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Favorite Stories 5 |
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Pindar remarked "Blissful is he who after having beheld this enters on the way beneath the Earth. He knows the end of life as well as its divinely granted beginning." Cicero said of Eleusis: "Not only have we received the reason there, that we may live in joy, but also, besides, that we may die with better hope." Aristotle revealed only that these Mysteries were an experience rather than something learned. |
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Some of the last sanctified research with this substance had to do with pain-reduction in cancer patients. Believe it or not, LSD in the preliminary study conducted by a noted psychiatrist, Dr. Eric Kast, was shown to be more effective as an analgesic or pain reliever than any of the frequently used morphine derivatives: "In 50 patients, most with advanced cancer and some with gangrene, LSD relieved pain for considerably longer periods than such powerful drugs as meperidine and dihydro-morphinone . . . On the average, freedom from pain lasted two hours with 100 mg. meperidine, three hours with 2 mg. dihydro-morphinone and 92 hours with 100 mcg. LSD." |
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Oscar Janiger first tried LSD in 1954, and has since said that "From that moment on my mind didn't stop for one minute." He wrote immediately after to Sandoz Pharmaceuticals in Basel, Switzerland, offering to conduct a "naturalistic" study, intending to examine its effects on all strata of society.
His fourth subject, however, was an artist who wanted to draw something prior to the experiment, and Janiger pulled a Hopi Kachina deer doll from his mantle and said something to the effect of "Why not this?" Well, it turned out this Murdock fellow, after becoming high on LSD, changed from a representational artist to a symbolic artist -- explaining that he felt the experience had been the equivalent of three or four years in art school. He insisted upon bringing artist friends around.
Janiger initially objected strongly because he wished to evaluate effects upon a broad spectrum, but gave in before very long by creating a "sub-project." Eventually, Janiger got more than 100 artists to draw the same Kachina doll before the experience, at the height of the experience, and, in most instances, sometime later. The conclusion of the artists involved was universally that their work was "better" after they had been LSDed.
Given photos of these productions, a large number of art professors and art critics concurred. Quite a few of the artists have since gone on to become famous, and Janiger comments that he now has a valuable art collection. |
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Al Hubbard, among the most mysterious and influential "Johnny Appleseeds" of this slightly chain-reaction-like distribution phenomenon, used to enjoy saying, "If you don't think LSD works, just try it!" |
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Terence McKenna, introducing Albert Hofmann to a Santa Monica audience in 1988, talked this kind of blarney: "The presence of the psychedelic molecules in nature -- a great mystery. Where is this information coming from? What does it possibly mean? Is it random? Is it chaotic? Or is it, in fact, centrally related to our destiny? This is really the open question of my life. All the rest is ancillary. The whole direction of what I personally am doing is trying to understand the presence of the impossible in the midst of the utterly mundane and prosaic . . .
"A person who goes through life without a psychedelic experience is like a person going through life without the experience of making love. These are objects in our world. Why they are there we cannot say. What they may mean to us we cannot say. But they vibrate with so much of the energy and the imagery and the intentionality that we have come to associate with intelligence that we would be blind to pass them by." |
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