From Dropping Out in Earnest, Psychedelics, Contacts with Source, Spiritual Steppingstones August 8, 2008, and John Ketchum’s philosophy house
Q6 Spring 1964-65, Apr-Jun 1965
POLS 153 Polit Soc Thry, 5, B
ENGL 25 Shakespeare, 4, F
PHIL 194 Probs Chinese, 4, I (GPA 1.1)
I’m writing this in 2017, fifty-two years after I first took LSD. From this vantage point my encounter with psychedelics (1965-71) remains the most spectacularly impactful experience of my internal life. But, sadly, it still remains almost completely beyond my ability to capture, or even approach, with words.
The only time I’ve been able to write anything about my experiences with LSD and related psychedelics is in 1976 for my Antioch Portfolio. Then I had the safety net of a very restricted format. I did manage to place the experiences in the context of my life as of five years after the most recent trip in the Self Evaluation section, quoted just below the links in the Psychedelics page of this site.
I was supposed to document Skills and Knowledge attained in various activities as evidence toward a college degree. I wrote minimal comments about each trip, trying to keep the tone very restrained, to downplay how outrageous it was to claim unsupervised recreational drug use for academic credit. This is what I wrote in 1976 about those two weekends at Esalen in 1965.
1. First Trip: Big Sur (1965)
P/R: I sat with my friend on a cliff overlooking the ocean and became one with the sea. Every time I would turn to tell him what a wonderful experience this was, everything would go black and white and two dimensional. I finally gave up trying to describe it. Later in the evening we went into the lodge for Perls’s dream seminar. I did not go onto the Hot Seat, but did have some wonderful eye exchanges with Perls while he was saying words which I heard as, “Well, my friend, nobody really knows what’s going on here except you, because all these other people are pretending to be neurotic so they can get my support, and they don’t even know they’re pretending. Only you can see through this game. This feeds into the book I am writing now called Games Therapists Play or Who’s Fooling Who?”
S/K: I felt that I gained knowledge of the personality of the founder of Gestalt Therapy, Fritz Perls, from the eye contacts that we maintained during his dream seminar. But more important, I gained first hand knowledge of the experience of unity with the All, the dissolution of the ego.
2. Second Trip: Big Sur (1965)
P/R: We went back to Big Sur, but this time my friend brought his girlfriend and a blind date for me. She was very nice but the LSD made it a little too intense for us to start a friendship so we sort of drifted apart. I ended up walking in the creek most of the day.
S/K: I learned that the depth of the LSD experience made it difficult for me to strike up a casual acquaintance with a new friend. Or at least I learned that I was too defensive to let a total stranger into this experience.
From Addendum – 31 Trips (Trips #1-2).
In question 3 of the 1976 overview of 31 trips I wrote:
The first session, at Big Sur in 1965, contained the most important experiential learning of the entire series. In gazing at the sea I experienced for the first time what I shall call “The Watcher Disappears.” (I think there is a parallel between this and what is called in Zen “Body and Mind Fallen Away.”) When I told my friend that I had become one with the sea and thereby with all existence, it was already too late. The watcher had reappeared. But I was very much struck by the sense that for the first time in my life there was no observer standing between me and the perception. In directly contacting the world as presented, I felt contact with this specific reality as contact with all reality.
This unitive first experience may be somewhat unusual, I find from reading the literature and talking with my evaluator, who wrote her master’s thesis utilizing the LSD literature. It is usually seen as a sign of a healthy personality, having worked through psychodynamic layers which would otherwise interfere with such an experience. I believe that this unitive experience in my first session was partially determined by the fact that I had been preparing myself by reading Watts, Leary, and Huxley on the religious and cosmic effects of psychedelics.
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