Maslow was talking about with his ‘peak experiences,’ though Abe could
get there without the drugs.” Richards would go on to study psychology
under Maslow at Brandeis University. “Abe was a natural Jewish mystic.
He could just lie down in the backyard and have a mystical experience.
Psychedelics are for those of us who aren’t so innately gifted.”
Richards emerged from those first psychedelic explorations in
possession of three unshakable convictions. The first is that the
experience of the sacred reported both by the great mystics and by people
on high-dose psychedelic journeys is the same experience and is “real”—
that is, not just a figment of the imagination.
“You go deep enough or far out enough in consciousness and you will
bump into the sacred. It’s not something we generate; it’s something out
there waiting to be discovered. And this reliably happens to nonbelievers
as well as believers.” Second, that, whether occasioned by drugs or other
means, these experiences of mystical consciousness are in all likelihood
the primal basis of religion. (Partly for this reason Richards believes that
psychedelics should be part of a divinity student’s education.) And third,
that consciousness is a property of the universe, not brains. On this
question, he holds with Henri Bergson, the French philosopher, who
conceived of the human mind as a kind of radio receiver, able to tune in
to frequencies of energy and information that exist outside it. “If you
wanted to find the blonde who delivered the news last night,” Richards
offered by way of an analogy, “you wouldn’t look for her in the TV set.”
The television set is, like the human brain, necessary but not sufficient.
After Richards finished with his graduate studies in the late 1960s, he
found work as a research fellow at the Spring Grove State Hospital
outside Baltimore, where a most improbable counterfactual history of
psychedelic research was quietly unfolding, far from the noise and glare
surrounding Timothy Leary. Indeed, this is a case where the force of the
Leary narrative has bent the received history out of shape, such that
many of us assume there was no serious psychedelic research before
Leary arrived at Harvard and no serious research after he was fired. But
until Bill Richards administered psilocybin to his last volunteer in 1977,
Spring Grove was actively (and without much controversy) conducting an
ambitious program of psychedelic research—much of it under grants
from the National Institute of Mental Health—with schizophrenics,
alcoholics and other addicts, cancer patients struggling with anxiety,
frankie
(Frankie)
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