Re-Creational 2
In current governmental jargon, the phrases "recreational usage" and/or "recreational drugs" usually refer to use other than utilization of a mind-altering substance for an established medical reason. As previously indicated, the history of LSD up until the second half of this century was almost entirely of this sort. In the intervening decades since then, little has changed. Much can be -- and has been -- said for and about the medical applications of this drug, and by 1966, when such usage was dramatically curtailed, it had been tried by well over 40,000 mentally ill patients. Yet so-called recreational users have since predominated and they now constitute the vast majority of users.
Adoption of the adjective "recreational" by the government generally has about it a connotation that such experiences are rather trivial, frivolous and/or of a vulgar and lower order nature. In fact, however, the impressions conveyed by most individuals engaged in such activities with LSD seem to have been to the effect that the consequences have been of a higher order. The bulk of those responding have repeatedly indicated that they have thought that their use of LSD has been among the most important experiences of their lives and that the drug's effects have been re-creational.
Because the use of appropriate language often falls short in the area of consciousness studies, it is instructive to refer to that first contrived, nonmedical experience with LSD by Hofmann. Hofmann claimed to have experienced out-of-body sensations, much fright, much religious feeling, much concern for his family's future, much sense about how ironic it seemed that he might die by experimenting further with a family of drugs that he had initially synthesized, and much feeling that he was going crazy. At that time, psychiatry could have easily described this as a dissociative experience -- a use of language that may lead to an easy dismissal of any significance of the psychedelic experience.
Yet even given such psychotherapeutic terms, the degree of dissociation produced by LSD is so pronounced as to have caused many, if not most users to see themselves from a completely novel point of view. Erhardt Seminar Training (EST) and a host of similar modern-day disciplines would describe many of these experience as, in their jargon, "re-creational." Hofmann's recollection of that first deliberate trip could be said to be typical of most of the LSD literature regarding rejuvenation: "I then slept; to awake the next morning refreshed, with a clear head, though still somewhat tired physically. A sensation of well-being and renewed life flowed through me. Breakfast tasted delicious and gave me an extraordinary pleasure. When I later walked out into the garden, in which the sun shown now after a spring rain, everything glistened and sparkled in a fresh light. The world was as if newly created."
Stan Grof has delineated some of the varieties of experience frequently encountered in re-creational use of LSD. For instance, his first acquaintance with LSD involved a stroboscope and led to important consequences, even though it was not designed with medical purposes in mind: "The basic idea was to study the driving of the waves in the occipital area of the brain. That combination of LSD and the strong flashing light triggered a very powerful experience of cosmic unity -- a feeling that I was leaving my body and expanding to cosmic proportions. The memory of this experience of mystic oneness with whatever there is has stayed with me ever since."
