Haight-Ashbury in the Sixties/Haight-Ashbury in the Sixties (1996)(Rockument)(Disc 1 of 2)[Mac-PC].iso/mac/MAIN/TUNEIN/TUNEIN01.DIR/00407_Field_On Programming the Psychedelic Experience Part 2.txt

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On Programming The Psychedelic Experience
Part 2

   The psychedelic experience can help one to change thinking and attitudes underlying certain games.  This is a necessary first step.  But the new game-patterns then have to be learned, like anything, through practice.  One can use the process of re-imprinting to prepare oneself for new game patterns.  Suppose you were entering a new and strange occupation, or a country with different customs requiring changes in habitual behavior.  You might have in the session objects or symbols from this new game which would serve as anchoring points for the new imprints.  Learning a new language is an example of this.  You would take into the session language records which, listened to for hours in the hypersensitive state of the psychedelic experience, would imprint you on the sounds and patterns of that language.  Bernard Roseman, in his book LSD The Age of Mind, has described an analogous technique for learning to touch-type in two LSD sessions.
   (3)  A third type of session program is designed for intellectual understanding, for a person who wishes to deepen his understanding of religious, philosophical or scientific concepts.  A frequently reported reaction to LSD is the feeling of experiencing with one's whole being concepts which had only been grasped intellectually before.  How many people, even among professional physicists, for example, are able to grasp experientially the concepts called for the mathematical equations of modern physics, such as the space-time continuum, or the double nature, both particle and wave, of light?  Similarly the symbolic of Vajrayana Buddhism, as exemplified in the Tibetan Book of the Dead, are meaningless to a mind brought up in Western rationalist tradition, but come vividly to life with a psychedelic session.  Indeed it is clear that these symbols and concepts are based on controlled psychedelic experimentation and an enormous wealth of theoretical and practical teachings.
   Here, programming would consist in recording on tape beforehand relevant selections from the literature on the subject.  It is better to have a small amount of carefully chosen material than a great deal.  Too much symbolic material can become overwhelming because the mind in the psychedelic state responds with a much wider and faster network of associations than normally.  Passages of readings should be interspersed with periods of quiet or music.  It is often useful to repeat the same passage several time at different points in the session.  Care should be taken not to read heavy intellectual material in the early trans-ego phases of the experience, since it will tend to bring the experience down to the level of conceptual thinking.
   Fourth, one may program the experience for aesthetic appreciation.  There is no doubt that psychedelic plants and drugs can open up areas of aesthetic perception that are staggering in their complexity and intensity.  Aldous Huxley's mescaline sessions, described in The Doors of Perception, were predominantly in this aesthetic mode.  One becomes aware, with repeated listening or viewing, that certain artistic products have definite effects on consciousness in the sense of expanding or going beyond self, whereas others seem merely to trigger off particular stereotyped emotional reactions.  The Hindu musical tradition has preserved forms and modes of musical communication that have precise "psychedelic" effects on consciousness.  This explains in part the extraordinary popularity of musicians such as Ravi Shankar or Ali Akbar Khan among people involved in consciousness expansion.  We see the beginnings of systematic research on the effects of different sounds, colors, forms, etc., which would enable "artists" to communicate with greater precision and effectiveness.  The Gothic cathedrals provide instructive examples of the conscious use of artistic media--space, form, light, sound, smell--to produce religious -mystical, i.e. psychedelic, experiences.  You enter the church, the darkness dilates your pupils;  the soaring arches draw your gaze upwards, the stained-glass windows bathe your visual field in kaleidoscopic colors, the rose-window-mandala makes your visual awareness one-pointed.  The sounds of the organ, the choir and the priest's bells, as well as the incense, are all designed to lead your attention away from worldly, everyday concerns into higher levels of contemplation and ecstatic worship.
   Perhaps the most important application of the psychedelic experience in modern life is in the area of interpersonal relationships.  The model of imprinting is particularly useful in understanding this area of research.  The hypothesis that psychedelic drugs temporarily suspend imprints and permit re-imprinting (re-entry), accounts for the often-observed intense attachment, even "love" of the drug-taker for the drug-giver (and vice-versa if both take it).  The well-known psychotherapeutic transference is intensified and telescoped into the space of a few hours.  Often the guide is somehow held responsible for the liberation or revelation the voyager has received (in negative experiences, of course, the guide becomes the devil or monster).  Whether positive or negative, it may be taken as axiomatic that someone undergoing a psychedelic experience will take a very powerful imprint of the person with him.  Now if the person with him also takes the drug, you have a situation of enormous potential in interpersonal relationships.  Marriage partners can examine relationships that have become cold and mechanical and attempt to establish a new basis for interaction.  Sometimes a psychedelic session will simply bring out the basic incompatibility of the partners, exposing the superficial relationship which had been superposed on it, and the partners will separate.
   In sessions involving more than one person the problem of communication becomes vitally important.  A mutually agreed upon sequence of programmed stimuli (auditory or visual) is helpful, since these stimuli will provide a kind of link between the two flights.  In addition the participants should have some agreed upon code for making contact in case one or the other gets lost.  This need not be more than a gesture of some kind, a basic mudra, or a touch of the hand.
   There are simple ways of ensuring that the joint psychedelic session will in fact be a shared experience, and not the separate voyages of two individuals.  At agreed upon times during the session one or the other of the participants may take over the role of guide, and bring the attention of the other voyager to a particular object--a piece of fruit, a picture, a flower, a stone, a piece of music, a poem--which they will then explore together.
   Physical contact is of course another means of communicating.  Since the sense of touch, like the other senses, is made incredibly more sensitive, worlds of meaning can be communicated through a simple touch of the fingertips.  A well-known London psychoanalyst uses a kind of hand-dance to communicate with the psychedelic patient.  The two participants let their fingertips or palms touch lightly, and then explore through subtle and delicate movements a whole range of expressive gestures, which can convey shades of emotion unknown to our clumsy verbal machinery.
   Married couples who agree to explore the sexual basis of their marriage through LSD or another psychedelic will find that these are the most powerful aphrodisiacs ever known; in the sense of heightening sensitivity as well as capacity to respond.  It is of course a requirement that both partners feel completely comfortable with the situation since any crude or seductive action is very easily perceived and may be reacted to with heightened anxiety or paranoia.  The effect of psychedelics on sexual experience is primarily an enhancement of all sensory components, and thus a kind of diffusion of the erotic sensations over the whole body, away from the exclusively genital urgency of the normal sex game.  A simple caress can have the orgasmic intensity normally experienced only in genital discharge.  Thus the psychedelic sexual experience tends to assume the kind of timeless pan-erotic quality described by such Eastern texts as the Kama Sutra.
   There is another aspect to the psychedelic sexual experience that deserves to be noted.  Since psychedelics induce experiences that go beyond the ego, the partners are likely to feel that they are no longer themselves, no longer John and Mary, but instead simply two beings in complete union.  They may feel themselves to be gods, as indeed at that moment they are.  Here again we see a confirmation through psychedelics of the ancient Tantric teachings that the lovers have to become gods in order to go beyond the normal spheres of awareness and reach transcendent union.  The husband looking at his wife may see her as all the women he has known, or wished he had known, or fantasized, as all women of all races and times, as the One First Woman who is all.  Sequences of this kind, which are by no means uncommon in a psychedelic session may seem like crass hallucination or illusion.  Actually, there is nothing mysterious about such a perception, although it is unusual in our common experience.  It is a neurological, biogenetic fact that each current member of a species carries the history of thousands of predecessors, encoded in the DNA molecule in the nuclei of his cells, in other words, perception breaks through to that pre-symbolic, pre-mental level which is in fact common to all.
   Levels and durations of ecstasy can be reached that go beyond the wildest imagination.  At the same time it should be remembered that the psychedelic state is one of extremely delicate vulnerability and suggestibility, so that paranoid or anxious elements in one or the other partner's approach can easily be magnified and trap both partners in unhappy realms for a while.  It is for this reason that, in general, persons should have one or more experiences by themselves (guided, of course) before attempting the vastly more difficult two-person session.  A pilot has to learn to fly in formation with another plane.
   There are several simple aids that a two-person session can incorporate.  One of these is a little two-way mirror, which when held up in front of the other person's face will give a composite picture made up of your own reflection and that of the other person, a blending perhaps not unlike that which the genetic code brings about in the remarkable process known as "conception."
   Finally we come to perhaps the most important application of session programming--that of learning to control one's own nervous system.  The process of being brought up and educated in a particular culture is a process of having the nervous system imprinted with a few thousand tribal concepts and symbols.
   This process of tribal imprinting probably had survival value at some stage in the evolution of the human race.  Basic food, shelter and defense games can be played more efficiently if the enormous responsiveness of the nervous system in its pristine, infantile state is contracted to few simple approach-avoidance strategies.  But we pay a terrible price for this efficiency which has helped us survive.  The price is complete and blind addiction to external symbols.  Put a man in a so-called "sensory-deprivation" chamber and within a few hours he will show all the symptoms of junk withdrawal:  hallucinating, sweating, anxiety, pleading to be let out.  Actually these experiments do not deprive one of sensory stimulation, they merely remove external symbolic perception.  The inner universe lies open to vision, free now from the distractions of the outside.  But only a trained observer would know how to make use of this condition.  Yogins deliberately withdraw from external stimulation precisely because they seek internal perception.  In order to become free of the crippling neurological addiction to imprinted external symbols one must begin by learning to decode the languages of the body.  "Know thyself" is one of the oldest teachings known to mankind; it was inscribed over the entrance to the oracle at Delphi.  It points to the fact that in order to become free of the fetters imposed by accidental cultural conditioning one has to begin by observing and trying to understand one's own organism, physical, emotional, mental.
   The remarkable psychological system known as Tantra teaches that the development of self-understanding has to start with the physical body.  For us the body is simply a machine which performs its functions automatically and with which we have very little conscious contact.  On the other hand, the possibility of such contact exists and with it the possibility of greater control, as evidenced for example by the yogin's ability to affect his own autonomic functioning.  Tantra does not advocate the pursuit of such control, in fact warns against it, but regards it merely as a sign of increasing awareness.  Only when we have gained some understanding of the machinery of the body can we attempt to perceive the world outside our body realistically.
   The body is organized on different levels of energy-functioning:  physical, chemical, electrical.  The chakra system of the Hindu and Buddhist Tantra is an attempt to map out these different levels, based on experiences of guided inner exploration, whether through meditation or chemicals.  We have recently worked on session programs using the chakra system in which the psychedelic voyager is taken step by step through five or seven body centers--eliminative, reproductive, digestive, circulatory, respiratory.  These centers are in no sense primitive or alternate version of what we know as the "physiology" of the body.  The chakras are focal points of sensation-awareness, which undoubtedly relate to the neural and hormonal integrative systems of the body.  Such a programmed exploration of the inner universes may be thought of as the first halting steps in learning a new language--the incredibly complex energy codes of the human body.
   The human nervous system is like a musical instrument of great antiquity, complexity and perfection.  LSD is a tuning device--with its help we see for the first time some of the wonders this instrument is capable of.  To be able to use and enjoy it properly to its full capacity we must train ourselves and each other.  The programming of LSD experiences is such a training method.

Copyright © 1995 Timothy Leary
Copyright © 1995 Ralph Metzner