Investigators have noted a close analogy between LSD symptoms and symptoms of psychosis. As an Indian student remarked recently, "Who wants to build railroads when you can have the fulfillment of all your wishes?" Although both Leary and Huxley insist that LSD is only a means of educating oneself for the normal conscious state, neither really explains why it wouldn't be nicer to spend all one's time under LSD. One writer reports that most LSD subjects receive a "common vision of immortality." They, presumably, have seen through the mortality game. No less than five of the book's contributors call on William James' Varieties of Religious Experience for a precedent to LSD visions. What Leary calls the "nongame intuitive insight outlook" is more frankly described by Huston Smith (head of the MIT philosophy department) as religious experience. Leary assumes that his "game" perception is common to all psychedlic episodes, whereas Freudian investigators have reported an upsurge of childhood memories and Jungian therepists have reported their own variety of "transcendant experience."Īldous Huxley, in his more badly philosophical article, conjectures that under LSD the "deeper self decides which kind of experience will be most advantageous." But this is a fairly specific rehabilitative use of the drug. Leary's LSD sessions at the Concord state prison apparently helped some convicts to readjust. The obvious question is whether it is necessary to take LSD to gain Leary's insights into culture. "Anger and anxiety are irrelevant because you see your small game in the context of the great evolutionary game which no one can win and no one can lose." survival and peace of mind." Leary explains that the LSD experience frees men from the egotistic frustration of cultural "games".
In various places he speaks of the goal of psychedelic therapy as "the freedom from helplessness.the religious experience.the love experience.expansion of consciousness, freedom of the brain from the mind. Leary in his manifesto makes philosophical assumptions which are neither self-evident nor even consistent. The medical contributors have made isolated experiments in the use of LSD in psychiatric therapy, both in a psychoanalytic framework and in group rehabilitation Timothy Leary, Alan Watts, and Aldous Huxley speak for visionary, mystical use of the drug.
Solomon's anthology covers two possible approaches to LSD. Psychologists play with philosophy and novelists toy with psychology. Reading it one gets the disturbing picture of a lot of children playing with fire: Timothy Leary proposing psychedelic colonies, one researcher giving LSD to psychotics, another giving it to people approaching death. The book contains more answers than questions. Die Gedanken sind frei." Later in the book Dan Wakefield notes, "It has been reported that a pound of LSD dropped into a city's water supply could produce a psychosis of the population that would last long enough for enemy troops to take over."Īlmost every contributor to this book has his own optimistic theory about LSD's application. The editor of this anthology concludes his arguments for wider distribution of LSD with the statement, "No social authority can successfully arrogate unto itself the right to dictate and fix the levels of consciousness to which men might aspire.