From Spirituality, LSD at Esalen, and Contacts with Source
The passage below is from my write up on Altered States of Consciousness for the 1976 BA portfolio for Antioch. Although written over 40 years ago, it already expresses some of my current feelings about the transition from psychedelics to meditation and my sense that I wish I had been able to have at least one well guided session rather than only tripping in a range of social settings.
4. Self-Assessment: Evaluate this learning activity. Mention such things as the quality of the experience itself and its personal significance to you.
To most people the consensual definition of selfhood is what they experience as ultimate unquestionable reality. LSD was for thousands in my generation the first glimpse of a mode of experiencing in which the self is not only not the center of the universe, but does not even exist, except as a fiction. This perception is usually associated with a sense of more direct apprehension of reality, not limited by any conceptual screens, including that of the self or ego. To me this has been the primary significance of all this searching. The wholeness that I experienced in my first trip has never been surpassed, only deepened and stabilized as a viewpoint from which to approach life. The first wave of attempting to “turn on the world,” and force everybody to have the vision we had, finally polarized society too much. The assumption of the next task, in which I am still involved, then followed. This was to honor the experience by seeking to make it a part of one’s life without the use of drugs. Meditation became the chief tool, and the differences between these two ways have characterized the difference between the sixties and the seventies in this country. Only now, after three years of meditation, am I beginning to feel the calm assurance of that first insight pervading even the most structured corners of my life. But this has been through meditative discipline, not through repeated use of psychedelics. It has taken a long time to learn the lesson that Don Juan teaches in “Journey to Ixtlan,” that the drugs were not the message, they are simply a tool which makes the message visible for the first time. For me a major component of the personal significance of this experience has been the understanding that it is not enough just to have a powerful flash to build a self and a community. It also takes a lot of hard work, and most of this work must be done on oneself.
Some of this work could have been done if these sessions had been supervised rather than unsupervised. As it was I acted out on the visions and was finally frustrated. Reading Grof’s “Realms of the Human Unconscious” I can see that some of these years of reality-testing could have been saved if a competent guide to the fantastic inner realms unlocked by LSD had been available. That’s what brought me to Stephen, and Stephen pointed me to Zen, which stabilized me sufficiently that I came to Antioch and began to explore consciously the content of these unsupervised experiences.
A note added in 2019 – One thing I remember thinking after first taking LSD was it felt like having all the file drawers in my brain spilled on the floor and scattered so it would be very hard to put them back in the same order. I wanted to put them back in a better order, hopefully aligned with the Tao and all the natural forces in the universe. I decided to read and reread the I Ching while my mind was in a fluid state so it would set into a pattern influenced by that nature-based archetypal wisdom.
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