Welcome to my blog which on a weekly basis either updates my envious readers on my authorial life or, as is this case this week, admits there has been no evident activity on the publishing front (Chris! I’m beginning to hate you) and instead drifts on to other matters of parochial concern. Having spent 2 weeks on spirituality, I mean religion, I was intending to abjure that topic for the day but I haven’t quite managed owing to that report on magic mushrooms in last week’s Oberver.
Somewhere in a field near here on this overcast but not too cold morning, various people will be walking around with their eyes looking down in search of the psilocibin mushroom. I’ve done it myself – though not for forty years. At first it can be difficult to spot them and you find yourself picking ones which are similarly coloured but not quite the right shape. What you need then is someone more experienced to shake their head and save your stomach. After a while the mushies just pop up and offer themselves and you can’t quite believe that you missed them before and if you’ve just been reading your Carlos Castenada you are already half-way into a liminal state.I don’t suppose the fifty of so roomies who took psilocybin under the guidance of John Hopkins University in 2002 culled their own mushrooms one sunny early morning in some dew-soaked cow-padded sacred site, nevertheless, judging by their reports, they certainly got to experience some extraordinary states of mind. The university are now looking for (depressed) cancer suffering volunteers on whom to experiment although the terms of inclusion are so exclusive I’m not sure how successful they’ll be in finding people.
The recent press reports focussed on the personality changes in the subjects and how they had become ‘more open’ despite being of an age, i.e. my age, where openness wasn’t to be expected (sic). The greatest changes came in those who had had ‘mystical’ experiences, those carrying the characteristics I mentioned a couple of chapters ago as identified by William James and the great Walter Pahnke, the originator of the Good Friday experiment which gave LSD to Divinity Students, namely:
1. Sense of Unity
2. Transcendence of Time and Space
3. Deeply felt positive mood
4. Sense of awe and reverence
5. Meaningfulness of psychological and or philosophical insights
6. Paradoxicality
7. Ineffability
8. Transiency
9. Persisting positive changes in attitude and behaviour.
Before I go on…is it or is it not strange that the hoped for benefits of this trial is (as put forward by the press) that it will somehow ameliorate the sufferings of cancer rather than produce a soma that delivers divinity? Does this not show the preferences of our culture?
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| Valentina Pavalovca Wasson |
In 1955 a Russian woman called Valentina Pavalovca Wasson ate magic mushrooms with a Mexican Witch of the Mazatek tribe and it was she who first suggested, in 1957, that hallucinogenic experience could ease the pains of dying and that the mystical experience could cause entirely new understandings of religion and death. Her husband, also an anthropologist, coined the word ‘entheogenic’ for plant substances that promote the experience of ‘the divinity within’. Out of this, and the works of Jung, Campbell etc, came the trans-cultural theory of religion that claimed the foundation of religion was a non-ordinary state of consciousness inspired by entheogens or other practises designed to produce mystical states, eg, fasting, ritual, music, chanting.
In 1964 Eric Kast of the Chicago Medical School gave LSD to 128 patients with metastic cancer. There was no therapeutic intervention and the patients weren’t even told they were on LSD. Kast noted significance decreases in pain and less concern with imminent death. The patients’ carers also showed significant decreases in anxiety.
In Maryland another set of experiments took place at the Spring Grove Hospital beginning in the mid 60s, this time undertaken by doctors who had personal experience of LSD. A program applying LSD to alcoholics was amazingly successful with something like two thirds of those who had a ‘mystical’ or ‘peak’ experience renouncing the drink. (A study giving ketamine to alcoholics in Russia has had similar results.) From this it was theorized that alcoholism is a search for transcendence.
Next the doctors turned to the terminally ill cancer patients and provided a program for 60 of them with a view to measuring the effects on pain relief, levels of emotional distress, acceptance of death and fear of death, hierarchy of basic values and philosophic/religious orientation. A third showed great improvement in all these measures, a third some improvement and a third no obvious change.
As predicted the greatest change came in those who had mystical, or peak, experiences. In 1973 Grof wrote:
The phenomenology of the individual sessions covered a very wide range from aesthetic experience of an abstract nature through reliving of traumatic or positive childhood memories to profound transcendental experiences of a mystical and religious nature. It has been our impression that most dramatic therapeutic changes followed sessions in which the patient achieved an intense psychedelic experience – an experience of unity, most frequently preceded by profound experiences of agony, death and rebirth.’
Stanislav Grof, who conducted much of this program, was very struck by this last point and noted, ‘That these changes’, (i.e. in values, depression and fear of death) ‘did not come from an ontological or religious belief about life after death but as the direct experience of experiencing death in their own psyche.’ He also noted that family and partners of a dying person who had taken the phantasticum was often so impressed that they asked to take the drug themselves.
Remember that these patients were so seriously ill and terminal that a few of them signed the consent forms even though they were too ill to take the personality tests.
In 1973 psychedelic therapy was ended owing to political idiocy.
Forty years pass and where have we got to? Nowhere. So good luck to John Hopkins.
