AN INTERVIEW WITH MYRON STOLAROFF
BY ROBERT FORTE
RF: I’m glad that we are going to have this conversation about Tim. Your perspective on what was going on with him at that time is very important in the process to resuscitate the potential of psychedelic drugs. Leary was so popular that many people associate LSD with his style, his exuberance, and in that process a great deal’s been lost.
MS: I think it’s a question of being thorough, so as to disclose all aspects of the situation. Most of us who have honestly pursued the investigation of psychedelics think that one of the real tragedies of our time is that such an extraordinarily valuable and necessary tool as LSD should be held in such disrepute. And Tim certainly understood that as well.
RF: To what extent do you think that this disrepute is caused by Timothy?
MS: I think as far as the scientific community is concerned, he really scared them, and if you followed the exchange of letters with Ralph Metzner and myself that was published in Gnosis [winter 1993, spring 1994, and summer 1994], and also the documentation that I pointed out in Storming Heaven, I don’t think there’s any question of what Tim was trying to do. He made it very clear to me personally he thought psychedelics weren’t going to be accepted by our current society, especially by our current mainstream scientists, who haven’t even accepted the transpersonal aspects of the human being. Therefore he wanted to publicize psychedelics and set up a national network for them to be supplied. His goal was to turn on the country.
Tim appreciated the potential of human beings very much. I think he was very aware of the investment we have in our conditioning that results in the establishment of a kind of self-interest that interferes with clear perception. And he recognized psychedelics as a powerful tool to cut through such conditioning, to bring a person to direct understanding of their own true nature, and the nature of the universe. This is probably the most valuable tool that one could have. I think he was committed to it being understood and accepted. In that regard he and I are very much in alignment.
He and his associates wanted to spread the word. They wanted to make it possible for everyone to have the LSD experience. In their published announcement of their organization, the International Federation of Internal Freedom, they acknowledged this would have to be approved by the FDA. However, the FDA didn’t approve it. The FDA wouldn’t allow LSD to be supplied to groups like this. So Tim’s private agenda was to find ways to have these groups form around the country and to make sure they had supplies of LSD. A lot of this is beyond my direct knowledge but some of it is not. They worked with people who manufactured black-market LSD and had means of distribution. So people around the country began to have supplies and were able to have the experience. I believe that a huge bulk of this was engineered by Tim and his associates. That was his plan. That’s what he announced to me that morning when I visited him in Cambridge to invite him to get off our advisory board. He told me that’s what he wanted to do—turn everybody on. He was convinced that all you had to do was to take LSD and move into transpersonal areas. Unfortunately its only true for healthy-minded people. Ones who are not can have difficult times with this. That was the problem of his whole approach to setting up a national network for the purposes of turning on the country.
RF: You can see from some of your correspondence at that time there was a spirit of camaraderie. You offered to supply him with LSD, according to this letter that I have here dated January 8, 1963.
MS: [laughs] That’s quite a letter. I’m amazed I don’t have a copy in my file.
RF: You’re offering to provide them with the material and you’re working together.
MS: Yes. And of course, I might say that one of their objectives was to obtain drugs and to distribute them in conformance with existing laws to research groups. So the letter I wrote is consistent with that. We very definitely needed approval of the FDA. But the FDA made it clear that approval was not forthcoming for the kind of thing Tim wanted to do. In fact they were extremely adamant about it. So in a way that offer is kind of hypothetical—although it’s true. If he’d gotten approval we could’ve gone ahead with what I said in the letter.
RF: Let’s back up a little bit. Tell us about the International Foundation for Advanced Study. How did that come to be? How did you get interested in the subject of psychedelics and why did you start the International Foundation for Advanced Study?
MS: Well, I won’t repeat a lot of material that you can get right out of my book: Thanatos to Eros: Thirty-Five Years of Psychedelic Exploration. To be brief, I had my first spiritual awakening through participating in the Sequoia Seminar, and that got me in touch with Gerald Heard. We sponsored a couple of lectures of his in Palo Alto. I was extraordinarily taken by him, so I spent a two-week seminar with him once at our Sequoia Seminar Lodge up in the mountains. He was one of the great human beings on the planet—totally, absolutely fascinating. I began to visit him whenever I was in L.A. In one of these visits he told me about LSD. I was utterly amazed. First of all, since he was such an outstanding mystic, I didn’t know why he needed to take LSD, but he assured me that it had enormous potential. It created vast openings of the mind that led to an understanding of spiritual realities and it was very valuable.
RF: What year was this?
MS: Probably early 1955.
RF: That was the first you’d heard of LSD?
MS: Yes. I asked him how he got in touch with it. He told me about Hubbard coming down from Canada and administering it to both him and Aldous Huxley.
RF: Gerald Heard really started a lot of fires. Huston Smith says his first opening came from reading one of Gerald Heard’s books.
MS: As a matter of fact, one of my spiritual awakenings came from reading his Preface to Prayer. Reading that book led to a spontaneous experience where I awakened into a brilliant, overwhelmingly glorious light. It was very brief but I’d never experienced anything like it in my life. It had quite an impact.
RF: You were coming at this from a field that’s not normally associated with mysticism. Am I correct that you were an electrical engineer?
MS: I was an engineer, but I spent a number of years with this Sequoia Seminar. At the time we’re talking about I had been with them four or five years and I was on the planning committee. I’d already had a spontaneous mystical experience with them, so I was deeply into meditation and the study of mysticism. I was reading everything I could get my hands on. And Gerald’s books were quite an opening; but Preface to Prayer was the outstanding one for me.
RF: The International Foundation for Advanced Study was one of the first institutes set up to explore the application of psychedelic drugs to creative problem solving, personal growth, and to psychotherapy. What were some of the things you were doing there?
MS: Well, I’m not sure how accurate your statement is. At that particular time I don’t know if any real work was going on in creativity. I was totally unfamiliar with the work in Europe until I went to visit Hofmann in 1963, which led me to Leurner in Germany and then to Sandison in England, who Hofmann said were the two best investigators. But prior to that time, there was a lot of work done in Canada by Humphry Osmond in Weyburn, and Abram Hoffer in Saskatoon. And the two of them got most all of the Canadian funds for work in the field of mental health research. Al Hubbard was very close with them in that work. Then Hubbard joined J. Ross MacLean who had a small hospital just outside of Vancouver. It was a mental hospital, and they started using LSD there as a treatment for alcoholism. And it was open to people who wanted to come and have the experience. They worked there for several years together. After Hubbard left, MacLean kept the work going for several years. Then Hubbard decided to be independent of MacLean and set up a separate treatment room in Vancouver with a psychiatrist. I was going up and visiting frequently and we were all learning. We had the great vision of setting up LSD clinics all over the world. The next place to start was Menlo Park, where I set up a nonprofit corporation and a clinic after I resigned from AMPEX. We had two separate session rooms. We got Charles Savage as medical director and Dr. John Sherwood to be the immediate medical supervisor and we started to conduct sessions there, which we did from 1961 to 1965.
We started that with Sherwood. Hubbard talked Savage into being our medical director after we’d been operating a few months. And then Savage wanted to do research, so he put together a team of Robert Mogar, who was a professor of psychology at San Francisco State College, Willis Harman, Professor of Engineering at Stanford, and James Fadiman, a psychologist. Those were the three main ones. Quite a bit down the line Bob McKim from Stanford joined. He was very interested in creativity research.
RF: You keep using the word “clinic,” but your work was not solely clinical. It wasn’t only for treatment.
MS: It was open to the public. It was open to anyone who wanted to have the experience. It became more and more treatment-oriented as time went on, because as the adverse publicity grew, people became more and more resistant to coming. The people that did come were the more desperate ones so our client group had more and more pathology as time went on. But Savage was the one that made the decision on whether or not they were acceptable to the program.
RF: This is a different program than what was going on in Palo Alto with the VA hospital, where Ken Kesey and Allen Ginsberg turned on.
MS: Oh that was almost purely a pharmacological experiment. They were giving people different drugs just to see what happened. As a matter of fact, Leo Hollister, who was in charge of the Veterans hospital investigation, was very opposed to our operation. He had no understanding of what these things really do. He deeply resented the mystical aspects, and he disliked Hubbard.
RF: There have been allegations that this was under the auspices of the American CIA.
MS: It could have been. Who knows what their contracts were? Hollister was their kind of man. Then there was another group in Palo Alto. You see, the Palo Alto clinic was an enormously famous clinic because the director was Russell Lee. He’s the one that’s given credit for single-handedly getting Medicare accomplished.
Theirs was a regular clinic that treated many thousands of patients. As a part of it, they set up a foundation for scientific investigation, I think called the Palo Alto Research Center, that was headed by a physician named Jackson, and they did some work with LSD for a while. They administered to about a dozen psychiatrists and psychologists. Karl Pribram turned on there. Out of the twelve I think he had the best experience. Gregory Bateson was involved with them as well. A lot of them had horrible experiences. That’s what contributed a lot to the psychotomimetic label—these psychiatrists taking it and having horrible times. Are you familiar with Abram Hoffer’s quote? “The people who have the worst time with psychedelics are (1) ministers, (2) psychiatrists, and (3) psychologists.” These are the ones with the greatest investments in their status.
RF: When you had your first LSD experience and decided to start the clinic in Menlo Park, what was your vision? What was your dream of what LSD and the other psychedelics could be for our society?
MS: I pronounced that LSD was the greatest discovery man had ever made. It has such enormous potential because the mind is infinite. LSD opens up the resources of the mind. Since the mind is the most important aspect of the human being, what could possibly be more important than a drug that revealed the awesome, infinite potential that lies within? Soon after my first experience, I had no doubt I was going to spend the rest of my life researching psychedelics: promulgating understanding and the development of the potential of psychedelics. That came as a result of my first experience in April of 1956. I didn’t have a really good opening until 1959, and that’s when I discovered that I truly was God. The Buddhists particularly don’t like looking at it that way, but that’s how I experienced it.
RF: That’s right around the time that Tim had his first awakening. Tim took it first in 1960, in the summer. When was the first time you met Timothy and what were your impressions?
MS: Well, I’ll prologue this by saying that we met Dick Alpert first. He was in Palo Alto. He knew people at Stanford, among them Jim Fadiman, who arranged our meeting. Jim knew the group back there in Cambridge and said a lot of good things about them. So we met with Dick Alpert and were very impressed. Later, Al Hubbard went to visit them at Harvard and he came back and said, “Myron, we’ve got to have Leary and Hollingshead on our advisory board.” I was very reluctant to put anybody on that I hadn’t met so I didn’t do anything about it. Then Tim came to visit—I think it was in the spring of ’62—and I was very taken with him. He was extremely charismatic, very bright, very personable. We had a really good time together. I won’t go into details here, but I went up to San Francisco and met him and we spent some time together. After that I had no hesitation about putting him on the board, but I never found out anything to encourage me to put Hollingshead on. Tim and I had a very genial relationship.
RF: So when did your relationship start to go sour?
MS: I wouldn’t say it ever went sour.
RF: Well, thank you for clearing that up, because you can tell even in this letter where you chastise him, it’s done with such a loving tone.
MS: No, I never was down on Tim. I regretted a lot of things that he did. I thought that he was extremely unwise. Abram Hoffer and I went to a conference in San Francisco in the summer of 1966. Leary was tremendously popular. I remember he got up on the stage wearing a white blazer and pants with vertical white and red alternating stripes. He made an appealing presentation—his usual way of telling half-truths and getting people stimulated without discussing the adverse side of things—and everybody in the audience yelled and cheered. Hoffer and I were standing together and Hoffer said, “You know, we hate to see this kind of promotion because there’s so much you need to understand before you embark on using these things, but who are we to judge? It may take forty years before we know whether Tim is an absolute hero or whether he brought everything tumbling down.” I thought that was very open-minded of Abram and I never forgot it.
RF: Well, Myron, that’s one of the main questions I want this book to address. You know as well as I that psychedelic drugs have been most forcibly repressed in Western Christian civilization for a long, long time, for two thousand years. Whenever the European colonialists found them in Mexico or anywhere else in the New World, they dominated those cultures and forbade the use of them. They were almost totally eliminated from history until Wasson and a few people started to do their work. Eventually this knowledge began to accrue. There was bound to be resistance by the establishment to these substances, so maybe Tim’s style was exactly what was needed to make sure the cat didn’t get back in the bag.
MS: Perhaps. Time will tell. There is no question in my mind that Tim is largely responsible for terminating legitimate psychedelic research in America, and through our example and persuasion, throughout the world. On the other hand, hundreds of thousands of individuals have had psychedelic experiences through his leadership. Tim will have succeeded if sufficient numbers of persons who have taken psychedelics achieve enough wisdom and responsibility to restore scientific research and obtain public recognition of the value and potential of psychedelics. Psychedelics are powerful. They are intense. It’s now clear how you have to approach them and that was totally misunderstood in our culture. You see, one of the things that becomes clear with time, and a point that I wish to emphasize from now on, is that in order to take these substances for benefit, you have to be honest. And if you look at how our culture is going, the level of dishonesty has been growing steadily. Here we are, a nation with a five trillion dollar debt. What does that tell you about honesty? What does it tell you about morality? Look at what our politicians are willing to say to get elected. Look at the abysmal, politically driven War on Drugs that is dismembering our profoundly wise constitution. Look at our media and the way they handle news. So here’s a substance that requires honesty and you look at the level of honesty in our society. Of course they don’t want to embrace it. Everybody thinks that they’re making the right choices and doing the right thing. Who wants to be shown differently? Only a very honest person and one who is sincerely interested in being a true scientist or true investigator or is truly invested in his or her own personal growth.
RF: I think that you just gave Tim a fantastic compliment. Is that true?
MS: Well, I think he did understand the bullshit. But he did not come from the position of unconditional love. Because he was excited I think by the confrontation. He did a lot to create confrontation and keep it going. If you realize that people are frightened, you have to put them at ease. If they perceive these things as dangerous and they’re very reluctant to face the truth, you have to comfort them. You have to make them comfortable until they’re willing to objectively look at the data and then make their own decision. He didn’t do any of those things. He flaunted it. That was his great error. That’s what produced all the commotion.
RF: So your group and Tim’s group had very different ways of dealing with the resistance. Your way was going to be work through science, to systematically demonstrate the positive or negative aspects of the drugs. Tim wanted to offer them to the wind and trust the great evolutionary current.
MS: As a matter of fact, when I visited him and he explained his program to me—and this was a few days before I wrote the letter excerpted in Storming Heaven—we made an agreement. He said to me that our institutions are too encrusted, they’re too invested, their too solidified to ever accept something like this. I said, “Tim, the only way you can go is to win over our institutions, because society is not going to go against the institutions.” He said, “Myron, you go ahead, you do the scientific work, go ahead and do the conventional thing of winning the institutions over and having it come through appropriate developments, and I’ll do the things to shake them up.” Fifteen years later when we had a reunion with Hubbard, Leary, and many others, at Oscar Janiger’s, I said to Tim: “When we made this agreement, you said you’d shake them up, but I didn’t know you were going to hit them over the head with a baseball bat!” He said “I don’t like your metaphor.” But it’s true. My metaphor was accurate.
RF: So what about now, Myron? We now have a culture where literally millions of people have tasted the fruits of psychedelic experience and we have the most draconian laws prohibiting them. Do you think that you could have done it differently? Do you think you could’ve sidestepped the resistance and enabled as many people to benefit from these drugs?
MS: Well, you know, the question is meaningless because we could only do what we have the understanding and awareness to do. Back in the sixties, I was a highly neurotic person. I happened to have some natural instinct for sitting in sessions with people, but my God, it’s taken me the last several decades to develop some maturity and wisdom. You can’t exercise wisdom before you have it. Now if I took today’s wisdom back to the 1960s, I think we would have been much more articulate in dealing with the public, dealing with reporters, the whole approach. Unfortunately you just can’t go back and start over. We have to deal with the current situation. We have to take the wisdom we’ve gathered and the understanding, realize the enormous fear people have of these substances, realize the ignorance that prevails, realize that there are a lot of people who benefit from the current perception of psychedelics being dangerous and toxic.
RF: Who are they?
MS: Number one, the psychiatric profession. If they really understood how effective psychedelics can be in therapy, these agents would be an enormous threat to them, unless they were willing to undergo the experiences themselves, advance their own personal being, and learn how to use them. In this field, any really knowledgeable good-hearted person can be of considerably more help to another person than many psychiatrists. Even perhaps with very sick people. There’s so much to be learned to properly use these things. But anyhow, that’s where a lot of powerful resistance is—the psychiatric profession, because I think they perceive it as a real threat.
The March 1993 issue of Psychiatric Annals was devoted to psychedelics. There wasn’t a single article in there by anyone who knew much about the proper use of psychedelics. They kept repeating over and over again all the toxic problems, the abuse problems and so on. And that is, I think, an accurate picture of the psychiatric community’s regard for these drugs.
RF: I conducted a survey of the American Psychiatric Association back in 1984 that measured psychiatrist’s attitudes toward psychedelic drugs. First I measured how much they knew about them personally and in terms of the literature, and then I asked them to rate the perceived potential of their judicious exploration. The first question was, had you ever taken a psychedelic drug? Respondents self-rated their expertise. And sure enough, just as you’re saying, there’s no informed opposition. The only people within the psychiatric profession who dismiss the significance of psychedelic drugs were the ones who, by their own admission, didn’t know anything about them. All they knew was from sources in the popular media. Psychiatrists who had taken them, or who had bothered to read the research literature, usually predicted immense possibilities in fields as diverse as neurology and religion.
MS: Well, if one were a genuine psychiatrist and heard that something made it possible to open the mind and get into one’s own unconscious, enabling examination of one’s own shadow material and unconscious values, goals, anger, pain, guilt and so on, my God, wouldn’t they be interested? One might be skeptical, but how could you not be interested?
RF: Well, this is what brings us back to Tim now and maybe why he decided to just do an end run around the psychiatric profession.
MS: Well, I get back to Hoffer’s quote. It may have been necessary for someone like Tim to really shake the boat. Without him we would not have nearly as many people with an understanding of psychedelics. So in a way he did a great service. Probably a few million people know the experience because of him. The unanswered question is: What will be the outcome of the people who have had the experience because of him? We do know that there are areas where there have been major contributions. I think everybody agrees that the computer field has proliferated because of these people. I am told on pretty good authority that practically every leading scientist today in that particular field is an acid head. There’s no way to verify this because of the illegality. No one will admit it, but yet it’s logical. Because if you learn how to use these tools, they’re so valuable, they open up so much, they make so much more possible, how could you not use them, law or no law? There are certainly wise people who have been introduced through Leary’s efforts who are making headway. On the other hand, look where we stand. Jeremy Tarcher wished to sponsor a book with interviews of fifty people with name recognition who were willing to say that they owed a lot to psychedelics. Charlie Grob was in charge of the project. He couldn’t get anybody willing to say public that they had taken psychedelics. Kary Mullis is one of the few who’s been wide open.
RF: I quote him in the introduction to Entheogens and the Future of Religion. He said, “I think I may have been stupid in some respects if it weren’t for my psychedelic experiences.” He won the Nobel Prize. But remember when he was going to testify in the O.J. Simpson trial, the prosecutors were going to knock his testimony because he admitted to using acid, as if that discredited his genius.
MS: But he didn’t mind saying anything. I went up to him at the Entheobotany Conference in San Francisco in October 1996 and told him about the book. He gave me his card and told me to get in touch with him, but later he wouldn’t respond. Perhaps because he was writing his own book, which is now out. But he hasn’t hesitated to declare himself in public. I contacted others as well. I was told that anybody would be an idiot to admit in today’s culture that they used psychedelics.
RF: Or they’d be honest and courageous.
MS: Now that’s what I tried to say. I said it’s time to stand up and be counted. How long are we going to be pushed around by this?
RF: I spoke with Huston Smith about this very point. He is a little reluctant to speak favorably about psychedelics. Huston Smith is one of the most dignified and prestigious scholars in the world, and he’s afraid for his reputation. That’s how subversive this subject is.
MS: He’s already written about it.
RF: Yes, he has. But he writes about it very carefully, and is more cautious now because he feels like he’s just hitting his stride.
MS: Well, that’s great. Now you see you have to take into account another thing, Bob. I don’t have many contacts—we’re too isolated here—but I have a little bit of evidence that, as people get older, the experiences get more uncomfortable and they abandon them. At the Vallombrosa Psychoactive Sacraments conference in 1995, several of the old-timers doubted that psychedelics are valuable on an ongoing basis. They all admit they’re great openers and great initiators, but they imply that you then have to go on to other means of development. There was a bit of sharing of information that perhaps the experiences do get uncomfortable. I personally know people who stopped using them because the experiences are so uncomfortable. One prominent psychologist thinks that the body doesn’t process them as you get older. In my own experience, that’s not true. I think if you keep on using them, certain priciples need to be taken into account.
First of all, these sacraments, as I prefer to call them, are fantastic privileges. It is an undescribable grace, an undescribable privilege. And to not fully appreciate the experiences and act accordingly begins to create negative karma. And if you keep on using them, seeking the positive effects and not making the indicated changes in your life or not taking on the responsibility for the awareness that you have gained, I think that our inner awareness perceives a violation, which results in discomfort. I say this based on my own personal investigations, because it’s true that for me the experiences have gotten far more uncomfortable as I’ve gotten older, but that’s because I’m trying to do more with them. And almost every one turns out better than the last one. I don’t think that you can be fully in heaven without being totally in hell. It’s like Gibran’s section on love in The Prophet. “If you want only love’s pleasures and love’s peace, then get up from life’s threshing floor, go out into the seasonless world and laugh, but not all of your laughter, and cry, but not all of your tears.” I’d like to get together with other elders and share this, because I may be underestimating the amount of grace that’s available. But I have checked this out with several very serious searchers. And of course we have two outstanding people very outspoken on this, one is Kazantzakis in his Saviors of God, the other is Andrew Harvey in The Way of Passion.
RF: Carl Jung said, “You can’t see light without darkness, hear silence without noise, attain wisdom without foolishness. The experience of holiness may well be the most painful of all.”
MS: That’s a beautiful statement. It’s a beautiful statement and unfortunately, you see, there’s not enough information being disseminated, so the people using these substances today are not aware of it and most of them want to avoid discomfort, which really puts a lid on their growth.
RF: This is one of the valid criticisms of Timothy. He was so positive and ebullient in his message that he overlooked the importance of confronting the shadow.
MS: Yes, and he didn’t confront his own shadow. So that’s part of the problem. I think somebody who really wants to be a charismatic figure and a model for people has an enormous responsibility to be honest. To be tremendously honest and committed to their own growth and development so that their own blind spots don’t get projected out onto others. It’s an enormous responsibility.
RF: Well, I watched Timothy very closely. As you know I was with him a lot in the last four or five months of his life to try to get a sense of the man’s relative contentment, you know, and there were some times when he just appeared the most sparkly kind of Zen master, and other times he was such a twisted and tormented and pained man. And he was, I think right up till the very end of his life, he was wondering himself if he’d done humanity a great service or if he set back the advance of knowledge of these sacred magical drugs. I don’t think he knew.
MS: That’s fascinating. Well, I don’t think any of us do yet. It’s a pretty fair balance. An awful lot of good was done. An awful lot of harm was done. And it remains to be seen. I still stand by my statement to Ralph Metzner in the letter in Gnosis that the final word will be to see how many sincerely pick up the torch and contribute. Unfortunately the signs are not good. None of the organizations committed to understanding psychedelics except for MAPS, through Rick Doblin, has yet done a good job. The rest of us have had a hard time raising money.
RF: Timothy was penniless when he died.
MS: Yeah. But the thing is, you know, if there are a couple million people who have benefited from these experiences, suppose they all kicked in . . .
RF: A dollar.
MS: I was going to say ten or twenty. But suppose they did? We’d have funds for research, we’d be able to do a number of educational projects. There’s something strange about the niggardliness. Is the vision real?
RF: This is another image from Gerald Heard via Huston: that it’s by necessity that the psychedelic drugs remain underground. The image that Gerald gave to Houston was like a ball floating in a lake. Half of it is always underwater. And that as soon as it comes up it’s going to fall back down. That by necessity these are esoteric devices and they have to remain underground.
MS: I don’t agree with that, and neither does the Dalai Lama. Look what’s happened in Tibetan Buddhism. If you go back before 1985, I think it’s roughly that time, all the esoteric teachings were kept secret for the adepts. But the Dalai Lama, as I understand it—I don’t have direct knowledge here, but as I understand it—feels the world is in such shape that anything that can help should be released. And in the last ten to twelve years a lot of these sacred texts are being translated and released. Okay, it’s going to fall on a lot of deaf ears, but it’s going to fall on some good ears.
RF: Yes. Again I think of Timothy somehow perceiving that this was a time when this most protected religious secret be spread far and wide.
MS: And you know there’s another interesting book, The Jew and the Lotus, where a bunch of Jewish people got together with the Dalai Lama. It’s really a critique of Judaism. One of the things they discovered after learning more about Buddhism and the esoteric side of it was in taking a look at their own religion where the esoteric side is the Kabbalah. Did you know that the Kabbalah is restricted from the general Jewish population? The average Jew in the average congregation doesn’t know anything about the Kabbalah. And they realized what a mistake this was. Sure, it would be great if you could get everyone who was exposed to dedicate themselves to the value of the privilege and earnestly commit themselves to the study. But if you are unwilling to make it available because of possible misuse, there will be a lot of people you miss because they don’t even know about it. And these things weed themselves out. The ones who are sincere will advance. If you’re not sincere it catches up with you and bites you.
RF: There are at least two different ways of looking at why there has been secrecy. One is that things like the Kabbalah had been kept from the Jewish people because it was the Jewish Orthodoxy that was trying to preserve their own power. On the other hand, these teachings may have been kept secret because if they were exposed outside of just the right context, then they would lose their power. On one hand it’s wise to protect secret teachings. On the other, it’s political control.
MS: The real problem you face is that you don’t want to dissipate valuable things. This is what happened to LSD. It’s what happened to MDMA. We have a living example of what happens if you try to spread it out without instruction, without understanding, just indiscriminately. And I think there are people who feel that’s the way. Tim obviously felt strongly, let anybody use it. It will be self-adjusting. In due time those who abuse it will lose interest in it, which according to Jerome Beck’s studies happens with MDMA. It’s a way to go, but if you don’t want to pay the price resulting from ignorance, then let’s at least be able to publish some guidelines and key factors that are important to know before people experiment with these substances.
RF: When the government took away your permissions and your research supplies, why didn’t anybody challenge them? Why didn’t you or Hubbard or Janiger or Cohen and everybody else say, “Wait a second, these are valuable scientific instruments. You can’t punish us because of some nonscientific social activism over here”?
MS: I don’t know. When I go back and feel myself in that situation, I think we all viewed the government as having great power and we viewed ourselves as having very little power. It looked hopeless. Today I would be very outspoken. I would have press conferences. I’d probably do a lot. I mean it’s an opportunity to educate. But back in those days we didn’t feel that at all. We felt that the whole medical profession in our area was against us. So we didn’t feel we had the strength or the power to do anything about it.
RF: But now you feel that you would’ve had the strength and the power?
MS: Well, I feel I personally do. Of course you know I’m old enough that I don’t care what happens to me personally anymore. When you’re young, when you have a career ahead of you, you have to be more careful. But also I have a much greater understanding of why society is doing what it’s doing, and a much greater understanding, I think and hope, of knowing the right things to say. You see, the very first thing to say is this issue of honesty. Let’s face it folks, this is for honest people. Let’s hope there’s quite a few out there.