Descriptions of such experiences always sound a little thin, at least
when compared with the emotional impact people are trying to convey;
for a life-transforming event, the words can seem paltry. When I
mentioned this to Richards, he smiled. “You have to imagine a caveman
transported into the middle of Manhattan. He sees buses, cell phones,
skyscrapers, airplanes. Then zap him back to his cave. What does he say
about the experience? ‘It was big, it was impressive, it was loud.’ He
doesn’t have the vocabulary for ‘skyscraper,’ ‘elevator,’ ‘cell phone.’
Maybe he has an intuitive sense there was some sort of significance or
order to the scene. But there are words we need that don’t yet exist. We’ve
got five crayons when we need fifty thousand different shades.”
In the middle of his journey, one of the psychiatric residents stopped
by the room to look in on Richards, asking him to sit up so he could test
his reflexes. As the resident tapped his patellar tendon with his little
rubber hammer, Richards remembers feeling “compassion for the infancy
of science. The researchers had no idea what really was happening in my
inner experiential world, of its unspeakable beauty or of its potential
importance for all of us.” A few days after the experience, Richards
returned to the lab and asked, “What was that drug you gave me? How is
it spelled?
“And the rest of my life is footnotes!”
Yet after several subsequent psilocybin sessions failed to produce
another mystical experience, Richards started to wonder if perhaps he
had exaggerated that first trip. Some time later, Walter Pahnke arrived at
the university, fresh from his graduate work with Timothy Leary at
Harvard, and the two became friends. (It was Richards who gave Pahnke
his first psychedelic trip while the two were in Germany; he had
apparently never taken LSD or psilocybin at Harvard, thinking it might
compromise the objectivity of the Good Friday Experiment.) Pahnke
suggested Richards try one more time, but in a room with soft lighting,
plants, and music and using a higher dose. Once again, Richards had “an
incredibly profound experience. I realized I had not exaggerated the first
trip but in fact had forgotten 80 percent of it.
“I have never doubted the validity of these experiences,” Richards told
me. “This was the realm of mystical consciousness that Shankara was
talking about, that Plotinus was writing about, that Saint John of the
Cross and Meister Eckhart were writing about. It’s also what Abraham
frankie
(Frankie)
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