Jesse in 1998, and met Roland Griffiths shortly thereafter, he couldn’t
quite believe his good fortune. “It was thrilling.”
Bill Richards, a preternaturally cheerful man in his seventies, is a
bridge between the two eras of psychedelic therapy. Walter Pahnke was
the best man at his wedding; he worked closely with Stan Grof at Spring
Grove and visited Timothy Leary in Millbrook, New York, where Leary
landed after his exile from Harvard. Though Richards left the Midwest
half a century ago, he’s retained the speech patterns of rural Michigan,
where he was born in 1940. Richards today sports a white goatee, laughs
with an infectious cackle, and ends many of his sentences with a cheerful,
up-spoken “y’know?”
Richards, who holds graduate degrees in both psychology and divinity,
had his first psychedelic experience while a divinity student at Yale in
- He was spending the year studying in Germany, at the University of
Göttingen, and found himself drawn to the Department of Psychiatry,
where he learned about a research project involving a drug called
psilocybin.
“I had no idea what that was, but two friends of mine had participated
and had had interesting experiences.” One of them, whose father had
been killed in the war, had regressed to childhood to find himself sitting
on his father’s lap. The other had hallucinations of SS men marching in
the street. “I had never had a decent hallucination,” Richards said with a
chuckle, “and I was trying to get some insight into my childhood. In those
days, I viewed my own mind as a psychological laboratory, so I decided to
volunteer.
“This was before the importance of set and setting was understood. I
was brought to a basement room, given an injection, and left alone.” A
recipe for a bad trip, surely, but Richards had precisely the opposite
experience. “I felt immersed in this incredibly detailed imagery that
looked like Islamic architecture, with Arabic script, about which I knew
nothing. And then I somehow became these exquisitely intricate patterns,
losing my usual identity. And all I can say is that the eternal brilliance of
mystical consciousness manifested itself. My awareness was flooded with
love, beauty, and peace beyond anything I ever had known or imagined to
be possible. ‘Awe,’ ‘glory,’ and ‘gratitude’ were the only words that
remained relevant.”