There's more to reality than meets a normal eye.
Behind the curtain of everyday consciousness
is hidden another unutterably strange mental universe.
It's the realm of mystical experience.
And those who've been there describe the visit
as the most significant event of their lifes.
Until recent times that was a world known only to holy men, to saints, or perhaps to the insane.
Then a generation ago this drug, LSD, escaped from the laboratory.
It was consumed by millions of young people.
To some it's a doorway to the mystical universe,
chemical ecstasy, enlightenment in a bottle.
To others it's a dangerous and subversive poison.
The drug challenges our very conception of reality
and its turbulent history raises sharp questions about the dividing line
between private experience and public policy...
– ...people who would benefit most of all are professors...
... I think it can be extremely good for almost anybody with fixed ideas,
with a great certainty about what's what to take this thing...
-... LSD is the most dangerous drug that we have in the world today...
– Acid is good for you its goals
– If you can reach how to righty use this fascinating, beneficent but dangerous drug...
The remarkable effects of LSD were discovered by accident in Switzerland
during the World War II
Albert Hofmann was then a young chemist working in a laboratories of Sandoz
– a large pharmaceutical company.
The program I was involved was to study the active principals of medicinal plants.
And one of these medical plants we were studying was ergot.
Ergot is a fungus that grows on corn.
For centuries midwifes have used it to stimulate the uterus ...
At Sandoz, Hofmann was experimenting with ergot trying to refine its effect.
On the 16th of April 1943 he was in his laboratory
preparing a fresh batch of a compound he first synthesized 5 years before.
It was LySergic acid Diethylamide – LSD
At the end of the synthesis I've got in a very strange psychic situation -
a kind of dream-world appeared quite a ...
feeling of a oneness with the world – a very strange
experience which reminded me to some experience I had in childhood.
Sometimes when I was in nature – in the forest, in the wood
that I had some kind of I would say mystical experiences.
The feeling of oneness – to be one with nature.
The feeling to see now the true aspect of nature –
the “beautience” and which filled me with happiness...
He believed that his present dream-like state
was in some way connected with the crystals of LSD
that Albert Hofmann was purifying that afternoon.
He'd certainly not eaten any but his fingers
might possibly have brushed against a few traces of the compound.
If so then LSD was a remarkably potent drug. He decided to experiment on himself.
Being cautious man and I thought I would start
with the smallest-smallest quantity which even it could have any effect
Namely I started with 0.25 mg
and at intention then to increase dosage get then to see that something would happen.
But this very small dose, the first dose of my experiments I've planned,
was very very strong.
Feeling increasingly unwell, Hofmann was obliged to return home.
It was war time, he went by bicycle.
As a journey progressed, the external world
began to look stranger and stranger.
By the time he reached home, normal reality had disintegrated.
When I entered this room I was really astonished
how this room had changed.
The room itself and the objects in this room
had quite a different form, different color, different meaning.
And the objects like this chair had...was... like if he was
a living object it can moving from inside.
That was so unusual that I really got afraid
of that I had became insane.
-A kind next-door neighbour brought milk with an antidot.
She too was malevolently transformed.
The bizarre and terrifying hallucinations continued all evening.
At times Hofmann felt that he was dead and had arrived in hell.
But at last 6 hours after taking the drug
he felt himself returning to the normal world.
Two days later, now fully recovered, Hofmann reported his discovery
to the head of laboratory.
One teaspoon of this new drug LSD could render 50000 people temporarily insane.
– I, myself, and also of course medical department here realised immediately
that it was very important agent which could be used in psychiatry and in research.
Sandoz distributed LSD to psychiatric hospitals as an experimental drug called “DELYSID”.
No one really knew what medical use LSD might have
but this extraordinary substance deserved further study.
Research soon showed that LSD closely resembles powerful natural chemicals in the brain
used to exchange messages between nerve cells.
The drug acts like a false signal, disrupting the normal flow of information.
One specific effect is to disable the region of the brain that filters
information arriving from the senses.
A flood of signals reaches consciousness and is experienced as an overwhelming ??? of sensation.
The impact on a mind is profound.
It is if reality was suddenly uncensored,
revealing a world exquisitly or horrificly transformed.
All the senses are affected.
Colors particularly are brighter and more vivid.
Sound, too, is strangely transformed.
Sights are smelled, and sounds are seen.
Motion becomes a (weld) of frozen moments.
And often the world is (strooming???) with bizarre distortions of reality.
But hallucinations and pretty colors are only part of the story.
LSD also affects the subconscious mind.
In the early 1950s psychiatrists began to investigate this aspect of the drug.
All over the world scientific papers appeared reporting the use of LSD
in a treatment of psychiatric pacients.
The leading center was Powick Hospital in England
Here in a purpose-built facility, known as the LSD Block,
hundreds of mentally ill people were treated with LSD.
A consultant psychiatrist to pioneer this work was Ronald Sandison
For decade he ran the Powick unit.
Today the LSD block has been converted into offices.
Doctor Sandison returns there to recall the past:
– This is where we worked 30 years ago?
– Yes it's, I don't quite remember it as being this sort of shape,
I remember something different; an entrance from the corridor.
– ... remember .... patients came there...
We meet with Dr. John Whitelaw, a colleague from the LSD days.
– This, remember, was a trolley area where the nursing staff
used to set up the LSD ampules.
They'd draw the LSD up with a syringe
and you know had these (little bits)
they poured it into distilled bottles, um, uh, added to it.
They just used to stand where you are and ...
– Most people measures to the first effects came all after about 20 minutes
and some were in the fist hour.
They would retire to their particular room which have been allocated to them.
And noted from the outside you might think there was nothing going on
because LSD doesn't have a mark-effect on behavior,
more of an effect on internal mental processes.
– we used to have a little... um...little bed in the uh...
– single bed...
The point of giving patients LSD was to release suppressed memories
and mental conflicts, that psychoanalysts belive are the root cause of mentall illness.
LSD was perhaps a key to unlock the unconscious mind.
– There's a curious kind of artefact in the early
stages of LSD that people often have a great tendency to laugh and that seems
to be a sort of side effect...
And... I expressed myself when I took LSD.
I wasn't quite sure...you know, it wasn't funny...I wasn't laughing at
anything but I just had those, those, those things.
So that, sort of, sets a scene for experiencing
greater emotional intensity.
But with our patients there was very often
a great deal of fear, a great deal of crying, sobbing
And then of course one would want
to move in and try and get the patient to relate that to what they were
actually experiencing in themselves.
Given a reputation LSD has today it’s natural to wonder
whether any patients were harmed by the drug.
– We don’t believe that anybody has a long term psychosis.
Although certain cases have been reported over parts of the world.
But we examine our consequences pretty carefully in that respect.
And I don’t believe anybody was permanently damaged.
Extraordinary, as it now seems, thousands of people
were given LSD in psychiatric hospitals during the 50’s.
According to several independent studies there were surprisingly few bad side-effects.
And a second group began to experiment with hallucinogenic drugs around this time.
They were artists and intellectuals.
And the inspiration came from the British writer Aldous Huxley.
Huxley was fascinated by mystical experience and believed
that a drug called mescaline might be a means to achieve it.
Mescaline is found in a cactus called peyotle used by the ritual Indians in Mexico.
They regard peyotle as a sacrament.
They consume it in religious ceremonies, receptions.
Subjectively the effects of mescaline are identical to those of LSD.
The drug precipitates a charge an overwhelming journey of the soul.
In 1953 Aldous Huxley sent an invitation to a British psychiatrist
who had suggested a link between the effects of mescaline
and the symptoms of schizophrenia.
– He’d ask me, ahm, (he got) there for many reasons but
one of them was that he hopes I'd give him mescaline.
He’d been (keyed) by his doctor.
(Consider one way) I told I apologize.
Just concerned that he (bought a grey autograph)
And so I had no way out really.
And so as I… ahm, on last, on second last day of my visit,
I stood staring at the mescaline which has a strange oily swell
and I wondered if I would be remembered: this is a man
who’d gone to California and driven Aldous Huxley mad.
(and I told him we were really in rather ??? ) reputation.
Thus it came about, one bright May morning,
I swallowed four-tenths of a gram of mescaline
dissolved in half a glass of water and sat down to wait for the results.
After a while I became aware of a slow dance of golden lights.
I was looking intently at a small vase of flowers.
My eyes traveled from the rose to the carnation,
to the smooth scrolls of sentient amethyst which was the iris.
I was seeing what Adam had seen on the morning of his creation
the miracle, moment by moment, of naked existence.
I looked down by chance, and went on passionately staring by choice,
at my own crossed legs.
Those folds in the trousers – what a labyrinth of endlessly significant complexity!
This is how one ought to see, how things really are.
Now someone produced a phonograph and put a recording on the turntable.
These voices—they're a kind of bridge back to the human world
Through the uneven phrases of the madrigals, the music pursued its course,
never sticking to the same key for two bars together.
And suddenly I had an inkling of what it must be like to be mad.
I found myself on the brink of panic, disintegrating under pressure of a reality
greater than a mind accustomed to the cosy world of symbols could possibly bear.
None too soon I began to return to that reassuring
but profoundly unsatisfactory state known as “being in one's right mind”.
The man who comes back through the Door in the Wall
will never be quite the same as the man who went out.
The world he saw that May morning in 1953 profoundly impressed Huxley.
A name was required for a substance that could provoke such revelatory experience.
Aldous suggested “phanerothyme”. Phanero and “to reveal” and Thymos – the “soul”.
And he then wrote such a rhyme:
To make this mundane world sublime Take half a gram of phanerothyme.
And I thought this is wonderful word but rather too difficult
for (most) people ??? Huxley was.
I wrote back to him, having looked up in a dictionary
the word “psyche” of course was available
and so was “deloun” – “to reveal” – and about half a dozen others.
But I fixed on psychedelic. And wrote back:
To fathom hell or soar angelic You’ll need a pinch of psychedelic.
– In your book about mescaline recently
you talked of a valuable state of heightened perception,
being induced by... by drugs, by proper drugs.
Do you think imagination of writers would benefit by that?
– Well I think the people who would benefit most of all are professors.
And this I think it would be extremely good for almost anybody
with fixed ideas, with a great certainty about what's what
to take this thing and to realize that the world he's constructed
is by no means The Only World.
That there are these extraordinary other types of Universe
which we may inhabit,
and which… we should be very grateful for inhabiting I think.
Not everyone shared Huxley’s enthusiasm.
A British writer Arthur Koestler responded in an essay with a parable.
He likened consumers of psychedelic drugs with those
who drive to the top of a mountain instead of climbing it step by step.
The view, he concluded, may be identical but the vision of the climber
is different from that of the motorist.
Such criticisms, however, only encouraged interest in Huxley’s account
of his mescaline experiments.
And others began to follow in his footsteps.
Well then, here I'm in my home, and before I take the drug
doctor (Rosman Scott) want to ask 68 dollar questions,
I have no idea what they are, to put to me.
– All right Christopher? – Carry on.
– Could you tell me the date today it is?
– The date? – Yes.
– It was Friday, the… 2nd of December. Right?
In 1955 Christopher Mayhew, M.P. and TV presenter
took mescaline under the supervision of Humphry Osmond.
BBC told the experiment this is the first time to confirm
– I want you to repeat this sentence after me. Now listen carefully:
“To be rich and prosperous, a nation must have a safe secure supply of wood”
After initial psychological tests the experiment began at noon.
– shall we go right ahead then?
– oh I'll take it – yes, (she is).
Well, I’m feeling (perfectly fit) at the moment,
(the sane) is (I've ram) and I’ll take the drug now.
An hour and a half later there were definite effects.
– Could you perhaps tell us any particular color which you think…?
– Yes. As is/this color just behind camera . This is color… damn, I want
you to have it ??? on colors my vocabulary's bad.
– Are you talking about the reddish curtain behind ...
– Yes, and the effect it has the most (strongly) gradations of (my own).
And lights… Sorry, this just my ... vocabulary ??? I can’t describe it.
– Would it surprise you if I said it looks to me around damage red curtain which has…
– Now who would you feel in the situation was… whose judgment would you feel sounder?
– Ahm, now you asking me… this is the 64-dollar question.
Whether I’m seeing the curtain more nearly as it is or whether
I’m intoxicated and seeing pink elephants
– Which is of course, ??? (the thing that pass next to about it)
Well, like I say this is still the 64-dollar question.
– I’m looking very hard now.
– The only camera.
Today, elevated to the House of Lords, Christopher Mayhew
watches the film with Humphry Osmond.
-And I see that... the sentence I... meant to say, can't be said.
I think this is most interesting that I’ve ever done.
And I say that after 30 years (emits) a whole ghastly business, you know,
is being depretiated, when drugs are being abused,
when this is our major social problem.
I mean I do know all that, and I hope and pray
it never helped anybody to experiment with drugs.
Nevertheless, the actual experience seems to me to being profoundly interesting
and thought provoking.
The time is now just on fourteen hundred.
And in the last half hour or so Christopher has been preoccupied
to a very great extend with time. We had numerous discussions on this.
In the interval he tried to instruct me as to how to work his recording machine.
And unfortunately we were quite unable to work it.
He has also been listening to a certain amount of music.
Now I’m going to ask you once more to go with the ad hoc sentence as I did
and also to take away seven from a hundred.
Now Christopher would you be prepared to do that for me please?
– Well, you’ve got me. As what I would call my period of time when I’m capable to do it.
– All right. Now repeat the sentence:
“to be reach and prosperous, a nation must have a safe secure supply of wood”
I’ve got thee too.
– Well done. Now would you like to take away seven from a hundred again?
– A 93, 86, 79, 72, 66, sixty-72 whatever it is 65, hm, 58, 51, hm forty-…
I can see still… 44, 37, 30, 23, 23, now off again I’m…
in my period of time I’m off again for a long period I’ve gone away at all.
Perhaps half a dozen times during the experiment
I would be withdrawn from my surroundings and from myself.
And having experience, state of euphoria, for a period of time that didn’t end for me
didn’t last for minutes or hours, but for months.
I do to show you that my point of view between the time
as I perhaps begin this sentence and time that I end it.
I actually gone there's a long time something and...
-The psychiatrists afterwards and common sense they all say:
this is nonsense; you couldn’t have had these experiences,
because there was no time as the film shows there is no time for you to have them.
And the psychiatrists would speak and I accept this,
that I was simply showing the symptoms what they call “the disintegration of the ego”
I accept that too. At the same time they didn’t have the experience.
And, when I look back even now after 30 years,
when I remember that after experiment I remembered that afternoon…
not as so many minutes spent in my drawing room interrupted
by these strange excursions in time,
but as years and years of heavenly bliss
interrupted by short periods in my drawing room.
When I recall it and when I recall various other symptoms,
I think the simplest explanation is that I had these experiences,
that they were real, and that they took place outside time.
– I am moving at this moment from one time into another time and back again.
And I'm… I’m not so conscious I feel moving myself in space,
but I’m extremely conscious… of moving in time. All things have no succession.
And that there be no absolute time, no absolute space.
It is simply what we impose on the outside world.
The BBC was worried. Could the film be broadcast?
Mayhew himself was all in favor.
But viewing the footage it was hard to judge the true significance of this experience.
Expert advise (was called for it) and a special committee of psychiatrists,
philosophers and theologians have assembled.
(Amid those) shown the film was Cannon Basset from Cambridge University.
From a religious standpoint he felt Mayhew's mystical adventure
had been obtained on the cheap.
The others agreed. And the committee had no hesitation in reaching a verdict.
When asked by the BBC whether or not Mayhew's experience was valid.
The film was never shown.
I think that the experience was valid. I think, for the reasons I’ve given
that you can dismiss it as a dream-like hallucination,
which lasted a fraction of a second, owed to the disintegration of my ego and so on.
Or you can say with me: it was a real experience which happened outside time.
And that is my view. And that is… and for various, sort of associated, symptoms
I would say that, on that occasion, by shortcut,
I did visit the world known to mystics and some mentally sick people.
And, therefore, to that extend, I’d say it is valid.
Huxley, too, was attacked by theologians.
The Roman Catholic scholar Arsey Zeina wrote an article “Dismissing the doors of perception”.
He argued that wide differences in people’s response (to) the drug
cast doubt to an individual claims to enlightenment.
So that he could write with authority, Zeina arranged
to take a dose of mescaline himself.
Overcome by hysterical laughter he found the experience to be spiritually empty.
And he concluded that Huxley’s claims had no more credibility
than the delusions of a lunatic.
Zeina maintained that the visions of the great Christian mystics
were something entirely different.
Those who believe in a value of psychedelic drugs see no clear distinction.
I believe that the experiences one be, one has under LSD
are very similar, even identical with mystical experiences.
It has been discussion along with scientists.
But if you compare the reports of mystics, of the saints,
the text reports, with reports on people who had mystical experience
on the LSD, you cannot find any difference.
Can the mistical experience of saints really be duplicated by chemical means?
30 years after Arsey Zeina raised the question, his successers of the University of Oxford
are still debating it.
One of them is Richard Swinburne of XXX college who is ??? professor of philosophy
of the Christian Religion:
– Taking drugs to get into the presence of God is (bargaining) into the presence of God
and if you just go and have an experience this is you're simply not equiped
to recognize the experience for what it isn't to react to it in the right way
so...for that reason, no, I wouldn't take drugs
there so much to religion indeed almost everything more to religion
than having experience. It's dedication to a way of life
which indeed can be very much reinforced by experience
but experience isn't the point of it.
Spiritual self-transcendence was hardly the ambition of another group
interested in LSD and Mescaline during the 1950s.
The american government were attracted to hallucinogenic drugs
for less savory purposes.
Former intelligence officer and also John Marks
has uncovered the CIA's secret research of LSD:
– In an early 1950s the CIA and american military intelligence were
funding the lion's share of the research on LSD...
You can give the intelligence agencies an awful lot of credit
for starting a field of experimentation into these sorts of drugs.
Through the Freedom of Information Act
Marks has obtained copies of classified CIA documents
that reveal why the agency was interested in LSD.
The essence of the intellegence say “Business is control”
this was an instrument or potential instrument
for breaching people's control, for making them
commit acts against their will...
In 1963 the CIA produced an internal report so sensitive, only one copy was made.
It concerned MKULTRA – the project that involved
the testing of LSD on unwitting american citizens throughout the 1950s.
They wanted to know how a diplomate might react
if given LSD at a party, how foreign leader might react
if given LSD just before he was to get up and give a speech,
how it might be used in interrogation of prisoners
or something of that sort.
Given the fact that the CIA felt it had to do that kind of testing
they had to find unwitting test participats, who,
by definition, couldn't be told they were being given the drug.
And so what the CIA did is it looked for people
who were ... let's say on whose lifes they put less value
than on a life of an american scientist or businessman or
someone of that sort.
The CIA turned to people like drug addicts,
prostitutes, prisoners, inmates in mental hospitals
and used them as test subjects...
People who did not know what happened they believed that they became insane
and the all kind of accidents happened
following these kind of ingestions. That was really crime
to keep people without a knowledge with agents is a crime
The american military was also experimenting with LSD as a potential weapon.
-Here is a group of normal soldiers
responding correctly to a series of routine (real) commands .
After receiving a small dose of LSD they are confused and (undisciplined).
The idea was to spray the drug on enemy troops.
But those, however, proved rather difficult to control.
And there was a different kind of fallout from these experiments.
One that took the Army and the CIA entirely by surprise.
Civilians (who were) exposed to LSD began to do strange things.
I believe with the advent of acid we've discovered a new way to think.
And it had to do with piecing together new thoughts in your mind,
that produced people like Bob Dilan and John Lennon and William S.Burroughs.
They were using new images together in a way that (jarred) the mind
and produced images that were latent in our consciousness but were not been brought about
by reading [magazines like] Vanity Fair or Woman's Home Companion.
In 1960 CIA funded researches of the Menlo Park hospital in California
were paying students 40$ a day to take LSD
One volunteer was Ken Kesey.
Psychedelic ???, author of “One flew over the cuckoo's nest”
And today a farmer in Oregon.
You were in a little room pretty much by yourself
There was a window with a wire grating on it
and through that window you could look out and see
a lot of people out there who undestood a whole lot more
what you're going through than these doctors
And my metaphor for the thing was
it's as though these people had discovered a room
And they thought there was something in that room of value to them
but they didn't wanna go in there, so they hired students to go in there
and after enough of those students came out with
“Wow...look on your eye!” - they said
“Close up that room and don't let anybody else go back in that room”
And once when I founded my key fitted doctor's office
and decided that this was too important a business to live in the hands of government.
Odd, by the power of the drug, Kesey began to distribute it to his friends.
Accross America LSD was leaking out of the laboratory.
I've always thought that this is one of those things that proves
that God has a sense of humor.
That if Gabriel come up and says
«heyaa, Chief, the americans are really messed up down there we gonna have to do something
strait in amount to gotta knows diet karma going on»
and then God says
well... send them some of that stuff you've been working on...
that acid stuff. And have the CIA distribute it”
You can hear the celestial laughter when you realize
it was the CIA that realy turned-on America
In the early 1960s
20 years after Albert Hofmann's bicycle done steadily home from the laboratory
his discovery was (poised) to kindle a revolution among the young of the west.
For the father of LSD it was an alarming prospect.
I knew from the use of this kinds of substances in old cultures
the Indians: there's a taboo on these substances.
They are only used in religious...setting...and in the hands of the Shaman,
not in the public.
And the Shaman in our society is a psychiatrist and they should
remain in the hands of the Shaman.
And therefore I was really became immediately
I become sceptical and I've just said that things would...
could happen and did happened indeed
by the unwise and uncontrolled use of this substance.
Next week in the second of these two programs
every man follows the bizarre and sometimes tragic events
that LSD exploded down to unsuspecting world...