Raw Footage of a Lecture by Drs. Ralph Metzner and Timothy Leary on "The Social Implications of the Psychedelic Experience" (Part 1)

Ladies and Gentlemen good evening. Tonight form present doctors Ralph Metzner and Timothy Leary for the third in our series of lectures on utopian thought in America. The topic of the lecture tonight is the social implications of the psychedelic experience. Doctors Messner and Leary are well grounded in the social psychological and medical aspects of psychedelic drugs. Dr. Metzner did his undergraduate work at Oxford got his doctoral degree at Harvard in developmental psychology. He had a post-doctoral fellowship with which to study the pharmacological effect of psychedelic drugs at the Harvard Medical School. Dr. Louis got his Ph.D. in psychology at the University of California and for many years taught social relations at Harvard University. He has written three books and 35 articles on psychedelic drugs and the psychedelic experience. Dr. Metzner currently is the editor of the psychedelic review. They they describe themselves as probably the world's leading experts in a profession that they cannot

practice. Yeah. They are currently the directors of the Castillian Community Foundation in Millbrook New York dedicated to research in consciousness expansion and the psychedelic experience. Dr. Leary will speak for us tonight. It will be followed by Dr. Metzner and now I'd like to present Dr. Timothy Leary and Dr. Ralph Metzner who will talk about the social implications of the psychedelic experience. Or to. Atlanta. Thank you. I want to begin by making an apology. We were in a rush in getting here. And we don't have all of our material in order to give a very satisfactory talk tonight. This is a very complicated topic. It takes up the question of the

use of the human nervous system and its potentials. And we just didn't have enough time in this. If you could only have given us 100 more years we might be able to make more sense than we will tonight. We're going to talk tonight about some of the general. Implications and applications of the psychedelic experience. I know the title of our talk tonight might be. Sober reflections on the ecstatic experience. I use the word sober not to indicate that I'm not intoxicated at the moment. But to indicate that. The powers and energies that are released by psychedelic drugs such as LSD are enormous. The blunt fact of the matter is that.

Probably no one in this room is really equipped at the present time to deal with the complications and possibilities of that extraordinary instrument which you carry around. In the seven inches behind your forehead. Another reason why we use the word so very is that we want to underline the fact that we are not here as a drug salesman. We're not here to proselytize or to urge anyone to take LSD or to rush lightly into the psychedelic experience. There is a third aspect to the So Brian three of our. Discussion tonight. And that is that. Ready or not you can't escape facing in your life time. The meaning and the applications of drugs which expand consciousness.

Sober reflections by the word reflections. We want to suggest that we are not rushing here lightly. In haste to tell you our ideas about the psychedelic experience. For about five and a half years a group of some forty five or fifty professional men and women. Mainly And originally in the Cambridge area had been studying the effect of psychedelic drugs. All of us who worked on this project were professional people with considerable experience. We've been working a long time in this research area and. At the moment we're still pretty baffled. Our group is probably the largest group of professional people ever to work

together on a project studying psychedelic drugs. We have studied probably the largest number of cases some thirty five hundred. We have undoubtedly published more articles and books on the subject. And we're here to tell you that the possibilities and the problems presented by drugs which expand consciousness require considerable reflection. Sober reflections on the psychedelic experience. Well what do we mean by the psychedelic experience. I put briefly and bluntly The Psychedelic Experience is the experience of going out of your mind. Now to a western audience. The concept of going out of your mind strikes a note of terror going out of your mind to most

Americans means to become crazy to have elucidations. Such concepts of psychosis and Lisa nations are really pretty new to the human race is an eye fact. Even today the majority of educated men and women in the world. A majority of people who live in other continents than our own. Consider the process of going out of your mind as one of the most highly prized experiences of life. And today in other countries and in other continents some of the most best educated men and women are spending a lifetime trying to go outside of their mind. By going outside of your mind by going out of your mind we mean to have the ecstatic experience. X-Day says to stand outside to stand outside what

to stand outside your normal conceptions of space and time which I learned such concepts a second and minute hour in my 1965 completely parochial notions which is only been around for what just a few generations. To most of the cells in your nervous system and you've got I'm sorry to say this. You've got 13 billion cells in your brain. To most of the cells in you nervous system such concepts as minutes and seconds years just don't exist. Most of the cells in your body and most of the cells in your brain are concerned with time sequences and cycles. Which. Are very very little to do with such concepts as 1965. They are time dimensions which have existed for hundreds of thousands or. Hundreds of millions of years. The ecstatic experience means the experience of going out beyond your identity.

Sometimes the concept of ego loss is used as a very poor notion we think but it does point to the fact that as Alice Huxley used to say he found it amusing and somewhat comforting that ninety nine point ninety nine percent of his brain didn't know that Alice actually existed. So although most Americans might consider the process of going out of their minds as something to be feared and avoided for most of recorded history and for the most educated people in other continents today this process far from being frightening is one which as it's recognized takes a great deal of discipline to bring about but which is considered on the high points of life. Now you know why

should that be. Well again we have a simple phrase for this. You go out of your mind to use your head in order to tune in to understand to decipher most of the messages which are going on in your brain. You have to go out beyond the static world of symbols which most of us use most of the time to interpret explain. Ourselves and our world. Well who would want to have this experience. We have found in the last few years that there are extraordinarily strong a large number of people who are interested in. Using more of their nervous system. I would say that of the people who are

interested in psychedelic drugs they can be put into three classes you can put anything into three classes three categories. One is a learned group. People of all ages who have some suspicion that they take somewhere along the line that there's more to life and more to the human situation than the three or four thousand concepts which have been taught to us by our parents by and by I think that somehow that they're being short changed. They keep saying is that is that is that. You know unfortunately in Western society in America today there's almost no respectable philosophy to answer that question. So many of the people who have this vague hunch that there is more inside then the chess pieces

that we move around out there and then internalize most of these people. Are Really shortchanged by our culture and they call themselves whether it's in reincarnation or they're interested in philosophy and they're interested in various forms of extrasensory perception rather. Low status and areas. And that's unfortunate because. The possibility is there and the fact that there's a new and efficient philosophy or language to deal with these problems. Is not the fault of the nervous system. It's simply a challenge for our psychologists and philosophers. The second group of people who are attracted to the psychedelic

experience and who toyed with the idea of taking psychedelic drugs are people who have no necessary idea about there being something more or that there could be other levels of consciousness that people who are unhappy confused or miserable with a particular chess game that they're playing. These are people who are hurt and who will grab anything any new Tenn any new psychiatric technique any new social remedy that comes along they hope that they'll be given some magical cure so that they can go back to their chess game and win all the time. These of course are the people who should be warned most strenuously against. Having a psychedelic experience because if you're having trouble mastering the simple little chess game holler for a Mount Holyoke College which takes three or four thousand pieces to play. If you're having trouble with this simple

reality you should definitely stay away from the psychedelic experience which takes any one of these little problems and magnifies it with one of your many different perspectives. The third group of people who are interested in the psychedelic experience. And here's the most controversial group of all. The third group are young people and. I for one would not miss chosen if you had psychedelic research be upon in that most complex and bloodthirsty a lot struggles the struggle between the generations. But it seems to be developing that way and there are many reasons why we think young people are not so frightened by the possibility that you can change your mind that you can go out beyond. Your chess game of identifications

and favorite concepts. And that. Indeed there are many potentials inside that hadn't been tapped. Will say more about. The problem which psychedelic drugs provides young people later on. But it's there. The interesting thing is that as I look around this room almost all of you under the age of 25 are going to be involved. Implications of psychedelic drugs in your lifetime. I would guess that maybe 10 percent of you will be working professionally with psychedelic drugs in the future as psychiatrist and psychologist as educators as artists. Another 10 or 15 percent of you will probably be dealing with. Psychedelic drugs as administrators or deans. Heads of foundations we sponsor research or as Congressman you know we're going

to have to pass laws about this whereas bureaucrats in Washington are going to have to decide how do you institutionalize. Prophecies that can change people's minds very dramatically and probably will change the culture. So that accounts for about 20 or 25 percent of you. But then and here's the real sticker. All of you who have children are going to have to bring up children. And have to face the questions that are being asked today by young people. About drugs which is man's consciousness. I suspect that for most of you in this room the important implication of psychedelic drugs. Will not be reached because you're already too old. You're already probably most of you too committed to the chess games which have been imprinted on your nervous

system. Some 10 or 15 years ago and which had you been playing with competence and diligence or you wouldn't be in this particular situation tonight. But your children will get the full benefit of the possibilities we're talking about tonight. I want to consider next the question why should anyone want to go out of their mind. And again I want to underline that nothing we say tonight should be construed as a simple suggestion that the psychedelic drug experience is good or necessarily beneficial for any problem. Frank question you have now the psychedelic drug experience is going to not give you any answers but compound the questions

which you now have to face. And it's very hard to talk about the psychedelic Street experience and I'm not the first one in history to say that every person throughout history who has talked about the visionary experience or the going out of your mind experience has made the same complaint. It's ineffable. We don't accept that complaint and we don't want to cop out on it because the fact that you can't talk about the psychedelic experience is not because it's so precious and so delicate that it's eternally beyond words. It simply defines a scientific problem and linguistic problem to work out the language which can reliably and replicability and usefully define these different levels and will have more to say about that later. But it is difficult to talk to an audience who has

not ever had the experience of confronting the wonders of their own nervous system. See the problem is this. Each of you. Each second of your life like this second. Each of you has a brain which is receiving each second 1000 million signals in the time that I flick my fingers a thousand million signals went off in your brain. Now of course you're not aware of most of these. You can think at the rate of about oh say three thoughts a second if you're thinking very quickly. I will mention how redundant most of these are. So we can move the symbols around at the rate of about three a second. That means that there's 1000 million minus three and there's zooming around in there that we're not aware of has a good biological and evolutionary reason

why the DNA designers who planned this machinery didn't want us most of the time to be aware of what's going on inside see. If I were away right now even a fraction a fraction of the thousand million signals that are shooting around my head I'd be so entranced or so engulfed or so confused that I wouldn't be able to rattle off this barrage of three words a second that I'm doing right now. It's not that I'd be in a stupor but I'd be unconscious. I'd be so fully conscious that I have to put a lot of several hundred thousand images one two three at a time when. The entire switchboard is lit up. The problem that I think is tonight the problem we face tonight is something

like this I'm going to use a metaphor and I apologize for it. But that's. We do have better languages but they're too technical for us again to tonight. So I'm going to have to fall back on metaphors. The situation is like this. You see we belong to an Australian tribe who are Aborigines. We live in the jungle and. We've never been out of the jungle. We've never seen anything of civilisation. But what happened is that one night by some process that none of us understand one of us suddenly found himself after he went to sleep on his little mat in his hut found himself transported to Times Square at midnight and not last night at midnight. Your psychedelic midnight. Now he imagine the dilemma. You get up from the

cot and you look around. Now point number one is that there's nothing that you can look at that you've ever seen before and point out that everything that you're familiar with in our jungle doesn't exist there. There are no trees there are no animals no I don't need any ground. You put your hands down on the ground you crawl on your hands and knees and some strange kind of rock formation you rush up to a lamp post which thing is a tree and you scrape your hands. There's no bark. You are then all those lights and those enormous like the cars of those enormous things going by zooming. And then the rumble of the subway underneath there's not one thing that you have a concept for. And all the concepts that we used back in the jungle obviously don't work in this new situation. Whatever notion hell exists in our tribe chances.

Are you'd be trotting it out. Boy I'm really in hell and I don't know how I got here or what I did to deserve it. Maybe maybe you start to think of what you might have done to deserve it which would make you feel worse. Whatever our tribal philosophy had told us about where you go after death or what other realms there are. You probably using it. OK now let's suppose we bring our Voyager back and he wakes up in the morning. In our strategy and young and looks around there he is in his hut. He rushes out and he grabs the first person he sees and he say you know what happened to me last night. But how can you describe it. He has many words for subway or I don't hear so well. I was in this strange place where there was no jungle. There were no trees there were these huge cliffs with suns in them. You know these huge lightning bugs going around there as big as elephants and on and on and on. We have to use the language of our jungle tribe to

describe the territory for which we have no words. Now. If their tribe was like our American tribe suppose he was sent to the head man the Wise Man of the village the guy that knows everything has got all the degrees and he walked in. And he walks into the head guy's hut and says listen you know what happened to me. And you start telling the wise man experiences that he's never had. When I talked about this Ralph said well you know for them and for us most Australian tribe do have a shaman and the shaman is the man in the village that is most likely to have wandered up in the mountains and taken mushrooms or I've meditated on the hillside or whatever so that the situation wouldn't be as grim as I make it sound. Still.

If that happened to you you'd be that person with a memory of those horrible or it might've been a pleasant experience that nobody understood. And you'd be in that situation you'd be in that situation even if the next night and the next night another man from our tribe were to be taken to say Miami Beach or to Las Vegas or to the front line in Vietnam because you know there are endless places you can go from the jungle or the next we went to Venice. So each one of them would come back and they would describe in the language of the jungle the thought they went to say you know there was a bowl of water but it was so big you could walk in it you couldn't see it in a bowl of water that was so big you could walk in. So again the confusion would be multiplied but then there come that great moment when two of us would have been to Times Square. Now then the two of us could watch a little part of the jungle and say yes and there was that rumble Yes. And then the

lights where yeah that place yeah yeah yeah. When two people have had the same experience of that sort then you have the crude beginnings of the language and the crude beginnings of a science. And of course that's the interesting situation that we're in today because enough of us have had the psychedelic drug experience enough times that we can. Very crudely begin to chart out some of the regularities and some of the consistencies in the strange terrain that lies within. Now every LSD session is different every second of every LSD session is different. It's a completely unique experience but yet there are certain there are certain territories or certain terrains that are roughly similar although your reactions to them are different. So that very slowly over the last three or four years we have been developing a language to describe some of these regularities. The problem is

that in order we have to take a piece of bark and colored berries and scratch out a picture of what Times Square looks like. Because the fact of the matter is that at the present time we don't have the conceptual machinery or the linguistic machinery to duplicate to externalize the kaleidoscopic simultaneous multiplex imagery of the human nervous system when it's uncensored by symbolic thinking. Now I've used the metaphor. Attempt to explain. What a psychedelic experiences. Now I will try to be more psychological and I'll give you three characteristics of a psychedelic experience and what I'm wearing you can see your nervous system has 13 billion times squares of the neurologists are now telling us that memory is molecular.

Every cell in the nervous system is not just a round billiard ball not connected not even a vacuum tube. Every cell is a universe of its own. So that the range of possibilities and the speed and the multiplicity of possibilities make it very difficult to do. To summarize what I'm going to attempt to give you three characteristics of the psychedelic experience. Number one. I've already suggested there is a tremendous acceleration of thinking imagery. It's just hard to put put into words which I think if I could explain they say. See we're used to thinking that reality is built up in terms of linear sentences. The dog chased the rabbit

right. Let's do a reality end period. Or throwing them out a fire. The dog chased the rat quickly. Period. Then we start another line. Then we get a paragraph. We're used to thinking that we're used to dealing with the reality which is nice and tidy and symmetrical which flows along the subject predicate object. Temple. Actually your nervous system is 13 billion so computer any one cell of which can be hooked up to as many as 25000 other cells. It's a like a bio chemical electrical electrical network. And when you step outside the addiction which we have two external symbols and you open yourself up to what you're doing. It just flooding at you just flooding at you. Thousands and thousands of ideas and images a second and see they don't stop. So you can turn the page. We can't put the book down it keeps coming and coming and

coming and coming and we're used to that. Therefore when I say that there is a tremendous acceleration of thought I'm not suggesting it is necessarily anything beneficial about this for almost everyone. This is the most confusing set of events matter how well prepared you are by study foresight to experience what happens and when it keeps coming and coming and coming thousands and thousands of thoughts and images and memories and new vistas. It is overwhelming. And it can there's no necessary social benefit from this. If you're having trouble enough getting through this jungle of United States and Amherst just react to deal with them one at a time 3 a second. Again it's going to take a tremendous amount of discipline and study to deal with this

multiplicity. Characteristic number two aside our experience is. The multiplication of realities. Again this is very hard to get across to anyone who hasn't experienced the fact that there are many realities now. All these signals which are going off in your brain every second. They're not meaning less. It's not nonsense they are coded energy messages. The problem is that you don't have the code and I don't have the code. But your brain your nervous system is decoding these messages and integrating them and coordinating them and sending messages out acting on the basis of these. Messages now. We were going to have a movie tonight if we had the movie I would at this point

darken the lights and I put on a film one of our training films. We were training people how to use their heads and when these training films all of them have pictures some of the level of awareness that you get into when you go out of your mind you might see a huge cellular machine turning and tumbling over. But again they're not out there. They're inside and you are kind of tumbling around inside of them or you see streaks of light across. The thing. Again you're not watching them you are streaking across that darkness. Again it's hard to get across that that when you leave your symbolic chessboard wherever your consciousness is where the new consciousness is that's that's the universe for you. If I come before a group of this

sort maybe five or six hundred years ago and I said you know there are many levels of reality and actually this world of solid solid tangible macroscopic macroscopic objects is just one level of reality and actually there are other levels invisible to us. And the fact that all of these things are made up of little invisible universes which have an intelligence and a beauty and a planned fullness of their own. I think that a lot of skeptics and you wouldn't believe me or even if you believe me you wouldn't know what I was talking about unless I could fit your eye and microscope and put underneath a microscope slide of. A leaf or a blood or a snowflake. And then indeed you would see that the world around you what you thought was so solid is actually made out of tiny invisible objects. There is another level of reality. Well that's roughly the idea of what happens inside except that you're not looking at it. You are it.

You know again this multiplication of realities doesn't solve any problems. It's math like for many people who are unprepared for this. It's the most frightening it's terrible that they can happen in your life. Because suddenly you're like that. Australian aborigine in Times Square she has the same nervous system that we have. Then he finds himself in a new reality which he has no concepts. This multiplication of realities which is talked about by almost everyone who takes LSD can be extremely frightening although for most people it poses no paradoxes which they consider to be religious in nature and for many people. It's a tremendously exhilarating and almost relieving event that they still call cosmic laughter of the mystic is the laughter which comes when you see that that tiny little chessboard of three or four thousand concepts that you used to play your game of not wholly grammars is just one of a wide variety of energy signals and intelligences that are going on.

And other ways of interpreting the world when you see all this your reality is just one of a meaningful continuum of many realities. There is often this tremendous laughter. Why was I so stupid as to hate it and struggled and had all these ambitions and worried self-worth when I now I see that the Redeem that chessboard is one meaningful part. And unified part. Much more complicated picture. So again the multiplication of realities poses paradoxes which can be terrorizing or which can be for many people the deepest religious experiences of their life. When people talk about the religious implications are usually referring to this modification of reality as the sense of awe and reverence that you see where you belong and your chess game belongs in the picture. This religious experience it again is a different kind of religious experience and most of you would expect. It doesn't necessarily have to do anything with the things that you wear the

symbols you are taught in Sunday school. It should because the symbols are probably correct and right. But you don't you know you never really live them. There's a story here we often tell about the religious aspects of the site experience. We gave LSD once too. I see that rabbi who wrote a long report about it which has been published and when I was over he said yup there's no doubt about it that was the deepest religious experience of my life. But it wasn't Jewish enough. And he then wrecked and went on to recommend in his paper that the psychedelic drugs should be used in the rabbinical training but it should be in a set and setting and with guides who. Were Scenic to get the full import. Then we had the

experience in the last few years of giving LSD to about a hundred fifty professional religious people including a large group of Protestant divinity students and present ministers. And very often the complaint or the responses. Yes it was all lies the deepest religious experience in every sense of the word. Full of full of reverence of it but it wasn't very Christian. We also had the experience. And privilege of giving these drugs to. Well I would say 25 to 30 professional people from eastern religions mainly Buddhist Tantra Hindus and typically when we get a Buddhist when it's all over we say well he looks at us and said Yeah just what I expected. The reason for this is of course that Buddhism is not basically a religion in our secular sense that Buddhism is a psychological theory

of consciousness. It's a theory of love as both a method and a theory for bringing about the psychedelic effect. And the Buddhist training prepares them. Indeed that can seem chores the sort of multiplication of realities which I've been talking about. Now the third characteristic of a psychedelic drug experience. And again this is the very devil of our own is the intensification. Of. Sensory awareness. Any of you have read about psychedelic drugs. Huxley heard Havelock Ellis or the Gordon Watson progress struck by the emphasis on the visual that the doors to perception are clean cleansed.

That ordinarily we live in a world of dead symbols. We see just those chess pieces that we need to play the game of playing. And if you're in New York City at the rush hour and you're playing a game to get a cab you're just looking for that yellow car that comes along. That's the one symbol that's important if you're waiting for your boyfriend he's got a red car. That's what you're looking for and you disregard to screen out everything else you've got to because your retina is picking up you know millions and millions and millions of impulses in mosaic patterns a minute when you step off the chessboard suddenly boom it's all hitting your retina. With equal. Power. And. Somehow it's alive that you realize that wrapping everything up in a nice plastic label symbol you have put a lot of distance between.

Yourself and most of what you're surrounded by and you've cut you cut down. The amount of stimulation. People often will just look for a long long time at a rose or water coming and not because they're in a hypnotic trance or because they're in a stupor but because they have never looked before and they probably haven't ever really looked since that time when you were 2 or 3 years old when you first began to start wrapping everything up in symbols. The same thing is true of the sense of the auditory sense. Ordinarily we listen for just that game cue that we need like the mother can hear a thousand things going on but she just can pick up the little cries of the baby in the next room. Not everything except what we. Why do you pick up when you are no longer trapped in your symbolic chess

board suddenly. Sound is just exploding in your ear as raw direct energy. And of course see what we mean by X by extending X stakes this means when you're experiencing directly without symbols. During such moments. Say one node of a box and goes boom. But instead of you sitting there politely as a person of culture listening to a Bach Sonata playing the game of audience it's banging in your panic membrane and that's all there is because. All of your touch is located there so that you hear overtones and meanings and of course your time dimension stop. So you can stop it and you can just lay there on evolutionary shelf and orbit around that one sound for light years examining all of the meaning of it but it's you and then very slowly there comes the second sound. So then

again you can spend several light years comparing that to the again the overtones the fuel quality and so forth. At these moments when the attention is completely unconscious completely involved in the living stimulus you hear as you've never heard before. The same thing is true of other senses smell touch sound. Most. Complicating of all the same thing is true of the sexual awareness not sexual behavior but sexual awareness. I see that the PM has nothing necessarily good about he and tense education and sensory awareness. Very few if anyone in this room is really prepared for the full impact. Of direct awareness. Many people find this

microscopic vision to be too much but the effect of the drugs is the opposite of narcotics. Take a narcotic to dull sensibility to dull pain. Whether it's physical or mental with drugs everything is opened up glittering gleaming kind of pulsing with life and I can be very disturbing. Similarly with with sound. Most of us want our sound package for us and we were quite disturbed if we get a situation where it's just direct energy coming. And similarly with the other senses. So I repeat the three characteristics which I've mentioned acceleration ideas and images. The multiplication of realities and the intensification of senses

are not necessarily positive nor beneficial. Almost no one is prepared at the present time to deal with the release of such energies because the unfortunate and complicating fact is that it takes much longer to use to learn how to use this machine than it does any of the simple machines out there like computers and jet planes a software machine which after this machine designed and built. It. In order to use a psychedelic drug drug you should be very carefully prepared and trained. You should have some familiarity with method and with language. As I suggested it is possible to develop the language and that's what we've been doing in the last two or three years and the fact that we are not legally allowed at the present time to use these drugs is no problem to us because the real work now is the developing of the

language the working out of maps which will help us recognize and communicate about these experiences and no matter how crude the math is. The fact that you have any kind of a map is a help because even if it's not on the map at least you know where it's not and you can start building up a descriptive language. Now I want to give you an illustration. I think. We're always bothered by the fact that we're talking abstractly about something which is really quite alive. And I see if I can bring some of this home to you by a personal experience of mine. I was going to India last fall and before I went I had some dental work done and I didn't want to have a tooth ache on the banks of the Ganges. I went to a dentist to Kitty's behalf far away from where we live and I had to go about 15 times and each time I went.

He used a drug. He is the narcotic drug. No the cane put in my jaw. Then the fourteenth time he finished his work he said just come back one more time and I got a little cleaning to do what I want to do a little scraping but that's all. So I made a point of the following week. And in the meantime a doctor Metzner. Had a tooth ache and went to the same dentist. An eternity of wisdom tooth and it was about a two hour operation. So then I said I'm going to use gas at the gas prices nitric oxide which years very different from novacaine oxide is a psychedelic drug. Anyone who's read William James's Varieties of Religious Experience will remember in the chapter on mysticism. William James makes claims for oxide experience a much more

extravagant and I think ever said about LSD. So later that afternoon Dr. Messner drove back to saturn and he walked in the house and he walked over to the sofa and he sat down. We realized something very important happened to him and he said forget about LSD. So. I was very kind of chagrined by this because I had to remember all those holes I had from the needle. And so the next day I went to the dentist and I got in the dentist office I said he said this won't take very long today and he's going to see I want to do it you know the cane is OK. So I looked at him and I said How about some gas. So it was quite surprising really. You know it's not going to hurt at all but you know as well.

Dr. Metzger gets that gas when I get there. So he's trying to get a lot of difficult patients hands so he strapped my legs to the chair and he strapped my arms to rest and then he put this thing over my mouth. And I watched his hand. Turning the dial you know that black hairy hand. And then I went out of my mind into another level of reality. Now at this point I should tell you that I was first turned on by my father many years ago. My father was a dentist. And when I was about seven years old I had to have a baby tooth out and I dimly remember that I went to his office and he gave me gas.

And I remember laughing and it was a pleasant experience but I hadn't remembered it for. Some 30 years or more. But as soon as the dentist and the kids say turning the dial. I suddenly found myself back in my father's office and I realized that everything that happened. In the meantime some 35 years was a dream. It was a dream that I'd gotten up and left the office. It was a dream that I got into high school. It was a dream that I'd gone to college and been in a world war. It was a dream that I got a degree in psychology. It was a dream that I went to Harvard. It was a dream that I left Harvard. I am. Arab. And. Actually reality. The only real reality was the deadest year.

Now. There's of course that old Zen parable. Yes chunks through the Taoist philosopher who after studying for about 30 years. Told his students one day. I had a dream last night and that I was a butterfly. And that dream shook me up ontologically. My concepts of reality because now I'm not sure whether I'm a philosopher who dreamt he was a butterfly. Or a butterfly who dreamt he is a philosopher. And I'm not really sure now how whether I am. A man who goes around giving lectures about the psychedelic experience or whether I'm a small boy in a dentist chair dreaming he goes around giving lectures about. The Psychedelic Experience. Now I tell you that story because it's exactly the scientific problem with psychedelic research.

The that your brain can be compared to the astronomical situation. There are about as many galaxies as there are brain cells. And. Although the first few times you have this experience it's all different and new and you're shooting from one galaxy in one planet to another. Yet there are certain consistent places that you tend to go back to depending on your karma or your set or your psychological background. And I'll second secondly that any time you are in one area of your nervous system that's reality and all the time and space and any problems of the other levels are reality. Those are dreams. That's both the eerie and the challenging aspect of the nervous system.

There are many many realities inside. And of course the message we're giving you tonight is dressed up in new metaphors and there are new methods involve all of you recognize it as the oldest message that men have been passing on to each other for the last few thousand years. The real challenge the real problem the real discoveries the real areas for exploration lie within. And that's the thing that keeps you from reaching these potentials within is your addiction your addiction to external symbols of positive and negative that you can't give up. I want to. Just talk about two or three more minutes before Dr. Metzger continues

about some of the social. Possibilities and problems of the psychedelic experience. One of the. First things we discovered when we started using drugs at Harvard was that almost everyone you talk to had their own explanation about what this experience was. The people who didn't who hadn't had experience of course were more certain than the people had. But everyone tended to impose their own model. I see none of us can stand to have anything out there. We don't have a chess piece. That's the one thing we can't that we've got to have a symbol. We've got to have a name for anything that exists.

And if somebody comes along and tells you the line experience which you don't have a symbol it's really quite threatening and then we have those safety wastebasket symbols will say well as I listen nation or as a delusion or as we used to say it's magic anything we can explain and label. We have to sweep it under the rug in some catch all term. I know the first thing we discovered. Was that everyone tended to impose his own model upon this new experience which is rather discouraging because. It was obvious that none of our models really could explain or label these experiences. The. Researchers that are there should be used in research. The psychiatrists should be used in psychotherapy. The artist said. They should be used to enhance creativity. The hipsters rebellious people said this is a new way to get high. The lawmaker said. We can pass a new

law. Or IRA. We were pretty protected and insulated. We tended we thought we'd exhausted all the possibilities that once after about six months we were running a session one day for a friend of a psychiatrist who was a businessman in Newton and after about an hour and a half he sat he said this is wonderful. This is incredible. We've got to get a million doses of this reality for us. What are we going to use it for in the Cold War era you know to explain the mysteries. He said We'll make a million with it. The point is that everyone imposes his own model. Point number two what we discovered was that there is no single LSD effect and that anyone who takes a psychedelic drug

will find that what happens what you experience which of these internal galaxies you visit depends upon which are set in the setting as your expectation and your training your preparation. Of what is going to happen and setting the environment or the people that you're with and so forth. We found that we gave drugs to divinity students on Good Friday in Boston University Chapel and we had organ music playing. They had meditated and prayed and prepared for this experience for some time at a time. And 90 percent of them had the deepest religious experience of their life given in other settings. The Environment determined what happened. We were looking around for some scoreboard or some way to demonstrate to society and what goes on inside can add implications for the outside.

And we decided to research in the Congress state prison. We gave we gave rice which say we took LSD with prisoners over a hundred times in the conquered state prison. We picked the prisoners because they were looking for some scoreboards too and that if you give people religious experiences or if their mental health improves. Still no way to prove it but if a prisoner gets better the way the ball game is scored like numbers of runs and he's either in prison or is out after a certain time to count the bodies and see how successful you are then. So that's why I went to the prison. Now when we first went to the prison we faced a tricky situation because we were proposing to put out of their minds some of the toughest men in Massachusetts is a maximum security prison and. These men are by definition impulsive and have very little self-control. They have

no trust at all and considerable skepticism about middle class professionals who command and try to make them into nice good people like us. And. So. We did something then which we often continued to use as a general procedure in our research and that is that we took the drug with the prisoners. We always had some of our research down who didn't who would like us observers but. When you're studying consciousness or you're changing somebodies consciousness you're intruding on that last prized possession we have they can take everything and move everything around they respond by it as with television and with the one thing you have left is your own internal way of interpreting things. And if you take that away. As you can with these drugs you're really infringing on some pretty tricky territory so that in the prison the first day we went there they were three prisoners and two Harvard

psychologists who started. And the psychologist were the first ones to take the drugs recently. You know the table and then three prisoners to get in there were three prisoners who had notebooks and watching and two other psychology were watching and for five hours we changed roles and they took it and we had to do it that way because. When you put somebody out of his mind there comes that moment of. Like. How did this happen. Who's done this to me. And then. If there is anything in the situation which provokes distrust or which doesn't instill trust. You get into the paranoia years and these tremendous panics and certainly giving these drugs to people in a situation like a prison who they looked around and looked at it. These Harvard psychologist we came in and knocked them out of their minds that the prison project would have lasted more than one day. Yeah.

I've been trying in the last hour last 15 minutes to tell you something about what a psychedelic experience is and some of the philosophic and linguistic and social problems of its application. I'm going to ask Dr. Metzner if he would continue to talk a little bit about the some of the community. Projects which we ran in the last few years. Or to Will.