, or be in a room where Timothy was being remembered. Will the establishment succeed in trivializing his efforts?

RD: Well, I’m not terribly interested in historical remembrances. I think we played a part and that part transforms something and that transformation leads to the next transformation. It is just a tiny blip on the screen full of blips.

RF: Little blip, big awakening. These drugs have been hidden from the people for thousands of years. We don’t know how their re- emergence will turn out, but this was one of the great moments in history.

RD: I think the seed is still in fruition. It is a much less homogeneous society, it is a more chaotic society, it is a more fertile condition for growth and change. It’s all doing fine.

I’ll be speaking from my home on the coast of Attica, in Greece, not so far from the escalating insanity brought on by what seems clearly to me to be a sinister cult leading our governments, manipulating our minds. All my life humans world wide have lived with the threat of nuclear war, but in spite of the vast majority of us opposed to this horror, we have done nothing to avert it. Why not? Please join us tomorrow to shed some light on this. Here’s the link:

https://www.facebook.com/events/1438607294615621?acontext=%7B%22event_action_history%22%3A[%7B%22mechanism%22%3A%22attachment%22%2C%22surface%22%3A%22newsfeed%22%7D]%2C%22ref_notif_type%22%3Anull%7D

The day of this interview was the day Huston received a letter from the Council on Spiritual Practices which offered to compile all his writings on psychedelics into a single book. He told me he would decline. He didn’t want to be known as an advocate. His feelings about the subject were nuanced and his writings spoke for themselves, scattered about though they were, in various journals and books. I told him his reputation was beyond reproach and his acknowledgement of the religious significance of entheogens could be a important book to move the subject into a field where it belonged. That book eventually was published as Cleansing the Doors of Perception.

It has been many years since I read this interview. I’m posting this from my home in Greece, having fled the United States into the arms of my very own Goddess. Now that I have re-read it, I still like it, though I have learned, and unlearned, a great deal more about psychedelics, history, and religion. What would I give to sit down with my friend and discuss these changes? A lot, but that will have to wait. Until then, I will welcome any and all comments. Let us be our own gurus now.

TIMOTHY LEARY AND THE PSYCHEDELIC MOVEMENT

Huston Smith left this earthly plane on December 30, 2016. His obituary was published in the New York Times.

RF: Huston, it’s a pleasure to be in your beautiful home overlook-mg San Francisco Bay and hear your reminiscences about Tim. I’m hoping you’ll also speak more generally about the advent of psychedelics in modem life. Perhaps you can compare the styles of Aldous Huxley and Timothy Leary. You worked closely with each of them.

HS: That’s true. I will do my best to speak to your questions.

RF: It may be a surprise to some readers that you have been intimately involved with this subject—psychedelics and religion—for over thirty-five years since your first experience in 1961. You’ve written over a dozen scholarly articles on the religious importance of psychedelic drugs, and devoted an appendix to the subject in your book Forgotten Truth. These writings are being compiled into a book by the Council on Spiritual Practices. Your most recent book, One Nation Under God, is about the victory for religious freedom won by the Native American Church. You are widely known as one of the most authoritative and eloquent voices on the religions of the world. You’ve worked for over thirty years to express the common vision of the world’s religions to revive a sense of the sacred in modern life. Yet in spite of your deserved stature you are still somewhat reticent to discuss this subject. Why is that?

HS: Because the psychedelics are so ambiguous. They are like a two-edged sword. They can cut through samsara to get to nirvana— which is to say, cut through the daze and doze of mindless existence and wake us up—while at the other extreme they can behead us. Just this week, in reading Peter Coyote’s first person account of the psychedelic sixties, Sleeping Where I Fall, I came upon his mention of one of the Haight-Ashbury’s Diggers who took acid on a bad day and became the three hundredth person to jump off the Golden Gate Bridge. The potential of these substances for both good and ill is so great that it is irresponsible to be glib about them. One should know one’s audience before one speaks.

RF: This is a subject that has been trampled in the war on drugs. Official sentiment against psychedelics was largely motivated by the ebullient antiauthoritarian spirit of the sixties and Timothy’s zeal certainly catalyzed that; or, perhaps the resistance had already been in place for centuries, and Leary’s efforts vaulted over that resistance to spread the word—like the I Ching says: when the wild geese find food, they call their friends. So what I’m hoping we can do today is talk about Timothy and what went on during that period, but also discuss the larger subject, the problems and prospects of integrating psychedelics or entheogens into modem society.

HS: You want me to plunge into that?

RF: I brought some documents with me that I found in the Leary archives to put you in the mood of those days, to help you remember the optimism, the intellectual and spiritual enthusiasm around those early openings of consciousness. Wonderful, passionate, excitement and interest from universities throughout the world, and from governments too. Here are just some of the letters from medical schools, divinity schools, prison wardens, the Parapsychology Laboratory at Duke, the National Institute of Health. Here’s a letter from William Wilson, the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, written to Tim in 1961 praising LSD. Another from the distinguished psychiatrist Abram Hoffer in the Department of Public Health in Saskatchewan where they used LSD to treat patients citing “cures in alcoholics and addicts that are practically miraculous.”

HS: This is going to be an interesting book for me to read.

RF: Brilliant minds, some of the world’s leading scientists and artists, engaged in discovering these drugs and applying them to a whole range of things. Then the whole movement turned into chaos. Harvard and Sandoz chastise Leary and Alpert for being out of line, for seeking publicity more than science, then they’re fired. In just a few years Tim is sentenced to twenty to thirty years in prison, ostensibly for marijuana offenses. He’s denounced by Nixon as “the most dangerous man in the world.” Considering the source, that may be a compliment. Here’s a letter from a federal judge in Texas who sentenced Leary to twenty years saying he’d do it again and that he is unwilling to reduce the sentence, in spite of Leary’s having cooperated with authorities. Did you have any idea of what was to come when you first became acquainted with the subject of sacred drugs?

HS: Before answering your question I want to take exception to your calling them “sacred drugs.” They have sacred possibilities, I’m not going to back down on that. But Aldous Huxley was wise in calling them “heaven and hell drugs,” and hell connotes what is demonic rather than sacred. We’re back with my point about their ambiguous character.

Now to your question: did I have any idea as to what was in store? Not at the start. As you noted, during the first year or two the mood was wildy optimistic, for all signals seemed to read green. You have touched on the important ones. Psychologically, the psychedelics promised easier access to repressed unconscious materials, shortcutting the years and prohibitive expense of psychoanalysis. In behavior change, they held the promise of reducing the recidivism of paroled prisoners. And in the area of my prime interest, they seemed to hold the promise of rolling back the materialistic worldview that imprisons us by showing people—causing them to see directly— that Nietzsche was wrong in announcing that God is dead.

RF: Was it apparent right from the start that these were religious sacraments when they arrived at Harvard in 1960?

HS: To me it was, though set and setting quickly entered the picture—“set” denoting the subject’s psychological makeup, and “setting” the circumstances in which the chemicals are ingested. This again makes me restive when you refer to them categorically as “religious sacraments,” for that seems to position them in a linear, one-to-one relationship with religion.

Others picked up on the resources of the drugs. Leary’s appointment was in the Center for Personality Research, and his chief interest was in the psychedelics’ potentials for behavior change, specifically changing asocial habits. One of the first experiments he designed involved his taking psilocybin with prisoners at the maximum security penitentiary in Concord and following up to see if it reduced their recidivism rate when they were paroled, which it seemed to do dramatically. (I have since learned that he may have fudged the data to make this point.) But for me, at the time, the important thing was the altered view of reality—what (in the tide of one of his books) Carlos Castenanda called “A Separate Reality”—that the psychedelics repeatedly (though not invariably) brought to view. This was Aldous Huxley’s chief interest too. He arrived at M.I.T. for a semester as Distinguished Visiting Professor of Humanities in the same week that Tim took up his tenure at Harvard, and, having written The Doors of Perception, he was an important presence at the start of the Harvard experiment.

RF: Do you continue to feel that psychedelics are a way to see into a spiritual plane of reality?

HS: I do.

RF: Would perceiving that plane have social or political consequences?

HS: This a far-reaching and important question. It relates to the whole issue of whether metaphysical and religious outlooks— worldviews—affect history and shape it, or are simply head-trips that “bake no bread,” as the saying goes. Needless to say, I wouldn’t have gone into philosophy if I held the latter view. I’m with William James, who said that if a landlady were interviewing a prospective roomer she would do better to inquire into his philosophy than to ask about his bank account. Arnold Toynbee raised the stakes on James by asking who in the past have contributed the most to the present generation. His answer was Confucius and Lao-Tzu, the Buddha, the prophets of Israel and Judah, Jesus, Muhammad, and Socrates.

RF: Were you responsible for bringing Aldous Huxley to Cambridge that fall?

HS: Minimally. The Humanities Department at M.I.T. had a line item in its budget to bring a distinguished humanist to its campus each fall, and its chairman asked me what I thought of inviting Huxley. Needless to say, I was enthusiastic. When he accepted, I immediately volunteered to be his social secretary, managing his schedule, shepherding him to his appointments, and generally spending as much time with him as I could.

RF: Was your enthusiasm for Huxley related to his book, The Doors of Perception, that he published in 1953? Were you already curious about sacred drugs?

HS: Far more than curious; I found his book riveting. This needs a bit of explaining.

As you know but your readers may not, I was born of missionary parents in China and lived there until I came to the States for college. China was like the boondocks then, and I spent my college and graduate school years scrambling to catch up with the West and trying to become a full-blooded American. It seemed obvious that science and technology were what made the West dynamic and traditional societies stagnant, so I was an easy convert to the scientific worldview which I now see as scientistic rather than I scientific.

RF: Some readers may not be clear as to the difference between science and scientism.

HS: Science consists of the actual discoveries of science and the I method—the scientific method—which produces those discoveries. Scientism adds to those, first, the belief that the scientific method is, if not the only reliable way of getting at truth, then at least the most reliable method; and second, the belief that the things that I science can get its hands on—physical, material, measurable things— are the most important things, the foundational, generating things from which all else derives. Nothing that science has discovered supports, much less proves, that those tacked-on points are true. They are no more than opinions, which my teachers led me to assume are true—there is truth in A. K. Coomaraswamy’s quip that it takes four years to get a college education and forty to get over it. I’m fortunate that it didn’t take me that long.

RF: What did the trick? What enabled you to see through scientism?

HS: That brings me back to Aldous Huxley. He had a sidekick, another Englishman named Gerald Heard. His name hasn’t lasted, but he was brilliant—H. G. Wells said that he was the only radio commentator (his beat was science) that he ever bothered to listen to. Heard is credited with having moved Huxley from his early Brave New World cynicism to the mysticism of The Perennial Philosophy. Have you heard of him?

RF: Sure. I have some letters here from Gerald Heard to Tim.

HS: Well I hadn’t, but I chanced—chance? Is there such a thing?— upon one of his books, Pain, Sex, and Time, and it proved to be the most important reading experience of my fife. Let me warn those who might take that as a come-on for the book that it is unlikely that it would have the same impact on them. A book’s impact depends almost entirely on who the reader is and where he is on his life’s journey. I have never gone back to that book because I know I would find it disappointing now, for I am in a different place, but it spoke powerful to where I was then for being the first mystical book—book written from the mystic’s perspective—that I had ever read. It is the only time in my life that I read all night, and when dawn was breaking and I closed the book I closed out my naturalistic philosophy with it. The mystics’ worldview struck me as the truer of the two and I have never changed my opinion about that.

After that first book I went on to the others that Heard had written, and when I had read them all—quite a few—I decided that I wanted to meet the man, so I wrote him in care of his publisher. He replied, saying that he would be glad to see me but that it might be tricky to get to him, for he was in retreat, meditating as it turned out, in Trabucco Canyon about thirty-five miles from Los Angeles.

I was about to move from the University of Denver to Washington University, and as St. Louis is farther from Los Angeles than Denver is, I hitchhiked from Denver to Trabucco Canyon. I had no car and was in debt from graduate school; it was easier to hitchhike then than it is now. As I was saying good-bye to Heard he asked if I would like to meet Aldous Huxley. “He’s interested in our kinds of things,” he said, and he gave me Huxley’s address in L.A Huxley and his first wife Maria were at their cabin hideaway in the Mojave desert but their maid put me on the phone to them and they told me how to find their place by bus for what turned out to be a glorious afternoon. For the next fifteen years those two men were virtually my gurus, and Huxley’s anthology of mystical texts, The Perennial Philosophy, virtually my bible. I brought Huxley to lecture at Washington University and Heard to teach for a semester there.

That in itself was enough to excite me when The Doors of Perception appeared, but there was more. Mystical texts had convinced me that there is a separate reality but I wanted to experience it so I became a serious meditator in the hope of doing so. Unfortunately I turned out not to be good at that art—in Indian parlance, I’m a jnana rather than a raja yogi. I don’t regret the twelve or so years during which meditation was my spiritual path, and I have not given up meditating some each day. I find it useful for the focus it gives my life and for the way it helps me direct my attention, but I can’t alter the focal length of my consciousness by meditating. Even in the instance when I came closest to that goal, during my koan training in Japan, what happened was a radical reshuffling of components of I this-worldly experience, not a visionary experience. I needed help to experience what the mystics experience, and Huxley’s mescalin I held the possibility of providing it. So when he came to M.I.T. in 1960 I naturally raised the issue and he referred me to Leary who I had enlisted him as a consultant for his project.

That’s a long answer to what sprung me from my naturalistic worldview.

RF: And it leads you to Tim. Do you recall your first meeting him?

HS: It was a luncheon date at the Harvard faculty club and I found I him charismatic. His reputation for being brilliant had landed him a dream contract—full-time research on anything relating to personality theory he wanted to investigate. He was urbane, witty, and a great raconteur. On top of which he had style. The tailor in I Harvard Square who specialized in outfitting Harvard professors I had replaced his California casual wardrobe with natty, expensive English tweeds, replete with stylish leather elbow patches, but it was typical of Tim that he added a distinctive touch to his designer academic fashion by rounding it off with spanking white sneakers that gleaned as if they had been bought that morning. He was a marvelous performer and (I was to learn later) could read Finnegan’s Wake with such a flawless Irish brogue that he could have gone on stage.

The point of our meeting was to sign me up as a subject in his psychedelic project, which at that exploratory stage involved collecting firsthand reports of what subjects experienced when they took mescalin, or psilocybin, so as our lunch drew to its close, we pulled out our academic datebooks to schedule my first ingestion. The first several dates we tried wouldn’t work for one or the other of us, and finally Tim flipped past Christmas, eyed me with a mischievous grin, and said, “What about New Year’s Day?” I accepted and it turned out to be a prophetic way to enter the sixties.

RF: Did Tim come across as a spiritual person, or a brilliant intellectual—not that they are necessarily in conflict.

HS: Add his charm and I would say the latter. Also he had enormous self-confidence, which made him his own man. When he considered something to be important he went after it, regardless of what others thought. But I don’t recall ever having looked to him as a spiritual model, and I don’t think he saw himself in that role.

What I can say is that for the first three years of the Harvard project, my involvement in it was the most exciting thing in my life. Tim may have had other satellites in his orbit—he probably did, for his energy and exuberance were uncontainable—but the twenty or so people I was involved with constituted for those years my most important community. The important kind of experience that we shared, and others were ignorant of, bonded us far more solidly than I was bonded to my academic colleagues or members of my church.

Some of the names of those in my group are still remembered in psychedelic circles: Dick Alpert who became Ram Dass; Walter Pahnke, an M.D. who mounted the Good Friday Experiment to earn a second doctorate in the psychology of religion; Walter Houston Clark, Professor of Psychology of Religion at Andover-Newton Theological Seminary; Ralph Metzner, who was to become Dean of the California Institute of Integral Studies; Paul Tillich’s teaching assistant Paul Lee, who I hired to teach at MIT, and who went on to teach at the University of California, Santa Cruz; Rolf von Eckartsberg, who became Professor of Psychology at Duquesne University; and Lisa Bieberman, who managed a journal that sprang up, The Psychedelic Review.

Those are the ones I remember best. We would meet about every other week, sometimes for an all-night session with one of the substances, sometimes simply to discuss the religious implications of the psychedelics. During one of the all-night vigils a burning candle overturned and set fire to a lace window curtain. Soon thereafter (it was around 2:00 a,m.) Eleanor, my wife [she later answered to the name Kendra], who was not with us that evening, phoned to ask if everything was all right. She had been awakened by a vivid dream that Tim’s house (where we were meeting) was on fire.

There was glamour in the mix, too. Tim’s project had become news, and it attracted the rich and the famous along with other curiosity seekers and would-be guinea pigs. More weekends than not Tim would spend in New York and return with gripping accounts of sessions with people we knew only by name. One that comes to mind is Jack Kerouac. He was known for picking fights when he was drunk, but he was mellow under LSD. Tim’s parting words to him were, “We had a good time and you didn’t throw a bean ball the entire weekend.”

There was a lot of humor in the picture. Michael Hollingshead arrived from England via John Beresford’s LSD project in New York City with a whole mayonnaise jar, large size, filled with LSD—as you know, I’m talking about a substance so potent that simply licking a postage stamp with a speck of LSD on it will put you into orbit. Basically he was a con man, but he had great plans to strike it rich in America by selling Hollywood this idea he had for a movie. The story line was about a man who wanted to seduce a young woman who had no use for him. He was determined, though, and resourceful, so he figured that if he could learn to levitate, that would get her i attention.

Transcendental Meditation claimed that it could cultivate that talent, so he signs on with them and practices diligently. Sure enough, there comes an evening when he realizes that his body is beginning to feel strangely light, and half an hour later it begins rising from his meditation pad. Excited, he phones his would-be lover and heads for her apartment. It isn’t easy going for his feet have difficulty maintaining traction with the sidewalk, but he gets there and she is indeed impressed—to the point that she agrees to return to his room with him. Taking her arm to keep himself grounded, they make it and by this time she is impressed enough to agree to acquiesce to his overtures. She goes into the bathroom to prepare herself, but when she emerges his levitating prowess has peaked and she finds him plastered to the ceiling, powerless to disengage himself. The closing scene of the movie was to have her stretched languidly on the bed beneath him, saying sweetly, “Anytime you’re ready baby, anytime you’re ready.” The movie never materialized.

The humor carried right through to the end of Tim and Dick Alpert’s Harvard odyssey. On the twentieth anniversary of their firings Tim and Ram Dass continued their flamboyant style by appearing at Harvard University to celebrate the occasion. The hall was jammed, and of course jazzed—and the ambiance resembled nothing so much as a concert by the Grateful Dead. The two principles were introduced by David McClelland, Chairman of the Department of Social Relations, who had fired them twenty years before. Wreathed in smiles, he was overflowing1 with warmth and goodwill, which made the contrast between the occasions captivating. But the contrast between firings and celebration was no greater than the contrast between the routes Tim and Ram Dass had traveled in the two decades. Ram Dass had found his guru in India while Tim had moved into high tech cyberspace. The finalist films for the Academy Awards that year were E. T. and Gandhi, and Tim, with his characteristic wit, pointed out that the contest was being enacted before the audience’s very eyes. He, into cyberspace, was obviously a stand-in for E.T., “while in that corner” he said, gesturing to Ram Dass, with his bald head, mustache, legs folded beneath him, and his eyes closed in meditation, “we have Gandhi.”

Underlying all these highjinks, what held us together was our feeling that we were on the cutting edge of knowledge. We were spearheading the acquisition of new and important truths and their potentials. We likened ourselves to explorers in Africa when that continent was still unknown to the Europeans. But given my temperament and my interests, it was always the spiritual value of the psychedelics that were the most important. They didn’t change my worldview, which had already become that of the mystics. What they did was enable me to experience their world—experience it as more solid and real than our everyday world, which it demoted to the shadows on Plato’s cave. And they taught me, again experien-tially, what awe is. For more than a decade I had been teaching my students that awe is the distinctive religious emotion combining two emotions, fear and fascination, which (apart from their religious joining) are in tension with each other. Fascination draws us toward the object in question while fear holds us back.

RF: In Flashbacks, Tim tells of a meeting with Lama Govinda, die great Buddhist sage and scholar, who reportedly said to Tim, “You are the predictable result of a strategy that has been unfolding for over fifty years. You have done exactly what the philosophers have wanted done. You were prepared discreetly by several Englishmen who were themselves agents of this process. You have been an unwitting tool of the great transformation of our age.” Thirty-five years after Lama Govinda reportedly made that statement, how does it sound to you, Huston?

HS: Lama Govinda’s Foundations of Tibetan Mysticism was I so foundational in my understanding of that tradition that it took me to Almora, India in the early 1960s for two weeks of unforgettable tutorials with him that lasted in the glorious setting of his hermitage until the sun set behind the Himalayas. But when I try to understand what he was getting at in that statement, I find myself unsure. What strategy was he thinking of, and what was it that he thought the philosophers wanted done? More than half my career has been in philosophy departments, and I haven’t noticed my colleagues being at all keen about what Tim was up to. Most important, what great transformation of our age was he thinking of? My guess is he was thinking of exceptional states of mind, and regions of reality that psychedelics can now make available to the public—people who can’t devote their lives (as Govinda did) to accessing them through meditation. I can see that as a great incursion in modernity, but has it transformed history? That’s difficult to answer.

RF: There came a time when you parted from Tim and Alpert. Was it an amicable parting?

HS: Very, as their parting with McClelland, their department chairman, had been. The organization that emerged from Tim’s experimental program called itself the International Federation for Internal Freedom—its abbreviation was poetic, for, freighted with ambiguities from the start, IFIF was the iffiest organization Cambridge had ever seen—and I was a founding member of it. But as the three years unfolded, differences began to appear with Tim and Dick on one side and Walter Houston Clark and I on the other. They were anti-establishment rebels, whereas Walter and I thought of ourselves as reformers. They were giving up on the university, where we were sticking with it. And—perhaps most importantly, for their was a lot of sex on their side—they were bachelors and we were married. So one night a formal parting of the ways took place. It occurred during a Thanksgiving overnight gathering of the clan at Millbrook, Peggy Hitchcock’s estate. Dinner was preceded by the traditional Thanksgiving touch football game, which Kendra remembers with delight because she was regularly assigned to block opponents and (as she put it) getting in people’s way was something she was good at. Her moment of glory was when she was assigned to block Maynard Ferguson.

Not surprisingly, the brownies were spiked with grass; but the pertinent part of my report came around midnight when Tim, Dick, Walter Clark, and I decided, with our friendship at frill tilt, to face up to our differences, and Walter and I officially withdrew from IFIF and the direction it was headed. As we were the “squares” in the organization, I suggested that we might organize ourselves into IFIF squared with the logo IFIF2, though we did not in fact institute a parallel organization.

I remember one more moment that night which relates to Dick Alpert. As an assistant professor who was just beginning his career, he was so overshadowed by Tim’s glamour and status during those Harvard years that I confess I hadn’t paid much attention to him. But after our “parting-of-the-ways” discussion was over and I was heading upstairs to join Kendra for the night, he sought me out for the first one-on-one conversation we had ever had, as I recall. “I am sure that we will remain friends and continue to see each other,” he said, “but before we formally go our separate ways, I want to tell you that I have been impressed with the steadiness with which you have maneuvered these turbulent years.” It is self-serving for me to report that, but I do so because it was my first glimpse of the generosity of the man who was to become Ram Dass. Also, in a way that brief exchange was to prove prophetic, for in the years that followed I grew closer to Ram Dass than to Tim. Proximity has played a part in that—for the last fifteen years we have been neighbors on opposite sides of San Francisco Bay—but we also think more alike.

RF: I’m noticing now, Huston, as I’m watching your face when you talk about the football game at Millbrook and your other memories [of Tim, that you seem to have a lot of affectionate and loving memories of Tim and those times. When I first asked you about contributing to this volume a couple of years ago, you declined. You said you didn’t want to be seen as endorsing Tim’s behavior, so you felt you couldn’t speak about it.

HS: That’s true.

RF: In 1961 he spoke at a conference with Huxley on “How to Change Behavior.” Already he was seeming very radical as he anticipated his critics:

Those of us who talk and write about the games of life are invariably misunderstood. We are seen as frivolous or cynical anarchists tearing down the social structure. This is an unfortunate misapprehension. Actually, only those who see culture as a game, only those who take this evolutionary point of view, can appreciate and treasure the exquisitely complex magnificence of what human beings do and have done. To see it all as “serious, taken-for-granted reality” is to miss the point; is to derogate with bland passivity the greatness of the games we leam.

What do you think of that statement?

HS: I think it polarizes, pitting them against us. Whatever Tim’s intentions were, what comes through is: you see us as a threat, whereas it’s only we who see life’s magnificence. His statement is unnuanced. And it is disingenuous, for in other situations he did talk about tearing down the social structure and—in jest but only half so—spiking the public water supply. And though it would be unfair to charge him with cynicism, he could be frivolous in the sense of being reckless and not as responsible as he should have been.

RF: He had a thoughtful rationalization for his attempted “juvenilization” of society. He cites Arthur Koestler:

Biological evolution is to a large extent a history of escapes from the blind alleys of overspecialization, the evolution of ideas a series of escapes from the tyranny of mental habits and stagnant routines. In biological evolution the escape is brought about by a retreat from the adult to the juvenile stage as the starting point for the new line; in mental evolution by a temporary regression to more primitive and uninhibited modes of ideation, followed by the creative leap.

And in his own words he writes:

The emergence of Hedonic Psychology in the 1960s was greeted with official scorn and persecution. Larval politicians correctly saw the cultural perils of hedonism. The neurosomatic perspective frees the human from addiction to hive rewards (which are now seen as robot) and opens up vistas of natural satisfaction and meta-social aesthetic revelation. The revelation is this: “I can learn to control internal, somatic function, to select, dial, tune incoming stimuli, not on the basis of security, power, success, or social responsibility, but in terms of aesthetics and psychosomatic wisdom. To feel good. To escape from terrestrial pulls.” (Info-Psychology, p. 29-30)

HS: There is some truth in all that, but again the polarization and absence of the qualifications and specifics. Suppose we accept Koestler’s statement. How, precisely, would/should we act and organize society if we were to “retreat from the adult to the juvenile stage as the starting point of the new line”? Throw tantrums? Play with matches? Expect others to feed us and clean up after us?

RF: I thought I noticed compatible notions in your writings that critique the modern world mindset. Particularly in the essays assembled into your book Beyond the Post-Modern Mind, wherein you describe the modem world mindset as an overly scientific, authoritarian, outer-directed, controlled, measured, “disqualified,” worldview that is giving way, thank goodness, to a perspective that values [ more the individual’s inner resources. “The supreme human opportunity is to strike deeper still and become aware of the ‘sacred unconscious’ that forms the bottom line of our selfhood” (p. 178). You write:

Our final adversary is the notion of a lifeless universe as the context in which life and thought are set, one which without our presence in it would have been judged inferior to ourselves. Could we but shake off our anodynes for a moment we would see that nothing could be more terrible than the condition of spirits in a supposedly lifeless and indifferent universe— Newton’s great mechanism of time, space, and inanimate forces operating automatically or by chance. Spirits in such a context are like saplings without water; their organs shrivel.... So we must pick up anew Blake’s Bow of Burning Gold to support “the rise of the soul against the intellect” (Yeats) as intellect has come to be narrowly perceived, (p. 102)

HS: Tim was right in calling for that rise. Looking back, I think I agree with him in most of the things he was against. Reformers, as Walter Houston Clark and I regarded ourselves, are no more in love with the status quo than rebels are. The difference lies in how to change it. My concern is basically philosophical—to show that the diminished worldview that modernity’s misreading of modem science has caged us in is inaccurate. It was (and is) the promise psychedelics hold for helping to spring us from that cage that drew me to Tim and his Harvard experiment. I’m worried about social problems, too—overpopulation, environmental pollution, the growing gap between the rich and the poor—but I don’t have concrete solutions for them. I am not really a social philosopher.

RF; While Tim has become most visible for a kind of trivial psychedelic Pied Piperdom, there may have been some more historical, philosophical substance to his endeavors. Do you agree?

HS: Yes. But again, what were his specifics?

RF: Some folks hold him accountable for derailing the psychedelic movement by alienating it from mainstream society.

HS: Accountable is too strong. He probably contributed to it. There was a rebel streak in him that almost forced those in authority to react—every action elicits an equal and opposite reaction, as the saying goes. But questions of degree are difficult to answer—was Caesar a great man or a very great man? Tim appealed to the rebellious elements in the Western youths, and that’s not all bad. I admire Noam Chomsky greatly and he is very outspoken. But he stayed with the university and hasn’t lost his reputation. So the fine between rebel and reformer is not a clear one.

RF: Letters such as the following from Gerald Heard seemed to provoke him to a revolutionary stance.

As you say the trinity of the 3 Ps Police, Priest, Paymaster (banker) is always against the journey of the soul but the current of consciousness is against the 3. For better or worse— better if you and the consciousness] chang[ing] druggist do it—worse if the politician is bright enough [in] his dark way to get in on the act. In either case, police, priest, and paymaster have had their day. Did you see that Glen Seaborg head of the A.E.C. asked what would be the big breakthrough in the next thirty years said in the consciousness changing drugs.

How did your group hope to infuse the virtues of the psychedelics into society?

HS: As I mentioned earlier, there never was an IFIF(2), so it’s inaccurate to speak of my group. After the original IFIF it was for me a matter of cautious networking and writing as I struggled in the trail of William James, Aldous Huxley, and Gordon Wasson—and later, Albert Hofmann and Reuben Snake—to understand the workings of these substances and their import for religious living.

RF: I’ve been trying in the last several questions to get you to be critical, but you have been pretty muted. What was Tim’s shadow side?

HS: Judge not that ye be not judged: he did what he had to do. But his heritage is a mixed bag. He thrived on followers, and as the decades advanced he went to greater and greater lengths to get them—preparing groups to colonize outer space, touring the circuit as a stand-up comic with Gordon Liddy—until in the end it was hard to know what he stood for other than getting attention. And magical thinking seemed to enter the mix, as in his failure to check for the prostate cancer that killed him. He was not given to long-term commitments and the responsibilities that come with them—how many times was he married? His own family did not turn out well. When I asked him about getting addicted to the hard drugs he got into, he said, “You get addicted then you cure yourself.”

That’s a recklessness answer. He never broke himself of the tobacco habit. When I introduced him for his final book reading at Cody’s Books in Berkeley—his early books were riveting, but that last one was a paste-up hodge-podge—he had to take a break at midpoint to go out on the deck for a cigarette. I am left looking back on his life with gratitude, and also with sadness. Gratitude not only for the doors to my psyche that he opened but also for the friendship, fun, and excitement he provided during those Harvard years. Sadness for the way his life went downhill. So much talent but a sad conclusion. His spirit remained unbroken, however.

RF: Are you surprised at what a mess there is now? Did you ever imagine back in 1960 that these drugs would be as forbidden, as illegal, as they are today?

HS: Initially I was utopian like everybody else. Whether it could have been different, I have no idea. Oh, things might be better now in little ways. The hysteria regarding drugs might be somewhat less if Tim and Dick had curbed some of their more flamboyant antics. But it remains an open question for me as to whether these substances can be openly integrated into society. I have used the image-lifted from Gerald Heard—of a beach ball in a lake. A part of it is always underwater. Gerald thought it must always be with society. There will never be a society where everything is onboard because people have different tolerance levels.

RF: But we’re talking more about the soul now. Religious questions such as the existence of angels, life after death, spiritual laws of success, are making the bestseller list.

HS: You are quite right. Recently things have changed again. So perhaps the soul is coming back. And Tim may have helped to bring it back.

RF: There is such fear and ignorance that surrounds the mystical properties of psychedelic drugs, in spite of this interest in religion. Do you think that will ever change?

HS: I don’t know, but I find something in me resisting saying that it will. One of the thunderclap realizations of my first experience was that (as I have reported) I had never known what awe was, and the way it fuses fear and fascination. I have to confess that for me fear is a part of the psychedelic experience. Every time I approach the prospect of losing control and being ejected from the driver’s seat, I find myself fearful. And if that is endemic to the experience, fear may prevent an open acceptance of the psychedelics. Even in societies that don’t have the FDA stalking. So I’m not sure that nonacceptance can be chalked up to the three P’s—paymaster and so on. It may reside in the nature of these substances.

RF: You once told me of coming across Tim in Switzerland in the 70s. Something he said to you seems relevant here.

HS: I know what you are referring to, and yes, it is relevant. Kendra and I were involved in a three-week seminar on Jung and Kazantzakis in Switzerland and I got word somehow that Tim was in the country. The original IFIF network was still sufficiently in place for me to track him and we arranged to meet in the town near my seminar site. This was on the heels of his prison break and escape from the United States—as hair-raising a story as I’ve ever heard—and he was wearing the dark aura of a wanted man. He roared into town in characteristic style on the back seat of a Harley Davidson driven by a Swiss buddy of his. It was wonderful to see him again, out of I prison and free, but what I remember best was his statement, early in our conversation, that you are asking me to repeat, which was:

“Nobody ever changes, do they, Huston?”

Like so many of Tim’s observations, it was deeply discerning. Here we were, in a foreign land, thousands of miles from Cambridge, so much had happened for both of us. But I was still on the spiritual journey that was my I priority before I encountered Tim and the psychedelics. And he was still a fugitive from lawful society—kicked out of it as he had been kicked out of West Point, Harvard University, and Zihuatanejo.

RF: We still have this conflict between the materialist’s “scientific” worldview and that of the mystic. You can end it, in a way, with psychedelic drugs. You can see, in a scientific way, that is, a systematic way, that the numinous does exist, that there is a sacred, that God consciousness may be more fundamental than the materialist’s claim. You can prove the reality of the mystic’s experience.

HS: You can prove it to me, but then I didn’t need proof—I believed that the mystics were right before I encountered the psychedelics. And I’m afraid that the same holds for the disbelievers. Materialists have to agree that the psychedelic can generate mystical experiences, but there is nothing in those experiences that forces people to accept that they tell us what the world is like. Bertrand Russell is a case in point. Asked if he had ever had a mystical experience, he answered, “Many.” “What did you do with them?” “I dismissed them.”

RF: I’m trying to follow Huxley’s thought here. As he said in an early paper, “Visionary Experience,” given with Leary in 1961 in Copenhagen:

These biochemical methods are, I suppose, the most powerful and the most foolproof, so to say, of all the methods for transporting us to this other world that at present exist. I think, as Professor Leary will point out tonight, that there is a very large field for systematic experimentation by psychologists, because it is now possible to explore areas of the mind at a minimum expense to the body, areas which were almost impossible to get at before, except either by the use of extremely dangerous drugs or else by looking around for the rather rare people who spontaneously can go into this other world. (Of course it is very difficult for them to go in on demand, “the Spirit bloweth where it listeth,” we can never be sure that the people with the spontaneous gift of visionary experience will have it on demand.) With such drugs as psilocybin it is possible for the majority of people to go into this other world with very little trouble and with almost no harm done to themselves.

HS: That wise man; I don’t recall having read anything by Huxley that didn’t strike me as right on. But note the qualification in the passage you quoted. It says that psychedelics are “the most” foolproof, not that they are foolproof, which is what would be required to turn skeptics into mystics.

RF: I’ll concede that distinction but even so, doesn’t it seem strange to you that theological seminaries and monasteries ignore this “most powerful and most foolproof” way of accessing the divine? Religious training, or metaphysical inquiry, seems to provide the ideal context for these drugs.

HS: Here I’m completely with you. Of course, legal space would have to be carved out for this to happen, and even with that space they should be offered as an elective, so to speak, and not part of the required curriculum. For I don’t see that anything that has happened since the Wassons published their groundbreaking Russia, Mushrooms and History that counters the premise of that book, which is that “mushrooms” mean close to everything to half the world while the other half views them with phobia, as toadstools.

RF: In that same conference in Copenhagen Huxley raised the question: “Of course we come now to the philosophical problem: what is the metaphysical status of visions, what is the ontological status? ... it is worth going into, and I hope someone will go into it sooner or later.” I wonder if we’ll ever get around to that in this culture.

HS: Huxley got around to it, and William James, Gordon Wasson, and Albert Hofmann all got around to it. You are getting around to it and I got around to it in the key essay I have written on the subject, “Do Drugs have Religious Import?” which has been anthologized more than twenty times, mostly in textbooks. So the thrust of your question is whether our society will get around to giving the question the attention it deserves.

Who knows? As Bob Dylan sang, “the answer is blowing in the wind.” I am not entirely discouraged, however. I never thought that I would live long enough to be invited to give a well-publicized lecture on psychedelics and religion at a major university. It was at Northern Illinois University, two years ago. It was as if I were back at Harvard when the topic was respectable. Still I don’t know where we’re headed. It’s like when Dizzy Gillespie was asked about the future of jazz. He said, “Man, if I knew where jazz is going, I’d be there already.”

The Journal for Apophenic Research

The “fulcrum of awakening” and the “psychology of non-perception” with Robert Forte

I so enjoyed this conversation…

Listen now

9 months ago · 5 likes · 7 comments · Apophenia Gold

Loved sharing ideas with Apophenia Gold, honored to be a guest on her ambitious Journal for Apophenic Research. More to come….

3 years later I learned from a friend that David Ray Griffin wrote his first book on the subject, A New Pearl Harbor. Because I studied the history, philosophy and psychology of religion for many years already I was well aware that David Ray Griffin was widely and unquestionably respected as one of the foremost, most rigorous intellectuals of the modern era. I was incredulous that he wrote a book about what I considered a fringe conspiracy theory, that I had never taken a moment to learn. My friend put a copy in my hands. In two days I devoured it’s contents.

I immediately contacted Dr. Griffin to offer my support. For the next ten years I devoted myself to 9/11. I read every book, saw every documentary. It was the most brutal, soul challenging period of my life. Now I see that plunge into that darkness of the collective shadow, into the final death knell of American democracy, as a necessary stage in my life long study of altered states of consciousness and spiritual enlightenment.

I’m going to have more to say about my personal journey later. Now I just want to share two important videos.

The first of these, Press for Truth, was one of the most influential in my awakening. Co written by Kyle Hence, who I came to know as among the most courageous, devoted, and soulful men in my life. Very sad to share the news that Kyle tragically left this plane very recently. Died of a heart attack I learned just moments ago.

Second, I share the very promising and dedicated efforts of the International Center for 9/11 Justice, a group that is hosting a series of lectures named in honor of David Ray Griffin. This the third in an ongoing series. Congratulations to them.

In the future the brave women and men who devote themselves to this cause will be regarded the way the White Rose Society is today. May that future come soon. This lecture gets into an academic sociological analysis of the non-perception of 9/11, that is long overdue. Please watch, share widely, and comment. People often ask me if we’ll ever really know what happened on 9/11. The answer is yes, “we” already do know. The question is whether this knowledge will remain esoteric and confined to the comparatively small circles of scholars and scientists who have approached this subject with rigor, or will it break into mainstream discourse, and hopefully a courtroom, and produce the changes to American government that are long overdue….

https://www.ukcolumn.org/event/third-annual-david-ray-griffin-lecture-richard-ellefritz

This conversation took place in October, 1986, after a 5 year immersion psychedelic studies. I realized that many psychedelic seekers had very different understandings of the process of awakening as taught by the Buddha, though there was a lot of overlap of language and intention. So I sought out my Vipassana meditation teacher, Jack Kornfield to discuss.

Jack trained as a Buddhist monk in the monasteries of Thailand, India, and Burma. A cofounder of the Insight Meditation Society in Barre, Massachusetts and Spirit Rock in Woodacre, California, he has taught meditation internationally since 1974. Dr. Kornfield holds a Ph.D. in clinical psychology and is a husband and a father. His books include Living Buddhist Masters, A Path With Heart, Buddha’s Little Instruction Book, Teachings of the Buddha, Seeking the Heart of Wisdom (with Joseph Goldstein), Living Dharma, A Still Forest Pool, and Stories of the Spirit, Stories of the Heart. www.jackkornfield.com.

The goal, it cannot be stressed too often, is not religious experiences: it is the religious life. And with respect to the latter, psychedelic “theophanies” can abort a quest as readily as, perhaps more readily than, they further it.

Huston Smith, Forgotten Truth

Robert Forte: Jack, thanks very much for sharing your perspective. With so much said about psychedelic experience and spirituality it may help to look at psychedelics from within an extant spiritual discipline. There is a great deal in Buddhism that can illuminate psychedelic phenomena and help us to understand the curative effect—when there is a curative effect. Maybe a Buddhist perspective can help us to maximize the positive effects of psychedelic experiences and improve or reduce the negative ones.

Jack Kornfield: There are a couple of things I want to start with, some thoughts I have had on the subject, and we can go on from there. The first is a statement in answer to your question, which asks for a Buddhist point of view on psychedelics. It is important to say that there is no Buddhist point of view on psychedelics. They are rarely found in the Buddhist tradition, if at all, and generally would be lumped in the precepts under “intoxicants.” In the Zen, Vajrayana, and Theravada traditions, the three largest living traditions, there is very little mention of them, very little written, and there is no traditional point of view about the use of them. It is important to understand that. What points of view we have come from our understanding of Buddhist masters and teachers based on contemporary experience. But there is not a traditional body of knowledge in relationship to these substances that I know of.

A second point to make is that, unlike in Hinduism, which at least in its modern form uses a variety of mind-altering substances—particularly things like hashish that some sadhus use sitting by the river Ganges smoking a chillum—the fundamental relationship to psychedelics in Buddhist practice and tradition is as intoxicants.

The precept in Theravadan Buddhism for dealing with intoxicants is one of the five basic training precepts: not to kill, not to steal, not to speak falsely, not to engage in sexual misconduct, and lastly, to refrain from using intoxicants to the point of heedlessness, loss of mindfulness, or loss of awareness. It does not say not to use them and it is very explicit. It is interesting that it is worded that way: to not use intoxicants to the point of loss of consciousness or awareness. There is another translation of it, which says not to use intoxicants which remove that sense of attention or awareness. Then it is left up to the individual, as are all of the precepts, to use as a guideline to become more genuinely conscious.

A third thought I have to start the conversation, and I think I mention this in Living Buddhist Masters, is that practice in the West has taken a reverse direction from spiritual practice in the Asias, particularly Buddhist practice, but Hindu as well.

In Asia the tradition has three parts. You begin with sila or virtue. This is the foundation upon which any spiritual life is built. People take care with those precepts. They do not harm. There is a development of ahimsa, a respectful, caring, and nonviolent relationship to the people and beings around. This allows the heart to open and the mind to quiet. Out of sila comes the various spiritual practices. They are built on that as a foundation.

The second step comes after you are living a moral and a harmonious life—without which you cannot really have a quiet mind or an open heart. When your actions are in harmony, then you begin to train yourself through yoga, through concentration practices, through all different ways to begin to tame the wild and untamed monkey mind, and to use that training to open up the inner realms. This is samadhi, or concentration.

The third domain is the domain of wisdom, prajna, from which arise the kinds of insights and understandings of the play of consciousness in the realm of human experience, based on the foundation of a moral life and the training in various disciplines. When those insights arise and wisdom comes they are established on a base so they become available to you easily. They already have become integrated in your life by your discipline and your prior training—and you have a context to understand them in. What has happened in the West seems to be a reverse of that.

Many people who took LSD, mushrooms, or whatever it was, along with a little spiritual reading of The Tibetan Book of the Dead, or some Zen texts, had the gates of wisdom opened to a certain extent. They began to see that their limited consciousness was only one plane and one level and that there were a thousand new things to discover about the mind. There are many new realms, new perspectives on birth and death; on the nature of mind and consciousness as the field of creation, rather than the mechanical result of having a body, the biological result; and on the myth of separation and the truth of the oneness of things. Great kinds of wisdom opened up, and for some people, their hearts, too. They began to see the dance in much greater perspective.

People’s obvious experience was that in order to maintain this they had to keep taking the psychedelics over and over; generally speaking, that is what happened. Even though there were some transformations from these experiences, they tended to fade for a lot of people, at least aspects of them. We might want to discuss this further.

Anyway, this is a kind of simplistic analogy to the East and West but I think there might be some crucial points to it. Following that people said, “If we can’t maintain the highs of consciousness that come through the psychedelics, let’s see if there is some other way.” And so people undertook various kinds of spiritual disciplines. They did kundalini yoga and bastrika breathing, or they did serious hatha yoga as a sadhana, raja yoga, light and concentration exercises, visualizations, or Buddhist practices as a way to get back to those profound and compelling states that had come through psychedelics.

RF: Are you saying that it instilled in people a thirst for experiences?

JK: A thirst, that is correct.

RF: Is this the same thirst considered to be the cause of suffering in terms of the Buddha’s second noble truth? Buddha taught that we suffer because of our desire or thirst for sensual or mental experience. Suffering is inevitable because everything is transitory, yet the thirst goes on. Even the highest mystical experiences can lead to suffering because of our tendency to become attached. In other words, I wonder if these experiences can actually inflate the ego or tempt it with the possibility that even “God” is within its grasp.

JK: Well, the thirst has two sides to it. There is a useful thirst as well. When it is involved with a lot of grasping and attachment—to the extent that there is grasping and attachment—there is suffering. But psychedelics awakened in people not just a thirst, but a sense of the possibilities in exploring the mind and body, and living in a different way. Then they began to have those sensitivities and those visions without repeatedly taking psychedelics, by undertaking some spiritual discipline, yoga, or meditation. People began to see that what was necessary was to take care with their speech, with their relationships, with their family, with their actions in the social community and the political world, in a way that was nonharming and that was conscious. So we have gone backward in a way to discover that the roots of fundamental change has to do with our physical body, with our behavior, and with all those things that are called “virtue,” followed by a systematic discipline. Those are the supports for long-lasting or genuine access to these transformative experiences.

I would not say this is true for everyone. There may be people who actually have used psychedelics as a sadhana, as a practice. But I have been around a lot and it is really rare.

RF: LSD may be one of the most important causes for the importation of Eastern spiritual practices into this country during the 1960s. Because of LSD, as you are saying, young people sought out those maps and practices that could enable them to understand their experiences.

JK: They certainly were powerful for me. I took LSD and other psychedelics at Dartmouth though I was studying Eastern thought even before then, but they came hand-in-hand as they did for many people. It is true for the majority of American Buddhist teachers that they had experience with psychedelics either right after they started their spiritual practice or prior to it.

I even know of cases where people were genuinely transformed by their experience in the way that one would be from an enlightenment experience. They are rare. Of the many hundreds of people I know who took psychedelics I know of a few cases where people had radically transformative experiences. These were as much as an “enlightenment” as any other kind of “initial enlightenment,” using the terminology of a system that has a few major satoris and then finally full enlightenment. This is something you are welcome to print. However, along with it print that I am reluctant to say it because it may be misleading. It is like winning the lottery. There are not a lot of people that win. A lot of people play and not so many people win. But the potential is there. I am not sure if it is helpful for people to hear that.

RF: There is a story about a Buddhist master who was asked if you could use drugs to attain enlightenment. He paused and said, “I sure hope so.” When Zen Master Soeng Sahn was asked what he thought about using drugs to help in the quest for self-knowledge he said: “Yes, there are special medicines which, if taken with the proper attitude, can facilitate self-realization.” Then he added: “But if you have the proper attitude, you can take anything—take a walk, or a bath.”

Could you say more about sadhana? What is the right attitude? What are those qualities of mind and action that are basic to the Buddhist path?

JK: Okay, I am thinking if there is some linking question that comes in between these two. There is really. I will mention it briefly and then I will go into the development of sadhana.

First of all, I have the utmost respect for the power of psychedelics. They are enormously powerful. They have inspired and opened and awakened possibilities in a lot of people in really deep ways. They have provided transformative experiences. In taking a tempered view of them it does not mean that I do not have a lot of respect for them, and for the work that researchers like Stan Grof and others have done.

My sense from my own Buddhist practice and from the tradition as a teacher for many years is that people underestimate the kind of effort that is required to transform oneself in a spiritual practice. It requires a very great perspective called “a long enduring mind” by one Zen master; which means it can be days, weeks, months, years, and lifetimes. The propensities or conditioned habits that we have are so powerfully and deeply ingrained that even enormously compelling visions do not change them very much. Therefore, the system of liberation taught by the Buddha, and other great masters, draws on several different aspects or elements of life to help empower such a deep transformation. The Buddha said at one point, “Not good deeds, nor good karma, nor merit, nor rapture, nor visions, nor concentration, nor insight. None of these are the reasons I teach; but the sure heart’s release, this and this alone.” The possibility of human liberation is the center of his teachings. The liberation from greed, hatred, delusion, and the liberation from the sense of separateness and selfishness. This is a very compelling possibility for humans and it is quite profound.

To come to this level of illumination, first one has to discover the power of those forces in the heart and mind that bind us. In the beginning it may sound like the forces of greed, hatred, and delusion are a little dislike of this and wanting of that, and not being so clear about things, being confused, or not seeing so deeply. But when you have undertaken a deep spiritual practice of whatever kind, and I will include psychedelic experiences as part of that, you begin to realize that what is meant is Greed with a capital G, the most primal kinds of grasping; and Hatred meaning Hitler and Attila the Hun in the mind; and Delusion meaning the deepest dark night. The forces are tremendously powerful. So then how does one encounter these forces and transform them in a way that leads to genuine liberation?

First, you have to have a lot of respect for them. And a lot of people use psychedelics in very misguided ways, with wrong understanding. Some modern researchers like Stan Grof have a much greater sense for set and setting and of the power of the forces that one can deal with. Similarly in spiritual practice one needs to respect the depth of these experiences. Secondly, one has to make a conscious commitment to the journey of spiritual change—through whatever inspiration: meeting an inspiring person, inspiring reading, faith, or through psychedelic experience.

Lama Chögyam Trungpa once spoke to a group in Berkeley and when he began he said: “My advice to you is not to undertake the spiritual path. It is too difficult, too long, and it is too demanding. What I would suggest, if you haven’t already begun, is to go to the door, ask for your money back, and go home now.” He said, “This is not a picnic. It is really going to ask everything of you and you should understand that from the beginning. So it is best not to begin. However,” he said, “if you do begin, it is best to finish.”

For those who through some vision, faith, or reason have started, the next thing that is required, after seeing the power of these unconscious forces and of suffering in the world, is to make a commitment to the path of liberation, the path of the Bodhisattva, the path of the transformation of our being. To make that commitment wisely one has to realize that it encompasses every domain of life. This is the ground of spiritual discipline.

Spiritual discipline is based on our actions, our speech, and our relationship to people, animals, and plants in the environment. It is related to our inner thoughts, to whether our minds are filled with hatred, jealousy, and greed, or with kindness, tenderness, and compassion. It has to do with our intimate relations to our families, lovers, friends, and to the people we work with. All of this is a fundamental part of spiritual practice.

So there is seeing the forces, making a commitment to transformation, and seeing that the path is really a deep and fundamental one. There is realizing that the work of transformation takes place on all the levels of body, speech, and mind. Then there is the beginning of a spiritual sadhana.

Now your question comes in: What are the kinds of disciplines, what are the parts to it? Again, this is a kind of elaboration of what I started on.

The ground for systematic spiritual practice is virtue. Virtue doesn’t mean commandments and/or moralistic teachings; it is an understanding that one have the proper—John Lilly would call it the “launching pad,” or to have the earth base covered. And so one begins here.

Sadhana means to keep the five basic precepts in mind: not killing or harming living beings; not stealing, not taking that which isn’t given—not being piggy basically in a world of limited resources. To use proper speech, that is, words that are both true and helpful—not brutal honesty—but to see that one’s speech is both true and useful. Speech is very powerful. Words can heal. Many people have been healed by a word from their estranged father, a great teacher, even from a stranger in certain circumstances. And words have the power to create tremendous harm and to start wars. To refrain from sexual misconduct means to take care with the great power of sexual energy. Sexual energy can be associated with greed, compulsion, lust, denigration, exploitation, or it can be associated with intimacy, care, communion, attention, and love. So make sure that energy is used in a nonharming way. Finally for intoxicants: not to use intoxicants to the point of heedlessness, which means not use them to escape, to cover over one’s pain or difficulty, or in a regular or addicted way in which one has to use them. There has been tremendous suffering in the lives of many millions of alcoholics, drug abusers, and great suffering for their families. The unnecessary pain, misuse, and widespread addiction to substances generally has been a concern of legitimate spiritual traditions for thousands of years.

Even among the relatively conscious explorers of contemporary psychedelics, addiction and attachment has sometimes been a problem. Even more critical is the overly positive message about both the spiritual and the casual use of these drugs that has been adopted by quite a few people who could not handle them well at all. As many of us who have used psychedelics have discovered, it is not an easy path. What matters from the point of view of this precept is to make their use nonhabitual (which probably means occasional). If one uses these substances, whether it is a glass of wine, a joint of marijuana, LSD, or mushrooms, this precept says to make that a conscious and careful part of your life. Without these precepts, if one even begins the journey, they will get lost or go off the track. You cannot complete the journey until you get the basics right. This is really a very simple message.

Almost every system in the world that is assisted by substances, including the wide range of shamanism, it is in a context of purification.

The purifications are first of action, which we talked about, that is, sila. Then based on that, there are the purifications of the body through hatha yoga, exercise, or practices that allow your body to feel and to be open enough to touch these deeper levels and to integrate them. You can take a very powerful substance and even if you are physically a wreck, you can touch those places, but there will be a high physical price in the course of it. There will be the burning of the kundalini from the nadis opening much too quickly. When your body is in tune and open you can go to those places with much less of that burning and overwhelming physical disharmony that can come from it. Secondly, it allows the experience to be integrated. Without preparing the body one cannot hold those understandings. These are physical purifications of the body through diet, yoga, breathing, etc.

Then there are the purifications of the heart and mind, that is, emotions and thoughts. The purifications at the beginning are to train oneself to have thoughts of loving kindness and compassion. To begin, in a systematic way, to open up places that are constricted and extend forgiveness. This is the purification of forgiveness. There is an emotional transformation that takes place by extending forgiveness and opening the heart, seeing the fears, angers, and memories that have been locked in and releasing them.

There is the purification of generosity, of actions, words, and thoughts of caring. There is the purification in the realm of thought: taking the crazed monkey mind and nonstop inner dialogue and beginning to train the element of samadhi, or stability of mind. In this way, the mind becomes steadier and can focus on light, visualization, the heart, or some other aspect of being, instead of wandering all the time, or being lost in the past and future.

It is necessary to begin to overcome the powerful conditioning of reacting with aversion to pain, and with greed to pleasure, therefore getting lost all the time in past and future. This involves working with mindfulness and concentration in a specific systematic way. Then comes the mind; but first you stabilize the mind through concentration. Most people find that happens with a long regular practice of sitting meditation, with mantra, visualization, or a hundred other ways.

Once the mind is concentrated, you apply that one-pointedness to discover the laws of the mind, or the laws of consciousness.

First you start on the level of greed, desire, fear, anger, laziness, or restlessness. These are the hindrances to transformation. You learn how to overcome them through your attention so that you do not become caught up or lost in them. You learn liberation in a very grounded way. As your concentration builds, and your body becomes more open and purified, you take that ability to be balanced and less caught by these energies, to where you have access to other domains of consciousness, and you use that same ability in those other domains.

Now when you enter the domain of pure light filled with love and kindness, you have learned how to do that without getting too attached. You can see that too as part of the passing show. With the same attitude you go into the hell realms that arise through you. Not only is there greed or anger, but there is the deepest fear of dissolution in the realms of birth, death, and rebirth. You learn how to pay attention to those without so much grasping and attachment. This is where you learn not just the content of the various realms of consciousness, which the psychedelics can take you to, but how to relate to all of those wisely. If I were to put any sentence in the interview in capitals it would be to emphasize TO NOT JUST SEE THE CONTENT OF THE MANY REALMS OF HEART, MIND, AND BODY, BUT LEARN HOW TO RELATE TO THEIR CONTENT WISELY, COMPASSIONATELY, AND FREELY.

Most of the sadhanas require years of discipline. They require training under a competent master, because one is entering realms where it is almost a given that you will become attached, afraid, or go off course. You need a good guide and a systematic training in how to relate to pleasure and pain skillfully. One of the deepest roots of our conditioning that causes bondage is the fear and aversion of what is painful and the grasping and attachment to what is pleasant. And so we go through the rounds of samsara, which is repeating experience, over and over and over again.

Lama Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche described it as a monkey jumping from window to window of a house. The windows being the eyes, ears, nose, tongue, sense of touch, and the mind—the six sense doors. From this one to that, liking this, disliking that, hopping from one window to another. Someone raised their hand and asked, “What happens if the monkey takes LSD?” Rinpoche said, “The monkey has already taken LSD. So he experienced some new sights, sounds, tastes, and smells as a result of it—very powerful, compelling ones. He is still jumping around from window to window of the house because he hasn’t learned to relate to those powerful and compelling visions in a wise way.” He has not necessarily learned that from the visions alone, and as I said there may be a few exceptions. This is the point of view from systematic practice.

Suffering is caused by delusion and attachment, by grasping at anything that creates a sense of separation, or sense of separate self. The fundamental liberation that is available is not some particular state, but is the liberation of not being caught by the different lights, by the ten thousand joys and the ten thousand sorrows that arise through the senses.

It takes sitting down and hanging out with difficult or blissful states over and over again; with pains in the body, fear, rapture, light, darkness, and learning how to bring a balanced attention, a steadiness of heart, and a greatness of heart, to all of them. In this way it is possible to open to pain as the sorrow of the mother of the world, and open to joy as the light of the sun. See both of them as our birthright and our inheritance and that neither of them is really who we are. This is an elaboration on your question of sadhana.

RF: How can we understand the healing effect of psychedelic experience from the perspective of Buddhist psychology and meditation?

JK: Healing takes place in a number of ways but the most fundamental healing in Buddhist practice comes by bringing awareness to that which was twisted, knotted, or held in darkness in the body, feelings, thoughts, or in the domain of the views of mind. Through systematic meditation practice one brings the power of concentration and mindfulness to the knots and the deepest patterns of tension open up. Without even doing a physical yoga, through sitting meditation, the deepest kinds of body work release occur. The places of emotional fear and holding from this life or any past lives will arise. The kinds of thoughts where we get attached, the opinions and views, and finally, the very deepest kind of holding on to our sense of self being separate, better, equal, or worse than someone else.

Healing with psychedelics is much the same. Healing comes when you have a suitable and careful situation, and one’s unconscious is opened by the psychedelics. Maybe they will relive a past trauma, or experience the pain that is held in the physical body from an accident, or an operation, or the tension from all their stored-up anger comes into consciousness and begins to release. The healing effects come through the power of bringing into consciousness that which has been below the threshold of consciousness. Part of the difficulty with psychedelics, and even with meditation at some points, is that it comes too quickly and people get overwhelmed. The danger is then they may shut down immediately afterward. They will touch a place that is too fearful or too difficult. But there are healings that take place in that way on all those levels of body, feelings, and mind.

RF: They can be initiatory agents as well.

JK: They can open the heart and show that we are not separate, that we can touch the realms of the universal, the brahmavihara, of universal loving kindness and universal compassion. They open the mind and reveal that consciousness and mind create the world, that the physical reality is created out of consciousness and not the opposite. They show that reality can be filled with light and humor. They can show that there are realms of tremendous transcendent understanding, that there are realms of many different time scales, eternally slow or eternally rapid. There are also realms of the avici hells where there is extraordinary pain and seemingly no way out.

RF: Especially today in the West, where we have developed such mastery over the material world, something very powerful is required to show that this level is not the only one.

JK: That is what Ram Dass says in part. He thought it was fitting that in such a materialistic era the expression of holiness should come in the form of a pill, in a materialistic form. I see them as definitely having been useful as an initial opening for people, and at certain stages it may be possible to use them wisely, again within the constraints of sila. They can be easily abused if one is not careful about the set and setting. This is something we are just experimenting with.

RF: Maybe we could shift a little and discuss psychedelic substances in the history of Buddhism. What do you think of Gordon Wasson’s article about the last meal of the Buddha being mushrooms (Wasson 1982)?

JK: I have never read or heard of that in any of the main line Buddhist traditions. In the Pali Canon Buddha ate not mushrooms but pork that had gone bad. In the Mahayana Canon, it was mushrooms because they are vegetarians. In the Pali Canon the Buddha took whatever was put in his begging bowl, whether it was meat or vegetable, as long as it was not killed for him. That statement that Wasson quotes from the Digha Nikaya, Buddha’s last words before his meal:

I see no one, Cunda, on earth nor in Mara’s heaven, nor in Brahma’s heaven, among gods, and among men, whom, when he has eaten it, that food could be properly assimilated, save by a Tatagatha.

This beautiful phrase is also said at other times in other sutras, not just when the food is bad. For example, there is a sutra where someone offers the Buddha a bowl of rice in a denigrated way and the Buddha says “no thank you.” He will not receive it, and then he gives this exquisite sermon about what it means to be enlightened and that he does not need anything. The man’s faith is fully restored and he says to Buddha, “I give it to you now with tremendous good heart and faith.” And the Buddha takes the bowl and he says there is no one on earth who could eat this at this moment without it overwhelming them. So it really may be a symbolic statement.

RF: It was a smith who served Buddha his last meal. This is an element that Wasson did not explore. In The Forge and the Crucible, Eliade (1978, 89) points out the connection between blacksmiths, alchemists, and shamans in India and elsewhere. He writes: “This relation between shamans, heroes, and smiths is strongly supported in the epic poetry of central Asia. Metalworkers almost everywhere form groups apart. They are mysterious beings who must be isolated from the rest of the community. Smiths were thought to be masters of initiation, magical healers, shape shifters and so on throughout the ancient world.”

JK: It is interesting to look at Buddhist texts from the point of view of world mythologies. I have not looked at that sutra in that way. Anyway, in a simple way, there is not a lot that I have heard in any of the classic traditions that speak to the use of psychedelic substances.

RF: I wonder if they might be part of a body of secret teachings.

JK: Like soma or other substances? Honestly, my guess is not. Not to say that there might not be lamas in some corner of Tibet that have some substance they use. Most likely it would be in the Tantric tradition, which is also more recent and more closely connected to Hindu tantra which does use substances, at least modern Hindu tantra does. But having been around a lot of the Buddhist world, it is not in my experience yet, or in my knowledge. If it is secret, it is real secret. Most of the lamas do not know about them either.

RF: I have come across a couple possible psychedelic references in the Buddhist tradition. One that interests me I found quite accidentally while looking for the Wasson article on Buddha’s last meal. This article is “Brewing and Drinking the Beer of Enlightenment in Tibetan Buddhism,” by John Ardussi (1977) of Australian National University. It is a report on the ritual consumption of a beverage derived from grain that inspired spiritual songs (doha) and deep mystical insight. Milarepa was an initiate of this tradition. Although they repeatedly say “beer” in the article, it must be an especially powerful beer to give rise to such experience. The songs indicate that this beer was different from the usual chang in Tibet. There may be an ergot fungus at work here.

Less psychedelic in terms of effects, but curiously related to the subject, is one of the incidents around the reincarnation of the Dalai Lama. After the thirteenth Dalai Lama died his body was seated on a throne facing south while lamas awaited signs for the arrival of his successor. The first sign was that the head mysteriously turned to face east. The second sign was the appearance of a large star-shaped fungus on a pillar also to the east, indicating the direction where the fourteenth Dalai Lama would take birth. This story is told by the Dalai Lama in his autobiography, My Land and My People (1962). There is nothing to say that this fungus was psychedelic but it is another auspicious association of fungi with worlds beyond the body.

Could you say something about past lives?

JK: Past lives are a fundamental part of all the great Eastern teachings. There is a misunderstanding if one feels they are the owner of them, that it is “I” who lives this life and “I” who will live the next life. That is not correct. It is not reincarnation, but rebirth. It is like an apple seed being planted, turning into an apple tree, a blossom, a fruit, and then a new apple seed. This seed is not the same as the previous apple seed, but it is conditioned by it. It is like a match lighting a candle that lights a lantern. Each flame is conditioned by the previous one, yet each completely different in other ways.

Past lives are a basic part of the Buddhist teachings and most significantly are included in the description of the Buddha’s own enlightenment. He had three visions called “the three watches of the night.” In the first, he saw his own past lives and he saw that it was a much bigger dance than he had ever imagined. In the second watch of the night he saw the birth and death of many beings according to the laws of karma, and how ignorant they were of the laws that govern the process of death and rebirth. If they acted kindly, they were reborn in favorable circumstances; acting in hellish ways, they were reborn in hellish circumstances. In the third watch of the night he saw what binds beings to the wheel of birth and death in an unconscious way. It operates between lives, but also operates from day to day and from moment to moment in our lives. This is the law of dependent origination. Based on the senses and consciousness coming together and creating experience there is unskillful grasping at the pleasant, trying to hold on to ever-changing experiences, a resistance to the painful ones, and a sense of self through that.

Then he said, “I see a way out”—which is the way of equilibrium of heart and mind in which one takes the arising experiences and sees them as not self, and does not grasp or resist them. Then he gave a whole systematic training that leads to human liberation and freedom.

So past and future lives are a big part of the Buddhist teaching, and all the realms that have come to light through psychedelic research are part of the Buddhist tradition: the archetypal realms, the heaven realms, the hell realms, the realm of the hungry ghosts, and so forth. There is nothing that I have seen in the realms that Grof and other modern psychedelic researchers describe that has not been charted by the breadth of Buddhist psychology. At the same time, Grof’s cartography is comprehensive. It covers the research of modern psychedelics and describes most of the experiences that are traditionally written about in the context of Buddhist practices and attentional meditations. There is a great deal of overlap.

RF: Why is it important to have rebirth as part of the Buddhist system?

JK: It is not important. One can get liberated and come to great compassion and wisdom with no belief in past and future lives and no understanding of it. Birth and death actually take place moment to moment in this very life. You can experience the actual death and rebirth of the body and mind moment after moment in the deeper states of meditation, as you can through other ways, psychedelics included. It comes as a flashing out of nothing, into being, and then disappearance.

The closest modern analogy is of single pictures on a movie screen that appear to make a continuous living action but in fact are one moment after another of the arising of consciousness, the experience of the object with it, and then the passing away. You can come to see that all of life is a process of birth and death, moment to moment, through powerful training of the mind in concentration and intention.

RF: Do you think it is possible to guide someone with psychedelics into that insight?

JK: I am not sure that you can structure the psychedelic state so easily. It has its own laws of opening from what I have seen, and from descriptions—as this meditation practice does. There are ways you can support it. In meditation you can tell people not to be attached or not to resist things, to sit quite still. Similarly for people who want to use psychedelics you could train them in meditation so they would learn not to be as identified, which gives them a certain power. You could create the proper set and setting and you could remind them of it during the experience. But in terms of what material comes up, I do not think you have a lot of say about that in meditation or with psychedelics.

RF: At a meeting held at the Harvard Divinity School in 1983, Dan Brown brought up the distinction between ecstasy and enstasis in a discussion about psychedelics. Ecstasy would be the flight of the soul from the body, “the soul’s ecstatic journey through the various cosmic regions, whereas Yoga pursues enstasis, final concentration of the spirit, and escape from the cosmos” (Eliade 1964, 417). What do you think about this distinction with regard to psychedelic experience and meditation?

JK: There is a very good article that Roland Fischer (1971) wrote while he was doing research at Johns Hopkins on the spectrum of ways of altering consciousness, from high stimulation to low stimulation. Buddhist meditation goes the route of enstasy to ecstasy. There exist ecstatic practices in Buddhist meditation, but primarily they work not so much by turning up the volume, as by tuning the receiver—so you can receive what is going on in the unconscious and sensory level that is actually happening all the time. All these realms are available through more powerfully tuned awareness and concentration. Then you can get to realms where the body fills with light, you experience tremendous rapture and ecstasy, and are catapulted through all the realms of the heavens and hells.

I see psychedelics as one of the most fruitful areas of modern consciousness research. I would not be surprised if at some point there comes to be a useful marriage between some of these drugs and a systematic training or practice that I have described. That marriage will have to be based on an understanding of the ancient teachings, the laws of karma, responsibility, action, virtue, training the heart and the mind, and the laws of liberation.

One of the maps that is quite interesting from the Vipassana tradition is the Progress of Insight (Sayadaw 1978). One gains access to the progress of insight through the level of what is called access concentration, where thinking is pretty much stopped or slowed down. The mind can be steady on the object, the breath, or wherever it is placed, through systematic training. I am not talking about years to do this, although to stabilize it in one’s life it takes years. Some people can reach access concentration in ten days or two weeks in intensive meditation practice. Most others will take a year or so, but lots of people can reach it in ten days or two weeks. From access concentration you go through a process based on a finer and finer awareness and more and more precise looking into the body and mind. Here you begin to see parallels to Stan Grof’s death-rebirth sequence of the four stages.

First there is simply a recognition of the interaction of body and mind, a seeing of its conditioned mechanical nature. This arises and that follows, sight arises and consciousness comes with it. Then feeling arises, then liking or disliking. You see the very mechanical workings, of all which we take to be our self-experience. Following that, you begin to see how nonself it is. How, in fact, by being mechanical, our experience is all conditional and impermanent. Whatever our experience, it arises for a moment and passes away. None of it is graspable. There comes a deep insight into the characteristics of impermanence, ungraspability, insubstantiality, and dukkha, the unsatisfactory nature of it all. Then there comes a level of pseudo-nirvana, which Dan Goleman (1977) describes succinctly in his book, Varieties of Meditation Experience—the arising of dangerous states of rapture, awareness, equanimity, and light. It requires training to not become attached to these states. None of these are it. They are simply the beginning openings of the light of consciousness.

RF: In The Progress of Insight, Mahasi Sayadaw lists these states under “corruptions of insight.”

JK: That is the translation, the corruptions of insight. Most people who have used psychedelics on their own have gotten lost at this place. It is a stick point, even in meditation with a good guide, and much more so in exploration with psychedelics. When one comes to the realization that none of those states are it (which is a profound insight), that you cannot attach to any of these as bringing liberation, then you start to observe these with detachment. That is the entry point into the deep process of death and rebirth that comes in the Vipassana tradition. The next stage is to see dissolution. Only after you have released those states of the mind and body filled with light, rapture, and equanimity, you see that everything, including those states, dissolves, and everywhere you look you see dissolution.

Based on that dissolution there arises tremendous fear. You look out the window and the window is scary. You look at a someone and you see they could die any minute. You look at your body and there arise visions where pieces of the body fall off like hunks of meat. There are visions of many past lives that come at this stage, and all the ways that you have died before. There are visions of charnel grounds. The whole insecurity of life is revealed to you. Following this, based on dissolution and fear, there comes terror and misery and you say, “I don’t want any part of it, it is too scary.” And you get caught for a moment, plopped into a new life, and forget all about it. And then some other dangerous thing happens, or you die again and want out.

Then there comes desire for deliverance, but it is so scary and so hard that at that point you say, “I can’t do it. It is impossible. It is beyond me to let go that deeply. I want to go home.” This is called the “roll up the mat stage,” because you want to roll up your meditation mat and head home.

If you stay with it, finally there comes a full stabilization or balance of equanimity. It really requires a good guide because at the “roll up the mat” stage you do not believe you can go any further; it just seems impossible. Your teacher says, “stay with it, just observe that, be aware with equanimity and balance.” And finally, if you can observe even your desire for deliverance, and you let go, there comes this state of tremendous detachment and presentness combined. This would parallel Grof’s fourth stage. It is not a detachment of not caring. It is a perfect equanimity in the middle of experience that sees it all as empty, and none of it as I, me, or mine. You see just arising and passing; and out of that, the deepest kinds of insights and enlightenment can come.

RF: Do the Vipassana stages include visions of planetary annihilation?

JK: The annihilation initially tends to be quite personal and then it becomes as I said, universal. You see lifetime after lifetime. They could be planetary. I could imagine that arising.

RF: I wanted to ask you about your feelings about where we are in the world, in terms of global ecology, politics?

JK: I think about it often and I talk about it to a lot of people. We should do everything we know how to educate people and transform our own hearts so that we learn to overcome the forces of greed, prejudice, and fear that start wars. If we cannot do it, how can we expect someone else to? We must use all the tools and disciplines, including the beneficial powers that may come through researching psychedelics. Certainly spiritual sadhana bears on the question of our planet. From the Buddhist point of view, one tries as best as possible, compassionately and passionately, to save all beings, plants, and animals—even though it is taught, and one can touch the realms in meditation where this is true, that there are world systems that come into being and pass away. Our dharma and our work is to bring as much of our heart and as much of our consciousness to this earth as we can. Whether it lasts or not, I do not know, and we will not know until we see, but the earth too is impermanent. All these things are impermanent.

RF: Is there any mention of life on other planets in Buddhist teachings?

JK: There is not much talk in terms of the meditation but there are definitely writings on what are called world systems. It is said that the Buddha’s mind was able to affect beings on tens of thousands of world systems.

RF: Meaning actually physical places far, far away, as opposed to other-dimensional worlds?

JK: Yes, physical places, and yes, that is in addition to all the realms of heaven and Brahma (which are different than heaven realms), hungry ghosts, asuras, and hell realms. There is as extensive a cosmology in Buddhism as anywhere that I have seen. There are equally extensive cosmologies—Egyptian, Sumerian, and shamanistic—but they are not quite as systematic.

RF: Thank you for a most interesting talk.

References

Ardussi, J. 1977. Brewing and drinking the beer of enlightenment in Tibetan Buddhism. Journal of the American Oriental Society 97(2).

Chah, A. 1985. In A Still Forest Pool, ed. J. Kornfield and P. Breiter. Wheaton, Ill.: Theosophical Publishing House.

Dalai Lama. 1962. My Land and My People. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Eliade, M. 1958. Yoga: Immortality and Freedom. Princeton: Bollingen Series.

Eliade, M. 1964. Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy. Princeton, N.J.: Bollingen Series.

Eliade, M. 1978. The Forge and the Crucible. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Fischer, R. 1971. A cartography of ecstatic and meditative states. Science 174:897–904.

Goleman, D. 1977. The Varieties of Meditation Experience. New York: Putnam.

Govinda, Lama A. 1960. Foundations of Tibetan Buddhism. New York: Weiser.

Grof, S. 1976. Realms of the Human Unconscious. New York: E.P. Dutton.

Kornfield, J. 1977. Living Buddhist Masters. Boulder, Colo.: Prajna Press.

Lamb, B. 1974. Wizard of the Upper Amazon. Berkeley: North Atlantic Books.

Sayadaw, M. 1978. The Progress of Insight. Kandy, Sri Lanka: Buddhist Publication Society.

Smith, H. 1976. Forgotten Truth. New York: Harper and Row.

Wasson, G. 1982. The last meal of the Buddha. Journal of the American Oriental Society 102(4).

Yesterday on my Facebook page I started a conversation about extraterrestrialism, a subject I have studied quite a bit. To my mind extraterrestrialism, or exopolitics, or UFOolgy, is a subset of the history and psychology of religion, like psychedelics. ET’s are as fascinating as anything but to me, a frustrating, so far unsatisfying topic because I have never had a direct, personal experience of an ET or UFO in an ordinary state of consciousness. I mentioned this in my post. I’ve read dozens of books, heard countless reports of close encounters from very credible people, including good friends, which lead me to believe that at least some the reported phenomena are real. But belief is not the same as knowing so I employ what my professor, the philosopher Paul Ricoeur, termed a ‘hermeneutic of suspicion,’ towards all these reports, which just means there may always be another way to interpret them.

This morning I am taking a shower outside in the soft Aegean sunlight at my home in Greece, thinking about an experience I had years ago coming back from an ayahuasca trip that might have been a visit from an extraterrestrial. Thinking I might follow up my Facebook post by telling that story when I look at the wall and see this four inch long praying mantis.

Now I have to tell the story.

In 2011 I embarked on an ambitious project. Having heard of an extraordinary healing of a deadly cancer after two months of drinking ayahuasca I invited a couple cancer patients to join me in Peru for an immersion in traditional medicine which included taking ayahuasca a few times a week to see if we could replicate the effect. Many people applied for this all expense paid trip. I selected Cheryl from Canada who was stricken with advanced stage IV ovarian cancer, and Alan, an American Jewish doctor, someone I knew but not well, with prostate cancer, who once accused me of being an anti-semite because of my views on 9/11. But that is another story.

I made a prior journey to Peru to scout out some possible locations and consulted a few colleagues about where to go. Jeremy Narby, the anthropologist and author of The Cosmic Serpent: DNA and the Origins of Knowledge, one of the most interesting books I have ever read, suggested we go to Mayantuyacu in north central Peru where Maestro Juan Flores, an Asháninka curandero and ayahuascero performed his art of healing. To pay for this adventure I grew cannabis and sold it on the grey market, supplemented by two small grants, one from the Lloyd Symington Foundation, and one from a friend who prefers to remain unnamed. The expedition included me, Cheryl, Alan, and Brent, one of my closest friends and expert in language who served as our interpreter.

Impossible to describe the enchanting magnificence of Mayantuyacu. To get there we flew to Lima, then Pucallpa, then a 4 hour drive in a beat up car with bald tires on a muddy “road” to an hour long ride up a muddy river in a canoe. Then a two hour hike in 100 degree heat over a small mountain, through the jungle.

Finally we arrive at Mayantuyacu, nestled in an ancient volcano crater that is dissected by a smaller river. When the cool river enters the crater it is heated from below by hot springs causing it to become a scotching hot river, much too hot to touch.

I could write for days about this adventure but I want to jump to the weird coincidence that inspired today’s writing.

Juan Flores is a unique fellow. Early in our visit he spoke matter-of-factly about how he learned the art of healing with plants from extraterrestrials. I listened with an open mind.

Early one morning, after we’d been there for a couple weeks, Juan sent his assistant to wake me up. He has something important to tell me. Brent and I go to his house and learn that Juan had a dream. The ET’s said I could meet them if I wanted to meet them. Bravely I say, “OK let’s go." Told him I wanted a round trip ticket for I had a son in California who means the world to me.

That night Juan prepared the ayahuasca he put something special in it for me. My experience is not pleasant. Another one of those trips where I am inundated with suffering, not so much my own personal variety, but the suffering of the ravaged earth and her people mercilessly tricked, exploited and enslaved by fascist governments, greed, violence… No matter how much I purged I could not relieve the sensation of collective misery.

Hours pass, the effects subside. I go to lay down by the steamy river, comforted by the sound of rushing water. I gaze up above me through the misty steam and “see” what appears to be an eight foot long praying mantis peering over me. I am startled by this creature but somehow I remain calm, observant, wondering if I am hallucinating, or is it real. Then it occurs to me that this is not just your ordinary, everyday, run of the mill, 8 foot long praying mantis. This is an 8 foot long obstetrician praying mantis. It is examining me to see if I can withstand the ontological shock I am about to face when I leave the comfort of my womb-earth realm and launched into a greater cosmos. At the moment my mind comes up with this idea I am seized with fear and the vision faded into the ever present steamy mist.

I still do not know what to make of that experience but it was a decisive moment in my life. The next morning I wrote a poem about how I am like those little sand pipers at the beach that bravely strut around, pecking at the sand. Sometimes they seem to dance about, or taunt the waves that lap upon the shore. The moment a big wave comes at them they run like hell.

What happens when we die is one of the greatest mysteries of being alive. Confounded by it, some say, is why we invented religion. Fear of it, say others, is why we have war. Really knowing and celebrating the mystery of death will seem creepy to some, but it might actually be the greatest happiness we can know.

Psychedelic drugs can sometimes offer a glimpse into the mystery of death. This is one reason I have devoted so much time to understanding all the ways they’ve been used by humankind. Along this marvelous path I’ve come to know many fine people with the same passion. I can’t tell you how many have urged me to write a book about what I’ve learned over the last 45 years. Jay Stevens was one of them. One who shared this calling, and one who urged me to write up my own.

If you are familiar with the subject, then you know Jay Stevens’ Storming Heaven: LSD and the American Dream. If you don’t know it, you’re missing one of the best.

Jay died on February 19. My wife and I were expecting Sara and him to stay with us here in Greece for the months of March and April. To escape the Vermont winter, and for Jay and I to finish up some writing we had agreed to do. He was doing an upgrade, a remix he called it, of Storming Heaven, and together we aimed to complete a screenplay about Timothy Leary I began a while ago.

Instead, the evening of February 19, Jay said to Sara, “Not feeling well. I’m going to lay down.” Went upstairs and died. 72 years old in reasonably fine health except for diabetes that he was managing just fine. Did 30 minutes on the rowing machine that morning. Bragged to Sara: “Now you do it.”

I loved Jay. A new friendship on this path, and a most important one. I read his book when it first appeared in 1988. I thought then, and I still think, it is the best one written. A lot of the most experienced psychedelic people say that. When you read it, you will too. Certainly drew me in.

Jay Stevens had a remarkable intimate and scholarly grasp of American and world history. He was an old soul, a mischievous, wisened, deep thinking, poetic soul. You feel the generations of his being walking in the fields, or the maple groves of his family’s land in Vermont, once thousands of acres, they’ve stewarded since before the Revolutionary War.

He was a hero to me, that I didn’t get to know until recently. In 1993 I invited him to contribute to a Festschrift I did for Timothy Leary because he deserved a book to honor his role in getting LSD out there. A role I knew Jay appreciated, which distinguished him from other modern psychedelic writers who think of Tim as a bad guy who made psychedelics illegal.

But Jay was in the midst of Lyme Disease. Not doing much writing except channeling these “orphics” he called them, laying on his roof, singing poetry at the moon. So we didn’t get to meet until 2021. He caught me on Facebook sharing conspiracy theories about the dawning of psychedelics. I’d just moved to Vermont. He wrote that I was onto something and invited me to visit. That first visit lasted long after we ran out of weed. It was the first of many, comparing our notes about the history of psychedelics.

Having a friend like Jay express his interest, and challenge me to prove what was not evident, while sharing his own advanced research was a real boon to my life, even as it narrowed my friendships to the real philosophers and the truly open minded. When I gave him my unfinished screenplay about Leary he called me the next day. “This is good, you have to finish it.” Last Spring when he and Sara came to visit us in Greece, he told me again. I didn’t think I would without his help so at Delphi we shook hands and began our partnership.

The first thing we did was have an argument. He said 70-30. I said “No way. No way this get’s finished without your help. 50-50 or no deal.”

We spent days at a time at my home or his in Vermont over the last year imagining how to tell the Leary story. Now sitting in a pile of handwritten notes in my backpack. I was going to take them out when he got here and begin typing.

Instead I am wondering about this:

First, the last time Jay and I were together in Vermont, in the fall of 2024, I remembered a scene I wanted to write. Harvard Professor David McCelland calls Leary in to scold him about getting into drugs. I had a quotation by McCelland that gets turned into a great scene, except I couldn’t find it in my untidy notes. “We’ll find it,” says Jay, “Let’s keep moving.”

Two weeks after he dies I find it. I post it to Facebook. It gets many reactions, including one from Jay Stevens. I figured Sara or Zach or Ali is playing around. But no, they’re not. Ok some AI hack, some weird algorithm thing I won’t understand. I let it go. Just as the bewilderment fades two weeks later I make another post about the theory of cognitive dissonance. Once again Jay Stevens reacts. How’s that happen? I have an inquiry into Facebook to find out.

Ok weird shit happens. Now explain me this. Couple days ago Sara calls. She just got an email from Jay. The email is a poem. An original, unseen Jay Stevens poem. Sara tells their daughter Ali. “Let me see it.” But when Sara tries to forward the gmail to Ali, she gets a message from gmail: “Attachment removed by sender.” Good thing she downloaded it. It’s not just any poem. This poem:

Spring in the city of Amnesia and who

Can believe these trees are full of babies?

Bird babies and squirrel babies, an eternal

Baby factory above our heads in the leavings

And branchings of this great concrete Beast.

The bees dancing home to the honeycomb.

The buildings rocking their sparkle.

Same as it always was.

The years of cliche that say this will

Feel like the day before yesterday?

So what if it does?

Can we at least agree this cup of coffee

Is way more professional but tastes

No better and use that metaphor

To obscure how now

Where wherever we peer in the mere

Roar of nature we cannot remember

Any of the old lines? Do we care?

Does it matter if this is nothing but

A million billion entangled up stories

and all that implies, Multiplied?

Then why grasp after endings

If we can know only beginnings

You and I?

Sara doesn’t want to figure this out. She says we have to let him go. Ali is silent. I am awed.

Jay is best known for his books Storming Heaven and Drumming at the Edge of Magic with Mickey Hart of the Grateful Dead. Here’s some more of his poetry. Sara says there are notebooks of it…

This morning, a friend of mine, who is a close personal advisor to Robert Kennedy’s presidential campaign, called to ask me about psychedelic drug policy. A great prompt to begin these pages. A month ago I attended a psychedelic conference outside of Athens, Greece, and wished I had raised this topic with the medical researchers presenting there.

If you’re following the unfolding of the psychedelic renaissance at all you’re aware that the psychedelic drugs psilocybin, LSD, and MDMA are showing themselves in government approved research at some of the best universities in Europe and the US to have dramatic therapeutic applications. Psilocybin is proving especially effective in treating depression and end of life anxiety. MDMA appears about to be permitted for limited use by MAPS trained therapists to treat the epidemic of so called Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. There is no argument from me that these clinical studies reflect the truth of these remarkable substances when they are used in a wise way.

So why are these drugs still listed in the most stringent, prohibitive category, that is, Schedule 1, of the Controlled Substance Act? I’ve asked this question ever since I began to study the subject, more than four decades ago. Any good student of psychedelics will know that not only have psychedelics been used for thousands of years in cultures all around the world in healing practices, they have proven their therapeutic value in clinical research for nearly two decades in modern scientific studies. So why are they considered by the US Federal government to have “no medical use, and a high potential for abuse?” Why hasn’t this classification been challenged—since it is obviously false? And a more important question: what can we do to return our psychedelic drug policy to some semblance of sanity?

At this conference in Greece a few weeks ago I listened to a panel of “experts” from New York University, Imperial College, and Johns Hopkins University present their findings— as if they were pioneers—that psilocybin was effective to treat end of life anxiety. Good heavens, we’ve known this for decades! Valentina Wasson proposed it 70 years ago! Stanislav Grof demonstrated it for years in the Czech Republic and in the United States. We should be asking: ‘Why have the unique properties of these drugs been squandered for all this time?

Way too often when this question is asked someone will blame Timothy Leary for the government’s decision to make psychedelic drugs illegal. Right? How many times do you hear that Timothy Leary was so enthusiastic about psychedelics that he recklessly popularized them, leading people to question authority and think for themselves. Young people started to drop out of college, protest the Vietnam War, start communes. Damn that Leary! Why he even showed in Federal Court that the laws against marijuana were unconstitutional. So in 1970 Richard Nixon’s Congress passed the Controlled Substance Act. A comprehensive legislation that categorized drugs according to their medical use and potential for abuse; and created the Drug Enforcement Agency. And what did that do? It put a screeching halt to the hundreds of clinical studies with psychedelics that were being performed in the US, many that showed the remarkable curative and heuristic effects of psychedelics, and launched a tremendous underground industry of psychedelics. The CSA just stopped the judicious scientific use by researchers committed to obeying the law and advanced the comparatively careless or recreational use Exactly the opposite of what any sane person would expect from their drug policy.

For 50 years we’ve been subjected to this totally dysfunctional legislation. Why? Almost everyone, I dare say, who has taken a psychedelic drug with the appropriate care knows their exceptional, unique value and potentially curative effects. Why are we letting such an irrational policy continue to squander their value?

Freedom of Religion?

I am writing this evening at my residence near Concord, Massachusetts, just a few miles from the Old North Bridge, where “the shot heard ‘round the world” started the American revolution; a war that resulted in the birth of America, a country originally founded by pilgrims seeking religious freedom. The First Amendment to the US Constitution states:

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof….”

My career as a scholar of psychedelic drugs began in 1978 while a student at Columbia University, in a course on the History of Indian Buddhism. There I learned that the oldest body of writings of Indian religion is known as the Rig Veda. The Rig Veda is a collection of hymns about Soma. Soma was a plant, a God, and a drink that caused visions about the nature of universe. Something happened, no one knows what, to cause soma to vanish, so these ancient seers had to devise other ways to produce visions and attain ecstatic states, which gave rise to meditation, yoga, and the other ecstatic practices of Indian religion.

For centuries historians had wondered what was this soma. Until finally, in 1968, a Wall Street Banker named Gordon Wasson came up with the idea, still widely accepted, that soma was a hallucinogenic mushroom. Wasson further theorized in a monumental paper published by Harvard University that psychedelic mushrooms could well be responsible for not just Vedic religion, but the origin of the religious impulse of homo sapiens. While this theory may well seem outrageous to someone who has not tried psychedelic mushrooms, it makes perfect sense to someone who has. The point I want to make here is that it is against the law in America to pursue this question phenomenologically. This is in spite of the modern proof from controlled scientific experiments, such as the famed Good Friday Experiment, conducted by Harvard Divinity Student Walter Panhke, MD, and confirmed in more recent studies at Johns Hopkins, that mushroom induced mystical experiences are indistinguishable from accounts of the most renowned mystics in the history of religion. And they provide life changing experiences for those who have them. So the Controlled Substance Act, that severely punishes a person for possessing these kinds of mushrooms, is clearly a violation of the First Amendment.

I’m going to stop here for the evening. See if anyone is listening. I’m going to enjoy your comments, your feedback. There is of course, a lot more to say about this.

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Greetings everyone, and welcome to my brand new Substack. I’m expanding my presence on social media to share with you my thoughts about the ancient and modern history of psychedelic drugs, and the psychedelic drug renaissance that is currently surging through society. Yes, enormous subjects, ones that I have developed a perspective on over the last forty years of study, research, scholarship, and personal investigation. I’ve published three books and presently writing a fourth: a memoir of my travels through the altered states of America. This journey includes close personal working relationships with many of the most significant actors who have brought this subject to modern attention beginning in the 1940s, since the introduction of LSD by Albert Hofmann, the famed Swiss chemist, who treated me like his grandson in the years I knew him, from 1983 to his death in 2006. I also worked closely with Stanislav Grof, was his intern and assistant in workshops at Esalen in the early 1980s. Frank Barron, the man who turned on Timothy Leary and started the Harvard Psilocybin Project with him, really set me on this path, and was my mentor for 20 years. He introduced me to Timothy Leary in 1981, when I was 24 years old. It was Frank who urged me to start the psychedelic renaissance. The time had come, he thought, after the turbulent 60s, to reopen the subject to scientific and metapsychiatric investigations, wiser from the mistakes of the first go around, that he, among others, instigated. In these forty years I’ve been a student, a conference organizer, a scholar, researcher. I’ve conducted field work in Peru, taking cancer patients to be treated by indigenous curanderos. I’ve taught at the graduate and undergraduate level. During my graduate school years at the Divinity School of the University of Chicago I conducted quasi formal research into the phenomenology of MDMA that I produced in laboratories of my creation. Before this magic substance was named Ecstasy and became illegal, my project turned on many hundreds of people, from all walks of life: celebrities, students, professors, healers, artists. Though many people now praise US government and the hard work of the enterprising Rick Doblin and his MAPS organization, I see this subject much differently, as I will explain in the many pages to follow. I am just kinda quickly beginning this Substack on this chilly Saturday morning outside of Boston, where I now reside, before a podcast with Ryan Sprague, to continue the conversations we’ve begun. You may also be interested in my webpage: Alteredstatesofamerica.net.

Thanks for your attention. Looking forward to hearing your thoughts too.

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