Psychedelic experience characteristics

The stress on enhanced experiencing as the fundamental characteristic of these substances leads, in the literature, to a stress on the importance of the setting in which the drug is taken. In order for the enhanced capacity for experience created by these substances to show itself, an adequate range of stimuli must first be available to be experienced. Administration of psychedelics under conditions of sensory deprivation seems to abolish most of the usual effects attributed to them (Pollard, Uhr, and Stern, 1965). Hoffer and Osmond (1967) stress the importance of providing adequate environmental support to produce the kinds of experience required to produce change in personality. Alpert and Cohen (1966) also stress the need for adequate settings to provide psychedelic experiences. 

Obviously, these characteristics of the psychedelic experience, as I have known it, are aspects of a single state of consciousness—for I have been describing the same thing from... 

As Table 1 indicates, commonly observed characteristics of the psychedelic experience seem to operate both for and... 

SOME REPORTED CHARACTERISTICS OF THE PSYCHEDELIC EXPERIENCE (ias found in the literature and in subjects reports)... 

According to the functional model of the drug-state psyche advanced by us previously, there are four major levels of consciousness in the psychedelic experience. Each has its characteristic phenomena, and each can be of value in the therapeutic process. The tendency is for the patient to move through progressively "deeper" and more-complex levels of... 

In much of the writing about psychedelics, little effort has been made to clarify the differences between LSD and mescaline effects. In The Varieties of Psychedelic Experience, for example, Masters and Houston specify the agent ingested by their 206 subjects (of whom 89 received mescaline) but then seem to take ir for granted that stages and characteristics of mescaline experience will be the same as those under LSD. They noted no great differences between the effects of LSD and mescaline in the creativity studies cited in Chapter One. Aldous Huxley, writing to Humphry Osmond in December of 1955 about his first experience with LSD (75 meg.), emphasized the resemblances (and re-emphasized them later after more experiences with LSD) ... 

Necessarily, I have omitted mention of many research studies about phenomena which seem to fit well with my model, but which would have overly encumbered the present text to describe, if at the end of the last chapter I mentioned the risk of seeing habit routines everywhere, the reader will now see that, if they are not omnipresent, my model at least intimates that they are pervasive in a way that has not at all been suspected in theories of the operation of mind/brain. I believe that habit routines are fundamental, that HRS is the primary cognitive operation of the brain/mind, coming before and providing the very structure for the operations of mind of which we have everyday awareness and very importantly, due to these characteristics, that the HRS process is greatly obscured by its own operation. Only in the modification of its operation (gradual and unsurprising in the case of meditation, for example, radical and unmistakable in the case of psychedelic experience), can we even suspect its existence, and attempt to understand its characteristics and functions. 

The fundamental reason for taking psychedelics is the experiences they produce. These experiences may be of many kinds. Walter Pahnke (1967) has recently classified them into five types psychotic, characterized by fear, paranoid symptoms, confusion, impairment of abstract reasoning, remorse, depression, isolation, and/or somatic discomfort psychodynamic, in which unconscious or preconscious material becomes vividly conscious cognitive, characterized by "astonishingly lucid thought" aesthetic, with increased perceptual ability in all sense modalities and psychedelic mystical, marked by all the characteristics of spontaneous mystical experience observed in the literature. These experiences may be the cause for the effects of psychedelics on behavior. They are also the fundamental thing that must be explained if psychedelics and their effects are to be understood. 

It seems to me that the eventual outcome will be the construction of psychedelic parks. In general, these will feature a large center for therapeutic, creative, and other uses, supervised by medical men and guides, and a psychedelic chapel for religious and mystical experience. The most likely setting will probably be a park of artificial environments. The dimensions of the park need not be very great, since space counts for little in the experience. A point of some importance, however, is the matter of diversity, for one of the major characteristics of these experiences, after all, is flux. 

Almost invariably, my experiments with psychedelics have had four dominant characteristics. I shall try to explain them... 

Psychedelic usage can be life-changing, particularly in terms of one s relationships with others. The spiritual insights achieved may make it difficult to live in the same way one has in the past. Leary s guidance as to who is most likely to gain from the experience is worth keeping in mind (it is put with his characteristic flamboyance) ... 

The superiority of the synthetics over the natural MDA-like sources is pronounced. "Aminization (chemical conversion to amine form) of plant oils heightens and clarifies mental effects and all but eliminates physical side effects often accompanying use of the botanicals. Users of the synthetics generally report increased relaxation, empathy and mental fluency, and many prefer this experience for being without the "distractions of the psychedelic visuals that are characteristic of LSD and mescaline. 

Reduction of sensory input to a level as near zero as possible is a potent technique for inducing d-ASCs. In the fifties and early sixties, there were many sensory deprivation experiments during which the subject lay comfortably in a dark, quiet room without moving. The findings were interpreted as showing that if the brain did not receive sufficient sensory input, the subject went "crazy." It is now clear 46, 55 that practically all these studies were severely contaminated, as were the contemporary studies of psychedelic drugs, by implicit demand characteristics that account for most of the phenomena produced. If you a person through a procedure he thinks will make him crazy, in a medical... 

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