Slowly but
surely, LSD, Magic Mushrooms and Cannabis are been mastered and slowly turned
to good effect. This reports some of
that slow transition for us. It has
really been a lifetime to reach this point where unbiased enquiry can proceed
without gratuitous attacks.
All forms of
mental illness desperately need the protocols hinted at in the empirical
evidence reported so far. The gift of
these drugs promises to be uniform mental health, even in the face of physical
damage. The sooner we get serious about
perfecting our knowledge the better it will be for all.
Yet LSD served
to accelerate the process. It was too
clearly effective to dance about with confusing claims and simple denial.
St. Albert and
the LSD Revelation Revolution
December 19, 2013
On January 11th, 2006, the Swiss chemist who
discovered LSD, Dr. Albert Hofmann, turned 100 years old. The birthday celebra-
tion was an elegant gathering of family, friends and colleagues held in
Basel, Switzerland at the Museum of Cultures. My wife Allyson and I were
invited because of our association with psychedelic culture and participation
in a Symposium later that week. Distinguished guests at the birthday gathering
spoke in German, but even monolinguistic Americans could understand the
reverence and enthusiasm shown in speeches praising Dr. Hofmann as a scientist
and a sage. A reception followed where invited guests mingled and toasted.
Allyson and I greeted many old friends and made some new ones. I was intrigued
to learn that none of the members of Dr. Hofmann’s large family or any of his
relatives, except for his wife, had ever tried LSD. The good doctor has always
steered away from advocacy, yet has come to feel that some kind of divine
intervention or destiny did play a role in his discovery.
I was especially glad to see Stanislav Grof, M.D.,
and H.R. Giger because they could not be in attendance at the Symposium. Stan
Grof is the leading psychiatric researcher, having led over 4,000 LSD
psychotherapeutic sessions, and premier cartographer of the spectrum of
consciousness that LSD gives a person access to. Grof has commented that LSD is
a tool for exploring the mind in the same way that the telescope gives one
access to the celestial realms and the microscope gives one access to the world
of the cellular, molecular and atomic. He has also included in all his research
some amazing drawings and paintings by LSD patients and fine artists that help
describe the various altered states of awareness. Grof has used Giger’s work in
many of his books, such as Realms of the Human Unconscious and Beyond the Brain. When I asked the obvious question to Giger as to
whether LSD had made a difference in his own work, he would only say, “Oh no,
no, it is against the law, it is forbidden!” I guess you’ve got to respect a
man’s privacy. Though I do admire artists like R. Crumb and Keith Haring who admitted they used LSD and that it was
critical in the development of their own style. That is the way Allyson
and I feel regarding our own work. The next day we and some good friends
visited the Giger Museum, which is an astonishing, in-depth immersion into the
artist’s unique visionary shadow realm. You have to be a bit determined to find
Giger’s castle in the small and beautifully Swiss alpine town of Gruyere. We
enjoyed seeing the biggest collection of his work ever on display. The dark
galleries felt filled with the demons of modern life, a festering biomechanical
psychosexual orgy of predators and victims. On an upper floor Giger exhibits
some of his collaborative works with several artists and then has several
galleries filled with his own art collection, which includes Joe Coleman’s
amazing Charles Manson portrait and a few beautiful originals by Ernst Fuchs.
No one leaves without getting a drink at the Giger Bar. Gaudi meets Gunter Von
Hagen.
To honor Dr. Hofmann’s centennial, a three-day LSD
symposium was held January 14, 15, 16 in Basel, Switzerland. Leading
scientific, psychiatric, pharmaceutical, legal, artistic, mystical voices spoke
on the various physiological, personal, social and spiritual impacts of
LSD. Dr. Albert Hofmann spoke the first and last evening and was showered with
praise and applause by over two thousand attendees (we also sang, “Happy Birthday
to you”). Hofmann was swarmed with fans wherever he went, and one of the
Symposium announcers said, Dr. Hofmann apologizes that he will not be able to
sign everyone’s book, because he explained, “I’m no longer 90.”
Dr. Hofmann first synthesized the compound in 1938,
while researching ergot derivatives as a chemist for
Sandoz Pharmaceuticals in Basel. The substance was tested on lab animals
with no interesting results, so like hundreds of similar test compounds,
investigation of this drug was abandoned.
Yet, in 1943, at the horrific height of WWII and
shortly after Fermi made his discovery that led to the atomic bomb, Hofmann had a “peculiar presentiment” to
re-synthesize LSD. These were dark days in 1943, I imagine the smoke of the
ovens of Auschwitz psychically wafting over Switzerland. Hofmann said that
never before or since had he any similar “presentiment.” His remix of LSD-25 in
April of 1943 was when he discovered the psychological vortex of acid. He
experienced overwhelming fear of dying and feelings of having left his body and
later, heavenly kaleidoscopic visions. The first LSD trip, April 19, 1943, is
also widely known as “Bicycle Day” because of Hofmann’s wild bike ride from his
lab to his home through the streets of Basel, full of perceptual distortions,
not knowing whether he would ever return from his madness. The last element I
painted on the portrait was a little bike riding Hofmann, and in honor of the
good doctor, I was on LSD as I painted it.
In my portrait of Dr. Hofmann, the eye of transcendental
spirit in the upper left hand corner of the painting releases spiralic streams
of primordial rainbow spheres of potential, one of which becomes a
compassionate alchemical angel, whose tears drip down to anoint or “create” the
LSD molecule that the doctor holds in his hands, and a demon, here identified
with Nazi power, tugs or pushes at it. LSD opens a visionary gateway to the
heart, as shown by the spiral of fractally infinitizing eyes resembling
the stripey eye-spheres of the molecule, swirling into the center of the
chest. On St. Albert’s shoulderblade is a portrait of Paracelsus, the Alchemist
of Basel, 500 years ago, who is credited with founding modern Chemistry, yet
his alchemical goal was to discover the Philosopher’s Stone. Alchemy was the art
and science of the transmutation of the elements, like turning lead into gold
and the identification of the soul of the alchemist with the chemical
transformations as a metaphor of their journey to enlightenment. Modern
Chemistry took the psyche and mystery out of the material weighed and measured
world, reducing the world to a heap of atoms. LSD brought psyche back front and
center to the chemical material world, that is partly why I believe that LSD is
the Philosopher’s Stone, the discovery of which, also in the town of Basel, is
the result of an alchemical process put in motion by the great Paracelsus.
I put a lot of LSD personalities and symbolism in
the aura of Dr. Hofmann. Some of these people were Dr. Hofmann’s friends, like
Aldous Huxley, Gordon Wasson, Maria Sabina, and Richard Evans Schultes, each of
whom had a special connection to psychedelics. Huxley wrote fearlessly
about the psychedelic experience in The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell, which also talks about visionary states and works
of art. His dying wish was to be injected with 100 mcg. of LSD and this was
noted by his wife Laura to assist his transition. Gordon Wasson brought the magic psilocybin mushrooms to the
world by attending the Mexican curandera, Maria Sabina’s sacred mushroom
healing ceremony, then writing about it in Life magazine. Hofmann later
analyzed the mushroom and distilled the previously unclassified psychedelic,
psilocybin.
I put the classic folks in like Timothy Leary, Ram Das, Ralph Metzner, Grof, Ott and McKenna. I tried to put in a few
lesser known psychedelic stories, like the Pittsburgh Pirate, Dock Ellis, who
pitched a “no-hitter” on acid and said there were comet trails on every ball.
An article originally appeared in The Daily Mail (London) on Sunday, August 8,
2004, with the headline, “Crick was high on LSD when he discovered the secret
of life!”, explained how Francis Crick used it for creative thinking, in this
way unraveling the structure of DNA, the discovery that won him the Nobel
Prize. Directly under Crick is Kary Mullis, who won the Nobel Prize for
Chemistry in 1993 for his invention of PCR, a method for detecting even the
smallest amount of DNA in ancient materials. “Would I have invented PCR if I
hadn’t taken LSD? I seriously doubt it,” he says. “I could sit on a DNA
molecule and watch the polymers go by. I learnt that partly on psychedelic
drugs.”
One of the best summaries of the mystical impact of
acid was George Harrison’s Rolling Stone interview from 1987. In it he says,
“For me, 1966 was the time when the whole world opened up and had a greater
meaning. But that was a direct result of LSD. It was like opening the door,
really, and before, you didn’t even know there was a door there. I had such an
overwhelming feeling of well- being, that there
was a God, and I could see him in every blade of grass. It was like gaining
hundreds of years of experience within twelve hours. It changed me, and there
was no way back to what I was before.”
The LSD Symposium could be a turning point in the
story of this amazing molecule, as the subtitle of the conference, “From
Problem Child to Wonder Drug” suggests. Thousands of people from all over the
world came together to discuss the proven possibilities of LSD in
psychotherapy, spirituality, the arts, for creative problem-solving in all
fields, and how LSD was misused and abused by the CIA, and also by many
people seeking a recreational high who catalyzed their own latent psychoses.
Yet, as has been proven in the Good Friday
Experiment and in follow-up studies, psychedelics can evoke a mystical
experience and bring a person closer to God. Even if only a glimpse of the
infinite, a person never forgets that encounter. The hope is that such a vision
of unity can help bring people to care more for themselves, each other, and our
world. I believe that taken in the proper set and setting, LSD can be the right
medicine for humanity’s ailing and alienated soul. God help that it find a more
fair legal and spiritual status around the world in the 21st century. One of
the most intensely beautiful moments from the trip to Basel came when Dr.
Hofmann generously signed the back of my portrait of him, adding also the date
of his birthday and the LSD formula. He wagged his finger at me and in
Germanic-sounding English said, “You’ve got the eye!” He agreed to sign an
edition of 50 prints to help fund scientific psychedelic research through MAPS, and to assist our cultural center in New York
City, the Chapel of Sacred Mirrors (www.cosm.org). Forty-nine of the portraits have been sold, and
print 1/50 will be auctioned online in October 2006. St. Albert and the LSD
Revelation Revolution will be on display in the Chapel. Please come visit.
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