pair of aviator glasses and a sweater vest over his shirtsleeves, looks more
like a favorite uncle than either an outlaw or mystic. Yet he was both.
Zeff was a forty-nine-year-old Jungian therapist practicing in Oakland
in 1961 when he had his first trip, on a hundred micrograms of LSD. (It
might have been Stolaroff himself who first “tripped him,” to borrow one
of Zeff’s locutions.) The guide had asked him to bring along an object of
personal significance, so Zeff brought his Torah. After the effects of the
LSD had come on, his guide “laid the Torah across my chest and I
immediately went into the lap of God. He and I were One.”
Zeff soon began incorporating a range of different psychedelics in his
practice and found that the medicines helped his patients break through
their defenses, bringing buried layers of unconscious material to the
surface, and achieve spiritual insights, often in a single session. The
results were so “fantastic,” he told Stolaroff, that when the federal
government put psychedelics on schedule 1 in 1970, prohibiting their use
for any purpose, Zeff made the momentous decision to continue his work
underground.
This was not easy. “Many times I’d be in much agony falling asleep,
and wake up in the morning and have it hit me,” he told Stolaroff. “‘Jacob
[his pseudonym], for Christ’s sake what are you exposing yourself to all
this shit for? You don’t need it.’ Then I’d look and I’d say, ‘Look at the
people. Look what’s happening to them.’ I’d say, ‘Is it worth it?’ . . .
Inevitably I’d come back with ‘Yeah, it’s worth it’ . . . Whatever you have
to go through. It’s worth it to produce these results!”
During his long career, Zeff helped codify many of the protocols of
underground therapy, setting forth the “agreements” guides typically
make with their clients—regarding confidentiality (strict), sexual contact
(forbidden), obedience to the therapist’s instructions during the session
(absolute), and so on—and developing many of the ceremonial touches,
such as having participants take the medicine from a cup: “a very
important symbol of the transformation experience.” Zeff also described
the departures from conventional therapeutic practice common among
psychedelic guides. He believed it was imperative that guides have
personal experience of any medicine they administer. (Aboveground
guides either don’t seek such experience or don’t admit to it.) He came to
believe that guides should not try to direct or manipulate the psychedelic
journey, allowing it instead to find its own course and destination. (“Just
frankie
(Frankie)
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