The Varieties of Psychedelic Experience — summary and review
This seminal work of qualitative research by R E L Masters and Jean Houston, published in 1966, aims to cover the breadth of psychedelic experience. Briefly, these are seen to include: shifts in self-esteem to a change in the way others are viewed, changes in body, mind and all in-between, revelations about the human and the non-human and changes in the space-time relationship — “that the categories of time are strained by the tensions of eternity” [308]. Their data explores anything from sensory changes to mystical and theological revelation, from scientifically-framed perceptual alterations to mythological perspective shifts. In terms of psychological methodology, they employ the qualitative method from William James’ Gifford Lectures, The Varieties of Religious Experience, and frequently refer to him as part of their intellectual lineage. Here, James reports, describes and systematises different categories of religious experience by featuring lengthy sections of direct reports followed by analysis.
They conclude that psychedelics represent a multidisciplinary research field not limited to psychotherapy, but including theology, literature, art, philosophy of mind and metaphysics. Concomitantly, however, they discover that psychedelics can occlude, obscure and delude as much as they can display, clarify or reveal. [27] Masters and Houston thus represent a middle-ground between Leary’s claims that they are mystico-scientific research tools and the claim of others that they are merely virtual reality chemicals. And as such, in our current psychedelic renaissance — where the medical-technological industries are paving the way and statistical-experimental psychology is deemed the most sure-fire access to truth — this research is still highly relevant and bears taking-heed to.
“[W]e…do not agree that psychedelic drug research should be confined to medical and psychotherapeutic areas of use…[I]t is toward a much wider horizon of productive exploration and application that we intend our book to point.” [35]
The other significant contribution of this research is the systematic analysis and description of the rôle of a person whom they call, ‘the guide.’ Most readers will be aware of this term and it seems to have stuck.
History and controversy
Their approach is dialectical from the outset, seeking to come between opposing camps. In this respect also the book is to be lauded. In their analysis of the history and controversy surrounding most especially LSD, they state that both camps are speaking past rather than to one another because the claimed motives seem to “range from a frivolous quest for kicks to a high-minded search for union with deity.” [51] Thus scientific disagreement and journalistic error have resulted in public confusion and moral outcry. Two irrational polemics — psychosis on the one hand and panacea on the other — have resulted in the intellectual and physical violence. This is a violence which we fifty-five years later with the benefit of hindsight see as the war on drugs, though the peyote controversy started legally in 1620: this thus represents a continuation. Masters and Houston remain firmly on the libertarian side of the drug debate. Their dialectics come in analysing what exactly the dangers are, and they answer that question with reference to the phenomenological data in their research.
They acknowledge their therapeutic potential, referring to various meta-studies on addiction and trauma. But they also give examples of their potential for social work. They refer to Leary’s Concorde Prison Experiment, which seemed to have some success decreasing prison recidivism rates. They also referenced the Everdeen Study in the Netherlands, which seemed to have an abreactive effect on psychopathic criminality. Both of these areas of research would have ethical ramifications today which Masters and Houston do not anticipate. Their statements about “improvements in mentally retarded and schizophrenic children” also expose the time of writing. They further display dated attitudes towards homosexuality, calling it a sexual disorder to be healed along with frigidity, impotence and fetishism. [54] In this they share Frank Lake’s attitude in Clinical Theology, and many other researchers and thinkers at the time, including Alan Watts.
Nevertheless, in their overview of the history and the controversy to date (’66), they display a sociological awareness, noting that psychedelic drug users tend towards a different demographic to typical drug users: not just the hedonistic artistic class or those prone addictive behaviour, but “clergymen, scientists…[and] representative of the more intelligent and better educated segments of the population.” Motivations tend to be described by subjectsas ethical and healthy. [57] This does not preclude abusive behaviour, however, and the authors explicitly state that some behaviour with psychedelics can constitute “the best single argument against…free access to psychedelic drugs”: that they can “neglect the external requirements of daily life”, going into “small cultish units of fellow true-believers where…interior pursuits are followed to the exclusion of almost everything else.” This world-denying aspect of the counterculture or “exclusive absorption with consequent withdrawal from larger social involvement” [59] is something which Masters and Houston decry as a reason to be cautious about mass cultural availability of the chemicals and plants. Here they give two telling examples of people who have considered their worldly ambitions irrelevant to the salvation of their soul. This retreat inwards thus came at the expense of their career: rather than trying to change their situation they abandoned it.
Ultimately, they decry the ‘legal limbo’ facing researchers and the black-marketisation this necessitates. Not only does this render bad quality and laced drugs, but it impacts the ways and contexts in which they are used. We are faced, they claim, “with the ironic situation that while almost all therapeutic and experimental work has been made impossible, there is a growing Drug Movement and a flourishing psychedelic black market supplying just those persons who use the drugs under conditions least likely to prove of real benefit.” [66]
Methodology & structure
The authors used the field notes and first hand observation of 206 participants, as well as their reports, and interviews with 214 others who have taken them in other contexts as volunteer subjects, psychotherapy patients, or recreationally. The significant majority took various doses of either mescaline or LSD, and discussion is largely limited to these molecules. [5] The preparation time for the 206 involved an understanding of their biography and world-view, as well as artistic and cultural aspects which they would want to include on their with the molecules.
After a detailed description of context — cultural and scientific — they begin analysing their data which falls into six categories: “Experiencing the Body and Body Image” (Chapter Three), “Experiencing Other Persons” (Chapter Four), “The World of the Nonhuman” (Chapter Six), “The Voyage Inward” (Chapter Seven), “Psyche and Symbol” (Chapter Eight), and finally “Religious and Mystical Experience” (Chapter Nine). The book also devotes Chapter Five to a lengthy exposition on the unique role of ‘The Guide’ in psychedelic experience.
The Body
In Chapter Three, an insight is made explicit which I personally have always found to be the case with what trippers nowadays call ‘body load’: “the ‘hangover’ comes at the beginning instead of after the intoxication.” Bodily strangeness is discussed in its manifold wonkiness and weirdness in this chapter: from the more mundane occasional rubberiness of the body and the nausea to the the dissociation or transformation of the body into an atom or an animal. What is referred to as ‘internal awareness’ is also noted among the research subjects: the flow of blood and air, the transmissions of neurones, the activities of the brain.
Nevertheless, the intellectual implications of this vary from person to person — to some the body is a ‘temple of the spirit’, to others ‘mere machine.’ This is attributed to the varying worldviews of the participants, as well as the mood-tendency and shifting moods of different participants when they make these realisations. Where perceived bodily transformations tend to occur, they tend to involve themselves some form of metamorphosis — egg to hatchling or some kind of cocoon to butterfly.
‘Thingification’ is also defined, where an inanimate object becomes the person, or the person becomes that object. Huxley’s becoming ‘the not-self in the not-self’ of the leg of furniture is a classic example from the ouvre, and this was also noted among participants. [67–79] The perceived transmutation of subjects into a different material — wood, glass, metal — was present in five percent of cases, often interpreted symbolically. [87–8] The perception of a rapid aging through different phases of one’s life when gazing into a mirror is also reported as commonplace. [82] Macropsia and micropsia (objects appearing larger or shorter than they actually are), lengthening and foreshortening, and auras are also discussed as variations on these themes of body and body image. [86]
Mirrors often result in caricature — for better or worse. [72+83] This section deserves quoting at length:
‘Caricaturing oneself and others…exaggerated emphasis on selective physical characteristics may make a plump man appears to be grotesquely obese, transform a face with semitic features into a Julius Streicher catoon, and so on. The suggestion in a face of slyness, sensuality or cruelty may be magnified to rival the creations of Hieronymus Bosch. The subject is frequently amused by his caricatured perception of someone else; he is rarely similarly amused when the ugly, vicious or ludicrous countenance reflected by the mirror is his own.
Perceiving such a travestied version of someone else, the subject will usually say to himself, This is just the effect of the drug. He doesn’t really look anything like that.’ But, seeing his own distorted image, he wonders, ‘Am I now seeing myself as I really am? Is my actual character, if not my actual face, being seen?’ And: ‘Are others able to see in me all the time what I now, the veil ripped away, am able to see in myself?’…
…One wonders why the distortion of the image is so often in the direction of ugliness and emphasis on character deficiencies rather than fulfilling the wishes of most subjects to be beautiful…”
While there is no tendency in general to produce negative images, the reason for these curious physiognomic distortions “deserves further investigation”, they argue. It has not been investigated since. They do not note any correlation with previous sense of body image. The intuitive reason one might give — that it has to do with preconceived body image — offered no observable correlation among subjects. They thus proposed that it somehow “magnified doubts already created” by revelations of “character faults” under the drug effects which then get projected onto physical perceptions. [83–4]
In one fascinating example, they give the example of S-9, a subject in her mid-thirties, who took 175 micrograms of LSD. When she looked in the mirror, she was aghast at the caricature. The researchers note, in a way which could not happen in writing today, that in fact her face was naturally quite caricatured — “the cheeks seemed drawn and held in by a continuous muscular effort, and pursed lips contributed to the general impression of a rigid, puritanical personality.” Upon seeing her self under the influence, she claimed that something could be “ ‘done about’ the face to make it more attractive” as it “did not accurately represent her personality.” She proceeded to contort and change her face to something “much more to her liking.” When the guide suggested that she make this “her new image”, she agreed that the changes — relaxed lips and a generally less tense face. She embarked upon a regimen of regularly de-tensing her face for months after the session. Previously, she had never been able to gain weight and had a thin, almost feeble frame. Following this she was able to fill out, to become “more rounded and less angular”. Perhaps, hypothesise the authors, her conscious muscular relaxation had led to some kind of “metabolic relaxation”.
Concluding the chapter on body image, Masters and Houston suggest although this dimension to experience is curious and warrants, it is not the deepest aspect of psychedelic phenomenology. Next they turn to “Experiencing Other Persons.”
Other Persons, love & psi phenomena
The chapter has two broad purviews: perceptual distortion, and communication. Perceptual distortion they report as the most memorable and dramatic aspect of psychedelic experience for the majority of research participants. They isolate the causal variables regarding how the subject is perceived as follows: 1) sensory response, 2) emotional response, 3) preconceived thoughts and notions about the person, 4) inferred unconscious determinants. Anxiety and hostility generally result in negative distortions, and the opposite is true in affectionate circumstances, though this is not a hard-and-fast rule. Notably, the guide rarely appears distorted. [92] The reason for this consistency is that the guide is internalised as “home base” — a “trustworthy, authoritative figure”. Sometimes distortions occur ‘in favour of the guide.’ Negative distortions should be taken into account by the guide when assessing his or her own performance, but ought not to be the only factor in self-assessment, as the subject may have their own trauma with regards to authority figures. On the flip-side, for example, it can happen that the guide is viewed as a deity, priest or some other trustworthy character: this clearly has the benefit of enhancing the subject’s own sense of security, feeling themselves in good hands. [93]
Caricaturing, once more, appears commonplace. S-1 reports, “the twitch of a facial muscle became the sinister leer of an evil mind.” Awareness of one’s his own projections followed this. He would maniacally laugh at people and perceive this to be ‘three quarters sarcasm and one quarter delight’. This he subsequently recognized as the “magnification of a trait I usually kept hidden.” [93–4] Unknown others — in shopping centres or restaurants — are especially damningly warped, variously ‘clucking and complacent hens’, ‘partially paralyzed gargoyles’ [96–7]: Master and Houston pick especially evocative reports. Some of experienced readers may have been there. The authors theorise along the lines of Sartrean psychology: the stranger is always the enemy, the Other of essential conflict. Finding a pattern, they note that: if the predominant emotional response is anxiety, the visual distortions will appear menacing; if hostility, the appearances will be absurdly grotesque, ridiculous or pathetic. This can include ‘animalizing or theomorphizing’ of others — one subject viewing his partner, whom he usually considered physically attractive, as having the “head of a snouty hippopotamus and the body of a weasel”. The researchers note that there was significant conflict between them at the time. [96]
On the other side of the spectrum, the authors were at a loss for what to call positive distortions when the other in question was especially admired or loved. For only the grotesque or ridiculous is strictly a caricature. This they refer to as “complexification” or “symbolisation.” Moreover, the experience are interpreted by most — 19 out of 25 — subjects not as distortions but “valid perceptions.” [98–9] Well acquainted subjects may treat the other with ambivalence, noting an interesting example in long term partnerships,
“…a woman may perceive her husband as extremely handsome in his role as intellectual companion; and then, should he attempt to exert his authority as ‘head of the household’, perceive him as a shrunken, ridiculous, inept figure.” [99]
A common visual distortion is to see other people as surrounded by or extruding intricate patterns of lines or wires. Here, hidden complexity — where before simplicity had been assumed — of personality has been revealed to subjects in the weeks and months following their experience.
Finally, in terms of visual distortions, visuals of other people are often seen in terms of potential. In a similar example to S-9, a couple concluded that the husband’s corpulent body did not suit his personality. Within six months he had dropped 30 pounds and both agreed this suited his personality more. Whether this was combined with a change in diet is not revealed. The reader is left wondering if the authors would hypothesise a ‘metabolic acceleration’ occasioned by the LSD, or an increase in willpower to make distinct lifestyle choices.
They conclude that all of these distortions are actually “magnifications of tendencies found also in ‘normal perception.’” They thus afford a unique opportunity for studying the perceptual process from within. This is in keeping with Stanislav Grof’s later statement that psychedelics are “nonspecific amplifiers.”
The second half of this chapter details the impact of psychedelic experience on ‘communication’ between individuals. The varieties here are also manifold: tempo of mental processes appear to increase; empathy is heightened; the subtleties of language and non-verbal cues such as body-language, posture, facial expression are noticed more viscerally; the uselessness of language in the face of ineffable reality; the illusion of speaking or communicating something to someone during objective silence; extrasensory or telepathic communication is also claimed. [100] One humorous example comes from S-7 and S-8.
“S-7: Smiles at S-8
S-8: nods vigorously in response.
S-7: Slowly scratches his head.
S-8: Waves one finger before his noes.
S-7: ‘Tides.’
S-8: ‘Of course.’
S-7: Points a finger at S-8
S-8: Touches a finger to his temple.
S-7: ‘And the way?’S-8: ‘We try’
S-7: ‘Holy Waters’
S-8: Makes some strange apparent sign of benediction over his own head and then makes the same sign towards S-7.
S-7: ‘Amen.’
S-8: ‘Amen.’”
They reported afterward that during the trip they had become aware of a “deep bond of shared feelings and ideas that united them.” They had proceeded to converse over a wide range of topics — the human condition, ethics, theology, their individual relationships to one another and the Infinite. They felt one another at all times in a state of perfectly shared understanding. Certain subjects became more eloquent and loquacious, and of these some continued this renewed conversational skill into the after-time. Some did not and it regretted its loss, having temporarily come to know it. Projection and illusory communication is reported, as well as seeming examples of telepathy.
No explicit statement on the mechanisms or realities of psychic parapsychology are made by the authors, and both the sceptical [116] and face-value side of the debate is entertained. They give a history of the perceived magical use, but also realise that science has thus far explained what was previously taken to be magical. [114–6] In one spooky example, S-19, a housewife, perceived remotely a little girl in her kitchen taking some cookies. Upon returning home, she could not find the sugar bowl, at which point her husband told her their daughter had knocked it over, looking for the cookies. In another session, one participant reportedly saw a ship stuck in the ice flows of the North Atlantic. They saw the name of the ship, The France. The report was written down, and then three days later a report of a ship, The France, freed from the ice flows, appeared in the newspapers. There could have been no external knowledge of this.
The problem with testing for telepathy is that it is often considered by subjects a “waste of valuable psychedelic time.” This is especially the case with the mere attempt to perceive lists of numbers. Thus the resistance, indifference or general unwillingness of participants may be said to affect the results. It could even be considered “psychedelically immoral.” [118–9] Thus, the authors devised a more imagistic test with more “emotogenic force” — this the subjects would consider to be more entertaining in the psychedelic state. Ten image ideas were placed in ten envelopes. The guide would pick an envelope at random and imagine the topic on the paper and say, ‘now’. The subject would then relay what they had picked up and the guide would write their words down. “Out of 62 subjects tested, 48 approximated the guide’s image two or more times out of ten. Five approximated the guide’s image seven and eight times out of ten.” [118–20] This research looks promising in terms of the tasks involved but did not involve a control placebo group, or testing the same people without a psychedelic — these would be methods employed today.
With regards to the big word in psychedelic culture — love — Masters and Houston make insightful socio-cultural observations as relevant then as they will be tomorrow. What they almost satirise as the ‘instant love and galloping agape’ claimed by many subjects can range from shallow lip-service . They note that love became incorporated into the culture and is not necessarily intrinsic to the phenomenology of the psychedelic state itself. Instead, the psychedelics subject is “affected by the Zeitgeist and gropes towards a solution of problems dimly or clearly sensed.” These problems, they note, are tackled just as insightfully in the Philosophical works by Martin Buber and Jean-Paul Sartre — I and Thou & Being and Nothingness. Their thesis is worth quoting in full.
‘In the 1950s, when psychedelic drugs research in this country was in its first phases, and when many persons taking the psycho-chemicals had no drug literature at all, the psychedelic experience rarely ever yielded claims of a drug-induced or -awakened sense of brotherhood. It is only more recently, with the emergence of a ‘love’-oriented drug literature, and also as brotherhood ahs grown very fashionable, that subject with an ever0increasing frequency have decided that to partake of the peyote or LSD is to quaff at the fountain of universal agape. That many proclaimed conversations of this type thus appear to derive from the wishes, public postures, and the expectatinos of the guide and/ or subject does not of itself negate the validity of what the subject says he has experienced. But these elements, combined with various others, lead us to require something more in the way of evidence than the subject’s willingness to check off ‘more loving’ on a questionnaire soliciting his description of the in- and post-session effects of his peyote or LSD consumption.’ [123]
In one example, a teacher had come to realise viscerally the intrinsic warmth and humanity of all — especially through gazing into the eyes of others — in his first psychedelic session. He thus joined what the authors call the ‘Drug Movement’, left his job, and became focussed on psychedelic and other drug experience and pursuits. Upon suggestions that those experiences might not be the goal of the journey, he would become aggressive and defensive, which flew in the face of his claim to have become “‘completely tolerant and loving’… ‘Loving everybody’, S soon managed to demonstrated his rapport with humanity by cutting himself almost wholly from the world and withdrawing into a tight little microcosm of true believers.” [125–6] Rather than the classical loyalty to friendship, this was perceived as a fanaticism more at home in cult dynamics. To take a departure from the book for a moment, let us look to that archetypal hippie psychopath, Charles Manson, and his rather catchy single, ‘Home Is Where You’re Happy’:
Your home is where you’re happy
It’s not where you’re not free
Your home is where you can be what you are
’Cause you were just born to be
Now they’ll show you their castles
And diamonds for all to see
But they’ll never show you that peace of mind
’Cause they don’t know how to be free
So burn all your bridges
Leave your old life behind
You can do what you want to do
’Cause you’re strong in your mind
Though the killings associated with his cultish ‘family’ would occur half a decade later than these authors were writing, they had clearly captured the dark side of the Drug Movement’s inner life — rampant individualism, pervasive world-rejection. Their conclusions on love and psychedelics are — for wont of a better word — sobering. While instant love is far from the inevitable result, problem-people can be focussed upon and relations improved. Measured reductions in hostility and anxiety also increase many subjects’ ability to be-with others. Whether this galloping agape can be sustained in praxis is the main measure of its authenticity, and Master and Houston note that it often represents more of an overly excited revelatory moment more than it does a large-scale life-shift.
The Guide
Chapter Five is perhaps the most distinct contribution of the book. Here the authors illustrate and theorise what the role of the guide is during psychedelic experience. They systematise four levels of experience which the guide’s core purpose is to help to navigate through. The guide, they note, is a unique position in Western Industrial society — it has little direct precedent in recorded history, though priest and shaman, seer and sybil, witch and magician, might be its closest analogues. The word ‘guide’ is used to convey the sense of journey which each experience usually feels like. Far more than a mere presence, the guide can be systematised as having certain duties before and after (‘pre/post session duties’), clearing misconceptions and developing trust. The authors analogise the guide as something akin to the role of Virgil in the Divine Comedy: guiding Dante through the different levels of hell and purgatory, “through all imaginable spheres of reality: through past and present, grandeur and corruption, history and legend, tragedy and comedy, man and nature.” [130] \
Their minimum qualifications would include “a broad educational background including a good practical knowledge of human psychology.” [131] This they define as having at least two specialities — psycholotherapy, anthropology, education — as well as the ‘highly desirable’ broad background in history, literature philosophy, mythology, art and religion. Coping with emergencies without force or domination, but rather with subtle manipulative strategies must be a capability of the guide. The final requirement of the guide is that they have been in the psychedelic zone themselves, at least twice. This is reasoned on the basis of empathy. [131–3] Regarding the debate of whether the guide should also be ‘under’ during the journey of the subject, advantages are noted: but, given the sheer amount of sessions required of the guide, it is considered impractical, and the guides (authors) for the research in this book remained sober during their subjects’ sessions. [134] Their training ought to be both theoretical and practical — literature, film, as well as peer-reviewing and introspecting when under. Training would not be limited to the psychodynamic, but include cultural aspects. [135–6]
Fascinatingly, they conclude that hospitals and clinical settings make a bad psychedelic setting, noting that the earliest psychedelic experiences tell us more about hospitals than about psychedelic experience generally. They tend to lead to psychotic or psychotomimetic experiences. They are distressing to the subject and offer little in the way of interesting data for the researcher.
Crucially, if a rapport of trust cannot be established between guide and subject, these authors suggest that it is better to call off the session. It is worth noting that this recommendation may seem obvious these days, but at the time of writing, if we observe the trip reports of someone like Rudolf C Zaehner, scholar of comparative religion at All Soul’s, Oxford, we can see that it was not realised at the time, even with V.I.P. participants. White-lab coated psychiatrists followed this professor around Oxford, shoved art under his nose, leaving him feeling he was in some academic hamster-wheel. His experience did not endear him to psychedelics, and he considered it shallow. In one telling example, he looks at Fabriano’s Adoration of the Magi and sees the one kneeling having a little nibble of Christ’s foot. Instead of seeing this as a humorous anticipation of, say, the Eucharist, Zaehner saw it as an irreverent insult to his Lord and Saviour. His austere Roman Catholicism seems to have biased his view and disallowed humour in this context. When his friend arrived, things became more light-hearted. In an example such as this, we notice the importance of these authors’ urge to develop trust and rapport between guide and participants beforehand.
‘the subject should never be made to feel like a guinea pig…in line with this, the subject always should be given ample time to pursue his [sic] goals and to go into those areas he [sic] decides during the session he particularly wishes to explore.’ [140]
The exploratory conversation to build this rapport and trust must be spread over several weeks and serve six purposes.
1. To determine the psychology and intentions of the subject
2. To determine effect methods to maximise the meaningfulness of the session [139]
3. To garner the subject’s aesthetic, philosophical and religious tendencies (this can include “trigger words” of the subject’s idiolect which hold a resonant significance [146]
4. Misconceptions can be cleared and proper preparation recommended
5. Expectations can be managed
6. Establishing that the value of the experience will depend on his or her “willingness to suspend or abandon his ordinary everyday ways of thinking and ‘looking at things.’” This they include as “routine value-judgements, ways of apprehending form and colour…the usual self-image.” [139]
The rationale behind the sixth purpose above is that “the subject will benefit most if he quickly and easily relinquishes…his usual controls and a priori constructs and permits the possible new ones…to have a free rein.” While setting ‘goals’ is important, these researchers also diminish the value of what they call “inflexible structuring.” [139] It is here, perhaps that the authors become naïve to the ways in which these molecules have been used traditionally. In indigenous and syncretic settings — for example, in Santo Daime and Native American Church Ceremonies — the structure of the ceremony is considered important to the safe and efficacious use of these sacraments. The statement about the relinquishing of a priori constructs, and the prescribed free-form of the session, perhaps expose the postmodern world which the researchers were inheriting, rather than an objectively ‘better’ way to use neurological molecules which have been used oppositely for many millennia. They caution against brain-washing and talk about the ethics of influence and forced introjection. This debate between the scientific and religious use of the molecules is clearly embryonic in the book. The role of the guide is a thus as a goal-maintainer, technique-helper, and tester, not an ideologue. [140] “Versatility, adaptability, and an agile intelligence are the characteristics of the successful guide.” [141]
Levels of experience
The general theory of the book and perhaps unique contribution to psychedelic studies is its four levels of psychedelic experience. This is included in the chapter on The Guide, because it is s/he who has the key role of aiding the transition between levels. The levels become more rare as they become deeper, and are labelled as follows:
1. The sensory level
2. The recollective-analytic level
3. The symbolic level
4. The integral level
The sensory level is limited to the perception-distortion of colour, shape, sound, aesthetics generally, as well as the confusion of the senses, known as synaesthesia. Confusion and chaos usually result from the resistance to these changes; their acceptance bodes well. The guide’s role in this level is to provide stimulating examples: one which strikes the imagination is the example of a guide cutting a door in a green pepper to reveal the “cathedral within.” [143] More importantly, the guide may aid the subject in moving from the sensory stimuli into a more meaningful consideration of their place in the world. It is here that descent into the second level can occur.
The Recollective-Analytic is predominantly introspective. Relationship problems, life-goals, biographical trauma — all this information is sifted, analysed and ordered. If these become obsessively repeated, however, the guide’s role is to help the subject move on. In a particularly humourous description of the time-loop trip which many readers may have experienced, the authors urge that the role of the guide here is one mostly of listening, but occasional goading.
“Only if the subject clearly needs help will the guide, in most such cases, interject himself and offer techniques and suggestions for ‘changing the course’ or making the most of the sudden insights and startling revelations. On occasion, for example, it will happen that the subject may get into a kind of circular rut wherein some insignificant or no longer useful theme will repeat itself over and over. Then the guide will interrupt and begin to direct the subject, assisting him out of his rutted quagmire of warmed-over sins and damaging self-images toward some new perspective on the problem.” [144–5]
At the Symbolic Level, the eidetic images are contextualised in the context predominantly of the “historical, legendary, mythical, ritualistic and ‘archetypal’”, hence necessity of the guide’s education in these matters too. The subject becomes a participant in the greater human or universal story. This can include scientific narrative — for example, the visceral sensation of the individual’s evolution through different life-forms — or theological — for instance, the Lucifer myth. The significance of this for our culture, which can be described to suffer from a lack of such viscera in comparison to other civilisations. [147–8]
Only eleven of the 206 participants were subject to the integral level. Each of these was seen in religious terms, although the authors hypothesise that they could occur in other ways. The integral level constitutes a profound self-transformation and a permanent change in the life practice of the individual involved. This change includes a strengthening, energisation, a new serenity, creativity and spontaneity in the subject which lasts years into the aftertime, often a lifetime. [147–50] Although sixty subjects experienced this for a limited time, the longevity of the integral change makes duration the clincher in establishing whether this level has been reached. They conclude that the guide must eventually abstain from the gentle creation of environment and intellectual and emotional nudges performed up to that point. This is to allow the subject to ‘go it alone’ — too much external intervention can halt necessary processes, and distract from deep inner work. [150]
The Non-Human World
Chapter Six discusses ‘The World of the Non-Human.’ With so much in current discourse and internet content since Terrence McKenna preoccupied with ‘entities encounters’ and the respective ontological and epistemic status of the entity, I was surprised to find nothing on this. The chapter’s chief concern is eidetic images generally and the movement from the sensory level to deeper ones. Whereas the previous chapters was to familiarise readers with the breadth of experience. Hereafter they are structured according to the “phenomenological pattern” of the levels proposed at the end of the last chapter. This helps to unlock latent possibilities in the psychedelic experience which remain unrealised without knowledge of such a pattern. Their intention is also to get beyond the bias in Western culture towards the visual aspects, as noted in the early researchers such Weir Mitchell and Havelock Ellis. [151–2] As such, we might say that this heuristic (problem solver) is also a hermeneutic (interpretative method).
That the sensory level’s core conceit or function is to “decondition” the subject. The unconscious postmodernity of such a notion can be taken at face value and has been mentioned above. Yet, it underscores a point nevertheless relevant to more traditional uses: surrender to sensory changes yields more fulfilling results for the subject than resistance to them. [153]
“Once these inhibitions are dissolved, the ground has been prepared for the free psyche to function in such a way as to result in the beneficial transformation and self-realization of the individual. As we will see, this transformative process would seem to be entelechical and, when the conditions for unfolding are met, will move in strange but effective ways to provide the subject with the measure of fulfilment for which his past life has readied him…The attempt to banish from consciousness this new world of stimuli yields only fear and confusion, and the same result is forthcoming when a desperate effort is made to at once impose some rigid order upon it. If, however, the subject is willing to lay aside his everyday assumptions and categorisations, then the drug-state environment becomes increasingly stable, although on its own ‘psychedelic terms’.” [152+153]
Entelechy was a cornerstone of Terrence McKenna’s talks and writings, and refers to the fulfilment of the maximum potential of a process or system or individual. It became a large part of the hippie geist, California ideology and seems even to have been observed as a useful way of understanding psychedelics by these seminal researchers, writing as the controversy rose to fever pitch.
The proleptic aspects of the research also stretch from the individual entelechy to the socio-cultural impacts on consumerism. Some reportage expose echoes of a commodified future for psychedelics. S-1 describes the geometrical patterns.
‘When I closed my eyes there was an endless flow of dancing geometrical forms in
The most magnificent combinations of color. I could not help thinking at this time how a man in advertising might make his fortune were he able tp capture just a bit of this.’ [154]
The psychedelic perception debate
Masters and Houston place their hats uncharacteristically in the ring on the debate about psychedelic perception. Put briefly: do psychedelic visuals help us to garner more of what is out there with renewed clarity, or do they diminish the acuity of access to consensus reality with an overlay of internally projected hallucination? Masters and Houston recognise that both can happen, but that more often than not the former is the case. This they propose happens due to two reasons: the physical apparatus of sense, and the internal processing of perception. Not only do more sights and smells make it into the eyes and nose, for example, but also these things are no longer processed in terms of “function, symbolism and label categorization.” [155] Things are focussed on for longer, and as such seen more truthfully. In terms of psychological insights, however, it is often the distortions which are more revealing with regards to the inner workings of the psyche, as they “impose symbolism upon the environment” and can be crucial segways into deeper levels, through “transformative symbolic dramas.” The usefulness what are effectively hallucinations reveals why psychedelic, for example, is an more apposite term than merely hallucinogen.
They distinguish what we today call ‘visuals’ between the “aesthetic images” and “purposive images.” Both are memorable features of the experience, and both are rich, complex and varied. The colours are preternatural and luminous [156] They are also have a strange sense of timelessness or derive from some other-time. They hypothesise the temporal changes are caused by the speeding-up of mental processes, which is perceived as the slowing down of time. Walking downstairs or the guide briefly nipping to the toilet can feel like eternity to the subject. [160–1+165] But where aesthetic visuals have no bearing on the subjects personal, intellectual, and spiritual life, and appear quite random. In perhaps the only mention of what we today call ‘entities’, they list the following: “…strange creatures from legend, folklore, myth, and fairy tale appear in wonderful surroundings.” They do not entertain the reality of entities in the way that modern researchers like David Luke and _ do. They dismiss the ontological status of these in an Enlightenment vein as “synthetic creations combining elements of several recorded images.” [156] Since 1966, various mappers of psychedelic phenomenology have uncovered patterns in these visuals. The ‘wee folk’ — in the form of aliens, dwarfs, and small homunculi — for example, appear with alarming consistency. Perhaps Masters and Houston did not notice patterns like this because of the drugs used in the research — peyote and LSD — which do not elicit such experience with the same frequency as DMT.
In a similar vein to the aforementioned telephathic phenomnena, these authors mention the perception of retroactive causality — events in the future causing events in the past — and claim that they are “not understood” and deserve more research: while they could be mnemonic hallucinations, they could also represent a protraction of the present moment.
In an observation which anticipates contemporary psychedelic discourse, Masters and Houston note that nature-relatedness is intensified. [166–7] Contemporary researchers such as Sam Gandy have argued that while psychedelics do not lead necessarily to particular political beliefs, aesthetic preferences, or religious inclinations, their most consistent feature (in terms of what is newly enjoyed) is an increase in awareness and enjoyment of the natural world.
One way in which the guide can encourage movement from the sensory to deeper levels is to tell the subject to enter into a tactile relationship with the object, and ask what they are ‘getting from it.’ The example given is that of a stone, and the answer can be ‘deadness’, ‘hardness’, ‘opaqueness’ or ‘coldness.’ The guide can then take the stone back, hold it, and place it in the other hand: “a few seconds can yield a whole new orientation.” [169] They can be told to compress or soften the stone, or “let yourself go into the stone. Let yourself dissolve into the stone. Be one with the stone, so that you understand it and it understands you”. [169–70] This game is said to induce empathy with the world as well as encouraging an introspective tendency within the individual. The moving example is given of S-8, an exceptionally strong-willed individual with success in business and industry. His intentions had been to develop an emotional relationship to the world not seen through what he symbolised as ice or glass. This subject proved unusually resistant to the visual distortions of the drug for over an hour. He then selected a cork, and described it as coming alive in his hands, at which point he put pressure on it in his hands (to “squeeze the life out of it”). This resulted in an emotional tirade against his son problems, whom he then realised he had spoiled by trying to buy him affection. The cork provided a spring-board from which to enter the recollective-analytic stage. The authors note that such a process works better if “no particular object is presented to the subject; he [sic] should have a chance to make his own selection.” [171]
Hallucination & psychosis
Due symbolisation of the eidetic impression, with both open and closed eyes, active hallucination can occur. The three examples they give again expose a range quite frightening: a four year-old boy, Sartre, and a stood-up lover. The boy, who had eaten a sugar cube from his mother’s fridge while his parents were in the process of a break-up, saw monsters and giant insects climbing out the walls and onto his skin, and continued to in the aftertime. The walls also seemed claustrophobically to bend and collapse around him. Though these hallucinations eventually dissapitated after he befriended the monsters and internalised the message from his mother told him it was something in the sugar cube. The perceived collapse of the architecture around him could have derived from an overheard conversation of his mother, who had experienced a similar thing, or the insecurity of a breakdown in parental relations. Sartre also experienced exoskeletal followings — lobsters, devil fish, umbrella-vultures — and was generally left in an anxious state after his mescaline trip. This once more could be attributed to an emotional malaise. In the final example, a man was expecting to take peyote with his lover, but ingested it before she arrived. As she never arrived, time expanded to the point where a minute felt like a life time and the environment became desperately meaningless, drey, grab and banal. What felt effectively like psychological torture had left him unable to act normally in society. His prevailing insecurity became, “‘what is permissible?’” S-10 had “‘lost or forgotten all the rules for behaving in scoiety’” and started “‘slinking along the streets like a terrified animal’… ‘drift[ing] along like a shadow, trying not to be seen’” merely behaving so as to stay out of trouble and continuing in this anxiety for several months thereafter. [172–6)
While Masters and Houston don’t play down the possibility of such psychotic symptoms, they provide practical explanations, solutions for lessening its likelihood, and disarming it through proper integration. The monsters are the monsters of childhood, arriving out of a sense of emotionally charged helplessness in the face of the world. The anxiety is a result of other forms of emotional malaise, maturity, age and other forms of psychological instability. Where is possible to interpret the experience to his or her own advantage, the opportunity is taken to diminish the force of that negative memory or emotion. Thus even the rarely occurring psychosis-like effects can fruit positively. [176–7]
The recollective-analytic level of experience
Chapter 7 — The Voyage Inward — discusses the second level in the quaternary structure proposed by the book. This is usually a gradual shift from random eidetic images to increasingly purposive and personally meaningful ones. In extreme cases at this level, age regression (feeling that one has gone back in time as far as infancy) and revivification (re-experience of the past and the loss of all contact with the present) have been known to happen. Intriguingly, such re-experiencing can seem to reveal what up to that time had been false memories as complete fantasies. Generally this stage is coupled with the general sensation of ‘scales falling from eyes.’ [185] What results is a “subsequent organization of the recollected and analyzed amterials into a clear formulation of the subjects objectives, life patterns, or specific conflicts and problems…in accord with a natural entelechical process of movement towards a unique and specific fulfilment.” [186] In this sense it can represent to many a form of automatically guided “instant psychotherapy — a term we do not use in any pejorative way” [187] (in the same way that they used ‘instant love and galloping agape’). Often, this can manifest in the form of a death-rebirth narrative — death to the old self and birth to the new. In S-1’s case, this halted his suicidal ideation in the aftertime. Regular follow-ups are crucial in these cases. S-2 had been drinking heavily to relieve the deep melancholy of her husband’s death. Her LSD journey allowed her to say goodbye, come-to-terms, and offered her an deeply felt emotional catharsis less likely to happen in everyday consciousness. [190–1] Nevertheless, “very serious emotional disturbances can be alleviated with…near-miraculous rapidity and ease” even where no explicitly therapeutic methods were utilised by the guide, hence their emphasis on the self-induced aspects of such healing. [188–90] Vomiting is intriguingly interpreted in the same way as it is among indigenous and syncretic psychedelic religion — as the emission of negative emotions. [207]
One large section the book dedicates to sexuality introspection, and here exposes its datedness. While, on the one hand, it describes sexuality fluid and as a spectrum. [192–8] Nevertheless, it refers to homosexuality as a possible result of “distorted body image” whose normalisation can lead to “heterosexualisation.” [199] This is a view of homosexuality based on aberrance. And, since the emancipation, legalisation and general acceptance of around eleven percent of the population, it has since been scientifically understood as a normal rather than disturbed sexual orientation. It is moments like these where one can sense the date of the book.
Masters and Houston lay out the initial conditions for the establishment of psychedelic psychotherapy — which can save money and avoid misery when compared to other current therapeutic methods in question — which I will summarised here in a list form.
1. Dogmatized theory saps therapy’s effectiveness — flexible model required
2. Experience must not become ‘vicarious’ — i.e. solely in the terms of the psychodynamic constructs of the therapist
3. Therapist must remain in the role of guide — “not the all-knowing, all-powerful leader of the patient.”
4. Respect of patient’s autonomy must be maintained.
5. Guide must refrain from interrupting the entelichal and self directed healing of the patient.
6. This will require that the guide has a new kind of power — i.e., less power — than therapists currently hold [200–2]
The move to a deeper level than the recollective-analytic, for example, is not something which most therapists in a scientistic world consider to be useful. Masters and Houston give a huge range of examples where the symbolisation of experience allows for a deeper and more sustained and transformation in the consciousness than merely a recourse to biographical materials. In late industrial society, it is this ability to relate our atomised lives to a greater narrative which lends psychedelics their therapeutic depth.
In one example, a philosophy professor who had felt emotionally estranged from the world (partly on account of his dropping out of Roman Catholic Seminary, with subsequent psychoanalysis giving him the idea that he felt a homoerotic attraction to Christ) underwent four forms of rite in his visions: a fertility rite, a puberty rite, a warrior initiation rite, and a tribal Christian rite. Physical sexual thrusting along with visions of intercourse, and castration followed. Bizzare as these may seem, they had a cathartic effect upon the individual involved, who, in the following weeks, proceeded to have a richer and more sexual relationship with his wife, have “one of the richest intellectual encounters” of his life with a colleague, and took more responsibilities at the university, improving his commitment to his students. [205–11] This is a good example of how levels inhere one another and are not entirely separable.
The Symbolic
Chapter Eight considers the third level: the Symbolic Stage. This unites the personal and particular situation of the subject with the universal and perennial patterns of the cosmos. As such, they are both perplexing and fascinating, and also hold much value on many levels: from the humanistic to the therapeutic. The guide’s role here, they reiterate, is to assume the ‘Virgillian mantle’: symbolic resources may not be entirely known to the subject at once. [214–15] Nevertheless, usually the symbols eventually become obvious in one way or another. [228]
Visions here can be scientific or historical and need not only be historical, so long as they maintain a symbolic resonance. Ritual is a very common experience, which the authors hypothesise could be a response to the secularising social field of the 1960s in conflict with a basic human psychological need. [217] This layer generally requires of the guide a mythological literacy less likely to be found among the specialised therapeutic disciplines. Such narrowing of intellectual fields to the exclusion of others even more relevant today.
Symbols are presented by the guide and can result in a panoply of responses depending on the subject. Thus, it is important to take stock of the subject’s inner life before the session.
“In the psychedelic state…the symbol does not remain for long in its static configuration, but quickly dissolves and points beyond itself to the dramatic events from which it was condensed, or leads analogically inward to some personal struggle of the subject which it may effectively symbolize. Thus, a traditional symbol like the cross may open outwards upon such historical pageants as those of the crucifixion, the crusades, the inquisition, and so on, or open inward upon some personal drama of guilt and redemption.” [221]
One experience is so powerful it deserves quoting in full.
“I saw Jesus crucified and Peter martyred. I watched the early Christians die in the arena while others moved hurriedly through the Roman back streets, spreading Christ’s doctrine. I stood by when Constantine gaped at the vision of the cross in the sky. I saw Rome fall and the Dark Ages begin and observed as little crossed twigs were tacked up as the only hope in ten thousand wretched hovels. I watched peasants trample it under their feet in some obscene forest rite, while, across the sea in Byzantium, they glorified it in jeweled mosaics and great domed cathedrals. My hand trembled, the cross glimmered, and history begame confused. Martin Luther walked arm in arm with Billy Graham, followed by Thomas Aquinas and the armies of the Crusades. Inquisitorial figures levelled bony fingers at demented witches and a great gout of blood poured forth to congeal in a huge, clotted cross. Pope John XXIII called out ‘good cheer’ to a burning, grinning Joan of Arc, and Savonarola saluted a red-necked hell-fire and brimstone Texas preacher. Bombers flew in cross formation and St Francis preached to the birds. A hundred thousand episodes erupted from the glinted facets of that cross and I knew that a hundred thousand more were waiting for their turn. But then, and I don’t know how or when it happened, I was immersed in it; my substance — physical, mental, and spiritual — was totally absorbed in the substance of the cross. My life became the glinting, sparkling episodes of the history of the cross, and the hundred thousand remaining events were those of my own life’s history. The shame and victory of the cross was endlessly repeated in the minutiae of my own life. Mine was the shame and mine was the victory. I had been inquisitor and saint, had falsely damned and sublimely reasoned. And, like the cross, I, too, had died, and lived, and died, and lived and died to live again and again. And perhaps once more I would die. But now I knew (and now I know) that redemption is a constant thing and guilt is only transitory.” [222]
This subject concluded that he served himself best when he served the cross, and such an experience provide the psychic energy for new attitudes and actions to define his later life.
This can have a dark side when subjects take on important ‘Wise Old Man’ personas from history: such “platitudinous pontifications of such psychedelic pundits rarely attest to any real increment of wisdom” — with one exception. When the ‘Wise Fool’ or ‘King’s Jester’ role is adopted, as this allows for a tragicomic tone — a laughing at ones self — to be embraced. [223]
The guide’s role thus is also one, in research, of a hermeneutical razor: a ‘bullshit detector’, in colloquial parlance. The authors’ categorisation of myth which owes much to Frazer, Jung, Eliade and Campbell. They list,
- Myths of the Child-Hero
- Myths of Creation
- Myths of the Eternal Return
- Myths of Paradise and Fall
- Hero Myths
- Goddess Myths
- Myths of Incest and Parricide (Oedipus, Electra, etc.)
- Myths of Polarity (Light/Darkness, Order/Chaos)
- Myths of the Androgeyne (Male-Female Synthesis)
- Myths of the Sacred Quest (from Holy Grail to the more satirical Don Qixote)
- Prometheus-Faust Myths (Myths of the Trickster)
In a long and close analysis of the widespread vision of being in a forest, they conclude that the forest is a place “where individuation is restored.” Forests, after all, can be many things and evoke a wide spectrum of emotion: enchantment, carefree lassitude, deep terror, calmness, concentration. As such, they symbolise a transformation from chaos to order (or the reverse!), from fright to acceptance, and such like — generally, the integration and development of individual awareness. [229–41]
Symbolic drama of this kind requires in their reckoning seven states coexisting in harmony.
1. A “guardian consciousness” which recognises the precondition of these visions on the drug ingested and can, if necessary, snap the experiencer back into consensus reality.
2. An “imagistic consciousness” that visually perceives eidetic images in the mind’s eye.
3. A “dramatic consciousness” which keeps tabs on what has happened in symbolic sequence.
4. A “somatic consciousness” — pleasure and pain sensation, odor, and such like — is also required for the symbolic level of experience.
5. A “somatic-kinesthetic consciousness” is defined as a sense that one’s body is moving in response to dramatic stimuli.
6. An “affective consciousness” refers to the emotional response of the subject. The emotional atmosphere or climate of the experiences impress particularly strongly.
7. Finally, the authors identify a “spiritual consciousness.” This loaded term means a feeling of an “in-dwelling huma spirit” with a “curious nonspatial” aspect and a “flavour of eternity”: this is “almost always unprecedented in the subject” and usually involves the “insurmountable odds” of communicating the incommunicable. [241–4]
This reviewer has been present in shared experiences with others who are not visualisers, and noticed that it possible to be deeply ensconced in a dramatic experiences and yet not be an eidetic imagist. We would thus question requirement 2. The authors do make allowance, though, that “in the absence of eidetic images, there will have to be ‘mental images’ which seem to fall within the functional province of dramatic consciousness.” [243–5] Perhaps the use of images requires another word — clusters of affective ideas or the like.
Intriguingly, the third layer of experience discussed in this chapter always marks the end of solipsism. It leads to a form of self-transcendence “‘towards the world’” rather than away from it. This is because the literal mnemonic data of his or her life biography are seen from a universal perspective. [244–5] Such mythic realms, the authors argue, represent the deepest levels of the psyche. In an urge which still rings true today, they also conclude that harm-reduction and healing are not the only role of these molecules, but also benefit-promotion and becoming-even-healthier ought also to be seen under the gamut of what psychedelics are capable of. Psychedelics can help not just with
‘restoring the sick to health, but at enabling the comparatively healthy to realize growth potentials thwarted by processes science has not yet even begun to describe, much less understand.’ [246]
The Integral Level — are psychedelics mystical?
Whether such experiences change people permanently is the topic of the final chapter. The ‘integral level’, coincides in their research with religious and mystical-type experience, though they feel this is not theoretically necessary. It is worth stating here that their way of categorising mystical experience is significantly harsher than contemporary medical metrics. In Imperial College London and Johns Hopkins University today, for example, mystical experience is rated according to the phenomenal criteria postulated by W T Stace in his Mysticism and Philosophy. The university’s mentioned above correlate mystical experience with an increased ability to heal.
Masters and Houston, in a subtly different way, judge the authenticity based not solely on the phenomena, but on the holistic impact of the later praxis of the individual allegedly changed forever. This urge echoes to us in today’s renaissance: it is just as salient now as it was then:
“Mystics and religious personalities have repeatedly warned against accepting states of sensory and psychological alteration or visionary phenomena as identical with the depths of the spiritual consciousness. These warnings go unheeded today by many investigators of the psychedelic experience who seem to accept the subject’s experience of heightened empathy and increased sensory awareness as proofs of religious enlightenment…Given this type of misunderstanding, it is no wonder that the psychedelic drugs have resulted in a proliferation of ‘fun’ mystics and armchair pilgrims.”
They begin the chapter weighing in on the debate, as present in the late sixties as now, of whether these phenomena constitute ‘authentically mystical experience.’ Their argument begins from the physiological [248–9] continues through the socio-cultural [250–4] and also into a metastudy of other large scale psychological studies to date. [254–5] Mystical states correspond with physical body-states — from fasting and chanting to ingestion of various vegetables. They are well attested in the scriptural and archaeological records among both Indo-European and new-world cultures. Moreover, significantly over half of the participants two large studies before this one considered their experience to be religious, mystical, or involving some kind of divine force.
Nevertheless, Masters and Houston remain uncharacteristically dialectical for scientists, taking R C Zaehner’s critique into full account. What they find valent about Zaehner’s reading of the ‘are psychedelics mystical’ question is his claim that as a culture we have lost sight of what the mystical even means. Anything preternatural is seen as so novel and exciting in a largely mechanised and rationalised culture that experiences such of hysterical ecstasy, or a shutting-off of thought and sensation, or ego-dissolution into the environment, are given the epithet ‘mystical.’ Yet what is meant is something other than mystical, or at least a qualified-mysticism, but certainly not necessarily religious: Zaehner gives us the distinction between ‘God’ and ‘nature’ mysticism, but also the monistic experience of undifferentiated unity. While Masters and Houston are one with many scientists and religious scholars at the time (such as Huxley, Watts and Huston-Smith) in pointing to Zaehner’s own biases (his pious Catholicism) and the problems with the way he approached his experience (in terms of set and setting, above), it seems that part of what Zaehner has urged has hit home. This reviewer sees this in the distinctive harshness with which they judge to be ‘mystical.’ It is possible, also, they they are influenced by the MIT Religious Philosopher, Houston Smith, whom they reference severally.
“the goal is not the religious experience…[but]…religious life…no religion that fixes its faith primarily in substances that induce religious experiences can be expected to come to a good end…[the] promised…shortcut will prove to be…short circuit; what began as a religion will end as a religious surrogate. Whether chemical substances can be helpful adjuncts to faith is another question.” [Smith 2000:23]
Statistically, 45% percent of their claimed religious experience. [257] 96% reported religious imagery of some kind. [265] The problem they have in wholly accepting such experiences the illusory nature of some of the other phenomena: why accept these and not other non-consensus aspects? Simultaneous to this dilemma is the fact that scientists are not technically qualified to decipher an authentic religious experience from a complete illusion. [258–9] This epistemic honesty and humility is laudable and testament to the multidisciplinarity required of the study of psychedelics. They thus go to the birth of this discourse, in the form of William James. James was a scholar of religion, a philosopher, and the one of the founders of empirical psychology. His lecture series — given in the context of ‘Natural Theology’ — became the much celebrated, Varieties of Religious Experience. James defines religious experience as one in which the depth of one’s being is “touched or confronted by the ‘Depth of Being’”. [258] Masters and Houston thus take this as their touchstone.
It is likely those reading this review will know many a “fun mystic and armchair pilgrim.” This shallow aspect of hippydom is analysed in great depth by these authors. Euphoria can lead to a loss in a sense of responsibility for the world and one’s life. Earthly ‘games’ can come to seem superfluous, uninteresting, and abandoned in so far as circumstances will allow. This is referred to in the discourse today as ‘spiritual bypassing’, and they give many a funny and frightening example in the book. Part of this stems from the countercultural writers such as Huxley and Watts.
“Armed with such terminology and ideation, depersonalization is mistranslated into the Body of Bliss, empathy or pseudo-empathy becomes a Mystic Union, and spectacular visual effects are hailed as the Clear Light of the Void… ‘holy pots’ and ‘numinous peach[es are] clearly not an example of religious experience…a commonplace practice of psychedelic subjects [is the] describing of various uncommon experiences in terms of sacramental metaphors.”
More than many other authors of the era, then, these researchers incorporated Zaehner’s caution. For such reasons, the authors feel it necessary to distinguish between ‘mystical analogues’, ‘symbolic analogues’ and ‘authentic mystical experience’ (which coincides with the integral level). Mystical analogues can at best be “stages on the way to religious experience” but are not strictly speaking religious. Authentic mystical experiences, conversely, lead to profound changes in the way the subject approaches the world.
That is not to say that mystical analogues can’t effect changes in aesthetic, intellectual and metaphysical perception in the aftertime, but rather that minor changes do not necessarily herald an encounter with the “Depth of Being”, as defined by James. Two examples of mystical analogues are a divinity school professor who saw a glowing rose, and in the days and weeks later came to a new understanding of the burning bush. Experience thus gave him a new viewpoint to contextualise his scriptural studies. In another example, a forest-turned-mystical-wood remained seemingly magical to the woman whenever she returned to it. Mystical analogues can still be “profoundly moving and impressive experiences”, yet remain less integrated and thus at the level of analogue.
With regards to symbolic analogue experience: 91% reported religious architecture of some kind in their visions; 34% experienced religious symbols (such as the Yin Yang or Star of David); 58% saw religious figures; 67% reported an experience of religious rites. There was also a curious preponderance of devil- over angel-experiences. Many of these symbols are seen in the Jungian lens as individuating and integrating the psyche of those involved. Alone, though, they do not necessarily constitute an authentically mystical experience.
At the integral level, there is “no longer any question of surrogate sacrality”, but the authors confidently state that we are dealing with a “Presence variously described as God, Spirit, Ground of Being, Mysterium, Noumenon, Essence and Ultimate or Fundamental Reality…of direct and unmediated encounter with the source level of reality, felt as Holy, Awful, Ultimate and Ineffable.” [266] The three features of the integral level are summarised as follows.
1. The subject feels reborn into a higher order of existence — this manifests as the erasure of behavioural patterns which block development and a new orientation with the insight and energy to effect self-transformation.
2. A complex familiarity is established with his network of being.
3. Curiously, that a “myth and ritual pattern should dominate and precede the emergence of the mystic.”
The final subjective account is arresting in its intensity, sublimity, theology and therapy: terror and beauty. With an IQ of 160, the subject, a psychology professor, was a precocious child, and in a world-painting detail, “born with hair all over his body.” He describes his life as one of constant manipulation and control of his surrounding environment. Whenever something was out of his power, he felt a deep anxiety, but most of the time he was able to bring things into being as he desired. Early in childhood, he developed an interest in magic, and always sympathised with the ‘bad guys’ in stories. He felt a disdain for the idea of divinity.
“He manipulated others and, for a long time, wished to make other evil just as he was evil — ‘so that then they could accept me?’ To do this, he was obliged to try to ‘make evil appear very attractive to others, to show others that if they would do something evil they would get pleasure from it, so that it was good after all — so that I was good after all?’ Yet, when others succumbed to his persuasion, his sense of having manipulated them tended to make him scornful of them. They were weak and he was strong, ‘and what worth is it to be accepted by weaklings?’ He apparently wanted others to remain ‘good’ in spite of all his tempting them, but he also wanted these ‘good’ others to accept him in all of his ‘evilness.’” [280]
This was largely an internal affair, as interviews of friends and relatives referred to him as a helpful and good -natured human being. Nevertheless, he had never felt the need or desire to surrender to a power greater than his own, and disdained anyone with faith as weak. Thus, his three psychedelic experiences were interpreted through the lens of the Lucifer myth. His perceived fight with God was also somewhat Jobian: “one is either crushed by God oe one surrenders to God…better to be crushed, no matter how painful the crushing” [280], he would “carve out his own domain, even if that domain were a wasteland, and be God there.” These echoes of Milton — ‘better to rule in hell than serve in heaven’ — allowed the subject to symbloise experience, leading to a thorough transportation and transformation. The myth was the only way to make sense of the “inscrutable mystery” of his lot on earth. By the end of his third session, he realised that God was merely “biding his time” [283]: “to try to contain the Idea of God would be to infinitely shrink and cheapen its proportions, or else one would have to stretch one’s own comprehension to the bursting point.” The intricate theological and psychological discussion of this trip report, “spoken from a deep recess of himself” [290] alone makes the book worth reading. He had moved from a position where he considered matter to be basically evil, and himself the crucible for an evil force, to a visceral perception that he could be a force for good and a novel faith in God heretofore impossible. In his final encounter, he
“found himself ‘asking all sorts of stupid questions of God’ — i.e., was all of this ‘real’ or was it ‘only a fantasy’? When he did this the lights in the hall were dimmed and S felt that God had withdrawn in disgust at these questions. However, he was somehow reassured that what had been given to him would not now be taken away…’These tears are the very first tears of gladness I have ever wept in my whole life.’” [294–5]
Psychosomatically, he ripped himself (by jerking his feet) free of the diabolical intent of his former life. [195] “Satan has no more power to control me! I still have habit to fear, but the organic link is gone.” The after effects were what qualified this as an example of authentic mystical experience: he felt and looked younger to all, his relation to other was one of renewed unity and harmony, the mind was active and stimulated without mania, his intellectual life became to do with synthesising rather than splitting apart, his “rootlessness” manifested a greatly expanded “sense of freedom”, his previous dissatisfied promiscuity was replaced by having fallen in love, the “negative reflex in his ear” had been replaced by a sense of how good everything was. Conclusively: “a destructive response to the world had been replaced by a response that is essentially creative.” [298]
One intriguing and very temporary side effect was a sense of ‘metaphysical panic’ where he considered his untetheredness frightful: “during these few seconds it seemed to me that nothing any longer held me to earth and that because of this I might simply blow away into what I thought of as a ‘void.’” Nevertheless, his subsequent satisfaction and happiness for years to come rendered this a momentary blip. [297–8] The inclusion of such details caution reader against trifling.
Authentic mystical experience, they conclude, must combine two aspects: subjective certainty and behavioural change. Nevertheless, they admit that this does leave many unanswered questions for future research. Why is the symbolic the vector between the biographical and the integrative?
“That the entelechical process so often moves toward confrontation with the most potent and beneficent of all man’s symbols — God — scarcely should surprise us. Neither should we be surprised when we know how often movement is just toward this ‘Symbol’ that the God is potent and the confrontation with God, the authentic religious experience, does have the power to transform.” [301]
What they term, ‘cosmological mysticism’ has much in common with W T Stace’s ‘introvertive and extrovertive mysticism.’ Where the latter is a overabundance of sensation and the perceived losing of one’s inner and outer barrier, the latter is a complete cessation of experience. Cosmological mysticism can be said to be reported by half of their participants and is an “essentially ecstatic experience of Nature and Process” with a felt insight into these realities. Masters and Houston, like William James, even make the theological statement that these experiences are more likely to be the “pervasiveness of energy states rather than the plenitude of a deity.” [303] Only 6 out of the 206 had fully integrative and introvertive experiences. [307]
In this sense, they place themselves in stark contrast to other researchers at the time, perhaps most notably Timothy Leary. Leary believed that these molecules were metaphysical and teleological research tools which can advance scientific question with regards to ultimate power, life, human destiny, and the ego.
“[W]e would be hesitant to suggest as he does that in the ecstatic-psychedelic state genetic codes are unlocked, nuclear enigmas are revealed, and the virtual infinity of intracellular communication lines can be perceived and understood…As mystics through the ages have known and shon, much that is accepted as evidence by Leary is but a part of the exotica accompanying certain minor forms of mysticism.” [304–5]
In one of the most theoretically dense aspects of the book, they are open the hypothesis of Leary and others that psychedelics somehow unleash the latent willpower of the entire organism on unconscious and autonomic processes. But, they also caution against this kind of “Jungian physicalism” which proposes “a priori knowledge of energy and nuclear and cellular processes.” While a seductive stance, does not exhaust the other possibilities — most obviously, the respective scientific literacy and education of the and the activation of drug-induced memory patterns. In spite of Ockham’s razor here, they admit such an explanation does not fully explain how drug subjects with no scientific training are able to describe states of matter and energy more reminiscent of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle than any wishy-washy hallucinogenic state. [305–6] They remain non-comital on mechanistic issues such as this, given the lack of data. What they would make of recent neuro-imaging data, along with the declassified MK-ULTRA and psi experiments of the CIA, is an interesting question.
Conclusion and evaluation
The way in which these researchers level-headedly refer to the agency of God hand-in-hand with deflating the more outlandish theories present at the time is to be lauded, as it exemplifies the possibility for scientists to adopt a wide epistemic palette while remaining critical. It is essentially dialectical in nature: it holds opposing camps in mutually assured possibility.
This research is magisterial in its scope and bares much relevance to us today. It takes us from the shallow to the absurd, from the profound to the pernickety, categorising and offering a useful systematisation of psychedelic experiences as journeys between levels which are easily distinguishable. Its long-lasting contribution is its prescription of the ‘guide’ as a new kind of facilitator for an experience unprecedented in Western Industrial culture. One might say that it has three limitations: the scope of the molecules it uses, the scope of the culture it analysis, critiques and proposes.
In one a sense it is actually ‘The Varieties’ of peyote and LSD experience. Little is made of ayahuasca, eboga, or pipe-smoked and intravenous DMT. The last of these examples is a twenty-minute affair for which a guide is almost impossible, or at least necessarily radically different to what they propose. In another sense, while the phenomenological breadth of longer psychedelic journeys in Western society is taken into account, little is made of what is now termed ‘naturalistic observation’: the reportage of the use of these molecules in indigenous and syncretic contexts. It remains a work of Western psychology. Yet contemporary psychologists such as Simon Ruffell Malin Uthaug have championed psychological analysis with traditional contexts intact, rather than taking them into a Western setting.
Nevertheless, the book is still worth reading over half a century later. Their critiques on ‘galloping agape’, ‘armchair mystics’ and ‘Jungian physicalism’ remain incisive social and intellectual critiques in what remains of the drug movement today. Yet they also establishe that psychedelics are, in aggregate, useful for the evolution of the individual psyche and the collective cultural spirit.
Moreover, psychedelics represent a radically different arena of research, requiring a shift to new forms of profession and vocation — most iconically, ‘the guide’. What constitutes the “right kind of research” must be “grounded in the psychedelic experience itself.” [315] In a situation where the medical-industrial complex, with all the patenting and licensing that entails, holds most sway over the re-emergence of these molecules into the public eye, these authors urge us not to forget the argument from religious freedom, as well as the other forms of personal and academic research these molecules can engender.
Most forcefully, Masters and Houston establish that, in contrast to those who prepare for a lifetime in monastic or hermetic setting for mystical experience, authentic psychedelic mysticism generally tends to position its experiencers in a “flight towards reality,” rather than a retreat from. The fullness of experience is cherished rather than banished. [313]
