INTRODUCTION

73 Days

Shortly after beginning my career as a university professor in northeastern Ohio, I made a decision that changed the course of my life. Between 1979 and 1999, I chose to take LSD seventy-three times in carefully planned, therapeutically structured sessions. I did this to explore my mind and the mind of the universe as deeply and systematically as I could. This book is about what happened on those seventy-three days and why it matters.

From ancient times, men and women have gathered under the night sky and taken substances that helped them commune with their inner being and with the life that runs through all things. They have sat in prayer and silence, seeking healing and guidance so that they could return to their lives better people and more aligned with the deeper currents of life. Because these substances opened them to the spiritual dimension of existence, they were called “sacred.” Because they healed the wound of forgetting who and what we truly are, they were called “medicines.” From before written history began, the sacred medicine path has been one of many spiritual paths human beings have taken to find themselves, each other, and the Divine.

In my corner of the planet, however, most of these medicines were made illegal in 1970. Officially classified as hallucinogens, they were declared to have no medical or therapeutic value. The powerful visions unleashed by them were held to be distortions of reality and therefore to have no philosophical value. When the Controlled Substances Act was passed, psychedelics became a closed door, not only to psychotherapists but to philosophers as well.

Fast-forward to 2014, a watershed year in the return of psychedelics to respectable scientific and intellectual inquiry. Leading up to that year, a handful of heroic studies had been published on the therapeutic uses of MDMA, psilocybin, LSD, and ibogaine to treat post-traumatic stress disorder, drug addiction, and cancer-caused depression. Newspapers and magazines began reporting these studies, frequently citing the pioneering efforts of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) to reopen psychedelic research as a legitimate field of scientific inquiry. Then in February of 2014, Scientific American published an historic editorial with the title “End the Ban on Psychoactive Drug Research.” The tagline read: “It’s time to let scientists study whether LSD, marijuana and ecstasy can ease psychiatric disorders.” That same year two important books on psychedelics were published. The first was Acid Test by the award-winning journalist Tom Shroder, describing the resurgence of research on psychedelic therapy and the lives being healed. The second was Seeking the Sacred with Psychoactive Substances, a two-volume anthology on the spiritual uses of psychedelics through history, edited by the psychologist and theologian J. Harold Ellens. Soon two more important books on the renaissance of psychedelic research would follow: William Richards’s Sacred Knowledge (2016) and Michael Pollan’s bestseller How to Change Your Mind (2018).

Clearly, a cultural pivot is taking place around psychedelics. Researchers at Harvard University, Johns Hopkins University, UCLA, New York University, University of Wisconsin, the University of New Mexico, and the University of Alabama are now doing legally sanctioned research into the therapeutic potential of psychedelics. Psychedelic research is also underway in England, Canada, Germany, Switzerland, Israel, Spain, Mexico, and New Zealand. In San Francisco, the California Institute of Integral Studies has established the Center for Psychedelic Therapy and Research to train the next generation of certified psychedelic researchers. In Brazil, psychologists have documented the positive social impact that ayahuasca has had in the churches of Santo Daime and União de Vegetal. The MAPS Psychedelic Science conference in 2017 drew a record 2,700 attendees. As science slowly replaces politics as the arbiter of whether psychedelics have therapeutic value, we appear to be slowly rejoining our ancestors under the night sky, replicating this ancient path in the modern therapist’s office.

If this trend continues, it will only be a matter of time before we document what many early psychedelic researchers discovered decades ago—that in addition to healing the psychological wounds of life, these substances have a remarkable capacity to initiate us into a deeper experience of the universe itself. We are on the verge of rediscovering that psychedelics have not only great therapeutic value, they also have great philosophical value.

I was trained as a philosopher of religion, and it is primarily the philosophical significance of psychedelics that has fascinated me, namely, their capacity to break through the sensory barrier and open us to the deeper landscape of consciousness. My interest in psychedelics began in 1978, when I first read Stanislav Grof’s Realms of the Human Unconscious. I was twenty-nine years old, fresh out of graduate school, and looking for where to take my research now that my dissertation was finished. When I read Grof’s book, I immediately saw the relevance of his work to core questions I had been trained to ask as a philosopher, questions about whether life has meaning and purpose, whether human beings survive death, and whether there is a conscious intelligence operating in and through the universe. In that book, Stan distilled decades of clinical research involving hundreds of subjects and thousands of psychedelic sessions. In one reading, he convinced me that when LSD is taken in a therapeutically structured setting, it can be safely used to explore our consciousness with beneficial results. In addition, he suggested that in this setting we could come to know not only our own mind but also the mind of the universe itself. It was the latter claim that riveted my attention. I simply had to see what this substance might teach me about our universe.

The problem, of course, was that my culture had just made psychedelics illegal. I could not keep the job I loved or remain part of the academic community if I worked openly with psychedelics. Harvard had demonstrated this when it had fired Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert in 1963. By 1970, the era of active psychedelic research was over. Faced with these circumstances, I made a difficult choice. I decided to learn Grof’s methods for working therapeutically with LSD and use them to privately explore my own consciousness.

To do this, a large part of my life had to go underground. In my public life, I continued my work as a professor in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Youngstown State University, doing the things that professors usually do. I taught courses, served on committees, published, and in time came to be regarded as a reasonably valuable member of my community, at least as these things are measured by grants, awards, and friendships. Meanwhile, in my personal life I stepped into a circle of secrecy and began an intense inner journey that ended up lasting twenty years.

I retired from my university in 2011 after thirty-three years of service. My entire career had taken place between the time when psychedelics had been made illegal and when Scientific American called for lifting their ban. If I had waited for my country to reclaim these substances, as it now appears to be doing, I would have missed an opportunity that comes around only once in a lifetime. I simply could not let this chance pass me by. Given the legal issues surrounding LSD, it is only now, years after ending my long self-experiment and retiring from active university service, that I am finally free to discuss my psychedelic work openly.

I hope that when psychedelics have been fully restored to respectable public discourse, people will understand the choice that I made in 1979. I hope the fact that I have lived a socially responsible and engaged life will give me a small measure of credibility when I tell the unusual story that follows. I hope readers will see that the powerful states of consciousness that psychedelics can unleash can be integrated into a busy householder’s life. And last, I hope that people who have had frightening experiences with psychedelics will find strength in learning that one can enter terrifying experiential domains and return unharmed, even strengthened.

Legally sanctioned research on psychedelics has now resumed, but it will likely be years before researchers will be allowed to explore the deeper dimensions of consciousness that have occupied me all my adult life. At the present time, psychedelic research is focused on healing the personal psyche and exploring the neurological and biochemical pathways that psychedelics activate. These are important steps in reclaiming these powerful agents, but as Grof and other early researchers demonstrated decades ago, healing the wounds of the personal psyche is only the first stage of a much longer journey. As the personal psyche falls away, a deeper horizon emerges. I had to find out what I could discover there and how far I could push this new frontier.

I came to this work as a psychedelic neophyte and deeply skeptical of the transcendent. I was raised in the Deep South, went to a Catholic high school, and studied theology at the University of Notre Dame. The psychedelic ’60s passed me by entirely. As I broadened my intellectual horizons at Cambridge University and then Brown University, the furthest I got psychedelically was smoking a little grass. Despite my early religious roots, by the time I finished graduate school, I was an atheistically inclined agnostic, well versed in the rise of science and the eclipse of religion in the modern mind. Essentially, I had studied my way out of religion altogether. My dissertation on the logic of religious metaphor concluded that our finite language simply does not allow us to speak with precision about the infinite, that all discussion of God is shining flashlights at the stars. By both background and training, I am the last person you would expect to have written the book you are holding now. But then came LSD.

There is no way to soften the fact that the story I’m going to share with you here is a radical story that challenges many of our culture’s deepest convictions about reality. Early in my career, I had articles rejected by professional journals because their editors simply could not believe that the psychedelic experiences that I was analyzing from Grof’s research were possible. They penciled in the margin comments like: “How is it possible for a human being to actually experience this? Do you mean this metaphorically?” Lacking personal experience of these domains, the editors could not comprehend how the boundaries of experience could be stretched to such extreme limits. I understand their reservations. If I had been standing in their shoes, I probably would have thought the same thing. These early rejections taught me that before the philosophical discussion of psychedelic experience could even begin, people would need to understand the inner workings of these experiences better. This would require not arguments and footnotes but the candid sharing and exposition of one’s own psychedelic experiences as a first step to a broader conversation.

LSD and the Mind of the Universe is the memoir of a psychedelic explorer. It is the story of one person’s journey into the mind of the cosmos. I’ve tried to tell this story as concisely as I can, focusing on the journey itself and keeping theoretical discussion to a minimum. I will rely on other authors to give the reader the history and science of psychedelics, their psychopharmacology, and their clinical applications. I share my psychedelic experiences here not because I think they are special or unique, for they are not, but because, all things considered, they are the most valuable gift I have to offer the psychedelic conversation.

I’ve pondered these experiences for many years, trying to fathom their complex patterns. In the end, I think the experiences themselves may be more valuable than anything I say about them. Interpretation may change over time, but experience endures as a measure of what is possible. I place these experiences beside the many other experiences being reported by the psychedelic community, both in print and in Erowid’s extensive online Experience Vaults. The psychedelic landscape is so vast, no one person can hold it all. Clearly, our strength is in our collective vision and our overlapping insights.

And last, this book has two titles, what Tibetans would call an outer title and an inner title. LSD and the Mind of the Universe is its outer title, describing what the book is about—exploring the mind of the universe through carefully conducted LSD sessions. Diamonds from Heaven is its inner title, describing its innermost essence, for at the center of the mind of the universe, one enters the infinite clear light of Diamond Luminosity.

I sincerely hope that the story of this journey will be useful to others, including those who never take a psychedelic themselves. In the end, what is important is not the method of exploration used but what this method shows us about the extraordinary universe we live in.