LSD and the Mind of the Universe: A Book Recommendation (Part One)

Psychedelics have been a shaping force in my life since my teenage years. My initial experience was unfortunate in one way -- I picked one of the worst days in US history. My friend and I discovered that if we sent $5 to "Margaret Jones" in Texas, we would get a box of lophophora williamsii -- peyote buttons. Like the 16 year olds we were, we pledged to eat the cacti "next Friday, no matter what." We did the teenage thing of telling our parents we were staying with each other (why did they not check?). So come Friday, November 22, 1963, we were sent home early because...well, I think you know. (At Phoenix Central High, in chemistry class, several people cheered when they heard the President was shot. Because of that, and the visions I experienced that night, the current political situation in the USA is not a surprise.)

We spent that night on top of a desert foothill in what was then the far north, now the center, of Phoenix. I'll skip a description of that night because it isn't relevant to this post. However, my next experience was transcendent. We had obtained pure mescaline crystals late in the summer of 1964, right before we headed for college. And we had a copy of Leary and Alpert's newly published version of "The Tibetan Book of the Dead." I started lying down on a comfortable couch with a pillow and blanket and blindfold. My friend arranged the music. For the first part -- the ascent -- he chose "Bolero," which was good and bad. The good part was that it built up as the medicine took effect; the bad part, and this was subjective, is that the crescendo seemed sinister to me. I met my shadow, had my first bad trip experience, and moved through it as my friend read to me about the bardos.

After that, I took 30-40 LSD and mushroom trips, mostly between ages 16 and 21. Then another two LSD trips in my 60s. I went to concerts, wandered cities, hung out in the wilderness with friends. We took several trips where we boosted with smoked DMT. And once I took 1000 micrograms. I learned things, had experiences both dark and light. But it was far from a systematic exploration. For more on my own experiences and conclusions, see my memoir of my adventures with Terence McKenna.

Fast forward to my university teaching years -- 2005-15. I had no training as a teacher and I actively searched for guidance. The first important book was Postman's "Teaching As a Subversive Activity." And then I discovered an interesting, useful, and somewhat strange book by Christopher Bache, "The Living Classroom: Teaching and Collective Consciousness." Interesting because it alerted me to a dimension of classroom learning that I had been viscerally aware of, but had not named. Useful because it enabled me to attune my learners and myself. Strange because Bache asserts that there is an invisible, unacknowledged "field" in a classroom, similar to Sheldrake's "morphogenetic fields" --"cognitive resonances that spring up between students and teachers in classrooms." I am agnostic about Sheldrake, but most scientists consider it to be too woo-woo. What I did know is that there is more obvious non-verbal communication going on: Any teacher knows the look on every students face when they mention something that none of the students knows. Taken together, the looks on students' faces, the looks on the teacher's face, the students' and teacher's body language, and other non-woo-woo factors do constitute a field (although Bache's concept goes further). One immediate consequence of my learning was to move the chairs into a circle, which definitely changed the classroom dynamic and supported my goal of "co-learning."

All of the above is a preface to my recent discovery of another book by Bache, "LSD and the Mind of the Universe: Diamonds from Heaven." My first thought was "what?" My second thought was "of course!" It made Bache's previous book make sense. I learned that Bache is no hippie, nor was he ever. He is a husband, father, and for 33 years was a philosophy professor. Starting in the mid-1970s, Bache took high doses of LSD (600 micrograms -- I consider 300 to be the threshold of transcendent experience, although as Bache points out, low-dose therapy has proven effective for PTSD, end-of-life-depression, and alcohol dependency). For 20 years, he embarked on a program of 70 trips. His wife, a clinical psychologist, was his trip-sitter. Every trip took place lying down with a blindfold, over-the-ear headphones, and a carefully curated musical set list.

Bache's mentor was Stanislas Grof. Grof conducted thousands of sessions with hundreds of volunteers, first in Czechoslovakia, then in the US at Johns Hopkins. One of the more interesting conclusions Grof reached was that the "after death experience" recounted by many who had died temporarily (moving through a constricting tunnel toward a light, to be greeted by large, benevolent beings) was a recapitulation of birth trauma. He later connected "bad trips" to repressed memories of perinatal experiences. I had an encounter with Grof in the 1980s. I had co-authored Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming, and I presume Grof had at least skimmed my other books. He came to my office. He looked at the paintings on my wall and asked me if I was the artist. When I acknowledged that I had painted them, he politely ended the conversation, left, and I never heard from him again!

In the next installment, I will describe and summarize LSD and the Mind of the Universe. If you have read this far and are not yet a paying patron, please consider pledging $5, $10, $25/month to support my writing and art-making.

To be continued...