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History Of Hallucinogenic Substances For the Explorers of Inner Space

12 Nov 2011 Leave a Comment

by goamusic in Uncategorized Tags: consciousness, Explorers, freedom, Hallucinogenic, peace, psy, shamanism, spiritual, substance

The history of mankind’s involvement with hallucinogens seems to go back thousands of years. Some modern scholars speculate that the soma of the ancient Hindus was indeed a hallucinogenic substance that was used for purposes of religious ritual and ecstasy. The use of opiates in China and the Far East is well documented. The religious uses of hallucinogenic mushrooms by Native Americans is also a well documented fact, as well as being a point of controversy in modern legislation.

However, the modern West only really became involved with hallucinogenic drugs after World War II. It was in 1948 that LSD was first produced from rye mold by Albert Hoffman, who was at the time looking for antibiotic substances in fungi. Also around this time, mescaline was identified as the active agent in certain hallucinogenic plants. Within a few years after being recognized, these substances began to cause severe polarization in opinions about their use and benefit.

On one hand, there were in the 1950s and early 1960s, small groups of avant garde intellectuals who began to associate religious and mystical qualities with the effects of these drugs on human perception. Perhaps best known in this regard was Aldous Huxley’s “The Doors of Perception”, which highlighted Huxley’s personal experiences on mescaline. Also in this vein was Alan Watts’ “The Joyous Cosmology” which also extolled the philosophical and mystical virtues of the hallucinogenic experience.

On the other hand, during this same period, hallucinogenic drugs such as LSD and mescaline were seen by the medical and psychiatric fields as being agents that seemed to simulate psychosis. Initially, the term “hallucinogenic” did not even exist. In the 1950s and 1960s these drugs were generally called “psychomimetics”, meaning that their effects mimicked symptoms displayed by psychotics and paranoids. Perhaps the crowning tribute to this view of LSD was the book “One Flew Over The Cuckoos Nest” by Ken Kesey, which reflected Kesey’s experiences as a volunteer in medical experiments on the effects of LSD. Incidentally, Kesey, in the late 1960s went on to be one of the leaders of the West coast psychedelic movement with his “Band of Merry Pranksters” (as described in the book “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Tests”).

So from the very beginning the hallucinogenic drugs have been viewed from totally opposite points of view: doctors initially equated the drugs’ effects with psychosis, and intellectuals equated the drugs’ effects with profound religious experiences.

The story of LSD climaxed in the early 1960s with the research of Timothy Leary at Harvard University. Initially, Leary, who was a Harvard psychologist researching the nature of personality, had only an impartial scientific interest in these so-called psychomemetic drugs. He soon found out however that their effects were so great as to cause him to essentially abandon his roots as an elitist East coast intellectual and to become the founding father of the psychedelic movement in the United States. It was Leary’s contention that hallucinogenic drugs opened up to human perception things long lost from Western tradition, things that were well understood in older cultures and religions. Timothy Leary recognized, like other intellectuals a decade before him, that these drugs have the potential to cause profound religious and mystical experiences, experiences that could easily be distorted and misconstrued by Western reductionistic intellectuals as being symptoms of insanity. Leary, like any other person made sane by LSD, came to the conclusion that it was the modern West that was insane, not some poor individual in a psychiatric ward who was experiencing visions and hearing voices.

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