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CHAPTER III
THE PSYCHEDELIC STAGE

"Serenely let us move to distant places
And let no sentiments of home detain us
The Cosmic Spirit seeks not to restrain us
But lifts us stage by stage to wider spaces."
-H. Hesse, The Glass Bead Game

3.1 PSYCHEDELIA AS A DEVELOPMENTAL STAGE: IMPLICATIONS OF THE THEORY

3.11 The Psychedelic Experience

The psychedelic or mind-expanding or disclosing occurrence, despite its grandeur, is not far removed from the experience of each one of us. Anyone who has been intoxicated by love has had the sense of a psychedelic encounter; anyone who has been transported by the beauty of nature has approached it; some people have such experiences listening to music, or communing in a church; others are turned on by group encounters; athletic events, sexual orgasm, a "good" trip with either drugs or liquor, the stress of great calamity, and all happenings which loosen the hold of the ego on the conventional limits of everyday life. Assuredly there are gradations in these experiences; they are not all of equal depth. There are several aspects which appear to be common to them all:

1) they often have an uncanny, supernormal quality;
2) they involve euphoria or bliss to an extent unknown in most usual activities;
3) they seem to be important in some strange way;
4) there is some element of dissociation; and
5) they remain in the memory longer and more vividly than ordinary events.
Psychedelic experiences can and often do occur without drugs.

Three terms are used to describe these experiences:

1) psychedelic or mind-expanding (which we prefer because it suggests the altered and enlarged dimensions available to the conscious mind when
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the doors to the preconscious swing open);

2) illuminations (used by Bucke), but one better reserved for the steady state of the eighth stage); and
3) peak experience (used by Maslow) to indicate a special kind of affective experience with unusual, vivid, or highly significant impact.


Maslow (Mooney and Razik, 1967, p. 49ff) describes some of the characteristics of persons having peak experiences. He lists them as ((giving up the past, giving up the future, innocence, a narrowing of consciousness, loss of self-consciousness, disappearance of fear, lessening of defenses, strength and courage, acceptance thrust, receptivity, integration, ability to dip into the preconscious, aesthetic perceiving spontaneity, expressiveness, and fusion with the world."
Pahnke and Richards (Tart, 1969; p. 406) point out nine qualities of the genuine mystic experience as:

1) unity,
2) objectivity,
3) spatial and temporal transcendence,
4) sacredness,
5) positive mood valence,
6) paradoxicality,
7) ineffability,
8) transiency, and
9) positive later changes in behavior.
"One's faith in one's potential for creative achievement tends to be increased."

Mogar (Tart, 1969, p. 397) cites some research:
 

With regard to positive revelatory experiences, Maslow recently developed the thesis that experiences referred to as religious, mystical, or transcendental actually denote special cases of the more generic "core-religious " of peak experiences, described as the hallmark of self-actualized people (Maslow, 1964). Similarly, the extensive research done on creativity by MacKinnon and his associates indicates that the truly creative person is distinguished from the noncreative individual by his capacity for "transliminal experience" (MacKinnon, 1964). Following Harold Rugg's study of creative imagination, the transliminal experience is characterized by an illuminating flash of insight occurring at a critical threshold of the conscious -unconscious continuum. MacKinnon's description of the transliminal experience bears a striking resemblance to the more inclusive peak experience. Interestingly, Maslow (1964) suggests that psychedelic drugs may offer means of producing a controlled peak experience under observation, especially in "non-peakers."'


Maslow himself (Anderson, 1959, p. 90) has this to say:
 

Since almost everyone I questioned could remember such an experience (peak), I had to come to the tentative conclusion
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that many, perhaps most people are capable of temporary states of integration, even of self-actualization, and therefore of self-actualizing creativeness.
Maslow (Mooney and Razik, 1967, p. 53) also remarks:
 
Part of the process of integration of the person is the recovery of the unconscious and the preconscious, particularly of the primary process (or poetic, metaphysic, mystic, primitive, archaic childlike). Our conscious intellect is too exclusively analytic, rational, numerical, atomic, conceptual, and so it misses a good deal of reality especially within ourselves.


Again in describing peak experience Maslow (Mooney and Razik, 1967, p. 47) says:
 

It has always been described as a loss of self or ego or sometimes as a transcendence of self. There is fusion with the reality being observed, a oneness, where there was twoness, an integration of some sort with the non-self. There is universally reported a seeing of formerly hidden truths, a revelation in the strict sense, a slipping away of veils, and finally almost always the whole experience is experienced as bliss, ecstasy, rapture, or exaltation.


Bucke (1929) was the first to give a semi-psychological explanation of some aspects of self-actualization with developmental overtones, although his book Cosmic Consciousness was heavily loaded with religious usage. While many of Bucke's ideas are ingenuous or outmoded, the volume deserves consideration because it was one of the first to investigate the topic; hence, a brief review of his ideas is in order.

Bucke felt that the development of superior individuals retraced the development of the race. He believed that as the race was in process of being given the gift of illumination, this phenomenon was now appearing in a few of the most superior individuals at the time of their greatest maturity and mental health. He defined illumination as a mystical conversion-hysteria type of experience, such as occurred to St. Paul on the road to Damascus, and saw it as of a profound religious nature, which afterward produced changes in the individual's life style. He professed to find more incidents of illumination now than in ancient times and concluded (rather ingenuously) that this indicated the race was in the process of receiving this ability. Most of the book consists of case histories of about 45 people, more

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than half drawn from history and the others known by personal acquaintance. (A similar method was later used by Maslow in his study of self -actualizing people.) Such incidents are more likely to be found in contemporaries; thus only major historical figures from earlier times have any chance of standing as examples.

Aside from the religious explanation, Bucke's book can be criticized psychologically on the ground that he did not realize that somatotypes apparently influence the kind of person who has the more dramatic illuminatory experiences. Thus Bucke leaves Emerson at the "twilight" level because this conversion hysteria was absent, while including others because it was present.

It seems to us that the conversion-hysteria phenomenon, complete with fire and all, may be inevitable for some personalities but unnecessary in others. Some natures require it because of rigid repression in the light of some religious or social code. Doubts or conflicting evidence inconsistent with that code are not forgotten or ignored but are stored in the preconscious. If enough of these pile up, the bonds of repression burst, and conversion to a fully developed code of more freedom and opposite to the previous restrictions seems suddenly to emerge. When the repressive forces are not so strong and clearly organized, the conversion phenomena need not occur.

The essential component of the psychedelic stage or process is a sudden opening of the mind to enlargement, to a grander vista than ever seen before, with a power surge which is analogous to shifting into overdrive in an auto. There has been an acceleration of process, and this acceleration becomes capable of occasional return under proper conditions of environmental stimulation. The interior conditions for this process are that the boundaries between the ego and the preconscious open up and the psychedelic mind expansion is felt because the conscious mind is suddenly master in an enlarged domain.

Despite its methodological limitations, Bucke's book made an early contribution which focused on development, on high mental health, on superior individuals, and on rare talents. He realized that because an experience is rare, it is not unreal, but only unusual, and hence an excellent guidepost to new and uncharted developments. This is a scientific principle of the first magnitude, as useful in the behavioral as the natural sciences. (One has only to recall helium, radium, and U-238 for illustrative purposes.)

Bucke often talked of superior individuals who lived in the "twilight" of illumination but on whom the full sun of enlightenment had never risen. This judgment was made because they never reported an ecstatic experience. Now we know that certain psychological types are more prone to these experiences than others, as Maslow (1967) reported. While experiences are often found in those in the process

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of self-actualization, nevertheless it seems also true that some in the process do not have them at all.

Evidently the process of self-actualization covers a wide track, broad enough for many different kinds of people. For one it will mean a continuous cycle of occasional creative flashes followed by longer rests; for another, genuine psychedelic or peak experiences accompanied by increases in power, energy and creativity; for a third it may mean an opening between the conscious and preconscious which either becomes systematic or habitual under certain stimuli or is amenable to control from the conscious side. None of these is to be preferred above the others, for all who dwell within the vestibule of the mansion are blessed. Those who come to self-actualization late in life, say, after 45, may never have the ecstasy appropriate for the generativist period, but live happy, constructive, and productive lives nevertheless.

One aspect of the peak experience, whether mystic or otherwise, is that something happens to the ego. Some types of such experience enable the ego to merge with the experience; in others it becomes altered or changed. But however this may be reported, the psychologist realizes that there is communication difficulty because of the uniqueness of the experience, and he suspects that the dimensions of the narrator's own ego have been drastically altered. This inner change throws off his sense of reality orientation because he is, for the time, measuring experience with an expanded yardstick.

Indeed the peak experience is much like the Pentecostal experience and the group encounter experience, all of which depend on a syndrome which:
 

(1) brings together a group of lovers, athletes, novitiates, etc.;
(2) develops a high degree of group cohesiveness or esprit:
    (a) resulting in a breakdown of barriers normally separating people so that
    (b) there is fluidity and flow and relaxation of ego controls resulting in
    (c) ecstasy much like a sexual climax
    (d) followed by relief, quiescence and satiation and
    (e) an invasion of energy, power, or morale which
    (f) results in a feeling of inner transformation and
    (g) a changed behavior pattern with superior performance.*


Bucke is quoted by White (1972:87ff) on the characteristics of what Bucke called illumination, but what we will call a psychedelic experience:



*This and the previous nine paragraphs are from pages 114-117 of The Development of the Creative Individual. Copyright 1972 by Robert Knapp, used by permission.

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a) The person, without warning, has a sense of being immersed in a flame or cloud;
b) He is bathed in an emotion of joy, assurance, triumph, or salvation;
c) An intellectual illumination, a clear conception or vision of the meaning of the universe; he sees and knows that the Cosmos is a living presence;
d) a sense of immortality;
e) the vanishing of the fear of death;
f) and sin;
g) the whole experience is instantaneous or nearly so;
h) the previous character of the percipient is important;
i) so is the age at which the experience occurs (which is between 25 and 40);
j) there is added a charm of personality;
k) and in some cases a change in appearance such as might happen to one who experienced great joy.
We shall use the word "psychedelic" in this book from here on with the special meaning of a cognitive mind-expanding aspect of the seventh developmental stage; we shall not use it in connection with drugs. We regard psychedelia as an intermediate state between the general psychic events and full illumination (seen in the eighth stage). (We shall discuss in Chapter 6 the problems; which ensue when artificial forcing is used to enter the psychedelic state prematurely.)

3.12 The Psychic and the Psychedelic

In this book we assume that the reader agrees with us in assigning a close relationship between psychic and psychedelic events, the one seen as an event in an expanded natural environment, and the other seen as an event in an expanded natural consciousness. W. G. Roll (1972:456-471) carries the idea further:
 

If the psi field and the other fields making up our environment are experienced as part of the self, we may define such an experience as one of "field consciousness". (FC) have been reported near the moment of death, during psychedelic drug trips, as a result of meditation, and in other altered states of consciousness . . . (pp. 458).


There is good reason for taking seriously the view that there may be a close relationship between the psi phenomena and FC experiences. ESP incidents during FC experiences indicate that the latter may not be occult illusions, but represent actual expansion of the self into the objective world of space and time. ESP and other psi phenomena may provide the

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empirical validation of self-expansion. Conversely if the FC experience encompasses the psi field, this is likely to give a richer meaning to psychical research. Indeed, if ESP is involved in FC experiences, then it is likely that this experience can be better understood, and perhaps achieved more easily through an understanding of psi phenomena. (p. 460)
In this book we shall treat the word "psychic" as referring to parasensory events in an expanded natural environment, which are capable of being explained by natural law, although the principle may not have been discovered at this time. We shall use the word "psychedelic" as pertaining especially to the mind-expansion of certain developmentally related experiences which may occur to the consciousness under a variety of stimulating circumstances, only one of which is that represented by drugs. Hence, psychic and psychedelic are two aspects of the same domain.

One important distinction between psychic and psychedelic is that psychic experiences are not developmental and psychedelic are. That is, psychic experiences may occur to the individual at any state of development, but psychedelic experiences, wherein the mind-expansion occurs with some degree of rationality and control, are definitely confined to the seventh stage (generativity-psychedelia), and hence when these mystic or peak experiences occur, it is a sign that the individual's development has reached that level.

Psychedelic experiences take place in an altered state of consciousness, although not all ASC experiences are psychedelic (e.g. dreaming). It is important to note that psychedelic experiences can be triggered by simple changes in sensory input (as well as by ingestation of drugs). Ludwig (Prince 1968:71-5) catalogues four pages of various categories of altered states of consciousness resulting from:
 

a) reduction of sensory stimulation,
b) increase in sensory stimulation
c) increase in alertness,
d) decrease in alertness, and
e) presence of somato-physiological factors.
Prince (1968:133-5) marshals impressive evidence that drum beats approximating 8-13 hertz (the alpha range) are very effective in inducing an altered state of consciousness. As we shall see later in this chapter ASC's can be induced by more subtle stimuli such as sexual ecstasy, natural beauty, or religious fervor. And some, but not all altered states lead to psychic experiences or powers.

In comparing the psychic and psychedelic, we wish to make clear that not all such experiences are at the same level. There are, of course, primitive psychic experiences - that of poltergeist phenomena is an immediate example. Similarly not all psychedelic experiences can be classed as mystical events. A psychedelic drug trip is rarely a mystical happening; it is usually a tortured search after identity. The core of mysticism, according to Stace (1960:14), is "an ultimate

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nonsensous unity in all things " (i.o.). He also refers (1960:24-5) to:

a) "melting-away into the Infinite of one's own individuality,''
b) which is "beyond space and time," and
c) which melting, brings "exalted, peace, blessedness, and joy."


Some, but not all, psychedelic events partake of this high quality. Similarly, a psychedelic event is mindexpanding. It discloses, like raising a curtain, some aspect or truth not seen or understood before. Seeing a ghost, or having a telepathic impression, might conceivably accomplish this mind expansion, but in general it is unlikely to.

The great religious and secular literature of all higher civilizations, from the Bhavagad Gita,including the Bible, Koran,and down to Huxley and Hesse, concern the efforts of a few adventurous men to enter the psychedelic state and to explain psychic occurrences.

There are two new scientific concepts which are very helpful in thinking about psychical events - the hologram and the plenum. The hologram is a kind of three-dimensional picture in which each part of the print contains specifications for the production of the whole picture. In a similar way, each part of reality contains a key to the whole of reality.

Tennyson (1869), in his inspiration tells us:
 

Flower in the crannied wall,
I pluck you out of the crannies,
I hold you here, root and all, in my hand,
Little flower - but if I could understand
What you are, root and all, and all in all,
I should know what God and man is.


The plenum is a region which is full, so that movement in it can be only circular (Crovitz, 1971:7). In a plenum, eternal recurrence must be a property, and consequently we should expect some kind of circular motion which brings things back to what they once were.

Since cyclic motion is the only possible motion in a plenum, the Zeitgeist is therefore a periodic manifestation of a superordinate plenum. This plenum is perhaps best characterized as the "species mind."  It is, however, imbedded in each one of us as the preconscious (or as Jung called it: "the collective unconscious"). As a plenum the species mind, in whatever manifestation, is one of the few nouns to which the adjective "my" (so important in self-concept) cannot be applied. That is why, when children first start encountering it, it appears as the Sullivanian "not-me" (Sullivan 1953:162) with its frightening, uncanny aspects.

This species mind is not personal. It is like a genie in a bottle in needing release by the conscious personal mind in order to assume its full service which is enormous. Like a genie it does not belong to the one who is using it, but for short periods of time gives him access to the whole of human knowledge and experience, as if he were con-

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nected to the terminal of a giant computer. In addition, being the inverse of nature, it controls not only the autonomic nervous system, and hence the mental and physical health of the individual, but also all other elements represented by the self-concept, in short, the natural environment. It is one of life's supreme paradoxes that all of the substantives modified by the adjective "my" are controlled by an entity which is absolutely impersonal. Powerful and "awe-full" as is this impersonal entity, it is also properly under the control and direction of our conscious rational minds if we choose to exercise this regnancy. This control of the species mind gives us dominion over every aspect of our environment including our future evolution, and since it makes man a co-creator, is actually the highest function of self-consciousness.

3.13 The Normal and the Psychedelic

The differences between ordinary and non-ordinary consciousness and reality have been identified by Andrew Weil in The Natural Mind (1972), as "straight" thinking versus "stoned" thinking. Considering drugs as the main symptom instead of the main problem of a sick society, he uses these words as synonyms for the kind of thinking done by our ordinary intellect contrasted with the kind of thinking available in the unitive consciousness of non-ordinary reality. Then in a long passage, worthy of the late Bernard Shaw, he details the imperfect characteristics of "straightland" as follows:
 

1. A tendency to know things through the intellect rather than through some other faculty of the mind;
2. a tendency to be attached to the senses and through them to external reality;
3.a tendency to pay attention to outer forms rather than to inner contents and thus to lapse into materialism;
4. a tendency to perceive differences rather than similarities between phenomena;
5. a tendency to negative thinking, pessimism, and despair.
He illustrates these tendencies by the following examples:
a) the overkill in the use of insecticides to control insects,
b) the use of antibiotics,
c) allopathic medicine (the treating of symptoms by counter-measures),
d) the allopathic model in psychiatry,
e) political action as a means of producing change and legislating virtue.
While one cannot agree with everything he says in this remarkable chapter, one recognizes the truth and force in much that he says.

In later chapters, Weil expands his thesis to deal with the unitive consciousness in control of the autonomic nervous system, mental healing (which he equates in many ways to psychotherapy), the importance of opening channels between the conscious and unconscious,

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ESP as an effect of the collective unconscious, and many other far-out subjects for which the drug aspect serves only as a vestibule.

Weil's book has been singled out because it contains the clearest statement of the counterculture in a manner which is constructive and non-militant. As such it provides a marker to help us discriminate between the "normal" life of our society, and the psychedelic state, which some such as Weil in The Natural Mind, and Reich (Consciousness III) in The Greening of America (1970) see as near-term evolutionary development in society.

As an attempt to pinpoint this dichotomy, and further to differentiate between the normal and the psychedelic, we offer the following series of propositions:
 

1. The normal state of consciousness is characterized by the continuance, intensity, and frequency of perceptual stimuli.

2. Altered states of consciousness whether:
    a) dissociated,
    b) hypnotic, or
    c) psychedelic
are frequently characterized by bizarre variations in the character of perceived stimuli.

3. Biofeedback, sensory deprivation, mantra chanting, or transcendental meditation experiences indicate that the deprivation of perceptual intake rather quickly changes consciousness from a normal to an altered state.

4. In a similar way, experiences of hypnotism, yogic or zen training, Christian or other mysticism and those covered in section three involve (through prayer, meditation, fasting, loss of sleep mantrams, zazen, and other means) gradual interference with the amount of perceptual experience, resulting in a change of consciousness.

5. The aim of the hypnotist in every technique is systematically to deprive the patient of the usual inflow of perceptual experience in order to gain control of his ego.

6. Various types of psychic phenomena (apparitions, OOBs, etc.) clearly indicate that with change from ordinary consciousness, various phenomena resembling (but not the same as) our ordinary experiences of nature can be reproduced with startling accuracy.

7. When the ego is in an altered (hypnotic) state of consciousness, it accepts the possibility of such phenomena, which it otherwise would not, and such phenomena then occur. We, in truth, may speak of the ordinary phenomena of nature as the perceptual intake sustaining our normal state of consciousness, and this altered phenomena as phenomena sustaining an altered state of consciousness.

8. Thus the occurrence of phenomena of a given kind is determined by a perceiving ego, and the two are aspects of one entity. In short, Berkeley was right.

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9. The occurrence of phenomena and the state of consciousness of the ego exert a reciprocal relationship on each other. As the individual ego is the more absorbed by the overmind, natural phenomena are freed from their usual physical restrictions and become super-normal. Hence, the union of the ego and the overmind can produce supernormal healing of the body.

10. The so-called laws of the physical world reflect the boundaries of the ordinary conscious mind. Because we are in a particular state of consciousness, we apprehend a particular state of nature. When consciousness is changed we apprehend a new state of nature. Nature is hence the inverse of the state of consciousness.


3.14 Creativity and Psychedelia

Creativity is the intuitive form of psychedelia. Since creativity is the junior cognitive stage, creative production results from leaks (as if by osmosis through a permeable membrane) between the preconscious and the conscious. In psychedelic production, doors between the two swing open, and the conscious mind is awed by suddenly finding itself master in a new and vastly enlarged domain.

It should therefore come as no surprise to us that creative people are often psychedelic, and psychedelic people are often creative. The only difference is that frequently the creative person cannot tell you how it happens and the more advanced individual can. Creative people are like children in the enactive stage where "the learning is in the muscles;" they therefore have often adopted a ritual for going into a relaxed state which will induce creativity. Among these rituals are travel, water, hypnosis, drugs, dreams, and extra sensory perception. The first two have been discussed elsewhere (1970a:88-90). The latter group are magnificently managed by the top expert in the field, Krippner (1972:210-222) who has generously allowed the following extended quotation:

Psychedelics Drugs and Creativity

"There have been many highly creative persons who have used consciousness-altering drugs (e.g., opium, alcohol, LSD, hashish) though one can only - at this time - speculate as to whether or not any of these drugs increased their creativity. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a poet and philosopher, habitually used a preparation of opium. Charles Baudelaire, a nineteenth century writer, lavishly described his sensations after eating hashish. William James (1902), the famous psychologist and philosopher, tried using nitrous oxide - commonly known as laughing gas - to "stimulate the mystical consciousness." Aldous Huxley, the novelist and essayist, took mescaline and LSD on frequent occasions. Even Sigmund Freud,

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the founder of psychoanalysis, ingested cocaine for several years and recommended it highly.

"In recent years, psychedelic ("mind-manifesting") drugs have often been used for creative purposes. In 1965, the psychiatrist Humphry Osmond and the architect Kyo Izumi announced that they had designed a new mental hospital with the aid of psychedelic drugs. Izumi (1968) took LSD when he visited traditionally designed mental hospitals to determine their effects upon persons in altered states of consciousness. In this condition, the long corridors and pale colors appeared bizarre and frightening to him; the corridor "seemed infinite, and it seemed as if I would never get to the end of it." He and Osmond assumed that the hospital would look similarly unpleasant to the mental patients. As a result of Izumi's experiences, he and Osmond designed a decentralized series of unimposing buildings with pleasant colors and no corridors.

"Barron (1963) administered psilocybin to several highly creative persons and recorded their impressions. For example, one of Barron's subjects, a composer, writes, "Every corner is alive in a silent intimacy." Barron concluded, "What psilocybin does is to . . . dissolve many definitions and . . . melt many boundaries, permit greater intensities or more extreme values of experience to occur in many dimensions." However, some of the artists in Barron's study were wildly enthusiastic about their seemingly increased sensitivity during drug experience but later when the effects of the drug wore off they found that the artistic work they produced had little artistic merit. For instance, a painter recalled, "I have seldom known such absolute identification with what I was doing - nor such a lack of concern with it afterwards." It appears that an artist is not necessarily able to evaluate his psychedelically-inspired work while he is under the influence of the drug.

The Role of Extrasensory Perception

"Aside from the possibility that extrasensory perception (ESP) may have played a part in some of the creative dreams just described, there have in general been many unusual and puzzling creative achievements in which ESP may have played a role.

"When Igor Sikorsky was ten years of age, he dreamed of coursing the skies in the softly lit, walnut-paneled cabin of an enormous flying machine. Sikorsky later became an eminent aircraft designer and inventor of the helicopter. Three decades after the dream, he went aboard one of his own four-engine clippers to inspect a job of interior decorating done by Pan American Airways. With a start, he recognized the cabin as identical to the one in his boyhood dream.

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"Max Planck, the physicist, first spoke of his "constant" when he was twenty-three years of age; however, he did not understand its implications for wave theory until much later. Indeed, he had to convince himself of its correctness; it varied so greatly from the logic of his time that he could not comprehend it when the idea first came to him.

"Hadamard (1945,116-123) has discussed a number of interesting "paradoxical cases of intuition" among great mathematicians. In the nineteenth century, Evarist Galois produced a manuscript that signified a complete transformation of higher algebra. The paper projected a full light on what had been only glimpsed thus far by the greatest mathematicians. In a letter Galois wrote to his friend during the night before he died, he stated a theorem on the "periods" of a certain type of integral. Hadamard comments that although his theorem is clear to mathematicians of today, it could not have been understood by scientists living at the time of Galois. These "periods" acquired meaning only by means of some principles in the theory of certain functions that were found about a quarter of a century after the death of Galois. Hadamard concludes that Galois must have thought of these principles in some way before he could arrive at the "periods," but that they must have been unconscious in his mind since he made no mention of them.

"Another example of a nineteenth century mathematician cited by Hadamard (1945) concerns Bernhard Riemann. When Riemann died, a note was found among his papers that read: "These properties of S (the function in question) are deduced from an expression of it which, however, I did not succeed in simplifying enough to publish it." Hadamard himself has since proved all the properties except one with the help of facts that were unknown in Riemann's time. Hadamard added that in regard to one of the properties that Riemann enunciated, "It is hardly conceivable how he can have found it without using some of these general principles, no mention of which is made in his paper."

"Yet another instance of this type concerns Pierre de Fermat who, in the seventeenth century, contributed to the development of the infinitesimal calculus, to the calculus of probabilities, and to the theory of numbers. He was also a co-founder of analytic geometry. After Fermat's death, it was discovered that he had a copy of Diophantes' book and that he had written this statement in the margin: "I have proved that the relation Xm + Ym = Zm is impossible in integral numbers (X, Y, Z different from 0; m greater than 2); but the margin does not leave me room enough to inscribe the proof." Since then, three centuries have passed and mathematicians are still trying to prove it. Hadamard (1945) believes that Fermat was not mistaken because partial proofs have been found, though by an immense amount of work that "required the

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help of some important algebraic theories of which no knowledge existed at the time of Fermat and no conception appears in his writings. "

"Hadamard theorized that these mathematical discoveries were made intuitively and imaginatively with the aid of deep unconscious processes. According to Freud's psychoanalytic theory (Freud, 1933) the primary processes involved in imaginative intuitive thought derives from the unconscious. And, according to recent parapsychological speculation, the unconscious is also where ESP originates. If this is true, it seems that any thought processes deriving from this mental level readily have access to information obtained by ESP (Anderson, 1962).

"Koestler (1963:75) mentions some interesting discoveries made by great astronomers such as Pythagoras, Ptolemy, Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, and Newton, and writes, "... the manner in which some of the most important individual discoveries were arrived at reminds one more of a sleepwalker's performance than an electronic brain's." Regarding Kepler, Koestler (1963:394) writes, "Unlike his First and Second Laws, which he found by that peculiar combination of sleepwalking intuition and wide-awake alertness for clues - a mental process on two levels, which drew mysterious benefits out of his apparent blunderings - the Third Law was the fruit of nothing but patient, dogged trying." Koestler (1963:502) continues, "With true sleepwalker's assurance, Newton avoided the booby traps strewn over the field: magnetism, circular inertia, Galileo's tides, Kepler's sweeping brooms, Descartes' vortices and at the same time knowingly walked into what looked like the deadliest trap of all: action-at-a-distance. . ."

" Although most of Koestler's sleepwalking insight can be explained as initially information acquired by normal perception which was subsequently used in imaginative thinking, it is likely that some of the "sleepwalking," in these scientific discoveries also involved using information acquired by ESP. Data acquired through ESP as well as the activities of his imaginative thought processes, may enable a scientist to explore non-ordinary reality.

"Perhaps one of the most interesting cases of this kind is that of Michael Faraday (cited by Koestler, 1963), one of the greatest physicists of all time. Faraday was a visionary even in a literal sense. He "saw" the stresses surrounding magnets and electric currents as "curves of force in space," which he called "lines of force." He visualized the universe as patterned by narrow curved tubes through which all forms of "ray-vibrations" or energy radiations are propagated. This vision of curved tubes which "rose up before him like things" led him to the ideas of the dynamo and the electric motor. It also made him discard the concept of the ether and to postulate that light is electromagnetic radiation. Did

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Faraday enter these new realities through his imagination, or was he also assisted by ESP?

"The case of Jonathan Swift (cited by Haefele, 1962), the writer of Gulliver's Travels and other novels, combines artistic and scientific creativity. When Gulliver reaches Laputa, the astronomers state that the planet Mars has two moons quite close to the planet. One completed its orbit every ten hours, the other every 21.5 hours. It took astronomers in ordinary reality 150 years to discover that Mars did, indeed, have two moons which completed their orbits around the planet every eight and every 30 hours.

"A final instance of the possible association between ESP and creativity concerns Futility, a popular novel written by Morgan Robertson in 1898. It described the wreck of a giant ship called the Titan. This ship was considered "unsinkable" by the characters in the novel; it displaced 70,000 tons, was 800 feet long, had 24 lifeboats, and carried 3,000 passengers. Its engines were equipped with three propellers. One night in April, while proceeding at 25 knots, the Titan encountered an iceberg in the fog and sank with great loss of life.

"On April 15, 1912, the Titanic was wrecked in a disaster which echoed the events portrayed in the novel 14 years previously. The Titanic displaced 66,000 tons and was 828 feet long. It had three propellers and was proceeding at 23 knots on its maiden voyage, carrying nearly 3,000 passengers. There was great loss of life because the Titanic was equipped with only 20 lifeboats.

"Thus, the role played by ESP in creativity demands further study. Anderson (1962) is convinced that the association exists because both ESP and creativity have their roots in deep, unconscious levels of the psyche. She concludes that creativity "by a process of purely conscious calculation seems never to occur. Scrutiny of the conscious scene for the creative end never reveals it; it is never there."
 
 

3.15 Stage Characteristics of Psychedelia

According to the theory enunciated in Chapter II, psychedelia is the cognitive aspect of the seventh developmental stage, of the "first column" or "latency" family, and occurring on schedule to adults in the 25-40 year bracket. If the Periodic Developmental Stage theory has validity, psychedelia will have certain predetermined characteristics. Let us investigate this possibility.

a. In the previous section we have explored the relationship between creativity and psychedelia, cognitive properties of adjacent stages, showing that whereas creativity is intuitive, psychedelia is more formal, the difference being the same between the sixth and

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seventh stages as that of intuitive conservation at the third stage and formal conservation at the fourth. This proportion is further set forth in Chapter II, page 73.

b. Psychedelia is the cognitive characteristic of a first column developmental stage. It shares with its junior stages (I and IV) a sense of absorption of the ego in the world of experience. In this it differs from the second column stages where the ego is absorbed in itself (with the accompanying identity-crisis), and it differs from third column stages in that there is a measure of sexual latency, instead of the sexual preoccupation with the "other" of that column. "God in the World" of column I now becomes "The preconscious is manifested in the world of experience" in stage VII. And nature (which has seemed very tangible) and the preconscious (which has seemed very intangible), are now seen as inverses of each other with similar properties.

We find both of these differences true of psychedelia. There is absorption of the ego in the expanded psychic world of experience and sexual latency, commonly seen in those who become involved in psychic or psychedelic experience. It is not so much that sexual activity is prohibited, as that it is transcended and that the sexual experience is appreciated not so much for lust as for the altered state of consciousness which it so often brings to those nearing self-actualization. Stace reports (1960:20) the Mandukya as saying about mystical consciousness that it is:
 

. . . the pure unitary consciousness, wherein awareness of the world and multiplicity is completely obliterated. It is ineffable peace. It is the supreme good. It is One without the second. It is Self.


From the standpoint of developmental psychology this is a very fine description of a column two stage (one involved with identity and the ego). This characteristic makes the writer feel that full mystical consciousness is reserved for stage 8 (in column 2) and that this kind of experience should be classified as illumination rather than psychedelia, (see Table 1, Chapter II).

If there is remaining any question as to whether psychedelia is a first column characteristic, let us listen to Fenelon (Huxley 1945:113) describe one of its components, simplicity, in terms of unselfconscious ego-latency, lost (to use our psychological jargon) in absorption in the world of experience:
 

In the world when people call anyone simple, they generally mean a foolish, credulous person. But real simplicity, far from being foolish, is almost sublime. All good men like and admire it; are conscious of sinning against it . . . I should say that it is uprightness of soul which prevents self-consciousness . . . It is
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not the same as sincerity which is a much humbler virtue ... To be absorbed in the world around, and never turn a thought within . . . real simplicity lies in a just milieu equally free from thoughtlessness and affectation in which the soul is not overwhelmed by externals so as to be unable to reflect, nor yet given up to endless refinements which self-consciousness induces . . .


c. We have in Chapter II alluded to the fact that some aspects of a particular stage are perfected in the stage four advanced from it. Thus the psychedelic stage bears the "perfected" relationship to that of stage three (initiative-intuitive) when the child first discovers the frightening "not-me" which is in the psychedelic state he has learned to manage and control. Because of the importance of this process, we shall reserve the last section of this chapter for a discussion of it.

d. In some respects the medium is the prostitute of the psychedelic stage. The prostitute allows her body to be invaded for profit; the medium does the same with her mind. Humphreys (1970:23) agrees in stating: "It is hardly necessary to point out the long delay in progress which any and every form of mediumship inevitably causes the medium . . . He who slips down the ladder of evolution so as to give up his own self mastery will spend many arduous lives in regaining his lost ground."

e. We learned earlier that there is a cycle of creativity which needs to be established in young people, and that it is often turned off because of the negative aspects or pejorative publicity which attends its early manifestations. Since psychedelia is also a stage in developmental process, we should realize that precisely the same situation applies to it. There is a cycle of psychedelia which needs to be established in young adults, and they often turn it off because of the disagreeable sensations of its early manifestations or the curious attention it attracts.

Each developmental advance involves the increased cognitive confluence with and understanding of a deepening interior process. In the case of psychedelia, this means an often frightening face-to-face confrontation with the Sullivanian "not-me," an aspect which is more veiled in creative performance. We shall discuss techniques to forward this process later in this chapter and in chapter seven.

Ropp, a leading Rosicrusian, (White 1972:95) identifies our psychedelic stage as the fourth state, and our illuminative stage as the fifth state. Normal waking consciousness is then the third state, while sleep without dreams and sleep with dreams are the first and second. Such a hierarchy, while not developmental, is in many ways similar as a taxonomy of stages or levels of consciousness.

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3.2 NATURAL PSYCHEDELIA

Psychedelic experiences have been occurring to mankind for a long time. The Bible from the visions of the Old Testament prophets to the revelations of the Disciples, is full of such episodes, and the great religious leaders of history, Augustine, St. Francis, Jacob Boheme, Luther, St. John of the Cross, St. Teresa, Meister Eckhart, St. Francis de Sales, Swedenborg, John Wesley, Mary Baker Eddy, Joseph Smith and Brigham Young have all recorded them. But they have occurred to many lesser people, under varying conditions and circumstances. Let us hear a few witnesses:

One of the most telling is that of Blaise Pascal, famous French scientist and mathematician who had an experience which literally changed his life. He wrote about it as follows (Bucke: 1929:274):
 

In the year of Grace, 1654, Monday, 23 November, day of St. Clement, Pope and Martyr. From about half past ten in the evening until about half-past twelve midnight, FIRE. God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob, not the philosophers nor of the Wise. Assurance, joy, assurance, feeling, joy, peace. . .


Jacob Boehme, the German cobbler, tells of his experience (Bucke: 1929:182):
 

The gate was opened to me that in one-quarter of an hour, I saw and knew more than if I had been many years together at a university, and which I exceedingly admired and thereupon turned my praise to God for it. For I saw and knew the being of all things, the byss and the abyss . . .


An even more famous example occurred to Moses on Mt. Sinai as related in Exodus3:2-5:
 

And the angel of the Lord appeared unto him in a flame of fire, out of the midst of a bush; and he looked, and behold the bush burned with fire, and the bush was not consumed. And Moses said, I will now turn aside and see this great sight, why the bush is not burnt. And when the Lord saw that he turned aside to see, God called him out of the midst of the bush, and said: Moses, Moses. And he said, here am I. And He said, draw not nigh hither; put off thy shoes from off thy feet, for the place wherein thou standest is holy ground.
And perhaps the most famous experience of all is given in Acts 9:3-6:
 
And as he journeyed he came near Damascus, and suddenly there shined about him a light from heaven; and he fell to the
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ground, and heard a voice saying unto him, Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me ?


Myers (1961:351) states:
 

We need not deny the transcendental ecstasy to any of the strong souls who have claimed to feel it, to Elijah, to Isaiah, to Plato, to Plotinus, to St. John or St. Paul or to Buddha, or Mahomet, or Virgil or Dante, to St. Teresa, or Joan of Arc, to Kant or Swedenborg, to Wordsworth or Tennyson.
Blofeld (1970:23) says it thus:
 
There are moments during life when a startling but marvellous experience leaps into mind as though coming from another world. The magic that calls it forth - as though someone had accidentally whispered 'open sesame' that rolls the stone back from the hidden treasure - is often so fleeting as to be forgotten in the joy of the experience . . . That the experience is not just a passing fancy but an intimation of something profoundly significant is recognized in a flash, but understanding of its significance does not always follow. A curtain hitherto unnoticed is suddenly twitched aside; and though other veils intervene, for a timeless moment there stands partly revealed a mystery. Then the curtain falls in place and at least a measure of oblivion descends.


Again Wordsworth, speaking of this lost glory says:
 

At length the man perceives it die away
And fade into the light of common day
................
Though nothing can bring back the hour
Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower.


This power, which withers if it is not developed, is often drowned
out by the stale uses of our culture, which make us oblivious to such
splendor.
James Russell Lowell (The Vision of Sir Launfal) tells us:
 

Not only around our infancy
Doth heaven with all its splendors lie;
Daily with souls that cringe and plot,
We Sinais climb and know it not.


But fortunately there are in every age those who transcend the mundane and leave us accounts of the mind-expanding encounter. Bucke's Cosmic Consciousness(1929) is but a catalogue of such experiences. Maslow (1954) also reported them often in his census

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of self-actualized persons. We note in connection with ecstatic experiences such as the previous: There are two levels, which we have called a) psychedelia, and b) illumination. (Bucke's illumination is our psychedelia). Psychedelic experiences are characterized by a sudden, spasmodic, transitory nature, an off-again on-again type of episode which leaves the individual enthralled, but somewhat let down when it is over. Illumination, however, is a steady state where the art of controlling the experience has been mastered. But like the display of adventitious psychic powers, "natural" psychedelia is not valuable unless followed up by action and development; it represents potentiality, not accomplishment. Huxley (1945:68) is very clear on this point:
 

Before going on to discuss the means whereby it is possible to come to the fullness as well as the height of spiritual knowledge, let us briefly consider the experience of those who have been privileged to "behold the One in all things," but have made no efforts to perceive it within themselves. A great deal of interesting material on this subject may be found in Bucke's Cosmic Consciousness. All that need be said here is that such "cosmic consciousness" may come unsought and is in the nature of what Catholic theologians call a "gratuitous grace." One may have a gratuitous grace (the power of healing, for example, or foreknowledge) while in a state of mortal sin, and the gift is neither necessary to, nor sufficient for, salvation. At the best such sudden accessions of "cosmic consciousness" as are described by Bucke are merely unusual invitations to further personal effort in the direction of the inner height as well as the external fullness of knowledge. In a great many cases the invitation is not accepted; the gift is prized for the ecstatic pleasure it brings; its coming is remembered nostalgically and, if the recipient happens to be a poet, written about with eloquence - as Byron, for example, wrote in a splendid passage of Childe Harold, as Wordsworth wrote in Tintern Abbey and The Prelude. In these matters no human being may presume to pass definitive judgment upon another human being; but it is at least permissible to say that, on the basis of the biographical evidence, there is no reason to suppose that either Wordsworth or Byron ever seriously did anything about the theophanies they described; nor is there any evidence that these theophanies were of themselves sufficient to transform their characters. That enormous egotism, to which De Quincey and Keats and Haydon bear witness, seems to have remained with Wordsworth to the end. And Byron was as fascinatingly and tragi-comically Byronic after he had beheld the One in all things as he was before.
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Osborn (1966:178-9) says:
 

It would seem that a predisposition for the experience is a certain degree of dissociation - a softening of the hard focusing on the glare of surface events. For instance, Dr. J. H. M. Whiteman, a mathematician and scholar, in his book The Mystical Life (Faber and Faber. London. 1961) has given a description of his many experiences which occurred during full separation from the body. The predisposition for bi-location of conscious-
ness may be more general with mystics than the records indicate. We do know that some of the writings of the classical mystics were of the automatic type where the surface self seems to become a passive agent for a deeper self. Evelyn Underhill tells us in her book Mysticism (Methuen. London) that  St. Catherine of Siena dictated to her secretaries while in a state of ecstasy and St. Teresa often wrote her Interior Castle when she was in a state of semi-trance. She always wrote "swiftly, without hesitation or amendments." This is related of other mystics, including Jacob Boehme and William Blake.


Such experiences occur more often to gifted persons and geniuses. We have discussed elsewhere (1972a:72-4) the reasons therefore. Such speculations corroborate the supposition that the very able person is further advanced on the road to self-actualization and is therefore more likely to reach advanced stages. It is in this respect a confirmation of our developmental stage hypothesis.

Masters and Houston (1966:138) say:
 

In our own work for reasons peculiar to it, we have found it advisable to establish certain other requirements. With regard to age, we have with few exceptions limited our research to persons between the ages of twenty-five and sixty. However, age is not always best measured in chronological terms and we have sometimes permitted considerations of biological age and mental and emotional maturity to override the twenty-five to sixty years' rule. We also soon learned that for our purposes a minimum I.Q. of 105 should be required, and most of the subjects have had I.Q.s substantially higher than that.


Myers (1961:76) puts it: "The differentia of genius lies in an increased control over subliminal mentation."

Myers (1961:82) sees close relationship between genius and psychic powers. He says (ibid), "The man of genius is what he is by virtue of possessing a readier communication that most men possess between his supraliminal and subliminal self.

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William James (1902) considered mystic states to be characterized by a breaking through of the subliminal or subconscious mind into consciousness.

Such experiences occur more often to those in high mental health than to the average individual. Both Bucke and Maslow noticed this property, and Maslow dwelt upon it at length. We may therefore regard the natural psychedelic experience as one would the radiance of electromagnetic waves from a heated object - as natural and inevitable once a certain level is reached.

Describing the aspects of the "core-religious" peak experience, Maslow (1964) says:
 

1) The whole universe is perceived as an integrated whole . . .
2) The percept is exclusively and fully attended to . . .
3) Objects, the world, and individual people are perceived as more detached from human concerns ...
4) Perception is relatively ego-transcending, self-forgetful, egoless, and unselfish . . .
5) The peak experience is felt as a self-validating moment which carries its own intrinsic values with it ...
6) Peak experiences . . . prove that there are ends in the world worthwhile in themselves . . .
7) There is characteristic disorientation in time or space ...
8) The world is seen only as good, desirable . . . never as evil, and undesirable . . .
9) The previous experience is the way the gods must look at the world, hence the peak experience is a way of becoming "god-like."
10) The answer to "how does the world look different? " is . . . the B-values . . .
11) B cognition is more passive and receptive . . .
12) Such emotions as wonder, awe, reverence, humility are reported.
13) The dichotomies, polarities, and conflicts tend to be transcended or resolved . . .
14) There is loss of fear, anxiety, confusion, conflict ,and restraint.
15) They have immediate effects or aftereffects.
16) The experience is like a visit to a personal heaven . . .
17) There is tendency to move closely to a perfect identity . . .
18) One is more responsible, alive, and creative . . .
19) Those who have the clearest and strongest identity are most able to transcend the ego and to become selfless . . .
20) The peak experiencer becomes more loving and accepting . . .
21) He becomes less an object and more a person . . .
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22) Because he becomes more non-striving and non-needing he asks less for himself ...
23) Afterward, people feel lucky, fortunate, and graced ...
24) Pride and humility are fused ...
25) What has been called "the unitive consciousness: is often given ...


Underhill (1960:234) regards this initial experience as one held in common by poets, artists and mystics:
 

To see God in nature, to attain to a radiant consciousness of the "otherness" of natural things, is the simplest and commonest form of illumination ... Where such a consciousness is recurrent, as it is with many poets, for instance, Keats, Shelley, Wordsworth, Browning, Tennyson, and Whitman, there results a partial, yet often overpowering, apprehension of the Infinite Life imminent in all living things, which some modern writers have dignified by the name of "nature-mysticism".


Underhill goes on to aver that the true mystic takes this experience as a point of departure and grows in grace from it, whereas the poet and artist simply use the recurrent experience as a basis for artistic production and personal euphoria. Underhill (1960:240) then notes three characteristics of the nature-mystic experience as:
 

1) A joyous apprehension of the absolute,
2) The "cleansing of the doors of perception" so that all are "strangely heightened" with added "significance and reality."
3) An increase in energy of the transcendental self, shown in visions, dialogues, automatic writings, and auditions.
There follows, according to Underhill (1965:249), in the mystic's development, a mysterious source of illumination,  "a new kind of radiance, a flooding of the personality with a new light." Underhill continues:
 
Frequently they report an actual and overpowering consciousness of radiant light, ineffable in its splendor. "Light without measure shines in my heart," sang Jacopone da Todi. "Light rare, untellable," said Whitman. "The flowing light of the Godhead," said Mechthild of Magdeburg . . . "Lux vivens dicit"said St. Hildegarde. It is an "infused brightness" said St. Teresa . . .
Sometimes this inward illumination is overpowering: Blake (1783) says:
 
For light doth seize my brain
With frantic Pain.
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And sometimes, (if we are to believe one poet about another) it is enough to destroy the optic nerve: Gray (1754) tells us: (referring to Milton)
 

He passed the bounds of Place and time;
The living throne, the sapphire blaze,
Where angels tremble while they gaze,
He saw; but blasted with excess of light,
Closed his eyes in endless night.


Zaehner (1961), after an analysis of the similarities and differences between drug-induced and religious-induced mystical experience, concludes that the former falls far short of the latter, and is in a class with nature-peak-experiences, so common to poets and artists. Here is the report of such a drug-induced experience from Masters and Houston (1966:261) which sustains Zaehner's point, being in every way identical to a nature-mystic experience:
 

I felt that I was there with God on the day of creation. Everything was so fresh and new. Every plant and tree and fern and bush had its own particular holiness. As I walked along the ground, the smells of nature rose to greet me sweeter and more sacred than any incense. Around me bees hummed, and birds sang and crickets chirped a ravishing hymn to Creation. Between the trees I could see sun sending down rays of warming benediction upon this Eden ...


We have now seen that "natural psychedelia" is indeed a natural and inevitable occurrence on the road to self-actualization, being particularly apt to occur to very able people and those in excellent mental health. But in an age which does not recognize this as Divine Grace, the inevitable question occurs: "What artificial means can be employed to facilitate this phenomenon?"
 
 

3.3 THE STIMULATION OF PSYCHEDELIA:  TRANSCENDENTAL MEDITATION

The "American Question," as Piaget called it, of whether or not a good thing can be speeded up developmentally is certainly appropriate. The psychedelic experience seems most likely to occur to young adults in good mental health between the ages of thirty and forty (Bucke 1929:81). Can we hasten or encourage this process in ourselves or others? The verdict of history is that we can, and many religious and philosophical systems have been built on the relevant techniques. These techniques range from chemical and psychological through

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hypnosis, religious experiences, and group encounter. We have catalogued these elsewhere (1972a:119-20) and recapitulate here:

a) hallucinogenic drugs,
b) nitrous oxide,
c) exposure of the eyes to stroboscopic flicker,
d) possession,
e) hypnosis,
f) alpha wave biofeedback techniques,
g) group experiences, including Pentecostal, and peak experiences, basic encounter, and other variants,
h) religious mortification, fasting, prayer,
i) yoga and zen techniques of meditation.


The Periodic Developmental Stage Theory constrains us to regard most of these methods as an unnatural "forcing" of developmental process into a stage (the psychedelic) for which the individual is not prepared.

Such efforts, whether by psychedelic drugs or other mechanical means, no matter how well intentioned, are dangerous since they result in loss of ego control. Because of the seriousness of this problem, a special chapter on developmental forcing, Chapter VI, has been reserved for a more thorough consideration.

While some methods (self-hypnosis, alpha wave biofeedback, and group encounter techniques) are less harmful than others, we feel comfortable in recommending only the cognitive procedure of meditation. Accordingly, this technique is the only one which will be discussed further here. Before proceeding with the discussion of transcendental meditation, a few things need to be said about meditation in general.

The key factors facilitating meditation appear to be:
 

1. relaxing the body and rendering the mind insensible to it by:
    a. sitting in a relaxed posture,
    b. shutting the eyes,
    c. being undisturbed,
    d. controlling the breath,

2. relaxing the mind, and bringing it to an altered state of consciousness by:
    a. use of a mantra (or repetition of the same words or tone),
    b. exclusion of thoughts from the mind,
    c. developing a simple "awareness" without being consciously attracted to any particular idea.


Generally speaking, a number of different yogic and zazen techniques have been effective in achieving the psychedelic state. Few of us, however, can journey to Tibet and spend ten years in a monastery, or adopt a vastly changed style of life, so the question becomes, which of these is most usefully adapted to Westerners? For a variety of reasons it appears that a form of meditation known as Transcendental Meditation, as advocated by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, is the best "packaged" for American tastes. Whether we like it or not, this packaging is essential in adapting to conditions of American-

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type initiation expense and the instant or week-end aspects of the intensive training.

A lucid account of the TM technique was contained in a feature article by Ellen Graham in the WallStreetJournal(Aug 31, 1972) from which we quote:
 

Instruction in TM is available at IMS centers in most cities. During training, each participant meets privately with a teacher and is assigned a mantra, or meaningless sound, which the IMS will define only be calling it "the vehicle that allows meditation to take place." (There are different mantras for different people, although the group won't say how many mantras there are or on what basis they are assigned.)
"A Deep Sense of Rest"

Sitting upright in a chair with eyes closed, the student listens to his mantra as it is chanted by his teacher, and then takes it up himself - first aloud, and then silently. During meditation, the muscles in the body relax, and may even twitch involuntarily. The head sometimes slumps forward. Meditators appear for all practical purposes to be asleep. Yet they say their minds remain acutely aware of outside stimuli, such as movements or noise in the room. The process is completely natural and involves no effort, meditators claim.

What goes on during meditation differs with each person, but one practiced meditator describes her experience like this: "You close your eyes, and after a few minutes the mantra just floats into your consciousness. Sometimes noises or mundane daydreams may distract you, but then you find your mind wandering back to the mantra. You feel a deep sense of rest and alertness pass through your mind and body." Practitioners say the meditative response begins as soon as the mind turns to the mantra. But how the mantra actually works - if, indeed, anyone knows - is a well-kept secret.

Teachers instruct meditators never to discuss their mantras with anyone else. (According to the IMS, this is to prevent misuse by would-be meditators who haven't learned the technique from trained teachers.) During four lessons lasting two hours each, participants practice meditation and meet in groups to discuss their experiences and ask questions. After that, they continue a twice-daily routine of meditating for 15 to 20 minutes on their own, although occasional check-ins with teachers are encouraged. The course costs $75 for adults and $45 for students.

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"Transcendental meditation is a systematic procedure of turning the attention inward toward the subtler levels of thought until the mind transcends the experience of the subtlest state of thought and arrives at the source of the thought." "TM is a purely mental technique practiced individually every morning and evening for fifteen to twenty minutes at a sitting. It requires no alteration of life style, diet, etc. and as a technique of direct experience rather than a religion or philosophy, it does not require belief in the efficacy of the practice nor an understanding of the underlying theory. Wallace and others (1971) have characterized it as a "wakeful hypometabolic physiologic state," i.e., a state of restful alertness. TM is apparently a universal human faculty, not requiring any particular intellectual or cognitive facility other than the ordinary ability to think. It is easily learned by anyone in about six hours of instruction, spread out over four consecutive days from a Maharishi-trained teacher. Once learned, it can be continued without the necessity for additional instruction.*

Another "American" aspect of the packaging of Transcendental Meditation is the great interest its exponents have shown in psychological research and evaluation. Seldom, if ever, has a "cult" shown such concern about scientific accountability. Despite its recent introduction, the continued practice of transcendental meditation has been shown to:
 

1. reduce anxiety (Wallace 1970, Doucette, 1972)
2. improve learning (Abrams, 1972, Shaw and Kolb, 1970)
3. improve accuracy of percepts (Blasdell, 1971)
4. increase energy and reduce need for sleep (Wallace, 1970)
5. increase mental health (Fehr, 1972) (Goleman, 1971) (Seeman, 1972), (Kanellakos, et al., 1972)
6. reduce blood pressure, respiratory rate, and oxygen intake (Allison, 1970), Wallace, el al., 1971), (Wallace, et al., 1972)
7. reduce drug-abuse dependence (Benson, 1969, 1970), (Williams, 1972), (Winquist, 1969)
8. decrease hostility (Bose and Berger, 1972)
9. increase alpha wave production (Brown, et al., 1972).


But TM has been packaged for American tastes in more subtle ways. One of its dictates is that practitioners should not meditate more that fifteen to twenty minutes twice per day, and that occasional



*This paragraph consists of a series of quotes from Levine, P., 1972. The first sentence is quoted from Maharishi, 1969. The extensive coverage given Transcendental Meditation does not necessarily constitute endorsement as against other techniques such as Zen or Arica for example. TM is used because of the availability of research.

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day long meditations should be undertaken only with permission and only under controlled circumstances. We believe the reason for this injunction is to avoid the phenomena of "unstressing". Goleman (1971) describes this in detail:
 

In meditation, the psychophysiological principle can be used to understand the significance of "unstressing," a term used by practitioners of TM. Unstressing takes the form during meditation of completely involuntary, unintended, and spontaneous muscular-skeletal movements and proprioceptive sensations: momentary or repeated twitches, spasms, gasps, tingling, tics, jerking, swaying, pains, shaking, aches, internal pressures, headaches, weeping, laughter, etc. The experience covers the range from extreme pleasure to acute distress. In TM, unstressing is gradual during regular daily meditation, so that it is not always discernable. During special extended meditation sessions where one meditates throughout much of the day, more extreme forms of unstressing can occur. When Maupin taught zazen to a group of college students as part of an experiment, they mentioned to him the emergence of "hallucinoid feelings, muscle tension, sexual excitement, and intense sadness" (1965:145), Vivid and detailed first- person accounts of unstressing are reported in Guruvani magazine by students of the ashtanga yoga system of Swami Muktananda.

Because of the unpredictable nature of unstressing, meditators who are unprepared for it or who are in the midst of others who do not understand the process, can become agitated when it occurs in disturbing forms. For this reason teachers of TM and other systems recommend day-long meditation only in supervised and secluded situations. Psychiatric clinics are beginning to get new patients who have been meditating on their own all day for many days, and are brought in by others who can't understand and are disturbed by behavior changes they see; the dynamics of this influx are parallel to the continuing wave of "bad-trips" due to drugs. As with acute drug cases, the psychiatric intervention may worsen and prolong distress rather than alleviate it, while someone familiar with meditation can reassure the person and alleviate the crisis without recourse to the paraphenalia of psychiatry.


Nikhilanda (1942:10-14) describes the trials of the budding saint Ramakrishna similarly:
 

During this period of spiritual practice he had many uncommon experiences. When he sat to meditate, he would hear strange clicking sounds in the joints of his legs . . . He would see flashes like swarms of fireflies floating before his eyes, or a sea of deep mist with luminous waves of molten silver . . .
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Many of his actions being contrary to all tradition, seemed sacriligious to the people ... Nearly all the temple officials took him for an insane person. His worldly well-wishers brought him to skilled physicians, but no medicine could cure his malady. Many times he doubted his sanity himself . . . (a brilliant Buddhist nun) assured him that he was passing through an almost unknown spiritual experience described in the scriptures . . . She told him that this extreme exaltation had been described as manifesting itself through nineteen physical symptoms, including the shedding of tears, a tremor of the body, horripilation (bristling of the hair) perspiration, and a burning sensation. (For similar phenomena in the case of Christian mystics cf. A. Poulain, The Graces of Interior Prayer).


What is being described in these instances may well be effects of what we call in Chapter VI, "developmental forcing" or the too-rapid attempt at progress. It is a consequence of the Periodic Developmental Stage Theory that proper escalation from one stage to another occurs only between continuous stages (i.e. one should be in the sixth stage before attempting meditation in order to become psychedelic). For those not ready for the escalatory step, (and some aspect of the psyches of most of us are in some kind of dysplasia), the transformation which we call "developmental forcing" will be felt as some kind of psychic jolt or jerk, and will produce exactly the kind of symptoms here enumerated. What mortification leads to is not so much enlightenment as psychic powers, as Huxley so cogently notes (1945:99):
 

Mortification is not as many people seem to imagine a matter, primarily of severe physical austerities. It is possible that, for certain persons in certain circumstances, the practice of severe physical austerities may prove helpful in advance toward man's final end. In most cases it would seem that what is gained by such austerities is not liberation, but something quite different - the achievement of psychic powers. The ability to get petitionary prayer answered, the power to heal and work other miracles, the knack of looking into the future or into other people's minds - these it would seem are often related in some kind of causal connection with fasting, watching, and the self-infliction of pain.


There is an important difference here which deserves careful attention. One of the strongest traditions of the yogis was that there was a "short path" to Nirvana, which wise neophytes would take, no matter how severe the suffering and mortification, because of the fact that human life is an absolutely unique opportunity of moving from illusion into reality which is not even offered to supernatural beings; moreover, who knows when reincarnation in human form might again

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recur? Classical Christian mysticism held similar views about the advantages of mortification, but for different religious reasons. The result of all this was that for the average sensual man, even the rather intelligent one, a method of salvation which proscribed such exquisite torture and rigor was simply not very attractive, as it required too much courage and fortitude.

The changed attitude toward this type of progress that we find in modern writers, such as the psychologist Maslow or the yogi Maharishi is strikingly pragmatic, American, and hedonistic. As part of the religion of "healthy- mindedness '' of James, man is assumed to be good and capable of making himself better. This task is not incongruent with health, wealth, and happiness. Trials and tribulations in the process are seen not as something to be endured but to be got rid of by better management. Hence, the proscriptions of TM against extensive meditation and our own against developmental forcing. But if one wants the blessing of a modern prophet on this more relaxed development toward salvation, one has only to turn to the poet Herman Hesse in the quotation which began this chapter: "Serenely let us move to distant places," (i.n.o.).

The relation of meditation to other aspects of living is shown in Figure VIII, Mental Sickness and Health in Relation to Consciousness. In this figure, the limited, mentally unhealthy individual is diagrammed at the top. He does not explore either very far into nature, or very far into himself, being limited by prejudices and fears in each endeavor. By contrast, the mentally healthy person reaches fully to the ground of being in meditation, and fully to the external world of nature through scientific investigation. These joint and reciprocal explorations of the two infinities of reality, the inner and the outer, promote the full mental health and self-actualization of man, for this is truly his purpose. Each vivency is the inverse of the other, with dual correspondences. One may therefore look at meditation as an inward exploration of reality, being the inverse of man's outward exploration of reality, and hence a necessary balance in his developmental progress.

Brunton (1972:19) declares:
 

Meditation apart from experience was invariably empty; experience apart from meditation was mere tumult.
and again in another section (1972:21) tells us, speaking of man:
 
Not only is he a constituent part of the world, but the world of sense impression is a part of him (i.o.).


Brunton (1972:27) quotes Sri Aurobindo on the fact that the psychedelic trance is not the highest stage available to man:
 

Trance is a way of escape - the body is made quiet, the physical mind is in a state of torpor, the inner consciousness is left free to go on with its experience. The disadvantage is that trance becomes indispensable and that the Problem of the waking consciousness is not solved; it remains imperfect (i.o.).
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Figure VIII, Mental Sickness and Health in Relation to Consciousness

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3.4 THE MYSTIC EXPERIENCE

While psychedelia is developmental in the sense that it is naturally encouraged by the developmental processes of this period, like creativity, psychedelia can occur at any time if environmental conditions are present. Whether the psychedelic experience will be "good" under the thrust of external circumstances is questionable and chancy, however.
 

a) Psychedelia may occur as a peak experience. A peak experience represents an artificial escalation into a higher stage under the enhanced reaction to a stimulus of some powerful influence.

b) Psychedelia may occur as a part of a drug experience. The trip may be good or bad depending on whether the ego is strong enough to understand and profit from this sudden change.

c) Psychedelia may occur as a result of spontaneous psychic causes, again, with questionable results, since the effects may be only temporary.

d) Psychedelia may occur as a part of a "developing" experience, either "naturally" occurring through growth to the proper degree of mental health, or "developed" through meditation or other religious or mystic technique.
 

Of these a) and c) appear to be adventitious, and not of great use, except perhaps to furnish the individual with more motivation and a "map" of his objective. Item b) (drug-induced psychedelia) is treated separately in Chapter VI, so we are left with item d) for discussion here.

Psychologists, however, can hardly be expected to be satisfied with the term "mystic," for mysticism is, after all, a religious rather than a psychological term. Maslow (1954) came closest in unraveling what this experience means in psychological terms when he referred to the "Oceanic or mystic experience" as one of his components of self-actualizing people.

Many other things have been said by less psychologically oriented authors about the mystic experience, and some of them are worth quoting:

Osborn (1966:168) describing the mystical experience says:
 

It is like a sudden illumination having the direct impact of a perception. The percipient knows with indubitable certainly that he has been vouchsafed a deep realization of what appears to be an ultimate truth.


As William James describes it:

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"This overcoming of all the usual barriers between the individual and Absolute is the great mystic achievement." The Varieties of Religious Experience. 1922 Edition, p. 419.
While the religious man will describe the experience in terms of some kind of orthodoxy, Osborn notes it is significant that agnostics are also subject to such theophanies. He goes on:
 
The literature of mysticism is now very extensive and we have on our own files cases where quite ordinary people have suddenly become alive to a transcendental state and also people who professed no specific belief. Marganita Laski, in her book Ecstasy; The Cresset Press, London, published sixty-three cases of people who have had experiences which bear the stamp of being genuinely mystical. Of these almost forty per cent were professed atheists or agnostics. Naturally, these people expressed themselves in non-religious terms. Nevertheless, one recognized that the same state of consciousness is being described in such expressions as "transcend your normal limitations"; "outside and above yourself"; "feeling of liberation from ordinary sense-impressions, but heightened awareness and sense of union with external reality"; "sensation of absolute oneness"; "a sense of the oneness of things." Compare such attempts at description with the more formal ones in religious terms and we detect at once that these ordinary people have at least momentarily experienced the state of transcendence typical of the mystical experience.

Life at any level exhibits paradoxes which defy logical solution as, for instance, the multiplicity and simultaneous unity of organic Wholes. Mystical experience, however, presents paradoxes so tantalizing that attempts at description distort all our clear-cut language forms, somewhat as would be the case of trying to translate the scent of a rose into the sensations of touch.

Whatever descriptive embellishments there may be of the true mystical experience, it inevitably involves a sense of the dissolution of the separate "I" or "me." This is sometimes called the "oceanic" feeling in which the individual becomes merged in a wider Whole. In Christian language, the empirical self we normally call "I" is negated and becomes one in the mystical body of God. However, this experience of becoming identical with God arouses strong doctrinal opposition in the theistic religions. It is condemed as pantheism and regarded as blasphemous, Meister Eckhart being excommunicated for saying, among other things, "God and 1; We are one."

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For many, especially older writers, the practice of mysticism is a meta-religion, transcending sectarianism and filled with the possibilities of ecstatic rapture. For example, Brunton (1972:61) lists the characteristics of mystic ecstasy as:
 

1. feelings of serene delight,
2. sensations of the remoteness of physical surroundings,
3. ecstatic exaltation above bodily and personal existence.


Brunton (1972:63ff) lists the tenets of mysticism (referring to the Deity) as the following:
 

1. His spirit is everywhere present in nature.
2. He abides inside the heart of every man.
3. Any man may enter into direct communication with Him.
4. Holy scriptures are a mixture of allegories whereby mystical truths are conveyed.
5. Mystic practices lead to the development of supernormal faculties and extraordinary mental powers.


White (1972:x) says:
 

The mystical state then is beyond words, and is highly emotional. More than that, the unifying principle at work in illumination dissolves the learned semantic categories of thought and feeling or reason and emotion. In the mystical state, intellect and intuition merge. There is a fusion ... which results in a new condition of being.


If, as some mystics believe, the physical body is not the only, but only the densest vehicle of consciousness, then the development of the consciousness of man might take place simultaneously or sequentially in whichever body was endowed with the preponderant amount of consciousness at the time. Following such a course of thought, supposing the assumptions to be valid, our developmental stages might represent only the primary grades of such a grand development process which might be completed in vehicles of consciousness unknown and unimagined by us at this time. In whatever mode this development may occur, it is in every case concerned with the individualization of rationality, cognition, and will, and the perfection of these aspects of consciousness, at whatever level of development, and whatever mansion of thought may be appropriate.

Garrett (1949:172) says:
 

I have learned that we live from life to the dream and then to waking, for the dream state collects the rejected impulses and condemned desires, and from them weaves the stuff of creative energy that will carry us with instinctive and driving aim toward the next day's satisfaction and beyond the dark areas of melancholy.
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and again Garrett (1949:133) tells us:
 

Some have said that all we can know of God is his subconscious mind, but one might turn this around and say that God is better conceptualized as man's subconscious mind.


McGlashlan (1967:116) puts it this way:
 

It is, after all, no new idea that the dreaming mind can be equated with a crucial mutation of consciousness. In the Bardo Thodol it is said that in the Fifth Stage of the world's development, a stage not yet actualized, 'Ether" will dawn in the consciousness of man. This is the kind of statement from which contemporary educated minds turn away in immediate distaste. The word "Ether" used in such a context evokes memories of dusty and discredited systems of thought about the structure of the universe, or even less acceptably, recalls the woolly abstractions of Theosophy. But this is mere semantic prejudice. The psychical attributes of "Ether" as conceived and defined by the Lamas are, in modern terms, precisely those of the Deep Unconscious. They believed, in fact, that what we call the Unconscious is a "transcendental" consciousness higher than normal consciousness, and as yet undeveloped; and that it will become the active consciousness of the next stage of the world's development, which they estimated would occur in the twentieth century. This is at least an intriguing anticipation, across the intervening centuries, of the increasing attention now paid to dreams and the unconscious.


The relationship of transcendental meditation to alpha wave production and to the psychedelic state in general, is well elucidated by Goleman (1971) in the following extensive description:
 
In reporting on operant control of the EEG alpha rhythm, Joe Kamiya (1966) mentions that the state of consciousness associated with alpha is one of "a general calming down of the mind" in which thoughts interfere with maintenance of the state. He also reports that his best Ss tend to be people who have practiced meditation in one form or another. An EEG study of Zen meditation (Kasamatsu and Hirai, 1969) found that production of alpha was associated with proficiency at meditation and with number of years practicing. Some very proficient subjects, who had been practicing Zazen for more than twenty years, showed heavy alpha production which gave way to theta trains. Yogis practicing Raj yoga tested in India (Anand et al., 1961) also showed the alpha rhythm. Keith Wallace's (1970a) study of TM found that during meditation alpha
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wave activity predominates; some subjects showed EEG patterns similar to those found in twenty-year practitioners of Zazen. Taking this finding in conjunction with those of lowered basal metabolism, lowered lactate level, etc., Wallace (1970b) proposes the existence of a "fourth major state of consciousness "- that special psycho-physiological state of rest and pure awareness one can reach in meditation. Tart (1970: 37) refers to the phenomenological experience of this state as "the Void", where the person's "identity is potentiality, he's aware of everything and nothing, his mind is absolutely quiet, he's out of time, out of space. . ."
A Tibetan description of the same state is given by Evans-Wentz (1968):
 
In its true state, mind is naked, immaculate; not made of anything, being of the Voidness; clear, vacuous, without duality, transparent; timeless, uncompounded, unimpeded, colourless; not realizable as a separate thing, but as the unity of all things, yet not composed of them; of one taste, and transcendent over differentiation.
"Kasamatsu and Hirai (1966) describe this state of restful awareness as a "special state of consciousness in which the cortical excitatory level becomes lower than in ordinary wakefulness but is not lowered as in sleep." They add, "and yet outer and inner stimulus is precisely perceived with steady responsiveness." This "steady responsiveness" among the Zen meditators means alpha blocking during meditation is less susceptible to habituation to sensory stimuli than in ordinary waking state. Wallace (1970b) also found no habituation with TM.
Kasamatsu and Hirai report (1966:449):
 
In this state of mind one cannot be affected by either external or internal stimulus, nevertheless he is able to respond to it. He perceives the object, responds to it, and yet is never disturbed by it. Each stimulus is accepted as stimulus itself and treated as such. One Zen master described such a state of mind as that of noticing every person one sees on the street but of not looking back with emotional curiosity.


"A number of alpha studies report the occurence of prominent alpha activity in subjects' normal waking state: Anand et al., found it in four practitioners of Raj yoga; Kasamatsu and Hirai noticed persistent alpha even after the end of Zen meditation; Wallace (1970b) reports that with TM, after meditation ended, regular alpha activity continued while eyes were closed, and irregular alpha continued after eyes were open. The more one produces alpha, the easier it becomes; Kamiya (1970) observes that every subject who produced a high percentage of alpha rhythm in a training session with eyes open was a natural high producer with eyes closed. Wallace (1970a) presents

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evidence that other types of "autonomic" body functions apart from alpha production can be controlled or changed through TM, and that the effects of these changes persist after meditation has ended and into the waking state. This has been demonstrated, for example, for lowering lactate level and blood pressure (Wallace, 1970a) and may be the psychophysiologic ground for reports of an "afterglow" affect in the waking state after meditation is over. Citing a range of psychophysiological evidence, Luthe (1969) concludes that the regular practice of autogenic meditative exercises brings about "certain functional changes in the trainee's brain" of a lasting nature.

"It seems that the more meditation is practiced, the easier it becomes to produce and maintain the alpha rhythm and concomitant physiological changes which Wallace calls the "fourth major state of consciousness." These psychophysiological changes observed in meditation - the fourth state - can become infused into the waking activities of the meditator to produce a "fifth state" of consciousness which is on the psychophysiological level a function of waking state and fourth state psychophysiology but identical to neither, and which is on the' psychological level what Fromm describes as "enlightenment. " The prototypic experience of the fifth state, and the ground from which it grows, is the presence in meditation of fourth state pure awareness coexistent with thought processes. The process whereby this occurs involves a "purification" or "culturing" of the nervous system, through processes such as unstressing and experiencing subtler and subtler levels of thought, which are prerequisite to and necessary for the sustained maintenance of fourth state effects in waking state activities. Maharishi (1969:173) describes the effects on consequent waking activity of TM:
 

When the mind transcends during transcendental meditation, the metabolism reaches its lowest point; so does the process of breathing, and the nervous system gains a state of restful alertness which, on the physical level, corresponds to the state of bliss-consciousness, or transcendent Being . . . activity after meditation brings an infusion of transcendental Being into the nature of the mind and through it into all aspects of one's life in the relative field. With the constant practice of meditation, this infusion continues to grow and when it is full-grown cosmic consciousness will have been attained."


There is almost a universal feeling among those versed in these matters, that while psychedelic mind expansion is desirable, psychic powers are distractions and temptations on the road to development, and that their cultivation is not in one's best interest. Indeed after a careful discussion of such matters Aldous Huxley (1945:260) declares:

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Many mystics, indeed, deplored such things as being signs, not of divine grace, but of the body's weakness. To levitate, to go into trance, to lose the use of one's senses - in De Condren's words, this is "to receive the effects of God and his holy communications in a very animal and carnal way."
"One ounce of sanctifying grace," he (St. Franqois de Sales) used to say, "is worth more than a hundredweight of those graces which theologians call 'gratuitous,' among which is the gift of miracles. It is possible to receive such gifts and yet to be in mortal sin; nor are they necessary to salvation." -Jean Pierre Camus
The Sufis regard miracles as "veils" intervening between the soul and God. The masters of Hindu spirituality urge their disciples to pay no attention to the siddhis, or psychic powers, which may come to them unsought, as a by-product of one-pointed contemplation. The cultivation of these powers, they warn, distracts the soul from Reality and sets up insurmountable obstacles in the way of enlightenment and deliverance. A similar attitude is taken by the best Buddhist teachers, and in one of the Pali scriptures there is an anecdote recording the Buddha's own characteristically dry comment on a prodigious feat of levitation performed by one of his disciples. "This," he said, "will not conduce to the conversion of the unconverted, nor to the advantage of the converted." Then he went back to talking about deliverance.


We would like to go on record as agreeing with and reiterating the injunctions of both Eastern and Western mystics that the "siddhis," or psychic powers, are adventitious epiphenomena of advanced states, never to be sought after for their own sake, and often a distracting bar to future progress. The fact that we have detailed incidents of paranormal phenomena, telepathy, OOB experience, and the like, is intended to help the psychological understanding of these events; it does not constitute advocacy of them, nor does it mean that they are the necessary hallmarks of advancement into the psychedelic stage, although they do sometimes accompany it.

If someone should ask "What is the psychedelic stage without psychic powers?" the clear answer is that it is contact with, and control of, the preconscious by the conscious mind, which produces beneficial mental health effects in the person and in his environment. This amelioration extends to his personal health and happiness, to youthful vigor and energy, to the warding off of harmful events, accidents, and disease, to the selection and visualization of desirable future occurrences, and the making manifest of them, and finally to

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an enlargement of service in his life work. It may also involve psychedelic experiences of union, rapture, samadhi, satori, or however else the peak experience may be described.

Psychic pyrotechnics, however spectacular, cannot bring any individual to the unitive consciousness. There are furthermore, notable examples from all times and cultures of individuals of indisputable psychological soundness or holiness who have not had such experiences. The seventh stage is appropriately named the psychedelic stage (for mind expansion) not the psychic stage. It is the cosmic expansion of man's mind which is important, not psychic tricks, which are the mere epiphenomena of it.
 


3.5 THE GENTLING OF THE PRECONSCIOUS

Creative function (the major developmental task of the sixth period) which opens up the preconscious, is the proper precursor of psychedelia (the major task of the seventh stage) because it allows the conscious mind to gain insights from, and to establish an intuitive working relationship with, the preconscious. Flowing from this creative interchange are a number of pre-psychedelic readiness signs (some recognized by Maslow, 1954, in his study of self-actualizing people), which signal the end of the sixth cognitive period and the dawning of the seventh, to wit:
 

1. serendipity
2. a kind of benign automatic and intuitive control over one's immediate environment (similar to that enjoyed by alpha wave devotees) so that good things are expected and occur.
3. joy
4. calm content
5. expectation of good
6. a sense of destiny, and of one's place in it
7. acceptance of self, others, and nature (Maslow, 1954)
8. spontaneity (Maslow 1954:208)
9. detachment and autonomy (Maslow 1954:209-212)
10. Gemeinshaftgefuhl (or brotherly love) (Maslow 1954:217)
11. a philosophical and unhostile sense of humor (Maslow 1954:222)
12. Psychological flexibility and accurate perceptions of the relationship between ends and means which clarifies the similarities of different forms with the same function, and prevents semantic hang-ups over such discrepancies.
(This may be the Structure of Intellect factor "divergent production of semantic transformations").

These signs strengthen as the psychedelic stage develops, particularly when meditation is mastered, but even the cognizance of the

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tip of the iceberg brings many benefits. The joining of the individual and the general minds, earlier seen only in trance states now becomes more suffused with rationality, so that it is closer within the reach of the conscious mind, and thus less irrational and frightening, and more humane and useful. The developing relationship between the individual consciousness and the generalized preconscious has become more rational through creative function because it establishes rapport and a working relationship between these two aspects of mind, and easily leads toward a more harmonious union in the psychedelic stage. It is like the developing relationship between a young child and a young colt. At first the child is afraid of the horse, and cannot ride him; the horse is skittish, unpredictable and unbroken. Eventually, through many intermediate stages, the child learns to ride the horse, and the horse is taught to accept the rider, until finally the man is the complete master of the horse who, by now, is fully amenable to his commands.

It is this "gentling," humanizing process exerted on the preconscious by creative function in the individual during the sixth developmental stage which is the only proper preparation for the psychedelic function of the seventh stage. The absence of this experience is what makes for the hair-raising, uncanny, scary, "bad-trip," experiences of those who, while in the fifth stage, try drugs to induce psychedelia.

This "gentling" process starts in the third period (initiative-intuitive), with efforts on the part of the child or the parents or both to "totemize" fearsome and irrational elements which contribute to night terrors. Fairy tales are helpful in this respect, especially those like "Where the Wild Things Are" by Maurice Sendak (1963), in which the child protagonist is shown as mastering these elements. But as we saw in Chapter two, any fanciful tale like Alice in Wonderland or The Wizard of Oz tends to help children picture themselves in control of this inverse environment instead of being immobilized by it. The aegis of the helpful and loving parental figure is particularly important in producing the boldness to become creative in such children, and in providing the reaction formation which (in line with Anne Roe's theory, 1957) produces a twist of psychic energy which develops into an interest.

The Senoi use of children's dreams (Tart 1969) is an excellent example of using these often frightening aspects of a child's involvement with the "not-me" to develop better mental health. In Japanese culture there is a mythical beast called a "baku" who comes to eat up childish nightmares, and thus protect the child. All these are examples of the "totemization" process of the commencement of superficial control over the preconscious.

While the frightening, traumatic encounter with the uncanniness of the "not-me'' commences in the third (or initiative-intuitive) period, it persists in later stages, and the fifth (identity-formal operations)

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stage is often filled with such brushes, in which the "not-me" is now perceived as the opposite of the identity-life aspiration of the subject, and hence, as death. Occasionally adolescent suicide results from a too traumatic encounter. It is our feeling that this is the aspect of the psyche which Freud identified as the  "death wish." This component is seen in the arts; for example it is often found in the work of Edvard Munch, and appears as the dark shadow behind the nude girl in his famous "Adolescence. "

Here, reproduced by permission of the author, Jerome Chandler, is a black adolescent's verbal account of the same type of encounter:
 

I Am Use Up
by Jerome Chandler

As my hungry body moves slowly down the street
The wind blows cold in my face and darkness falls.
I wipe the water that runsin all directions from my eyes.
Now I see a figure moving slowly up the street
His body battered like a tin can
His face wrinkled as if it eroded in the sun.
His hands pale like he had Hell, Death in them.
As we Pass I said to myself,
Is this me 30 years from now ?
Then I stop.
My almost used upbrain tells me to take anything he had
My eyes got tight.
My heart began to beat faster.
My body rejected the order my brain gave it
But still I grew closer to him
My hands went out to get him.
Then a light broke through
And it was over for me.


If the beginning circumstance of the child's relationship with the preconscious is traumatic and uncanny, while the hoped-for final relationship is that of conscious control in the psychedelic stage, then one may well inquire if learning can join with development in hastening this outcome. The answer is a positive "yes." Using

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Sullivanian terminology, between the initial prototaxic experience, and the final syntaxic one, there is room for learning and development through parataxic modes. These modes are chiefly let out through the creation of presentational forms, that is, through art. The enhancement of the youth's creativity through art forms is therefore a primary objective of education.

This definition of art, of course, involves the performing arts, such as music and drama as well. It should be remembered that art as a parataxic and presentational form does not require the degree of symbolic control (i.e.the highly developed intelligence) which would be requisite for similar creative ventures in science, mathematics, and creative writing. Such a bridge of helping the youth to become creative, allows an intuitive control of the preconscious on an occasional basis and sets the stage for the symbiosis of conscious union in the psychedelic period.

Surprisingly enough we have a prescription for all this from an ancient and rather worldly poet: Pope (1711) tells us:
 

First follow nature and your judgment frame
By her just standard which is still the same;
Unerring Nature, still divinely bright,
One clear, unchanged and universal light;
Life, force, and beauty must to all impart
At once, the source, the end, the test of Art.


The traumatic impact of the encounter grows less, however, as the individual develops; after he is able to handle the issue of his own identity, he learns to handle love, and finally death. So that in later encounters there is a sense of control and responsibility along-side of awe, dissociation, and distress. This continuum of affect modifies its colors like a rainbow as one continues developmental progress till the encounter with the numinous element ceases to be traumatically overwhelming, and becomes an experience possible of full emotional and cognitive acceptance. Even then, however, in peak and other psychedelic experiences one is very fully involved, and aware of the dangers, as noted in the following quotation.

Blanchard (1969) is abstracted by Prager as follows:
 

Peak experiences are moments of heightened awareness which have a profound influence upon creativity and emotional development. The peak experience is both exhilarating and frightening. There is simultaneous awareness of both freedom and responsibility. The creative act pushes the boundaries of the self and risks a rupture of identity. The concept of a free creativity is not possible without this sense of genuine danger. The peak experience is the presence of creative possibility. It
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can lead to self-fulfillment or self-destruction. The element of danger is the spice, the sense of adventure in the creative moment.


What then is the proper use of the awesome power of the psychedelic stage? In a nutshell, it is to protect and preserve those objects of individual man's self-concept starting with the health and welfare of his body image, and then extending outward to his environmental self and its possessions, his loved ones, his associations and interests, his concerns and finally his total environment and his creations, thus embracing all of his natural world. As the little "I" or "me" diffuses in this expansion of hierarchies of needs, the grand "Ego" is developed, and since this concept embraces all mankind, the syndrome leads to altruism and Gemeineshaftgefuhl. Mystic atonement in the higher stages crowns this quest, after the lower order hierarchies have been satisfied.

The powers of the psychedelic stage include such specifics as prevention and curing disease, warding off and preventing accidents, improving the immediate social climate, increasing real wealth, conserving and developing natural resources, relocating political, economic, and social efforts, reforming the current idea of communitas, all in order that man having surmounted the lesser levels of the Maslovian hierarchy may concentrate on self-actualization at last. This grand design has the objective of being a heaven on earth type of culture, of perfecting and demonstrating the potential of the Spirit of Man, and is vastly to be preferred to the childish tricks of the uncontrolled psychic realm.

The Bhagavad Gita says of the mystical state, samadhi:

 
The self-controlled practitioner, while enjoying the various sense objects through the senses which are disciplined and free from likes and dislikes, attains placidity of mind. With the attainment of such placidity of mind, all his sorrows come to an end, and the intellect of such a person of tranquil mind soon withdraws itself from all sides, and becomes firmly established in the supreme reality.


Man's highest purpose is not to experience the world of the senses as a reactive being but to design it, thus using his perfected psychedelic power to become part of the noumenon of the universe, in which he becomes a co-creator and a co-designer in partnership with the Spirit of Man, which gains individualized consciousness through his perfected life and will. Frankl (1966:97f8), in talking about self-transcendence says:
 

Motivational theories based on the principle of homeostasis overlook the characteristic human trait of self-transcendence. It is a mistake to think of man as a closed system concerned
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above all else with the pursuit of pleasure or need gratification. Happiness is the by-product of attaining goals rather than an end in itself. Primary human striving is directed toward finding meaning and purpose in life.


Frankl's theory is compatible with those of Buhler and Maslow. Self-actualization and peak experiences, however, must not be thought of as ends in themselves. Only to the extent that man fulfills a meaning in the world of reality does he fulfill himself.

In this chapter we have explored many facets of the strange terrain of psychedelia, including the psychedelic experience, its relation to the psychic, its relation to the normal, its relation to creativity, its periodic developmental stage characteristics, natural (as opposed to drug-induced) psychedelia, the proper stimulation of psychedelia, especially through Transcendental Meditation, the Mystic Experience, and finally, the Gentling of the Preconscious as a precursor of psychedelia. We are well aware that even this extensive analysis has by no means exhausted this subject, and represents only an introduction to its mysteries, some of which can only be properly understood after delving into developmental dysplasia and developmental forcing in Chapters V and VI. Before that, however, we need to attend to another pressing problem, the measurement of advancement into psychedelia and the higher stages, and to this end, Chapter IV is devoted.