Birth of the Metaphysician

I suppose I’ve always had metaphysical inclinations. For as long as I can remember I’ve been sensitive to energy, although I haven’t always been aware that energy is what I’ve been feeling. When I was eighteen I received a powerful intuitive message, one that told me not to be somewhere at a certain time. Heeding that saved me from a very unpleasant experience. In the more recent past I had visions that, had I heeded them, would have also spared me from a really horrid experience. Learned a lot from that one, though.

Probably the most significant factor, the one thing that pushed me hardest in a spiritual direction was drugs.

Human beings have used drugs for their spiritual benefits since pre-history. I read an article the other day about archaeologists finding tools with which prehistoric humans ground-up and sniffed mind-altering substances. Why? For the same reason these avenues are pursued today. Some of the natural and synthetic substances induce powerful spiritual states. Other substances increase awareness. This is not to say that all psychotropic drugs are useful. All mind-altering substances do just that. Some drugs, like the hard ones, may not be very beneficial. In my personal experience even the hard ones can induce very pleasant experiences. Up to a point. The fact that their use can bring on pleasurable states explains their popularity.

Some of us self-medicate in order to smooth the bumps on our path. Others of us are medicated by our doctors (the real street-level drug pushers), most of whom don’t seem to have a clue about what may or may not be good for their patients. Hence the widespread use of SSRIs, like Paxil or Prozac. Some of us use drugs as a spiritual sacrament, although this is rare in western society. Before the 1960s explosion in recreational drug use, when therapeutic LSD sessions were not uncommon, the spiritual aspects of these sessions were found to be useful in treating a number of psychological conditions, including alcoholism. Current research at Johns Hopkins is exploring the benefits of psilocybin-induced transcendent states. The beat goes on.

In the mid-1960s, when I was a wee lad of seventeen living in Chicago, I hooked-up with a tablet of pharmaceutical LSD-25 from Sandoz Laboratories in Belgium. At the time my drug experience was limited to alcohol, which I didn’t much care for, and cannabis, which I very much enjoyed.

LSD-25 was synthesized in 1938 at Sandoz Laboratories in Basel, Switzerland by Albert Hofmann (1906-2008). It was in widespread therapeutic use from the 1950s until the mid-1960s. I was able to get my hands on it through a connection at the University of Chicago. The tablet was round, elliptical in profile, and factory-wrapped in a protective layer of very thin foil, much thinner than any foil you could purchase in a store. I was told the dosage was 300 micrograms.

The LSD that most people in my generation saw was a result of LSD becoming illegal, making the Sandoz version unavailable. Once that happened LSD was produced by underground chemists like Owsley Stanley. In my experience, and I had a lot of experiences in those days, it didn’t compare with the factory product. Of course that's a subjective observation.

Back to the LSD-25 experience: My friend Peter lived with his parents in a brownstone on Chicago’s near-north side. Peter had an interesting family. His father was Russian and had been friends with Leon Trotsky. His dad had also hung-out in Paris with people like Ezra Pound and TS Elliot. His sister married Country Joe McDonald a couple years after the night I’m about to describe. They were later divorced and she went on to make some movies.

Peter introduced me to cannabis and DMT, or dimethyltryptamine. DMT is the active ingredient in ayahuasca, the hallucinatory herbal drink used as sacrament by Peruvian shamans and the Santo Diame religion. We smoked DMT crystals sprinkled on top of a pipe bowl of marijuana.

I'm describing all this to give you an idea of the place I was in at the time, and the company I was keeping.

It was a pretty good, although not ideal, setting. I had brought along a young lady I knew from school named Rosamond. Peter’s girlfriend, whose name I don’t recall, was there too. We were all in Peter’s bedroom when Rosamond and I split the tablet. About twenty minutes later I began to have chills to the point that I was on my back on the floor, shivering. Rosamond threw my coat over me and jumped on top of it, trying to warm me. Peter astutely observed, “It’s only ego-loss, man,” and I immediately came out of it. He then began reading aloud from the Ralph Metzner, Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert (aka Ram Dass) book, The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead. It was supposed to be a good guide for tripping, but I think he had to stop reading because I found it so hilarious. At that point I was most definitely tripping, big time.

Rosamond and I were relegated to the living room shortly thereafter, when everyone else went to bed. That’s when it got really interesting. The lights were out and the hallucinations were indescribable. Visually, everything was churning and changing, radically morphing second-by-second. The walls were breathing. I don’t think we spoke for the next five hours. We were both having such transcendent, inter-dimensional experiences that for two teenagers with teenage vocabularies to try to put any of it into words would have been impossible. Much of it was beyond our understanding, and from that perspective could have been wasted on us. In retrospect I can't really say. It was a formidable experience, cosmic in its breadth. Perhaps since our natural state is one of transcendance and we were essentially visiting home, it may not have been wasted. It has certainly stuck with me, decades later.

One thing that really struck me was a vision of the DNA double-helix on the wall. It was such a powerful image, I’ve never forgotten it. Many years later I learned the metaphysical importance of DNA. I also learned, many years later, that in the 1950s scientists were taking low dosages of LSD and using the insights from that to work out complex scientific problems. One of those researchers was Francis Crick, discoverer of the DNA double-helix model. Makes you wonder.

The effects wore off as the sun came up. I remember feeling quite fine. I wanted to be alone to absorb the experience, and Rosamond and I went back to our respective homes. I don’t remember seeing much of her after that, and didn’t discuss the experience with her. Would we have had words for it? I sometimes wonder what she thought of it and if she could express those thoughts.

As time went by I experimented with underground LSD, mescaline and psilocybin. Nothing came close, however, to the half-tablet from Sandoz. The last time I took a hallucinogen was in 1981, at the insistence of a Dead Head Berkeley graduate I was dating when I lived in La-La. She thought it would be fun on a day trip to Disneyland. There was nothing metaphysical about it.

The 1966 episode was the beginning of my spiritual quest in this lifetime. Once you start down that path you can never turn around and go back. I can't imagine why you would want to.

Peace to all.