My Favorite Obscure Books - Installment 1

I will now quote from The Light at the Center by Agehananda Bharati:

"For our purpose, one theme in [R.D] Laing's work is central: that the true schizophrenic, or more widely, the person labeled mentally ill by any clinical terminology, can make a recovery in clinical terms not by the various professional therapies, but by dismantling his whole person and recreating it from scratch. We have a notable parallel to this in the successful LSD experience. A good trip may not be a strong trip; but trips that are good and strong do just this to the perceptive taker - he casts off all he is, his cognitive, affective, orectic "personality;" his persona, his "mask" or masks are shed one by one. If he sustains the process without capitulating to the alternative, horror and pain, he re-assembles the bits and pieces that make up the total person in the normal state to which he returns - but the bits and pieces have been washed, rinsed, and dried as it were. The world looks different, for a blessed little while at least - not because it its different, which it isn't, but because the instruments by which he perceives it have been cleaned and oiled" (196).

"One of the main objections to Leary's and Alpert's experiments with psilocybin was that they refused to program the participants on medically acceptable lines, in a laboratory setting. Now Leary and Alpert insisted - not yet as prophets and cult leaders, but as scholars - that the laboratory setting was totally dysfunctional, and that it led to "bad trips" almost invariably; that a warm, loving, supportive atmosphere is essential in order to obtain the maximum benefit of the psychosomatic substance. But it was quite clear that such terms as "warm," "supportive," and particularly "loving" were outside the laboratory and research rules – and it was obviously Leary’s and Alpert’s initiatory action that catapulted them into disaster, and into the discontinuation of the Psilocybin Project. Leary and Alpert wrote “the goal of the research sessions run by the Harvard IFIF group was not to produce and study frightening disturbances of consciousness, which was the goal of most psychiatric investigation of model psychoses, but to produce ecstatic experience, to expand consciousness, to provide the subject with the most memorable, revelatory, life-changing experience of his life . . . from the beginning of our research, our attention was directed to the engineering of ecstasy, the preparation for, the setting for, the achievement of ecstasy” (210).