MAPS: Can This Drug Enlarge Man's Mind? An Essay On LSD By Gerald Heard

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Can This Drug Enlarge Man's Mind?
An essay on LSD by Gerald Heard

OCR'd from Psychedelic Review Issue Number 1, Summer 1963



"Can This Drug Enlarge Man's Mind?"

Narcotics numb it. Alcohol unsettles it. Now a new chemical called LSD has
emerged with phenomenal powers of intensifying and changing it - whether
for good or ill is a subject of hot debate.

GERALD HEARD

(This article essay originally appeared in Psychedelic Review Issue Number
1, Summer 1963.)

Since earliest times man has felt impulses to rise above his everyday self
and achieve either some higher insight or some release from mundane
concerns - or both. Western saints and Eastern mystics have subjected
themselves to strenuous spiritual exercises, others, less dedicated, have
resorted to chemical aids, from the ceremonial wine of the ancients and the
opiates of the Orient to the sacramental peyote plant of Aztec tribes and
the social stimulants of our own day.

In our time, moreover, psychologists and other students of human
perceptions, from William James to Aldus Huxley, have tried it on
themselves certain experimental drugs in an effort to induce states that
would lend extraordinary lucidity and light to the mind's unconscious and
creative processes possibly even assistance to these. Today these newer
drugs - mescaline, Psilocybin, and the latest and most potent of them,
Lysergic Acid Diethylamide, or LSD - are spreading so widely on a
"research" basis that major questions are arising as to their effects and
proper use.

Their enemies call them "mind-distorting" drugs, and warn that their
therapeutic values are unproven, that they may upset even a normal person,
and that they are already being abused for "kicks." Their proponents prefer
to call them "consciousness-changing" agents, and argue that in selected
cases, for individuals of strong mental and creative powers, LSD may widen
their window on the world and on the themselves as well. On the evidence so
far, both sides seem agreed that LSD is not habit-forming. Numerous takers
of it report that the experience is a strenuous and exhausting one, to be
repeated only after much thought.

Should man in any case put such a potentially dangerous substance into his
system? It is claimed for LSD that it is far less toxic than alcohol,
tobacco, or caffeine. At the same time one of its leading students and
advocates, Dr. Sidney Cohen remarks: "It is quite possible that LSD
attracts certain unstable individuals in their search for some magical
intervention." Can trance-like insight produced by chemicals be the source
of higher wisdom and creativity, like a kind of Instant Zen? This remains
unproven - especially since so many persons coming back from LSD can
describe their experience only as indescribable. One of those who can
describe it best is the writer of the following article, the distinguished
philosopher Gerald Heard, author of The Eternal Gospel, The Doppelgangers,
Is God in History? , and other books, and a leading student of psychic
research.

What will men of the future consider the greatest achievements of our time?
Releasing hydrogen energy? Putting a man on the moon? Extending the average
human life to a century or more? Last year Dr. Glenn T. Seaborg, Chairman
of the United States Atomic Energy Commission, gave his forecast of what he
thought might be our most revolutionary discoveries or advances in the next
generation. Addressing the graduating class of Northern Michigan College in
his home state, he asked his listeners to project themselves forward to
their thirtieth reunion in 1992, and selected fifteen items on which to
speculate. Fourteen of these ranging from the realizing of space
communications to capturing solar energy and the remaking of daily life by
electronic computers dealt with physical advances, and thus with the same
objective that Francis Bacon had put before the pristine scientists of ten
generations ago: "the relief of man's estate." The fifteenth, however,
would not have occurred to Elizabethan England's "wide-browed Verulam," or
indeed to any researcher until the last dozen years. "Pharmaceuticals that
change and maintain human personality at any desired level," was Dr.
Seaborg's definition of this major new possibility of power - and, he was
quick to add, of potential danger too. He was thinking of such recently
introduced drugs as mescaline, psilocybin, and no doubt particularly of the
phenomenal one known as LSD, about the uses of which much controversy is
raging today. Of them he went on to say: "It may become necessary to
establish new legal and moral codes to govern those who prescribe use of
these materials. Who should prescribe and under what conditions, such a
drug to a person in a position of high authority when he is faced with
decisions of great consequence?"

Of course man has had mood-changing drugs at his disposal for millennia.
First came alcohol, the great relaxant; then opium, the painkiller; then
caffeine, the spur of the nervous system; then cocaine, hashish, and a
score of other less common vegetable extracts. And in the last few years a
wide variety of tranquilizers has been developed.

They all, however, fall into one or the other of two classes. They either
weaken the mind's common-sense grasp of things, as does alcohol or opium,
or they strengthen that grip, as does coffee or dexedrine. They do not
leave the mind unclouded and yet at the same time permit it to view things
in quite an uncommon-sensical way. They do not raise the mind to high
lucidity and yet at the same time make the world it views appear fraught
with an intensity of significance that everyday common sense cannot perceive.

In LSD, or Lysergic Acid Diethylamide, however, a drug now exists that can
accomplish all these aims. As Dr. Seaborg and several medical authorities
cited in these pages emphasize, it is certainly not to be taken lightly,
and research has only begun on its possibilities as a therapeutic aid in
psychiatry.  For many who have taken it under proper, controlled
conditions, it has brought about an astonishing enlargement of sensitivity
and perceptiveness, and it may thus cast new light on the wellsprings of
creativity.

If you ask, of what possible use is such a drug? or, what is the difference
between the effects of taking LSD and, say, hashish in a Tangier dive or
opium in Hong Kong? The answer might be given in terms of an early
Franciscan, the ex-lawyer Jacoponi da Todi, when asked the same "what's the
use" question after he spoke of the exhilarating effect that joining Saint
Francis's company had on him. His response was, "a better order in all my
living."

Not an opiate or a narcotic, LSD is a chemical able to produce profound
changes of consciousness which, in healthily constituted persons, seem to
leave no untoward aftereffects. And while it can give an ecstatic
experience, at the same time it lends an extraordinary intensity of attention.

You see and hear this world, but as the artist and the musician sees and
hears. And, much more important, it may also give far- reaching insights
into one's own self and into one's relationship with others. Some takers of
it have even felt that they had won an insight into the "nature of the
Universe and the purpose of Life." These insights can be remembered and, if
the person wishes, can be incorporated into his or her everyday living to
bring it a "better order."

So, here may be a major breakthrough that meets the problem of letting in a
free flow of comprehension beyond the everyday threshold of experience
while keeping the mind clear. And this seems to be accomplished by a
confronting of one's self, a standing outside one's self, a dissolution of
the ego-based apprehensions that cloud the sky of the mind.

The drug was discovered by accident in 1943. Dr. Albert Hofmann of Sandoz
Ltd. in Switzerland, while doing research with derivatives of the ergot
alkaloids, somehow absorbed synthesized LSD into his system and found it to
have surprising effects on consciousness. It was soon recognized as the
most potent and reliable of the consciousness-changing drugs. A remarkable
fact about it is the extreme minuteness of the effective dose. The optimum
dosage - that which produces for the subject the most informative results -
lies between 100 and 150 "gamma" ; and 100 "gamma" is approximately one
ten-thousandth of a gram. (Mescaline, another of the
"consciousness-changers," has to be taken in a dosage four thousand times
that of LSD to produce similar mental results, and in this amount it does
have physical effects oh most subjects - sometimes unpleasant ones.)

A good psychiatrist, of course, must be the overseer of all LSD research.
He must, as did the physicians who trained the volunteers for the ascent of
Mount Everest, have "vetted" the subject. He must know whether this or that
particular psyche is likely to function satisfactorily at these rare
altitudes. Then, a person intimately acquainted with LSD should be at the
side of the subject as he embarks on his journey. It should not be
undertaken alone. A companion should be on call to act as an assistant -
for instance, to play music, change the lighting, answer any questions, or
write down any remarks the subject should wish recorded - and also as a
monitor, or night watchman, so to speak, ready to report if possible
trouble may be lurking ahead (in which case the voyage can be called off
instantly by administering a counteracting chemical).

So, though the subject should not be intruded upon, he should not be left
figuratively or literally in the dark. The optimal circumstances are
simple, though contrary to present clinical and laboratory protocol. For
the ideal setting is not a hospital or research lab, but rather an
environment that is neither aggressive nor austere, and in which he may
feel at home, perhaps a quiet house surrounded by a garden.

The first stage under LSD is surprising in a paradoxical way.  From what he
has learned about this research, the subject is of course expecting a
surprise. But during the first hour after swallowing the tiny pills, he
usually experiences nothing at all. He may feel some relief at finding
himself remaining completely normal, and perhaps a secret sense of
superiority at the thought that possibly he is too strong to give in to a
drug that will take him away from reality. An uncommonly able businessman,
the head of a major corporation, who had much wished to take LSD, in fact
waited fully three and one-half hours for something to "happen." Although
it is uncommon for LSD to be so long in taking effect, the occasions on
which this has occurred have led some researchers to speculate that the
onset of the experience can be held at bay for an extra hour or two by the
subject's unconscious nervousness or his suspicion that he might have been
given nothing more than an innocuous placebo.

Yet as the first hour wears away, quite a number of subjects become
convinced that they are feeling odd. Some, like the witches of Macbeth)
feel a pricking in their thumbs. Others - and this, too, is a common
reaction to the weird, the uncanny, the "numinous" - feel chill, with that
tightening, or horrification, of the skin as, in the vernacular, "a goose
goes over one's grave." They report, "I am trembling" - but, putting out
their hands, find them steady.

In the second hour, however, most subjects enter upon a stage which can
leave no doubt that a profound change of consciousness is occurring. For
one thing, the attending psychiatrist, or "sitter," can see that the pupils
of the subject's eyes are now nearly always dilated. This symptom is the
first and often the only undeniable and visible physical effect of LSD, and
it gives the physiologist almost his only clue as to which area of the
brain is now being acted upon. For the center that controls the pupils'
reaction to light is known, and it lies deep.

During this second hour we can say that the subject is "gaining altitude."
How does he record this heightening of consciousness ? By far the most
common remark refers to the growing intensification of color. Flowers,
leaves, grass, trees, are seen with tremendous vividness -"with the
intensity that Van Gogh must have seen them," is an often-used description.
They seem to pulse and breathe; in fact, even everyday, fixed objects
around the room may take on "flowing," "waving" shapes, as if invested with
some life force of their own. Intensification of sounds, too ( such as the
singing of birds, though far away), is often commented on with fascinated
surprise. Music frequently becomes an absorbing delight even to the
nonmusical - while to the musical it has on occasion become almost
unbearably intense. "Under LSD I asked that my favorite recording of my
favorite Beethoven quartet (Opus 135) be played," one musical taker
reported; "but after a few minutes I had it turned off. Its emotions had
become too searing -and besides, I had suddenly made the discovery that one
of the instruments was playing ever so slightly off pitch."

Another effect is stranger and deeper. The subject feels that time itself -
time urgent, pressing, hurried, or contrariwise, time slack, lagging, heavy
on his hands - is now in "right time." When he discovers what an ample
store of unhastened attention he can give to all the rich content brought
him by eye and ear, he finds it hard not to believe that somehow time has
been stretched. But a glance at his watch tells him it is a new-given power
of superattention that is allowing him to make such full use of every moment.

It is, however, in the next couple of hours that for most people the full
power of the experience comes over them. Till then, however absorbed, the
subject has still been an observer. Now, although sights and sounds, the
artistic splendor of the world, and the magic of music may still amaze him,
they are, as it were, the decor, the scenery of a drama. Now the whole
outside world becomes a composition that embraces and interfuses
everything. And yet this composition, though constantly changing, is also
(strange paradox) all the while complete and instant in a fathomless peace.
At this point one could say that he crosses a watershed. In this
all-pervading energy he feels around him, the subject realizes that he
cannot be isolated. It is flowing through him, as it flows through all that
surrounds him.

Here his experience with time goes still further. Time appears to have
stopped, disappeared. What has now befallen the "voyager" is not merely
that he is on the high seas with his ship in a vast calm, but that the ship
itself no longer seems distinct from the infinite ocean. He stands outside
of and apart from his familiar ego, all its protective barriers having been
shed; and this can lead in some to transcendent experience, while in others
to a deep panic. To those for whom their ego is their only possible self,
the only possible mode of consciousness, its disappearance is a kind of death.

It is here that the subject, however independent-minded, may literally
welcome a helping hand. Of all the senses, touch is naturally most firmly
anchored in the material world. So it is the least liable to illusions. It
has been found that if at the moment of this "transvaluation of all
values," this double change of the view of one's self and one's view of
nature, a hand is actually held out to the subject, he will be able to keep
his bearings. If the subject uses this simple "sea anchor," he may discover
that he is not merely "riding the swell" but has entered a condition of
what until then may have been inconceivable. With his consciousness
enlarged out of all bounds, he may - if all goes well - find that he no
longer feels anxiety about past or future.

It is not that he has gone into amnesia. He can clearly recall past
concerns and future appointments; but he recalls them as a wise guardian
carries in his mind the affairs of his ward. His personal appetites,
meanwhile, generally become suspended. Most people never eat or drink
during the experience, though it may last a full day; even constant
smokers, while they may start with a cigarette, put it down as soon as they
begin to "climb." There is not the slightest repugnance to food and drink.
It is simply that the subject feels the appetites are irrelevant. Any
sexual sensation, any erotic fantasy or preoccupation, is nearly always
reported as absent. So, for all its liberating powers, LSD remains
noneuphoric : as the Greeks would say, it is "eudaemonic" -"a possession by
the spirit of wholeness."

After these climactic hours, during which he may either have sat still and
wordless while contemplating the myriad images borne in on him, or conveyed
volubly to his companion or monitor what he has seen and felt, the voyager
returns gradually to shore, sometimes dipping back into the tides of the
far sea until the lingering powers of the chemical disperse.

In the Odyssey Penelope, the first hostess in recorded history, gives what
one might call the first psychoanalytic interpretation of a dream. The
returning Ulysses, appearing in disguise and keeping his identity concealed
from her after his ten years' absence, questions her about a dream she has
had concerning the fate of her exigent suitors. She answers:

"Many and many a dream is mere confusion, a cobweb of no consequence at
all. Two Gates for ghostly dreams there are: one gateway of honest horn,
and one of ivory. Issuing by the ivory gate are dreams of glimmering
illusion, fantasies, but those that come through solid polished horn may be
borne out, if mortals only know them I doubt it came by horn, my fearful
dream - too good to be true, that, for my son and me."

What Penelope is saying is that there are two categories, or channels, of
subconscious insight: one, coming in through the "Gate of Horn," of things
that "may be borne out" ( that is, having to do with events, both present
and future, in our actual lives) and the other, through the "Gate of
Ivory," of apparently the sheerest fantasy. And it is certainly recognized
by all students of psychical research that there is a deep current of the
mind which brings to the surface (sometimes by way of dreams, but not
necessarily always) raw data - an incoherent babbling, irresponsible
glossolalia, sufficiently confusing to justify the epithet "glimmering
illusion, fantasies." Clues as to this second traffic, when they do appear,
are ambiguous; symbols are so fractured that for a long while they are
quite unrecognizable.

Here lies one reason why many decades of modern psychical research into
this anomalous traffic have produced such baffling and frustrating results.
Another is that whereas the flow running through Penelope's "Gate of Horn"
is as constant and copious as the daily tides, the springs that feed the
"Gate of Ivory" seem sporadic and indeed capricious. No wonder then that
psychoanalysis, which confines itself to the masses of sea wrack brought up
through the "Gate of Horn" and stranded on the beaches of our waking mind,
attracts such an army of deep-sea psychobiologists, while those who wait by
the other water gate have but a few minnows to show after nearly three
generations of research.

Psychoanalysis is concerned mainly with man's conflicts between his sexual
urges and the taboos imposed upon him by society, and with the effects of
these conflicts on his everyday living. But the traffic we associate with
the "Gate of Ivory" deals with data apparently belonging to those higher
registers of the mind which very few researchers outside the psychical
field have even noticed. It is true that mystics and saints have reported,
time and again, "out-of- this-world," indescribable experiences that did
change their lives and bring a "better order" in their living. But these
experiences came as the result of many years of severe mental and physical
discipline carried out within a doctrinal frame of reference, which often
brought them to the brink of insanity. For many the experience was only a
brief flash. For some it came two or three times during a lifetime of
discipline. For instance Plotinus, so his biographer and disciple Porphyry
tells us, only three times in his long life of striving for it attained to
"the state." But until now there has been no other way of opening up this
other passage of perception, of keeping it open for any length of time, or
of doing it at will. How is this free flow of findings to be obtained?

We now recognize that our minds have, as oculists say of our eyes, not one
but a number of focal lengths. The aperture of our understanding alters, in
the way that we alter the aperture of our telescopes and microscopes to
bring objects into clear focus at specific ranges. But, though our minds do
shift, though our range of perception will at times change gear, we cannot
make that shift deliberately, consciously. Nor when it occurs can we hold
on to it. And when the most common, as well as the most profound shift -
that from waking to sleeping - takes place, we are not able to observe it
as we experience it. This problem has teased psychologists for sixty
years,.and the greatest of them, William James, saw that if it was to be
solved, the experimenter must use psychophysical means on himself. He tried
nitrous oxide as a means of enlarging consciousness, only to find that at a
certain point communication ceased, and he came back murmuring, "The
Universe has no opposite." Then he tried peyotl, the button cactus that
grows along the Rio Grande and is used in the religious rites of Indians in
the Southwest as a sacrament lending lucidity - only to be daunted by the
stumbling block of severe nausea.

Leave chemicals aside for the moment. There is an "other" state of mind,
known to and described by poets as well as higher mathematicians and other
scientific geniuses, in which a deeply "insightful" process can take place.
The current president of India, the philosopher Dr. Sarvepalli
Radhakrishnan, has termed this process "integral thought" as against
"analytic thought" - the latter being the inductive procedure whereby
through the patient gathering, analysis, and arranging of data there would
at last emerge a general "law." "Integral thought" is the art of the sudden
insight, the brilliant hypothesis, the truly "creative" leap. To have truly
original thought the mind must throw off its critical guard, its filtering
censor. It must put itself into a state of depersonalization; and from such
histories as Jacques Hadamard's The Psychology of Invention in the
Mathematical Field we know that the best researchers, when confronting
problems and riddles that had defied all solution by ordinary methods, did
employ their minds in an unusual way, did put themselves into a state of
egoless "creativity" which permitted them to have insights so remarkable
that by means of these they were able to make their greatest and most
original discoveries.

Paracelsus found that there was a "ledge of the mind," free of all caution,
to which wine could lift him; there, though unable to hold a pen, he could
still dictate, until intoxication swept him into speechlessness. Descartes,
sleeping on the floor with writing paper beside him, scrawled down the
insights that flashed across his mind in a half-waking state, when the
creative and critical levels of his brain were both working. Harvey, the
discoverer of the circulation of the blood, told his biographer Aubrey that
if he stayed in a disused coal shaft in total dark and silence, his
uninterrupted mind would reach a span it could not encompass above ground,
when trying to "think regardless of consequence" amid the wary, hostile
medical world of his day. Henri Poincare, the great French mathematician,
described his subliminal processes of discovery in these words: "It is
certain that the combinations which present themselves to the mind in a
kind of sudden illumination after a somewhat prolonged period of
unconscious work are generally useful and fruitful. ... This, too, is most
mysterious. How can we explain the fact that, of the thousand products of
our unconscious activity, some are invited to cross the threshold, while
others remain outside ?" (In his classic study of poetic creation, The Road
to Xanadu, John Livingston Lowes cited this passage as bearing on the deep
movements of Coleridge's own psyche.)

Can LSD provide any assistance to the creative process? Even when given
under the best of conditions, it may do no more ( as Aristotle said when
appraising and approving the great Greek Mysteries) than "give an
experience." Thereafter the subject must himself work with this enlarged
frame of reference, this creative schema. If he will not, the experience
remains a beautiful anomaly, a gradually fading wonder - fading because it
has no relevance to "the life of quiet desperation" which Thoreau saw most
of us living and which we cannot help but live.

What, then, should be done about it? LSD is certainly one of the least
toxic chemicals man has ever put inside his system. Compared with alcohol,
nicotine, coffee - our three great standbys - it could be called almost a
docile mare as against these mettlesome stallions, so far as most people
are concerned. Is it of any use with psychotics? Most researchers doubt it.
With the extreme neurotic ? Again there seems to be considerable question.
Although among these categories LSD appears to do no physical harm, cases
of severe adverse psychological effects have been reported. It is the
unique quality of attention which LSD can bestow that will or will not be
of benefit. Intensity of attention is what all talented people must obtain
or command if they are to exercise their talent. Absolute attention - as we
know from, for example, Isaac Newton's and Johann Sebastian Bach's
descriptions of the state of mind in which they worked - is the most
evident mark of genius functioning. On the other hand, the masterful
Sigmund Freud remarked that psychoanalysis, even when exercised by himself,
would not work with the extreme neurotic because of the hypertrophied
ego-attention which such a patient had sacrificed his life to build up. The
psychotic is even more absorbed in his distortive, self-obsessed notion of
reality. Give, then, either of these victims of their own egos still
greater capacity to attend, and it is highly unlikely that they will do
other than dig - till more deeply the ditch of their delusion and build
more stubbornly the wall of their self-inflicted prison.

But for the truly creative person ( and I refer specifically to that person
capable of exercising "integral thought") LSD may be of some use. It could
help him to exercise integral thought with greater ease and facility, and
at will. And for a number of sensitive people willing to present themselves
for a serious experiment in depth, LSD has shown itself of some help in
permeating the ego, in resolving emotional conflicts, and in reducing those
basic fears, the ultimate of which is the fear of death. However, the
practical answer to What should be done about it ? seems to be that LSD
remain for the time being what it is: a "research drug," to be used with
greatest care to explore the minds of those who would volunteer to aid
competent researchers by offering themselves as voyagers to the "Gate of Ivory."


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