perfectly normal. The only indication something was amiss were his
pupils, which were dilated in the extreme.
Once the acute effects wore off, Hofmann felt the “afterglow” that
frequently follows a psychedelic experience, the exact opposite of a
hangover. When he walked out into his garden after a spring rain,
“everything glistened and sparkled in a fresh light. The world was as if
newly created.” We’ve since learned that the experience of psychedelics is
powerfully influenced by one’s expectation; no other class of drugs are
more suggestible in their effects. Because Hofmann’s experiences with
LSD are the only ones we have that are uncontaminated by previous
accounts, it’s interesting to note they exhibit neither the Eastern nor the
Christian flavorings that would soon become conventions of the genre.
However, his experience of familiar objects coming to life and the world
“as if newly created”—the same rapturous Adamic moment that Aldous
Huxley would describe so vividly a decade later in The Doors of
Perception—would become commonplaces of the psychedelic experience.
Hofmann came back from his trip convinced, first, that LSD had
somehow found him rather than the other way around and, second, that
LSD would someday be of great value to medicine and especially
psychiatry, possibly by offering researchers a model of schizophrenia. It
never occurred to him that his “problem child,” as he eventually would
regard LSD, would also become a “pleasure drug” and a drug of abuse.
Yet Hofmann also came to regard the youth culture’s adoption of LSD
in the 1960s as an understandable response to the emptiness of what he
described as a materialist, industrialized, and spiritually impoverished
society that had lost its connection to nature. This master of chemistry—
perhaps the most materialist of all disciplines—emerged from his
experience with LSD-25 convinced the molecule offered civilization not
only a potential therapeutic but also a spiritual balm—by opening a crack
“in the edifice of materialist rationality.” (In the words of his friend and
translator, Jonathan Ott.)
Like so many who followed after him, the brilliant chemist became
something of a mystic, preaching a gospel of spiritual renewal and
reconnection with nature. Presented with a bouquet of roses that 2006
day in Basel, the scientist told the assembled that “the feeling of co-
creatureliness with all things alive should enter our consciousness more
fully and counterbalance the materialistic and nonsensical technological
frankie
(Frankie)
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