Re-Creational Uses 7
The LSD institute that Stolaroff eventually established did not view this substance as a psychotomimetic. This is quite evident from its first report, which appeared in the Journal of Neuropsychiatry in late 1962. Here, John Sherwood, Myron Stolaroff and Willis Harman -- principal figures at this West Coast institute -- discussed earlier LSD findings. They also summarized the dynamics of psychedelic sessions as involving (a) an evasive stage, (b) a stage of symbolic perception, and then finally (c) a stage of immediate perception in which the user is able to:
". . . experience himself in a totally new way and finds that the age-old question 'Who am I?' does have a significant answer. He experiences himself as a far greater being than he has ever imagined, with his conscious self a far smaller fraction of the whole than he had realized. Furthermore, he sees that his own self is by no means as separate from other selves and the universe about him as he might have thought. Nor is the existence of this newly experienced self so intimately related to his corporeal existence.
"These realizations, while not new to mankind, and possibly not new to the subject in an intellectual sense, are very new in an experiential sense. That is, they are new in the sense that makes for altered behavior. The individual sees clearly that some of his actions are not in line with his new knowledge and that changes are obviously called for. Behavior patterns, worn in with many years of usage, are not easily nor quickly changed. Nevertheless, because the individual's knowledge of himself results from deeply felt experience and is not merely intellectual, with the passage of time his behavior does tend to change, to become more appropriate to his expanded picture of himself."
The importance of the Palo Alto center was that it established the efficacy of using quite large doses of LSD (200 to 400 mcg.), because nearly 83 percent of the first 113 participants in its program claimed that they had received "quite a bit" or "very much" lasting benefit from this drug.
By the mid-1960s this institute was also viewing LSD as a potent creative tool and listed 11 ways in which it prodded these effects:
1. A capacity to structure problems in a larger context
2. A higher fluency and flexibility of ideation
3. A high capacity for visual imagery and fantasy
4. A greater ability to concentrate
5. High empathy with external processes and objects
6. Low inhibition and anxiety
7. Greater empathy with people
8. More accessibility to unconscious resources
9. An ability to associate seemingly dissimilar elements in
meaningful ways
10. Much motivation to obtain closure, with an appetite
for elegance
11. A capacity to visualize the completed solution in its entirety.
After Richard Alpert was dismissed from Harvard in 1963, the media expanded its coverage to the point where hardly a national magazine failed to comment in some way. So when the Harvard psychedelic center moved over to Cambridge as the International Federation for Internal Freedom (IFIF) and later that summer offered a week-long seminar in Zihuatanejo, Mexico, for $200 -- with psychedelic sessions available -- it was no surprise that it quickly received more than 1,500 applications.
The crucial issue then for presumably several million people, who by this time had grown curious to a greater or lesser extent, was the matter of access to LSD. In the book Utopiates, by Blum and associates (1964), much is made of the fact that during the previous period access had been through "gatekeepers" who for the most part had been psychotherapists. But now demand had ballooned.
