Datasets:
eliwill
/
Watts

Dataset card Data Studio Files Community
text
stringlengths
11
1.23k
Now, a law against the possession of LSD, whatever its wisdom, is completely unenforceable for the simple reason that you can disguise LSD as anything in the world. You can, for example, get a solution of LSD and alcohol and you can put a piece of Kleenex into it, and then pull the Kleenex out and let it dry. Then you’ve got a filthy old piece of Kleenex you jam into your pocket that looks like it might be something you blew your nose on.
And all you have to do is take it out, drop it again in alcohol, soak it out, and there is the stuff. You can disguise it as peanut butter, fingernail polish, just anything at all. Cookies.
And chemically, in a smallish quantity, say of a few hundred micrograms, it’s very, very difficult to detect. And you would really have to know. In other words, if you suspected that a given person who was wearing nothing but a suit, you would have to analyze everything on him to find out whether there was any LSD present.
It’s simply unenforceable unless you are tipped off, unless you know in advance that the person has it in such a place. But you could smuggle interstate, into the country, vast quantities. Because the the basic dose that will, as I say, turn a person on is as low as fifty micrograms.
A micrograms is a millionth of a gram. So therefore, the only solution in all these problems is the solution of facing facts—that is to say, of bringing everything out into the open. You cannot abolish the problem.
In fact, as you try to do so, you will only intensify it. That’s always been true, because if you prohibit something like this, well, of course, everybody will want it. Forbidden fruit is sweet.
And therefore there is always an organization to take care of the supply of prohibited things—whether it’s whores or possibilities for gambling, there is an organization of criminals who will undertake to do so. But the trouble is that whenever they deal in any business, they have no conscience about the quality of goods they deliver. So remember, in prohibition, the quality of the liquor you got from your bootlegger?
The illicit whores—who is to say they don’t have venereal disease? Illicit gambling: well, obviously the house always cheats and the one-armed bandits rob you and don’t give you a fair chance. Everything controlled by the mafia becomes crooked through and through.
So when naturally, then, the mafia were to move into psychedelics, heaven only knows what we should get. And a lot of the reason for the fact that there are these terrible stories about people who have complications with LSD is that what they took was not simply LSD. People will cut the supply.
You know, they just sell you sodium bicarbonate with a tiny bit of LSD. They do all sorts of things: mix it with other drugs. So the solution, as I see it, is to bring the whole thing out right into the open, to encourage research on it, and I suppose the (at this present time) maximum sort of control that ought to be imposed on it is to make it something prescribed by doctors.
Now, this isn’t the ideal form of control, but it’s a practical one. And then, in places like major university campuses, have LSD research centers or psychedelic research centers where anybody who wanted this kind of experience could simply apply, and there would be facilities for experiencing it in a helpful environment. Because when young people get adventurous, what they need is not police and prohibitions, they need help.
They need the best information and the best guidance that’s possibly available to do a dangerous thing. When someone wants to go to learn to fly an airplane—alright, he can apply and he needs a license, but he gets the best advice possible. Alright, you want to be an astronaut of inner space?
Why, you could go to school for it. And I visualize the possibility of psychedelic museums where you would have a gorgeous set of buildings in lovely grounds, in gardens or by the sea, and it would be equipped with a big library of art books with reproductions of all kinds of masterpieces from the whole world. There would be a collection of tapes and records with beautiful sound systems.
There would be glass cases full of objects like seashells, crystals, ferns. There would be a conservatory with plants of all kinds, you know, growing. And equipped in this way, then, if you wanted to take it, you would go in for a three-day session.
The first day would be for getting relaxed and for learning something about the properties of it; getting an idea of the map before you went into the territory. The second day would be to take the chemical and work on any problem you wanted to, because it is peculiarly suitable for working on some particular problem. There’s a book by Stafford and Golightly called LSD: The Problem-Solving Drug.
And there are ever so many case histories in that of engineers, architects, musicians, and so on who had specific problems to solve and who use this for doing it. So that would be the second day. Then the third day would be for evaluation.
Because after you’ve been through an LSD experience you need a good day’s rest to get back into the swing of things, but to think it over, to write about it or to do something about it. Supposing you had seen a particular image that you wanted to preserve: well, on the third day you could paint it out or draw it out or write it out or whatever you wanted to do. And the existence of such places, then, would put the youth above board, out in the open, and not something that is simply done in an illegal situation.
You see, one of the problems with most psychedelics is that they do tend to foster paranoia. And if a situation is illegal, you can get all sorts of ridiculous paranoid fantasies—as that your best friend is a representative of the police, and you can see every reason why he really should be. Because the capacity of these chemicals is that you have an enormous power of projection.
You can see. You know how, in the ordinary way, you might be looking at this sort of wall here, which has got irregular paint patterns on it. Well, you can sit here just in a perfectly ordinary state of consciousness and see pictures in it.
And you can see trees and people and all sorts of things. Leonardo da Vinci used to make a regular practice of looking at a dirty old wall and find paintings in it. That’s, of course, how we believe many of the great cave paintings were done: is that those people looked in the marks on the rocks and saw buffaloes and deer, and just followed the markings on the rocks, and for that reason created images of animals that were a astoundingly accurate and realistic.
Because if you use eidetic thinking you’ll do that. I remember one night I was out here and I was walking by the window. And I usually keep that table here.
And I looked in the window, and to my astonishment, I saw a man sitting at the table—on this side, facing the window; I was looking at the reflection in the window—a rather scholarly looking gentleman with a little imperial beard, resting his head on his hand like this and reading a book. There he was. Right there.
And I analyzed that for a while and I could see exactly what was going on. There were things in the fireplace (paper and stuff) that built themselves perfectly into this image. So then, you can see these things.
People, for example, who hear voices. I’ve got a theory about this and I believe it’s correct. Naturally, in any place, there are all sorts of noises going around on around you.
Sound of water and pipes, the sound of a gas heater, sound of people working in the distance, sound of the wind. And you can project meaningful voices and sequences of ideas onto these sounds and actually hear voices. So if you check with someone else and say, “Now, look.
I hear a voice talking,” or “I see a picture on the wall,” or “I see a vision. Do you see it?” And at first they say no. But if you then actually understand that you are projecting, you can point out to them where you see it and they will say, “Oh, yes, I see how you see that.” But of course it isn’t there in the ordinary sense.
So with the psychedelic chemical you have a tremendous power of projection. Your power projection is increased a hundredfold. And, in fact, you can play games with it.
You can take anything and turn it into practically anything else by looking carefully enough. And you’ll find out a reason for turning it that way. I play this game quite deliberately now in the ordinary state of consciousness.
I play projections and see shapes just in anything. It is wonderful what you can do. And especially if you take something a bit chaotic, like a Rorschach blot or a dirty old wall or whatever you want.
You can have infinite fun seeing images in it. But the problem, then, is: if there is an unconscious reason for seeing certain images (if you’re afraid, if you’re mistrustful, or anything like that) you can see in a human life situation—say, your relationship to your family—you can see a pattern of relationship which is absolutely misleading. And you can see the best reasons why it is this sinister situation.
And then you’re in trouble. So when, therefore, the use of LSD is totally illegal and people take it, they tend (because they are scared of what they’re doing) to have the paranoid reaction altogether reinforced, and so naturally the illegality, the reasons that the government puts forward for making it illegal, are of the nature of a self-fulfilling prophecy. By making it illegal they make it harmful.
Then they can say, “Look at all these harmful results. That’s why it’s illegal.” But it’s harmful because it’s illegal—partly. It can also be harmful simply through ordinary misuse.
But I think our answer is to bring the whole question right out into the open, and to deal with it as a fact that exists, that cannot be suppressed, it should not be suppressed, and try to control it. Because, you see, it’s only one step, one link, in a long, long, vast process of scientific work, which is—as I said earlier: once you started to interfere with the world, you can’t stop. And man (as many, many scientists now say) is no longer passively undergoing an evolutionary process.
He is involved in it. And therefore we are reaching out to try and control ourselves—our brains, our nervous systems—by surgery, by electrical stimulation, by chemicals. All sorts of things we’re using to try and find out how we tick.
And I suppose we’ve got to go on and go on and go on doing that until we for some reason can call a halt and see that we don’t need to do it anymore. But, you see, LSD and psychedelics are just a part of this whole thing. And it has to be faced.
But one final word. It is not something (and none of these things are) understandable, uncontrollable from what we might call a purely scientific point of view. Because the mumbo-jumbo of the purely scientific approach is in itself a kind of game.
Involved in many sciences is the myth that situations can be observed objectively. And therefore, scientists make a special effort, as it were, to be very serious and very analytic about certain situations—which is often quite right. But when you come into an LSD situation and you are investigating someone on its influence and you come in with your scientific pomposity, he immediately sees that you’re a freak and quite asinine.
And so it gives a rather bad impression. In a hospital, for example: hospitals are a big game. The disciplines and the routines and the things that go on in hospitals, they do an enormous amount of things that are simply precautions against possible legal action in the future.
And so now, in any hospital, the doctors and the nurses have a great deal of difficulty doing their business because they keep filling out papers. Hours and hours and hours of paperwork goes on so that the record is straight. Soon they won’t treat people at all, they’ll just record all sorts of things and just make records.
They don’t have to do anything, they just record something that didn’t happen at all. But just so long as the records are straight. And it’s getting that bad.
It’s getting that bad in universities. Happens that way, too. So in those environments the psychedelic experience can get very, very queer and frightening.
So the question is: what sort of people are qualified to investigate LSD? And the answer is: at present, in a way, no one. And in another way, I would say simply: those who’ve had a great deal of experience with it.
You might say, certainly, psychiatrists aren’t qualified. Least of all, practically. Because psychiatrists tend to be very scared of any kind of irregular reality.
They are guardians of what we call sanity, of the way the world is on a bleak Monday morning. And they’re frightened, very frightened, of the unconscious—especially psychoanalysts. They always speak about the unconscious with a hushed voice.
And we mustn’t go fishing in the unconscious. It’s a very dangerous field. Only a qualified person should investigate the unconscious.
Because the unconscious is the big mad sink, you know, of the primordial slime out of which life issues serpents and menacing dragons. So perhaps a psychiatrist has some disciplines that might help with using psychedelics. But here, there should be, generally: it needs the wisdom of a psychologist, of a pharmacologist, of an anthropologist, of a specialist in the psychology of religion, of a mythologist, of a poet, a painter.
And you would have, in other words, in my psychedelic museums, you would have to have a team of people with all sorts of knowledge to combine, somehow, the sort of skill that is necessary for understanding psychedelics. As I said, though, the best people are really those who are most familiar with the territory. Like you may be a specialist in mining, and you may know all about mining, but to get into a certain territory what you need is an Indian guide.
He will show you how to get in and how to get out, although he knows nothing about mining. And it may be that in the investigation of the LSD to be a great deal of helped know a lot about neurology. But the neurologist needs an Indian guide.
And the Indian guide is the person who’s been in the place quite often and knows his way around. And if you have taken LSD many times, you begin to know your way around. The landscape becomes familiar.
You know all the different states of consciousness. And so LSD people begin to formulate their own lingo. They know a state called the plastic doll, they know a state called the magic theater, they know a state called… well, I call it the eenie-weenie.
They know a state called the great white light. They know a state of the wiggles, where the walls seem to breathe. And if you look at a flower, it’s all rippling as if it were under water.
See? They know all these things. They know the state of paranoia, of getting lost, if wondering whether you can get back.
And because they’re familiar with them all, nobody gets frightened. And psychiatrists, if they are to be effective as psychiatrists, should be people who are familiar with all kinds of states of consciousness. And they should work—if somebody is way out of his head, he should be able to consult a person who knows exactly where he is and can come in and be quite familiar with that state.
So that he can say, “Oh yeah, I know where you are. I’ve been there myself.” And it’s like this, you know? But as it is, you see, psychiatry is not really exploring the mind.
It is trying to stand outside and understand psychiatric problems through looking at patients and writing down their symptoms without really knowing anything about it. And therefore, all the terms that are used in psychiatry to describe symptomatology are completely unscientific. They have no scientific spectrum of consciousness, and it’s all its possibilities at all.
There is no such idea. You could write a textbook called “The Spectrum of Consciousness,” and you could—with quotations from literature and photographs and so on—illustrate almost all the known states of consciousness of which man is capable. But nobody has done such a project.
And that would be basic reading for anybody who expected to be proficient in psychology or psychiatry. But these things have to be done, and without fear. But these these chemicals, in other words, are not something to be afraid of, they are simply something to be respected and handled with reasonable care: out in the open and not in, you know, sort of a dingy pad or in the back of a car.
I’m talking about the symbolic and the real, and from the very beginning I have to make it clear what I mean by these words. I think one of the very best illustrations of the difference between symbol and reality is the difference between money and wealth—and a lot of people don’t know the difference. Nowadays, we’re all accustomed to shopping in a supermarket.
And when we go there we get a great cartful of produce and groceries and liquor and what have you. You take it through the cashier’s… gangway-place—you know?—and she taps away on her machine, and she produces an enormously long strip of paper and tears it off, and says, “Thirty dollars, please.” And most people, at that moment, feel slightly depressed because they had to get rid of thirty dollars! And that’s [a] very strange and odd reaction, because you got rid of paper.
And in exchange for this paper you got wealth: real edible food, usable things—riches—and you should go home in a very happy mood that you got this great bundle of stuff. But somehow, the loss of money hurts us a little bit. The relationship of money to wealth is very much the same kind of relationship that words have to reality.
But when I use this word, “reality,” what on earth am I talking about? If I produce any kind of object in front of you, and—the most convenient happens to be a piece of money; a quarter—and I ask you, “What is it?” and I show it to you, most people would say, “Well, that’s a quarter.” But, obviously, it isn’t. Because the quarter, when you say, “It’s a quarter”—“quarter” is a noise, isn’t it?
Quarter: that’s a noise. It’s a noise you make with your mouth. What noise is this?
[Alan flips the quarter.] That doesn’t sound like “quarter,” does it? You think it does?
A dime would make the same sound. So, what this is is this, you see? [Alan points at the coin directly.]
Just that! Like that, see? That’s what it is.
And so we would distinguish between a world of physical events—physical reality—and on the other hand a world of names, and numbers, and noises, and signs which refer to physical reality. And the fact that we can arrange this in this way, the fact that we can make symbols for the world of physical events, is the thing that peculiarly characterizes human beings, makes them different from almost all animals, and is the root and ground of civilization and culture. You can see, in other words, that being able to make a world of symbols standing over against the world of physical events depends upon being able to stand aside from things and look at them, and also to stand aside from ourselves and look at ourselves.
There is something in the nervous system in man, some function of the cortex in the brain, which enables him to do just that. And that’s what we call self-consciousness. And self-consciousness entirely depends upon something in us which enables us to stand aside from the immediate situation.
For example, you may be happy. And in the middle of being happy you say, “My God, I’m happy!” That disconcerts some people, because the minute they begin to know that they’re happy it starts to disappear. They wonder how long they’re going to keep it.
But, you know, if you were happy and you didn’t know you were happy, wouldn’t that be too bad? There’d be, as it were, nobody home to enjoy it. See, knowing that you know is like singing in the bathtub.
Everybody has a good voice in the bathroom because the bathroom gives you resonance. It gives you echoes. It amplifies the sound in the same way as a great cathedral amplifies the sound of a choir.
And so in just that way we have, as it were, an echo system inside our skulls so that we know when we’re happy, we know when we’re sad. And when we exist, we know we exist. And that is simultaneously the grandeur and the tragedy of being human.
Because along with knowing that you know [goes along with] all kinds of things, the most important of which is the knowledge of time. You know the myth of the Garden of Eden and the Fall of Man? That when Adam and Eve had eaten the fruit of the tree of knowledge, death came into the world.
Why? It wasn’t that there wasn’t death before. All creatures in nature come and go, everything is born and dies.
But for the first time, having eaten the fruit of the tree of knowledge—that is, having invented a system of knowledge: the world of symbols—people knew that they were going to die. A cat approaches another dead cat, he sniffs it and sees that it’s good to eat, decides that it’s not and goes away. Probably—although we don’t know for certain—probably, the cat doesn’t reflect: “I will one day be a corpse like that.” But human beings predict because they are able to think about events with symbols and words.
They are able to see what the future will be. And we all believe—don’t we?—that this is the most useful kind of knowledge that we have: to know the future and, therefore, to be able to plan for it. To have your savings account, your life insurance, to plan for your old age.
That’s great. But at the same time it has very serious disadvantages, because the more you know the future, and are thereby able to control it, the more you realize that you can’t control it ultimately. That you’re going to come to a bad end.
And so that’s what makes human beings so strange. All human beings are, therefore, slightly anxious, slightly depressed. There’s a certain kind of sadness in human nature which the Japanese call aware: a melancholy, deep down in us, because we know—in the words of the song—“But it all comes apart in the end.” And even diamonds come apart at the end.
And so it’s a curious thing whether a human being is really a logical construction. It’s a great question. Whether a human being is not actually a self-defeating organism, a creature who knows too much for his own good.
Because—you know the proverb “What you gain on the roundabout you lose on the swings?” So with man: what you gain in power by having foresight and dexterity in controlling the world through symbols—what a price we pay for it! Because no one of us can any longer afford to be spontaneous. Imagine a life in which you don’t have to take any provision for the future.
You do just what you feel like on impulse. Now, you’d make many mistakes, and you might do things that would be quite fatal. Like a moth which can’t distinguish between a candle and the sex call of a female, and so it flies straight into the flame and it blows up.
Is that too bad? In a way, from the standpoint of the universe, it’s a fairly good arrangement, because if this didn’t happen there would be too many moths. And every time a moth plunges into the flame it’s a sudden disaster.
The moth isn’t worried about this—I mean, it doesn’t have anxiety about it before it happens—and the moth goes out, just like that. With a glorious explosion. And so, in the same way, all these creatures who don’t think what to do next—cats don’t lie awake at night worrying about what contracts they’re going to have to make the next day, and yet, nothing can match the dignity of a cat when it walks, and when it licks itself.
What a magnificent creature. So imagine a world in which there isn’t any worry. There will be disasters, but you won’t know it’s going to hit you.
But we have figured out how to beat that world, how to last longer and to be more smart than any other creature on earth. But the price is anxiety. The price is lying awake nights.
The price is having an ego, a thing in us that we call “I,” “my self.” A compound of all the memories that we have of our experiences; a history. When you are asked to give an account of yourself, what do you do? You give your, kind of, biography: where you were born, where you were educated, where you have been, where you have traveled, what things you are competent in.
It’s your life story, it’s your history. And we learn to identify ourselves with our history. And that is a series of symbols representing the actual events through which we have passed in our lifetime.
And that history is something with which we fervently identify ourselves. But all histories come to an end. And so the more we know about our history, about ourselves in that kind of a way of knowing, the more anxiety we have about the thought that this history cannot go on indefinitely.
It cannot be a story of complete success. Now then, I want to go into some of the properties of the human mind upon which this sense of our own existence is based. And the most remarkable property that we have which enables us to create a symbolic world standing over against the world of physical reality and, of course—may I just put in parentheses—when I talk about the world of physical reality, this is a symbolic noise.
And many people, when they hear physical reality spoken about, react to it in terms of 19th century scientific mythology, which is that the world of material, of energy—the world outside human skins—is mechanical and stupid. That was one of the dogmas of 19th century scientism which carries on into the common sense of the 20th century. So when I say the world of physical reality, please don’t put any such ideas on it.
We really don’t know very much about it at all. So then, the ability—the peculiar ability—of the human mind that underlies being able to create a symbolic world alongside the world of reality—and, through this, to manipulate and control and play god towards the world of physical reality—the thing that underlies this is what we call consciousness. Consciousness is conscious attention: the ability to focus our senses on what we call one thing at a time.
Now, consciousness is, therefore, comparable to the use of a spotlight which casts a narrow, bright beam upon certain areas. We all were taught to use this as children because, when we went to school, one of the most frequent things our teachers said to us was, [loud clap] “Pay attention!” Because the children were doing this, and they were doodling, and looking out of the window, and so on—having a wonderful time. But the teacher wants to get you to be able to focus on a point.
See? Now watch my finger. Who else does this, other than teachers?
Who else does that? Hypnotists! Hypnotists and conjurers; magicians!
They’re always saying, “Now, watch my hand. There’s absolutely nothing in it.” And when you watch the hand, you know, he’s busy pulling a rabbit out of his pocket or something. So teachers all do that.
And the children comply by tightening their legs ’round the legs of the chair and frowning, and looking at the teacher with a fixed gaze, because by that the teacher will know—so children think—that they’re really attending. Now, so you see, by this means we are taught to focus our awareness—that is, say, the total sensitive power of all our five senses—to focus it on certain areas of the external world, sometimes the internal world, which are called significant. What is significant?
What is important to notice? Many of us—you know, let’s say men—go out to a luncheon meeting where all sorts of people are present and we’ve got some kind of business to transact, and we go home, and the wives say to the husbands, “Well, you were at this luncheon meeting. Was Mrs. So-and-so there?” “Yes, she was there.
I sat opposite to her.” “What was she wearing?” “I didn’t notice.” See? He looked right at it, he saw right in front of him the dress that this woman had on, but he didn’t notice it. Because from his point of view it wasn’t significant.
He might’ve been interested in what was underneath it, but not what was on top, so he didn’t see it. And so, in the same way, you can drive your car daily into town, and talk with a friend, and you’re absorbed in conversation, and you don’t remember—you don’t even think about driving. And yet, you go through all these complicated stoplights, you avoid all the other maniacs on the road, and you get in comfortably.
But you didn’t notice it. Because there is an aspect of your total awareness that is not consciousness. It reacts, and it reacts intelligently, but it doesn’t enter into what we call the stream of consciousness: the stream of events which we focus on with our spotlight and consider to be important and significant.
So there are many, many different versions of what is significant about our world. The world, you see, is in many ways like a blot in a Rorschach test—I presume you are all familiar with a Rorschach test?—where you have an ink blot that is made by pouring ink on a piece of paper, and then folding it over, and then opening it up so that you get a symmetrical pattern. And the person being tested is asked to describe what he sees in the blot and, according to what he describes, the psychologists believe that they can evaluate his personality.