LSD and Aldous Huxley’s Island: Setting Sail for a Better Country


LSD and Aldous Huxley's Island: Setting Sail for a Better Country

by Bruce Eisner (Note: Scheduled for publication in Gaia News No.14)

Albert Hofmann, the man who discovered the effects of LSD, has said that he hopes that what he has called his "problem child" will someday become a "wonder" child. I believe Hofmann will have his wish. In the history books of the next century, the discovery of LSD will find its rightful place as one of our most significant achievements, in the same league as the discovery of fire, the wheel, written language, and relativity. In this essay I will reflect on the history of LSD's impact on society and culture as problem child and look forward to how the conversion to wonder child might occur.

This essay is scheduled for publication on the Winter Solstice 2005. As I write this, the days are growing shorter. Less than a month after they begin growing long again, I will be on my way to Basel, Switzerland, a city I first visited in my youth.

Basel has been home to a lineage of great minds in the search for human self-realization. Amid the dark ages, Auroleus Phillipus Theostratus Bombastus von Hohenheim, immortalized as "Paracelsus" spent a year in Basel as a Professor of Medicine. As a man of science, Paracelsus pioneered the use of chemicals and minerals in medicine. As an alchemist, Paracelsus searched for the Philosopher's Stone. Because they were persecuted by the all-powerful Church, the alchemists needed to shroud their work with hidden meanings. While they told the outside world the Philosopher's Stone's purpose was to transmute lead into gold, its esoteric meaning was as a bridge between matter and spirit, a key to illumination.

Another great Basel scientist, Carl Gustav Jung who introduced the concept of self-actualization to psychology was keenly interested in alchemy for its rich symbolism and capacity to describe the inner journey. He said "My studies of alchemy may seem obscure and baffle many people, but taken symbolically - the symbolic gold of great worth, or the transforming philosopher's stone 'lapis philosophorum' hunted for centuries by the alchemists - is to be found in man."

In the summer of 1976, I arrived by train in Basel, at age 28 a bearded long-haired hippie vagabond. I had dropped out of the university in my fourth year at age 20, hitchhiked halfway around the world and on returning to the U.S. became a journalist for the underground press. I had flown to Europe from Los Angeles to meet the third in the progression of Basel scientists on the leading edge of consciousness, Albert Hofmann, the man who had discovered the effects of LSD.

The friend who I traveled with had corresponded with Dr. Hofmann and so after we had pitched our tent in one of the Basel campgrounds, he called him. Dr. Hofmann told us to meet him in a café on Basel's middle bridge. The next day we made our way out there and waited in front of the café for him. Neither of us knew exactly what he looked like; we had only seen that one picture they used in all the old books of him taken at Sandoz in the forties. We knew he was seventy years old and so looked around for what we expected to be an old man.

A tanned, energetic man who appeared in his mid-fifties walked up to us and introduced himself. Albert Hofmann had already found his ways of slowing the hands of time. We sat with him eating a leisurely lunch that lasted several hours. We told him about our experiences becoming hippies and dropping out in the Sixties. He showed us from the bridge the route that he took on his famous bicycle ride home from the old Sandoz building on the day he discovered the effects of LSD.

Hofmann's discovery which is in a way is duplicated by every person who takes LSD was uniquely significant to both myself personally and my generation. I came of age in the 1960s and am part of the boomer generation who "turned on, tuned in and dropped out." The 1960s were an extraordinary period - a time in which millions of people acted as if they had swallowed some pill which made them different - and of course they had. As the decades changed digits, the cultural icon of the man in the
gray flannel suit with a martini gave way to a hipper way of partying. The Old Ike attitudes of the fifties were replaced by a new vision of the Western world, as articulated by Kennedy, who was both a symbol of the strong stirrings of change as well as a martyr to the reaction that it would bring forth.

In this period of American culture in which I reached adulthood, roles and ways of doing things that had persisted for centuries were quickly dissolving. In the old South, young Freedom Riders rode into town and threatened to overturn "Jim Crow" discriminatory laws. Women in great numbers decided not to be housewives and play the traditional role of the submissive sex. Many concerned that economic progress might eventually ruin the earth began using the word "ecology" (heretofore reserved for those seriously academic) to talk about a movement often symbolized by the "Whole Earth" as seen by the first humans to orbit the earth. And of course, with the arrival of birth control pills, there was the sexual revolution - before the tragedy of AIDS.

The 1960s caused so much cultural change that the eminent historian Arnold Toynbee observed of this period in American history: "I have been visiting the United States since 1925. Before my last visit (1967), I had been absent for two years, and I came away with the impression that in those two years there has been more change in American life than in all the previous forty."

Of course it was LSD in the pills that gave people so much insight. LSD, a potent mind-changing drug with few physical side effects discovered in Basel, Switzerland, during the dark days prior to World War II, around the same time as a much larger group in New Mexico was cooking up the atomic bomb.

For many, LSD was a roller coaster ride through their unconscious, a virtual Disneyland. But for a much smaller number the experiences took on significance that they called "mystical" or "religious." This smaller group, sometimes called the "Psychedelic Movement", grew from a small intellectual elite composed mainly of writers and artists in Los Angeles, New York, and London into a mass movement which involved the "best minds of [their] generation," including college students and open-minded people of all ages.

Leary For a few of those who took LSD, it had such a powerful immediate impact that they believed that it might provide insights of a similar magnitude in anyone who took it. There is the story told in High Priest by Timothy Leary of poet Alan Ginsberg's taking psilocybin (an extract of the "magic mushroom" synthesized by Albert Hofmann and used in early experiments with psychedelic compounds at Harvard). Ginsberg became convinced that if he could get John Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev to take LSD, it would end the Cold War; after not being able to get the telephone operators to connect him to either man, he slowly returned to the realities of 1962.

This kind of thinking colored the thoughts of many participants in the Psychedelic Movement. If we remember the world's political atmosphere at that time, in which the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists which publishes a clock in each issue with its hands suggesting their estimate of how close we are to nuclear midnight saw those hands close and moving closer to within minutes of utter annihilation. This feeling of urgency was the force behind what many in retrospect consider Dr. Timothy Leary's messianic crusade to spread the use of LSD. Leary simply believed that it was necessary to turn on a critical mass of people or the world might blow itself up.

The consideration of LSD's potential as a tool to transform society was not restricted to the radical members of the Movement. Although known to believe that LSD should be kept for the intellectual elite, even Aldous Huxley in an essay "Culture and the Individual" written in 1963 shortly before his death, speculated on a "mass experiment" of social LSD- taking as a remedy to the disturbing directions our society was taking.

How should the psychedelics be administered? Under what circumstances, with what kind of preparation and follow-up? These are questions that must be answered empirically, by large-scale experiment. Man's collective mind has a high degree of viscosity and flows from one position to another with the reluctant deliberation of an ebbing tide of sludge. But in a world of explosive population increase, of headlong technological advance and of militant nationalism, the time at our disposal is strictly limited. We must discover, and discover very soon, new energy sources for overcoming our society's psychological inertia, better solvents for liquefying the sludgy stickiness of an anachronistic state of mind. On the verbal level an education in the nature and limitations, the uses and abuses of language; on the wordless level an education in mental silence and pure receptivity; and finally, through the use of harmless psychedelics, a course of chemically triggered conversion experiences or ecstasies-these, I believe, will provide all the sources of mental energy, all the solvents of conceptual sludge, that an individual requires. With their aid, he should be able to adapt himself selectively to his culture, rejecting its evils, stupidities and irrelevances, gratefully accepting all its treasures of accumulated knowledge, of rationality, human-heartedness and practical wisdom. If the number of such individuals is sufficiently great, if their quality is sufficiently high, they may be able to pass from discriminating acceptance of their culture to discriminating change and reform. Is this a hopefully utopian dream? Experiment can give us the answer, for the dream is pragmatic; the utopian hypotheses can be tested empirically. And in these oppressive times a little hope is surely no unwelcome visitant

In fact, after Huxley's passing, the next few years saw the kind of mass LSD experiment that he had envisioned. Just as Gutenberg's printing press invented at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution in the fifteenth century allowed for anyone to own his or her own bible, a privilege that until then had only been enjoyed by the monks, so now at the beginning of the Information Age, the same mass production machines that had turned out bibles (and later Ford motor cars) were producing insight pills. As a result, this new Holy Grail gone high tech was given to somewhere between one and two million people between 1959 and 1970. The numbers who passed through Aldous Huxley's well-described "doors of perception," stepping out of Plato's cave to glimpse the white light of the sun, far exceeded any generation before it. The mystical experience, from being something reserved for saints, became available on sugar cubes.

There were some hard lessons learned during this 1960's experiment. One lesson was that taking large dosages of LSD unprepared and in public settings could lead to negative reactions with accompanying bizarre behavior. Another lesson was that not everyone could benefit by taking LSD, that there were some people with personality disorders or pre-existing psychoses who should not take it except under the most controlled of circumstances - and some not at all under any circumstances.

As the number of people who took LSD increased and the demographics of those people moved from a small group of intelligentsia to a wider spectrum of individuals, the incidence of negative reactions (which were called "freakouts") became a subject of media attention. LSD gained a public image as a "crazy-making" drug. Some unfortunate people predisposed to mental disorders became what have been called LSD casualties.

Casualties is a fitting term, as some looked upon psychedelics as a nonlethal weapon in a war against the powerful economic, political and other social forces - the Establishment. From that battle came a third lesson, that cultures like the living creatures they are comprised of keep a homeostasis. The rapid changes in society as well as the challenges to the established order produced a conservative counteraction. In a rather successful effort to stuff the magic genie back in the bottle, they made possession and use of LSD and several other related psychedelic substances serious crimes. In the U.S., possession of LSD was made a felony in 1966, and LSD's precursor, d-lysergic acid monohydrate, was similarly banned in 1968. Slowly, most of the existing supplies of LSD used by the members of the movement dried up, replaced by what has been called "street acid," a crude imitation of the pharmaceutical substance manufactured from ergotamine tartrate.

The counteraction came to be called the War on Drugs. This war never diminished the supplies of cocaine or heroin. But LSD was more dependent on special ingredients and high tech laboratories. So the Psychedelic Movement lost its ability to pass on to new people the opportunity to have the powerful experiences that LSD had given them access to. Those curious about these experiences turned to new synthetic and botanical drugs as potential replacements. But none of these substitutes provided as powerful and reliable an experience as that which had been taken away.

This story of LSD's banishment was what I told Albert Hofmann on my first visit to Basel. He listened, and despite our differences in age and positions in society, we understood each other at a profound level and became long-time friends. Getting to know Albert Hofmann, a man both accomplished in the world and connected with deep spirituality shattered my stereotypes about what hip people should be like. Freed in this way, I was inspired to shed my hippie persona and drop back into society.

Hofmannposter In January of the next year, I moved to Santa Cruz California, and became a 29-year-old undergraduate at the University of California campus there. In the early summer of that year, I heard that Albert Hofmann would be visiting the west coast and invited him to speak at my university. With the help of author Peter Stafford and his partner Lynn Francis, I arranged a conference around his visit which I called "LSD a Generation Later." Because the turbulence and hysteria of the Sixties had made it almost impossible for scientific meetings to be held on the subject, this event marked the first scientific meeting on LSD in a decade. The event brought together many of the scientific researchers and counterculture figures for the first time. These included Timothy Leary, Richard Alpert, Ralph Metzner, John Lilly, Oscar Janiger, Allen Ginsberg, Myron Stoloroff, John Beresford, William McGlothlin, Ronald K. Seigal, and many others.

A couple of months after this conference, a meeting was held at my home in Santa Cruz by Dr. John Beresford which led to the creation of the Psychedelic Education Center. This group which eventually became the Island Foundation worked for more than three decades to keep the the Psychedelic Movement alive during a time of cultural repression.

Earlier in this essay I talked about some of the lessons we learned from the 1960's. I have one last lesson that comes from my own experiences both as a participant and as an activist for the Psychedelic Movement. I am a humanistic psychologist and approach the use of LSD from that perspective and not from the medical model. When physicians look at LSD, they think how can I cure the sick. When humanistic psychologists look at LSD, they think how can I make exceptional people even more creative and productive and enlightened

In fact, the most significant uses of LSD in terms of its impact on society have been by informal use by highly creative, intelligent people who have personality characteristics which allow them to make good use of the psychedelic experience. In humanistic psychology, we call these people self-actualizers. It is the ability of self-actualizers to utilize the new states of consciousness for the creation of new ideas or memes that led to the breakthroughs of the 1960s.
It is with this idea in mind that I began writing about the Island Sanctuary Project named for Huxley's utopian Island. The Project which could be undertaken simultaneously with efforts to push for legitimate research and clinical use for psychedelics in the first world, but would take a different tack. There would be a search for some place in the world in which a group of people could use LSD within the context of a community in a way similar to the way that Moksha, the fictional psychedelic in Huxley's novel, was used.

I asked Laura Huxley in 1994 about how such a community might evolve and this is what she told me:

"An Island Group could adopt the methods described in Island. It can be done in a village. It is said that it takes a village to raise a child, and it is true. In a small village, a child can go out alone and visit small and adult friends. A child alone in the streets of Los Angeles is in danger both from adults and other children. You know about children being killed in the streets by other children.

They have handguns and machine guns. When they are little they are given for Christmas these war toys - a lovely way to celebrate the birth of a savior. So very soon they want to have a real gun, and when they have it they use it. People make money by selling guns to children and very young people.

Then we are surprised that they use them. But in a village where a few families have read and agreed with the method of education described in Island, a child could go out and even leave his family for a few days. Do you remember the mutual adoption club? Each family has two or three adoptive families where the child can go and take a vacation from his own family, who might also need a vacation from him.

There is so much which can be done with a small group who wants to grow its children in a safe place. This group must really have something basic in common to start a village of this kind. And now with the technological advances, it might be possible to make a living without going into the city. In Island the children have not only a loving family but also a sane environment in which to grow."

Such a group might come up with fresh visions and new memes to inspire the world toward the hopeful outcome I began this essay with. As Oscar Wilde said, "A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands there, it looks out, and seeing a better country, sets sail. Progress is the realization of Utopias."