Education, Teach, Learn, Study, etc.

A too-hasty return to game involvements will blur the clarity of the vision and reduce the
potential for learning.

All our education is predominantly verbal and therefore fails to accomplish what it’s
supposed to do.

Allen Ginsberg came to Harvard and shook us loose from our academic fears and
strengthened our courage and faith in the process. (That was Timothy Leary.)

American education is a highly dangerous, addictive, contracting process. (That was
Timothy Leary.)

Anyone who has learned to pay attention to and trust his intuitions, knows that his mind
contains a source of information about reality quite apart from his senses.

Anyone with philosophic ambitions and a thoughtful desire to increase intelligence could
learn how to use drugs effectively.

As a result of experiences of this kind, subjects can develop accurate understanding of
various complex esoteric teachings.

Because the teaching of the Buddha was a way of liberation, it had no other object than
the experience of nirvana.

Chemicals will be the central method of education in the future. The reason for this, of
course, is that the nervous system and learning and memory itself is a chemical process.

Consciousness and alteration of consciousness cannot be studied from the standpoint of
external science, from the standpoint of look-at-it-from-the-outside science.

Didn’t Christ center his teachings around the Brotherhood of Man? Haven’t all religious
leaders taught that we are all brothers

Don’t read a book. Tune in on your own internal vocabularies and cellular Libraries of
Congress. (That was Timothy Leary.)

Dramatic changes in our child-rearing and educational practices, politics,
communications will occur.

Education has focused almost entirely on developing the cognitive skills of our ordinary
state. We should be aware that this is a policy decision, not a necessary “given”.

Education has never been an instrument to free the mind and the spirit of man, but to bind
them. We think we want creative children, but what do we want them to create?

Elements of mystical consciousness can occur in psychedelic sessions of well-educated,
skeptical and scientifically oriented individuals.

Enriched by a consciousness perspective, liberal education can extend freedom and
mental refinement far beyond the parochialism of single-state learning.

Experiences of this kind can bring instant intuitive knowledge that by far exceeds the
intellectual capacity and educational background of the individual.

For thousands of years, pre-industrial societies taught that personal growth involved
visionary experiences.

Huxley did not win a Nobel Prize, a good sign, suggesting that he made the right enemies
and was properly unacceptable to the academic politicians. (That was Timothy Leary.)

Huxley was fascinated by the potential in drugs such as mescaline, LSD and psilocybin to
provide a learning experience normally denied us within our educational system.

I belong to one of the oldest trade unions in human civilization—the alchemists of the
mind, the scholars of consciousness. (That was Timothy Leary.)

I never really felt that school was my true place or any type of ultimately enriching
experience.

If, as we believe, the drug-state distortions are manifestations of tendencies found also in
“normal” perceptions, then they afford opportunities for studying the perceptual process.

If psychologists largely ignore this whole area, the students then dismiss psychology as
an academic word game of no importance.

In every culture, there have been men who have studied consciousness. They have been
called shamans, gurus or alchemists.

In order to perceive reality directly, one must learn how to abandon the intellect and
disengage oneself from the thoughts it produces incessantly.

In other times and countries, men would walk barefooted 2000 miles to find spiritual
teachers.

In primary school, we fell into the hands of addictive drug pushers—teachers. (That was
Timothy Leary.)

Insights are accompanied by an emotion which reinforces the conviction that a fragment
of Truth has been discovered. We call this kind of learning “revelation.”

Intense and impressive psychic experiences make possible the sudden unlearning of
ineffective ways of performing.

Is it not strange that an infant should be heir of the whole World and see those mysteries
which the books of the learned never unfold?

It is easier to change behavior if you understand the learned-game nature of behavior.
This sort of insight can be brought about by consciousness-expanding drugs.

It is merely an academic prejudice that prevents one from recognizing that it is quite
possible to be scientific about data of the internal world.

It is quite urgent that we learn to perceive ourselves as integral features of nature and not
as frightened strangers in a hostile, indifferent or alien universe.

It is unfortunate that most of the scientific studies on creativity have been done by
psychologists who don’t have a creative bone in their body.

It makes sense to experience and study altered states of awareness to learn about the
nature of our world by directing attention to aspects of it that usually remain peripheral.

Learning from a physics textbook about the wave structure of matter is one thing.
Experiencing it, being in it, is quite another matter.

Learning, memory, mood, judgment, identity, consciousness can be transformed by
electrical and chemical stimuli.

Learning need not be just to get a better job, or more pay. That sort of learning is not
really learning at all. Learning is its own reward.

LSD allowed you an objective look at your own conditioning, at all the categories you
had been taught to filter experience into.

LSD could enable one to study psychic material that is buried in the deepest layers of the
unconscious and is usually inaccessible to less dynamic techniques.

My brain is God; your brain is too. Let’s learn to practice the technologies of God with
the grace, compassion and skill which the Judeo-Christian Gods so obviously lack.

My most interesting intellectually stimulating experiences have been psychedelic
sessions. Psychedelics open wide the doors of learning.

Mystics of all faiths teach that understanding comes only when logic and intellect are
transformed.

Nothing is higher than these mysteries. They have not only shown us the way to live
joyfully, but they have taught us to die with hope.

Old destructive patterns of behavior may suddenly be abandoned after an overpowering
emotional experience. The learning of new attitudes and techniques may become easier.

One can undergo an experience of total annihilation and emerge from this process
renewed and reborn. The learning here is profound.

One could look at a pebble for days, and in a sufficiently enlightened state of mind, there
would always be more to be learned.

One is being inundated with an ocean of new information and one has to learn to
navigate.

One’s full potential could be realized not by suppressing signals from the inner core but,
on the contrary, by learning to listen to them.

Organized religion has very little to do with the non-verbal education of individuals for
spiritual insight.

Our academic community is predominantly consciousness-naive. Studies of human
nature and the human mind which omit non-ordinary states are clearly incomplete.

Our education, from the start, has taught us a certain range of emotions, what to feel and
what not to feel and how to feel the feelings we allow ourselves to feel.

Our perception of the world is relative to ways in which social conditioning has taught us
to see.

People of real genius or creative ability are increasingly unable to work in our
universities.

Plants seem to represent pure being in the here and now, in full contact with the
immediate environment, which is the ideal of many mystical schools.

Psychedelic drugs allow us to study—directly, experientially, empirically-the problems
which have perplexed philosophers for millennia.

Pursuing the religious life today without psychedelic drugs is like studying astronomy
with the naked eye.

Religions teach of the eternity of man, of the greater life beyond, of the soul, of that
which is greater than this physical life.

Schizophrenics have more to teach psychiatrists about the inner world than psychiatrists
their patients.

Some marijuana smokers learned from irrational condemnations and persecution to
mistrust all laws and conventions of our society.

The action of consciousness-expanding drugs on the cortex can be holy and intensely
educational.

The aim of human education is to learn how to use all these levels of consciousness (not
to memorize nonsense).

The bum trip could be a more meaningful and educational event than the good one. (A
bad trip isn’t as good as a good trip, but it can still be very beneficial.)

The content and nature of the experiences are authentic expressions of the psyche,
revealing its functioning on levels ordinarily not available for observation and study.

The discovery of LSD and subsequent psychedelic research opened up new revolutionary
avenues in the study of human consciousness.

The ego is the social image or role with which the mind is shamed into identifying itself,
since we are taught to act the part which society wants us to play.

The enriching growth potential that they contain demands continuing study and attempts
to understand them (the psychedelics).

The entire study of consciousness, the religious experience itself, remains in a state of
medieval ignorance and superstition.

The experience will teach you what you need to know in order to grow and mature,
which is to gradually dissolve your over-protective defense structures.

The full harmony of all qualities capable of teaching or delighting us may flow in at once
to ravish the soul.

The great religious and spiritual traditions all teach that the source of wisdom lives within
us.

The greatest advances in civilization, science and learning often result from new ways of
doing things.

The historic role of states of consciousness in the humanities, arts, and sciences is
neglected in current education.

The individual is almost universally unaware that he has learned to confuse himself with
a political and legal fiction.

The intimate relationship between the experience of the inorganic world and spiritual
states can convey an entirely new understanding of ancient teachings.

The learned perceptions disappear and the structure of the world disintegrates into direct
wave phenomena.

The molecular processes of life are a billion years older than the learned conceptual
mind.

The open cortex produces an ecstatic state, the nervous system operating free of learned
abstractions.

The psychedelic state, and other forms of altered consciousness are worthy of serious
study if the act of human creation is to be better understood, guided, and encouraged.

The revolution in the study of the mind is at hand. That revolution can effect an evolution
of mind also.

The study of psychedelic drugs has engendered an enormous emotional reaction from
society.

The time will come within a century when an educated man will be one who knows who
he is and where he came from, knows on the basis of direct psychedelic experience.

The wisdom of sages is not in their teachings; otherwise anybody might become a sage
simply by reading.

There is love in each human heart. We must learn how to release the love in our own
hearts. The great oneness of love becomes a reality when we flow into it.

These chemicals will inevitably revolutionize our procedures of education, child rearing
and social behavior.

These drugs, handled correctly, appear to offer incomparable opportunities for studying
religious experience.

These drugs produce ecstatic states from which new learning, a shift in values, or
subsequent behavior change purportedly ensue.

This is the central experience Jesus sought for all people. This is the heart of Jesus’ life
and teaching, although it is now largely absent from the institutional Christian churches.

This is what Jesus taught and demonstrated—cosmic consciousness, the direct experience
of divinity dwelling in us and all things.

Throw off the grip of your learned mind, your conditioning and experience the message
contained in the computer you carry behind your forehead.

To study drugs, one has to do it. It’s possible to be scientific about data of the internal
world.

To use music as a catalyst for deep self-exploration and experiential work, it is necessary
to learn a new way of listening to music and relating to it that is alien to our culture.

We are driving our children mad more effectively than we are genuinely educating them.
Perhaps it is our way of educating them that is driving them mad.

We are so ignorant of the basic effects of psychedelics that we can only legislate or
“educate” in ignorance and emotional hysteria at present.

We have learned to feel our consciousness much too superficially, as if all our sensations
were in the tips of the fingers and none in the palm.

We have much to learn from appropriate investigation of this powerful mind-altering
chemical.

We learn as children to see the function of objects, rather than experience them in all
possible ways.

We must learn how to be mentally silent, must cultivate the art of pure receptivity,
wordless experiencing.

Western scholars have greatly underestimated the importance of these drugs to the
cultures that use them.

What education does is put a series of filters over your awareness and you experience less
and less.

What you learn from LSD can make you a better person—more alive, awake, intelligent,
loving, creative.

Wisdom comes only to those who have learned how to talk, read and write without taking
language more seriously than it deserves.

You are more likely to find the evolutionary agents closer to jail than the professor’s
chair.

A deeper understanding of the transformative process, based on the synthesis of
historical, anthropological and experimental data, could have important implications for
many different areas, including psychiatry, art, philosophy, religion and education.

A number of patients in psychotherapy could begin to paint after having been given the
drug. Most of them had not previously done any painting at all, and yet the quality of the
work was far above average for the ordinary beginning art student.

Anything emotional, anything that might involve touching, anything that may involve
feeling, anything that involved spiritual things, was very, very frightening to academics.
Of course, Leary was doing all of that.

As a result of the explorations of such men as R. G. Wasson, Professor Roger Heim and
R. E. Schultes of Harvard, a whole new field was opened up—the study of the
relationship between plant-induced visions and primitive mythology.

Consciousness expansion is as equally complex a problem as the study of physics
because the nervous system and the levels of consciousness available to man are infinite
in their complexities.

During the next few hundred years, the major activity of man will be scientific
exploration of and education in the many new universes of awareness which have been
opened up by psychedelic drugs.

Even the uneducated layman can experience directly what is slowly deduced by
scientists. (Actually, the scientists are poking at straws. They have to take the LSD
themselves to understand what they’re working on or studying.)

Everyone who wanted to make it went to college. But now I saw it as a game I couldn’t
afford to play any longer. I wanted to start living something real. Tired of preparing for a
nebulous future, I wanted to live and learn about NOW.

Experiencing the profound psychological changes induced by LSD is a unique and
valuable learning experience for all clinicians and theoreticians studying abnormal mental
states.

For most people, it’s a life-changing shock to learn that their everyday reality circuit is
one among dozens of circuits which, when turned on, are equally real, pulsing with
strange forms and mysterious biological signals.

Geneticists, we believe, make the chauvinistic mistake of assuming that DNA is a
process, rather than a living intelligence as old as life itself that can teach us the meaning
of existence. DNA designs and constructs the nervous system.

Graduate students were lining up at our office doors for neurological fieldwork. Every
weekend, the Harvard residence houses were transformed into spaceships floating miles
above the yard. (That was Timothy Leary.)

Houston Smith ran psilocybin sessions for MIT undergraduates and graduate students as
laboratory exercises for his seminars on mysticism. How elegant and civilized! This was
exactly how we thought education should operate. (That was Timothy Leary.)

I, as an experienced student of the psychology of religion, can no longer pursue research
in the field. This is a barbarous restriction of spiritual and intellectual freedom. (That was
Alan Watts.)

I doubt if this can possibly be made to seem meaningful at the ordinary level of
consciousness. No wonder the mystics of all faiths teach that understanding comes only
when logic and intellect are transcended!

I felt strongly that the study of nonordinary states of mind in general and those induced
by psychedelics in particular, was by far the most interesting area of psychiatry and
decided to make it my field of specialization. (That was Stanislav Grof.)

If a Jesus or a Buddha were to appear in our midst today, he would be hard pressed to
convince anyone of the relevance to mankind of his teachings. (Our ignorant, sick society
would bash Jesus or Buddha just like they bashed Timothy Leary.)

If people in our schools and industries were allowed to participate in LSD programs
aimed at making the most of their creative abilities and stimulating peak production, we
could anticipate a Periclean age of achievement in all fields.

If the perceptions touched off by the drugs are in any reliable sense religious, then an
invaluable means of studying the dynamics and effects of profound religious experience
at firsthand is available to us.

If you can throw off the grip of your learned mind and experience the message contained
in the computer which you carry behind your forehead, you would know the awe-ful
truth.

In academic circles, there is hardly a more cutting comment than to brand an opponent
“mystical”. (Such academic types are ignorant, hung up in ego games and have no idea
what “mystical” means.)

In many instances, the degree of historical or ethnographic knowledge that emerges is
clearly incongruent with the subject’s previous education and level of information in
these areas.

In our society, the artist is a kind of harmless clown who can get away with a private life
that would be scandalous for a priest or a professor. (The artist is no clown. If anything,
it’s the priest and the professor who are clowns.)

It doesn’t concern me that young people are taking time out from the educational and
occupational assembly lines to experiment with consciousness, to dabble with new forms
of experience and artistic expression. (That was Timothy Leary.)

It is important to realize that by banning psychedelic research we have not only given up
the study of an interesting drug or group of substances, but also abandoned one of the
most promising approaches to the understanding of the human mind and consciousness.

It seemed to Leary more and more that, in practice, the procedures of scientific
objectivity and rigor were simply an academic ritual designed to convince the university
establishment that your work was dull and trivial enough to be considered “sound”.

Leary felt that Harvard treated him in an unsympathetic, unjust and inhumane way. It
seemed that Harvard had been afflicted with a failure of nerve. When the chips were
down, institutional preservation prevailed over open-mindedness and the search for truth.

No one who has studied the matter closely doubts the reality of psychedelic peak
experiences, the capacity of psychedelic drugs to open up the unconscious, or the
conviction of some who take them that they are gaining insight.

One of the most difficult things that a psychedelic therapist had to learn was how to do
nothing, how to become transparent, yet remain attentive enough to respond at the critical
moment.

Our culture teaches you that you’re nothing but shit in a lot of ways, both obvious and
subtle. You have to discover for yourself that you’re better than that. The Psychedelic can
actually help teach this lesson, but it requires guidance and preparation.

Psychedelic research will be of great value in such diverse areas as philosophy,
parapsychology and the creative arts and in the study of literature, mythology,
anthropology, comparative religion and still other fields.

Psychologists, philosophers, and educators who are unfamiliar with consciousness
research will be as out of date as they would be today if they were unfamiliar with Freud,
Skinner.

Religion to us is ecstasy. It is freedom and harmony. Kids should not let the fake,
television-prop religion they were taught as kids turn them off. The real trip is the God
trip.

Researchers who have seriously studied and/or experienced these fascinating phenomena
realize that the attempts of traditional psychiatry to dismiss them as irrelevant products of
imagination in the brain are superficial and inadequate.

Saying that a drug experience can precipitate a psychosis is not the same as saying that
drugs cause psychosis. We do not say that sex and college cause psychosis even though
we commonly see that both can trigger it.

The ability of the drug to connect diverse people in empathic bonds suggested exciting
social applications. Once people learned to share others’ perceptions, a higher level of
human consciousness might be possible.

The condition of alienation, of being asleep, of being unconscious, of being out of one’s
mind, is the condition of the normal man. Society highly values its normal man. It
educates children to lose themselves and to become absurd, and thus to be normal.

The educational topics, philosophical issues, intellectual questions, and personal insights
which evolved from my LSD experiences and subsequent investigations are a continuing
source of growth.

The experiences of the collective and racial unconscious frequently mediate a great
amount of accurate information that far transcends the educational background and
training of the individual involved.

The expression “a system of teaching” has no meaning, for Truth, in the sense of Reality,
cannot be cut up into pieces and arranged into a system. The words can only be used as a
figure of speech.

The form of spirituality I am referring to is fully compatible with any level of
intelligence, education, and specific knowledge of the information amassed by such
disciplines as physics, biology, medicine, and psychology.

The purpose of the whole experience is for the person to learn to experience himself and
the things about him with fulfillment and joy. Having a good time and experiencing
beauty is therapeutic.

The study of psychedelic-stimulated states of consciousness is, in principle, not opposed
to science and reason. On the contrary, the refusal to study them is both unreasonable
and antiscientific.

The things that are most important to many young Americans are not being discussed in
academic life. The sterile formalism of much American higher education can hardly hold
a candle to the psychedelic experience.

The variability of response to the drugs is enormous, largely because what is most
important for a particular person to learn at a particular time will vary tremendously and
thus the experience will differ accordingly.

The vast majority of individuals lose, in the course of education, all the openness to
inspiration, all the capacity to be aware of other things than those enumerated in the
Sears-Roebuck catalogue which constitutes the conventionally “real” world.

The way of liberation is by becoming stupid and rejecting the refinements of learning.
(Of course, that is not at all stupidity. Stupidity is blindly accepting what others shove
down one’s throat.)

Traditional Western scientists like to assume an all-knowing position and discard any
notion of spirituality as primitive superstition, regressive magical thinking, lack of
education, or clinical psychopathology.

Twentieth century educators have ceased to be concerned with questions of ultimate truth
or meaning and are interested solely in the dissemination of a rootless and irrelevant
culture and the fostering of the solemn foolery of scholarship for scholarship’s sake.

We cannot just talk about spirituality; it needs to be an experiential realization.
Enlightenment does not come simply from following the wisdom teachings. It comes
through direct experience.

We do not know what we want because we are only dimly aware of anything wantable.
We have taught ourselves to pursue goals but we have more words than experience for
what we mean.

We have been taught to narrow our awareness to a fantasy world of symbol solids. But
that’s not how it really is. All matter is energy—everything is whirling change, even you!
Look at your baby pictures. Look in the mirror. You are a dramatically changing process.

What a boon to society—converting violent criminals to law-abiding citizens! If we could
teach the most unregenerate how to wash their brains, then it would be a cinch to coach
non-criminals to change their lives for the better. (That was Timothy Leary.)

What can be done to prevent the glory and the freshness from fading into the light of
common day? How can we educate children on the conceptual level without killing their
capacity for intense nonverbal experience?

What I learned from Tim (Leary) had nothing to do with drugs but it had everything to do
with getting high. His die-hard fascination with the human brain was not about altering it,
but about using it to the fullest.

When you cut your finger, you do not heal yourself. You don’t even worry about it
healing. You know it is going to heal because you have faith in a greater power. You trust
your subconscious then, and you must learn to trust it about other things as well.

Wise men throughout history have told us again and again, in legends and myths,
aphorisms, poems and allegories that there exists within us a source of direct information
about reality that can teach us all we need to know.

Academic psychology is concerned with conditioning humans to accept what Freud
called the “reality principle,” implying that only the artificial, conditioned games of the
current social order are real; that natural pleasure is somehow a hallucination, even a
psychotic outburst.

Acid taught me a different mode of experience. I learned how to see: how to give
something my attention, to be drawn into it, to concentrate, to see worlds within worlds.
Through psychedelic drugs, then, a few extra layers of perspective were added to my
view of things.

As prime conditioner of his fellow men, the psychologist or educator must be an
exemplar—calm, serious, controlled, sensibly cynical, smugly pessimistic and above all,
rational. To study the unconditioned state, to produce pleasure in his subjects and to act
in a natural, hedonic manner would lead to his excommunication.

Controlled research aimed at maximizing their safety, their effectiveness, and their
human value has barely begun. In addition to questions concerning the possible uses of
LSD as a therapeutic or educative device, its potential value as a basic research tool for
investigating higher mental processes has also been minimally explored.

Every human being is born with an innate drive to experience altered states of
consciousness periodically, in particular to learn how to get away from ordinary ego-
centered consciousness. This drive is an important factor in our evolution, both as
individuals and as a species.

How strange that we should all carry about with us this enormous universe of vision and
that which lies beyond vision and yet be mainly unconscious of the fact! How can we
learn to pass at will from one world of consciousness to the others? Mescaline and LSD
will open the door.

I would not be allowed the freedom to discuss the reasons why these laws should be
changed. This is a clear violation of the American Constitution, academic freedom,
scientific openness and all of the principles upon which democratic societies are based.
(That was Timothy Leary.)

If left alone by society, our International Foundation for Internal Freedom (IFIF) would
have succeeded in training several thousand neurologicans who, in their own
communities, could have trained hundreds of thousands of Americans to use their own
heads. (That was Timothy Leary.)

If repression is not replaced by education and if intolerance is not replaced with
understanding, our hopes for the future and our vision of the human condition will be
gravely jeopardized. (In other words, we have no hope if dumb, ignorant, arrogant,
selfish, insensitive fascists continue to hold power and run things.)

If the history of science teaches us anything, it is that uncomfortable data cannot be swept
under the rug indefinitely. Galileo, we know, was not silenced; his manuscripts were
smuggled out and published after his death, laying the groundwork not just for the
science of astronomy, but for experimental physics in general.

In view of the enormous variety and scope of these phenomena, most of which lie far
beyond the conceptual framework of traditional psychology and the philosophy of
Western science, it is not surprising that Western scientists and educated laypersons alike
tend to take these claims with a grain of salt.

Individuals who experience transpersonal experiences of this kind in their psychedelic
sessions frequently gain access to detailed and rather esoteric information about the
corresponding aspects of the material universe that far exceeds their general educational
background and their specific knowledge of the area in question.

Is the use of LSD the initial event that will guide us to a new morality and to new patterns
of human life on this planet? Will we keep our heads straight and our bodies and minds
clear? Or will we become anti-intellectuals devoted to the culture of “big fishes eating
smaller fishes” in the holy names of religion, education, civilization, progress.

It is not unusual for subjects reporting evolutionary experiences to manifest a detailed
knowledge of the animals with whom they have identified—of their physical
characteristics, habits and behavior patterns—that far exceeds their education in the
natural sciences.

It will enable each person to realize that he is not a game-playing robot put on this planet
to be given a Social Security number and to be spun upon the assembly line of school,
college, career, insurance, funeral, good-bye. Through LSD, each human being will be
taught to understand that the entire history of evolution is recorded inside his body.

Jesus was aware of himself as a finished specimen of the new humanity which is to
come—the new humanity which is to inherit the earth, establish the Kingdom, usher in
the New Age. His mission and his teaching have at their heart the development of a new
and higher state of consciousness on a species-wide basis.

Leary once remarked that people who believe that LSD should be illegal because some
users have committed suicide, maybe because of it, should agitate even more heatedly for
the abolition of examinations. Statistics show that the link between final exams and
suicide is true beyond any doubt. Every year the college suicide rate rises at exam time.

Let’s come on as psychologists and develop a research project that aims at producing the
ecstatic moment. Develop a science of ecstatics. Train graduate students to illuminate
themselves and others. We have statisticians who systemize the static—how about
ecstatisticians who systemize the ecstatic?

Mainstream psychiatry and psychology in general make no distinction between
mysticism and mental illness. These fields do not officially recognize that the great
spiritual traditions that have been involved in the systematic study of human
consciousness for millennia have anything to offer.

Mainstream psychiatry and psychology in general make no distinction between
mysticism and psychopathology. There is no official recognition that the great spiritual
traditions that have been involved in the systematic study of consciousness for centuries
have anything to offer to our understanding of the psyche and of human nature.

Maslow disagreed with Freud’s exclusive concentration on the study of neurotic and
psychotic populations. He pointed out that focusing on the worst in humanity instead of
the best, results in a distorted image of human nature. This approach leaves out man’s
aspirations, his realizable hopes, his godlike qualities.

Most of the awe and reverent wonder stems from this confrontation with an unsuspected
range of consciousness, the tremendous acceleration of images, the shattering insight into
the narrowness of the learned as opposed to the potentiality of awareness, the humbling
sense of where one’s ego is in relationship to the total energy field.

Psychedelic drugs dramatically suspend the conditioned learned aspects of the nervous
system. Suddenly released from its conditioned patterning, consciousness is flung into a
flashing loom of unlearned imagery, an eerie, novel landscape where everything seems
possible and nothing remains fixed.

Real learning can take place only in a condition of freedom. (Real learning, therefore,
doesn’t happen in schools because kids are forced to go and teachers, using the power of
the grade, are like dictators. Pressurized, brainwashing propaganda is what schools are all
about, not real learning.)

Researchers who have seriously studied and/or experienced these fascinating phenomena
realize that the attempts of traditional psychiatry to dismiss them as irrelevant products of
imagination or as erratic fantasmagoria generated by pathological processes in the brain,
are superficial and inadequate.

The aim of the psychiatrist is to teach the (statistically) abnormal to adjust themselves to
the behavior of the (statistically) normal. The aim of the educator in spiritual insight is to
teach the (statistically) normal that they are in fact insane and should do something about
it. (That was Aldous Huxley.)

The American youngster who chooses not to buy the system is confronted with a
consciousness-control tyranny, classically Soviet in its disregard for his individuality.
Compulsory education means that if you don’t go to the state brainwashing institutions,
you and your parents are arrested.

The entire range of pleasurable experiences has gone unstudied, unlabeled, undefined.
You will not find the word “fun” in the index of most psychology texts. Indeed, until the
psychedelic movement, unconditioned behavior and unconditioned experience were
considered ipso facto schizophrenic.

The function of the guide is multifold: head nurse, tutor, baby-sitter, Mother Earth,
sympathetic ear, scullery maid, priest, trouble-shooter, tourist guide, doctor, navigator,
soulmate, and blank screen. The competent guide knows that it is the subject’s session,
not his.

The historic role of states of consciousness in the humanities, arts, and sciences is
neglected in current education. A truly liberal education should teach students about this
part of themselves and our civilizations, and should also give them rudimentary
experience with selected states and their resident capacities.

The kinesthetic sense tells us what is happening within our psycho-physical organism.
The other senses—sight, hearing, touch, taste and smell—give us information about the
outer world. Modern education does nothing to train the kinesthetic sense and very little
in regard to the other senses.

The psychedelic experience depends upon many factors—the dosage, the circumstances
under which it is given, the knowledge of the people giving it, and, most of all, upon the
attitude of the person taking it, what he wishes to learn about himself, how much he trusts
the people working with him, and how much he trusts his own underconsciousness.

The training for this new profession of psychedelic guides will aim at producing the
patience of a first-grade teacher, the humility and wisdom of a Hindu guru, the loving
dedication of a minister-priest, the sensitivity of a poet and the imagination of a science
fiction writer.

Theoretical speculations in Western academic psychology and psychiatry are based
exclusively on experiences and observations made in the ordinary states of
consciousness. The evidence from the study of non-ordinary states of any kind are
systematically ignored or pathologized.

These experiences have been known for millennia. Descriptions of them can be found in
the holy scriptures of all the great religions of the world, as well as in written documents
of countless minor sects, factions and religious movements. They have also played a
crucial role in the visionary states of individual saints, mystics and religious teachers.

Unbiased systematic study of this material would lead to changes in our understanding of
the human psyche and of the nature of reality that would be as far-reaching and radical as
those that were introduced into physics by the theories of relativity and the quantum
theory.

Under the current dispensation, the vast majority of individuals lose, in the course of
education, all the openness to inspiration, all the capacity to be aware of other things than
those enumerated in the Sears-Roebuck catalogue which constitutes the conventionally
“real” world.

We are going to have to develop, as chemistry has developed, a language that will pay
respect to the fact that our experience, our behavior, our social forms are flowing all the
time and if your language isn’t equipped to change and flow with them, then you are in
trouble, you’re hooked. You’re drugged by the educational system.

We overvalue the mind, that flimsy collection of learned words and verbal connections;
the mind, that system of paranoid delusions with the learned self as center. And we
eschew the nonmind, nongame intuitive insight outlook which is the key to the religious
experience, to the love experience.

When Western science dismissed the concept of consciousness after death as a
fabrication based on wishful thinking and superstition, this judgment was not based on
the careful study of the area in question that is otherwise characteristic of the scientific
approach.

While these new territories have not yet been recognized by Western academic
psychiatry, they are not, by any means, unknown to humanity. On the contrary, they have
been systematically studied and held in high esteem by ancient and pre-industrial cultures
since the dawn of human history.

You have to pass beyond everything you have learned in order to become acquainted
with the new areas of consciousness. Ignorance of this fact is the veil which shuts man
within the narrow confines of his acquired, artificial concepts of “reality”, and prevents
him from coming to know his own true nature.

A new and exciting area was discovered for psychedelic psychotherapy: the care of
patients with terminal cancer and some other incurable diseases. Studies of dying
individuals indicated that this approach was able to bring not only alleviation of the
emotional suffering and relief from severe physical pain associated with cancer, but also
dramatically transform the concept of death and change the attitude toward dying.

According to Laing, psychiatrists do not pay proper attention to the inner experience of
psychotics, because they see them as pathological and incomprehensible. However,
careful observation and study show that these experiences have profound meaning and
that the psychotic process can be healing. Laing believes that psychotics have in many
respects more to teach psychiatrists than psychiatrists do their patients.

All the learned games of life can be seen as programs that select, censor and thus
dramatically limit the available cortical response. Consciousness-expanding drugs unplug
these narrow programs, the social ego, the game-machinery. And with the ego and mind
unplugged, what is left? What is left is something that Western culture knows little about:
the uncensored cortex, activated, alert and open to new realities.

America is an irrational, materialistic, intolerant, religious state. General Motors is a
religious institution that worships mechanical power and money. Harvard University is a
religious institution that worships intellectual power and dogmatically clings to academic
taboos and empty rituals. Science itself is a religion defending its superstitious rites. The
American government is a monolithic religious structure.

As an educational psychologist, I’m interested in the implications of LSD research for the
study of human learning and further human development. Through the LSD experiences I
have learned to look at myself and society in a new way. These experiences have been, in
effect, an additional higher education for me, equal in impact, effort, knowledge, beauty,
and scope to obtaining a doctorate at Stanford.

Changes in point of view cannot happen overnight, for they require acceptance of painful
truths: that children daydreaming in class, for example, might be using their minds much
more profitably than children paying attention; that psychotic patients may be in a better
position to understand and experience reality than the psychiatric authorities who dose
them with tranquilizers.

Detailed study of psychedelic phenomena would require a long-term systematic team
cooperation of experts from diverse disciplines, such as psychology, psychiatry,
neurophysiology, neuropharmacology, ethno-botany, modern physics, zoology, ethology,
genetics, internal medicine, obstetrics and gynecology, anthropology, history of art,
theology, philosophy and comparative study of religion and mythology.

Drugs were a passport to an unchartered landscape of risk and sensation and those who
entered the forbidden territory moved quickly into areas where most adults could offer
little assistance. The drama enacted in this zone of enchantment was totally alien to the
academic curriculum, which failed to provide the necessary tools to deal with the rewards
and pitfalls one might encounter on such a journey.

Each human being is equipped with a 120-billion-cell brain, but we haven’t learned how
to use it. Few of us are aware of our neural ineptness. The organized religions have
comforted us by providing infantile fairy tales about God and promises of discarnate
immortality. Pray and obey, keep your legs crossed, avoid orgasms, and you’ll get the
one-way ticket to heaven.

Eighteenth century churchmen criticized experiments with vaccination as blasphemous
attempts to deprive God of his prerogative of punishing the wicked through smallpox and
it was dangerous for a God-fearing scientist to look through Galileo’s telescope. Even in
our own century, teachers have been dismissed at the instance of the pious for declaring
that creation took longer than six days!

Harvard—Over 400 “subjects” shared high-dosage psychedelic experiences with the
researchers in an atmosphere of aesthetic precision, philosophic inquiry, inner search,
self-confident dignity, intellectual openness, philosophic courage and high humor. The
historical impact of this “swarm” of influential scholars has not yet been recognized by
the still-timid press, popular or scientific. (That was Timothy Leary.)

I felt like the neurological Knute Rockne. I was a scholar from the greatest university in
the greatest country, moving the adventurous search for human knowledge forward. I
counted myself fortunate to be a member of that long line of visionaries who throughout
history have sought peaceful nature-shrines to carry on the search for self-knowledge.
(That was Timothy Leary.)

If mystical experiences are integrated into the personality, they are highly therapeutic.
Single-state scholars and theoreticians are hard-pressed to explain this therapeutic value.
Denial is easier. But if an enlarged map of reality includes altered states of consciousness,
then experiencing such states logically leads to a fuller view of reality, and therapists tell
us that a fuller view of reality is therapeutic.

In my utopian fantasy, Island, I speculated in fictional terms about the ways in which a
substance akin to psilocybin could be used to potentiate the nonverbal education of
adolescents and to remind adults that the real world is very different from the misshapen
universe they have created for themselves by means of their culture-conditioned
prejudices. (That was Aldous Huxley.)

In the field of treatment of alcoholism, there were several studies showing a close to 50
percent control rate following “LSD therapy,” a figure which cannot be matched by any
other therapeutic approach to this problem and successful beyond the wildest dreams of
Alcoholics Anonymous, to say nothing of conventional psychoanalysis, which has a
success rate of curing alcoholics of about one in every hundred, which is nobody.

In traditional psychiatry, mystical experiences of any kind are usually treated in the
context of serious psychopathology; they are seen as indications of a psychotic process.
In his comprehensive and careful study, Maslow was able to demonstrate that persons
who had spontaneous “peak” experiences frequently benefited from them and showed a
distinct trend toward “self- realization” or “self-actualization”

Jung’s basic assumption was that the spiritual element is an organic and integral part of
the psyche. Genuine spirituality is an aspect of the collective unconscious and is
independent of childhood programming and the individual’s cultural or educational
background. Thus, if self-exploration and analysis reach sufficient depth, spiritual
elements emerge spontaneously into consciousness.

Leary stated “We see ourselves as modest heroes, an educational tool to facilitate the
development of new social forms…We’re simply trying to get back to man’s sense of
nearness to himself and others, the sense of social reality which civilized man has lost.
We’re in step with the basic needs of the human race and those who oppose us are far
out.”

Most of our colleagues in the psychology department couldn’t take the brain-change
work seriously. They couldn’t admit that our new subject matter even existed. Altered
states of consciousness simply didn’t exist as a category in the psychology of that time.
It was the familiar tunnel vision that has always narrowed the academic mind. (That was
Timothy Leary at Harvard.)

Newspaper headlines describing the horrors of LSD “bummers” and drug-related
accidents ignited a witch-hunting response in legislators, politicians, educators and many
professionals. Ignoring the data from almost two decades of responsible scientific
experimentation, the anti-drug propaganda presented LSD as a totally unpredictable
devil’s drug that represented a grave danger.

Once people have experienced the spiritual dimensions growing in their lives, they often
learn that their lives without it were futile and impoverished. Previously, they may have
managed adequately but unhappily, unaware of the seemingly endless realms that have
since enormously enriched their existence. They discover that spirituality is a necessary
element that enhances their lives and sense of well-being.

Our capacity to think, except in the service of what we are dangerously deluded in
supposing is our self-interest and in conformity with common sense, is pitifully limited:
our capacity to even see, hear, touch, taste and smell is so shrouded in veils of
mystification that an intensive discipline of unlearning is necessary for anyone before one
can begin to experience the world afresh, with innocence, truth and love.

Our ordinary Newtonian-Cartesian consciousness can be invaded with unusual power by
various archetypal entities or mythological sequences that, according to mechanistic
science, should have no independent existence. The myth-producing aspects of the
human psyche will portray deities and rituals from different cultures that the subject has
never studied. (eyes closed)

Our problem is that the power of thought enables us to construct symbols of things apart
from the things themselves. This includes the ability to make a symbol, an idea of
ourselves apart from ourselves. Because the idea is so much more comprehensible than
the reality, the symbol so much more stable than the fact, we learn to identify ourselves
with our idea of ourselves. Hence, the subjective feeling of a “self” which has a “mind.”

Reports created a witch-hunting response from parents, teachers, ministers, police
authorities and legislators. Unfortunately, many mental-health professionals participated
to some extent in this irrational approach; although the reports of two decades of
scientific experimentation with LSD were available in the psychiatric and psychological
literature, they allowed their image of this drug to be fermented by newspaper headlines.

Specialists from various disciplines have asked me for specific details of my
observations, because they felt that these data may have important implications for such
diverse areas as personality theory, psychology of religion, psychotherapy, genetics,
psychology and psychopathology of art, anthropology, the study of mythology,
education, psychosomatic medicine and obstetric practice. (That was Stanislav Grof.)

The last thing an institution of education wants to allow you to do is expand your
consciousness, to use the untapped potential in your head, to experience directly. They
don’t want you to take life seriously, they want you to take their game seriously.
Education, dear students, is anesthetic, a narcotic procedure which is very likely to blunt
your sensitivity and to immobolize your brain and your behavior for the rest of your lives.

The mystics continuously get in trouble with religious authorities, but often also with
political authorities. By his teaching and by the very way he lives, Jesus appeals to
common sense and blows the pretense of public opinion to pieces. Common people said,
“Wow, this man speaks with authority, not like our authorities.” You can imagine how
the authorities felt about it and how they reacted: “This man has to die!”

The thing that most aroused my interest was the tone and contents of what my classmates
who had taken the drug were saying. They talked to each other in stunned, excited voices
about love, sharing, identity, unity, death, ecstasy—topics not generally discussed by
psychology students except with cynical flippancy or heavy academic seriousness—but
certainly never from experienced confrontation, as was happening now.

There are people in this society who will do everything within their considerable power
to stop our research. The managers of consciousness, from the Vatican to Harvard, have
been in this business for a long time and they’re not about to give up their monopoly.
And after all, they’re the experts and we’re the amateurs. They’re the pros and we’re just
the lovers. (That was Aldous Huxley talking to Timothy Leary while both were tripping.)

There is a limitless range of awareness for which we now have no words. That awareness
can expand beyond the range of your ego, your self, your familiar identity, beyond
everything you have learned, beyond your notions of space and time, beyond the
differences which usually separate people from each other and from the world around
them.

They’re not interested in mystical experience at divinity schools. They’re interested only
in words and in history. If someone had a mystical vision a safe 2000 years ago and left
some record of it, that might interest them. But mystical experience, the raw and vital
force that gives rise to a religion, is too much for them to cram into their semantic,
pseudoscientific endeavor to understand God.

Traditional scientists often attribute the appreciation that non-Western societies show for
shamans to the fact that these societies are unable to discriminate the abnormal from the
super-normal because of their lack of education and scientific knowledge. (This is an
example of how ignorant and arrogant Western societies really are. The West has
advanced in technology, but where is the wisdom?)

Transpersonal psychology has emerged as that branch of psychology specifically
concerned with the study of human consciousness. It attempts to expand the field of
psychological inquiry to include such human experiences as those induced by
psychedelics, as well as similar states attained through the practice of meditation or other
disciplines.

We have to think about the university as a place which spawns new ideas or breaks
through to new visions, a place where we can learn to use our neurological equipment.
The university and, for that matter, every aspect of the educational system is paid for by
adult society to train young people to keep the same game going, to be sure that you do
not use your heads.

Western scientists view their own particular approach to reality and psychological
phenomena as superior and “proven beyond a shadow of doubt,” while judging the
perspectives of other cultures as inferior, naive, and primitive. The traditional academic
approach takes into consideration only those observations and experiences that are
mediated by the five senses in an ordinary state of consciousness.

What is needed is the clear voice of people who have no stake in disguising the truth. The
young must be taught to distinguish between psychedelics, which hold out the promise of
religious experience and of self-transcendence, and destructive drugs like cocaine,
amphetamines, heroin, crack. They must be taught to respect the psychedelics and to be
ready spiritually and psychologically before they attempt to take them.

When I started taking LSD, I just saw that the academic thing was more or less a socio-
political game more than a true learning experience, in that the things that I really felt I
was learning were when I was just purely being or purely experiencing something and not
trying to read it from a stilted textbook or hearing it from some superintellectual
professor.

When we set out to study consciousness and such elusive altered states as ecstasy, there is
the observer’s “subject matter” and there is the subject’s “reality” and usually these have
no relation. The psychiatrist may see psychosis, while the subject may be experiencing
hedonic ecstasy. The outside observer has an entirely different view from the
experiencing person. (The psychiatrist must be experienced with LSD or it’s a joke.)

While samples of psychedelic drugs of doubtful quality are available in the streets and on
college campuses, it is nearly impossible for a serious researcher to get a license for
scientific investigation of their effects. As a result of this, professionals are in a very
paradoxical situation: they are expected to give expert help in an area in which they are
not allowed to conduct research and generate new scientific information.

You have to go out of your mind to use your head. You have to pass beyond everything
you have learned in order to become acquainted with the new areas of consciousness.
Ignorance of this fact is the veil which shuts man within the narrow confines of his
acquired, artificial concepts of “reality” and prevents him from coming to know his own
true nature.

Forgotten in the later hysteria of the 1960’s was the exquisite design of the early Harvard
experiments. Rarely in the short history of psychology was such elegant, complex,
socially influential research conducted! At the same time that the CIA was furtively
dosing unwitting Harvard students for the purposes of control and destruction, we were
operating with the books wide open. No secrets. Total collaboration. (That was Timothy
Leary.)

George used to tell me about the visions and insights and perceptual fireworks. I used to
listen politely but not caring. I had no concepts, no mental hooks on which to hang his
words and no intuitive electricity to get turned-on. Like every educated savage, I
automatically discredited anything that I didn’t understand. Now it was different. The
visionary flash had come. (That was Timothy Leary looking back to before he tried
psychedelics.)

Harvard dismissed Timothy Leary without a hearing even though his contracts had
several more months to run. There had been no effective protest by the Harvard faculty
against this gross abuse of the principles of academic freedom. Previously I had put
professors on a kind of pedestal, but my views were now gradually changing. I realized
that the average university professor, like most human beings, is both sheep-minded and
chicken-hearted.

Leary the scientist, Alpert the intellectual and later the mystic, Metzner the scholar: what
held these three together was their shared faith in the power of the transcendent
experience to remove the blinders that keep us at odds with each other. A world where all
humans have access to the mystical experience would be a world transformed, they
believed. Everyone would then directly see what Jesus, Buddha, Moses and Mohammed
preached.

Psychiatrists should listen to what their patients say about drug experiences; patients
often know more about the workings of the unconscious mind from direct experience
than doctors do from their intellects. Teachers should try to learn from students who
know more about the subject than they do. In these ways, we will come to have better
information than what we now get from experts who do not know what they are talking
about.

Systematic study of non-ordinary states has shown me, beyond any doubt, that the
traditional understanding of the human personality, limited to postnatal biography and to
the Freudian individual unconscious, is painfully narrow and superficial. To account for
all the extraordinary new observations, it became necessary to create a radically
expanded model of the human psyche and a new way of thinking about mental health and
disease.

The Harvard Psychedelic Project was surrounded by a charged field of excitement,
glamour, adventure, enthusiasm, mystery, hyperbole, passion, controversy. Those who
were running the show were charismatic, distinguished, articulate and colorful. Whilst the
majority of the Harvard faculty was content to observe the world, our message was
revolutionary: if things are not right, then let’s change them. (That was Michael
Hollingshead.)

A psychedelic system of education would result in a true utopia.
Acid taught us the universe inside our mind.
Alan Watts is the smiling scholar of the acid age. (Timothy Leary said that.)
As aids to learning about being, psychedelics are of great potential value.
Consciousness must be studied from within.
Consciousness Studies deserve it own place in the academic world.
Each person has to learn to decode their own internal road map.
Education prepares you for the future instead of showing you how to be alive now.
I am grateful to have been able to learn that I am capable of such experiences.
If you want to be a machine, go to college.
In school, we never go to know things, we only go to know words.
It’s your trained mind which prevents you from learning.
Learn how to guide high-flying internal aircraft.
LSD offers vast possibilities for accelerated learning and scientific-scholarly research.
Mystical teachings all agree that the source of wisdom is within.
One can’t speak these teachings, one can only BE them.
One subject of Janiger claimed that a single acid trip was equal to four years in art school.
Only paradise could teach such wisdom.
Our educational process is an especially dangerous narcotic.
Our education should surely teach us how to search for meaning.
Psychedelic experiences create an opportunity to grow and to learn.
Stars teach us lessons nightly, speaking both of Beauty and Truth.
Studying consciousness is the oldest subject matter of all.
The entire weight of American education is engineered to crush the religious impulse.
The experience is one of accelerated un-learning and re-learning.
The people who had trouble in school were usually more intelligent, so they got bored.
The psychedelic experience can release learning blocks.
The university is an institution for consciousness contraction.
The university is the establishment’s apparatus for consciousness contractors.
The ways in which we ordinarily interpret the reports of our senses are learned.
There are going to be new social forms. There are going to be new methods of education.
These drugs hold a potential of evolution and education.
We learn to identify ourselves with a conventional view of “myself”.
We spend a good deal more on drink and smoke than we spend on education.
When we teach kids in school, we teach them not to learn.
Why should I go back to school and interrupt my education?
You can learn how to alter your brain function to experience in novel ways.
You learn to appreciate the true value of things.
You’re going to learn little of value and meaning in high school and college.

He sees that his ego is his persona or social role, a somewhat arbitrary selection of
experiences with which he has been taught to identify himself.

He said that he did not “really think it possible to study and understand modern
philosophy without at least having tried a psychedelic.”

I realized that the mind and the senses that provide inputs to the mind were all grossly
underutilized faculties in the study of the world around us.

I suddenly understood the message of so many spiritual teachers that the only revolution
that can work is the inner transformation of every human being.

I was learning that all things are one, and all things are a part, an essential part, of my
being.

It began to dawn on me that the origins of some philosophical and religious ideas might
be better understood by a scholar who had ingested and experienced the psychedelics.

The knowledge that was suddenly revealed to me under LSD seemed to be remembered
rather than learned.

Time distortion enabled him to compress a great deal of learning into a short period of
time.

I learned a different way to be. I learned what awe, delight, blessedness, and serenity
were, and recognized them as more than platitudes. I felt as if the good news was being
whispered to me. I was in on a big secret. I was beginning to see what it was all about.

I learned that the brain is an underutilized computer, that normal consciousness is one
drop in an ocean of intelligence, that consciousness and intelligence can be systematically
expanded, that the brain can be reprogrammed.

It seems as if the “new” information,” the bombardment of the senses by unfamiliar
signals, had really taught the body something, on a preverbal level; something which
persuaded it that old fears and tensions were no longer necessary.

I had, on that day, entered William Blake’s Palace of Wisdom. He had been there, too.
And, I was to learn later, so had many others. And so can you. It’s our birthright. We are
all supposed to dwell in the mansion at the top of the hill. It’s our ultimate destiny. It’s
cosmic consciousness. Nirvana. Satori.

I learned that I am more—so much more than this body that walks the earth. I learned
that I’m still me, even without a name, a family, an identity, or a body. I almost think that
the body is a prison that holds my consciousness inside narrow limits, to make it possible
to function on earth. Once I was out of it, the limitless was my home.

I was amazed and intrigued. I’d learned first-hand how limited our everyday notions of
consciousness are. I knew that the experience had touched something very deep in me. I
recognized a level of reality in the experience that could not be ignored. I wanted to know
more and was willing to take the risk.

My understanding of mystical teachings, both Eastern and Western, Hindu, Buddhist,
Christian, and Sufi alike, took on a quantum leap. I became aware of the transcendental
unity at the core of all great religions, and understood for the first time the meaning of
esoteric states.

I thought about the things I had studied in religion, and about how much more of it
seemed to make sense now. I had somehow touched what Jesus, Buddha, and others had
been talking about. Formerly confusing phrases out of various scriptures came to me and
each seemed perfectly beautifully clear. I became aware of a harmony and wholeness to
life that had previously eluded me. Disconnectedness was very clearly illusory….

I was struck by the thought that since I’d first seen Julia, I’d felt that I’d known her for a
long time. That sounds trite, but what can I say? How else do you describe that feeling? I
simply felt that I’d known her for a long time. I told her so. “You HAVE known me for a
long time,” she replied. “But it was a long time ago”. “In school?” trying to remember.
She laughed and put her cheek against my arm. “In a kind of school,” she said softly.

My soul, I learned, is most “into” joy and beauty, i.e., experiences of joy and beauty most
occupied me on acid. Joy and beauty do not dominate my awareness in general—and
never with a comparable intensity—so I treasure these experiences on the grounds of
their rarity alone. They were also profoundly educational. I think I understand the human
race a little better.

Now I could hear, as if for the first time, the depth of the wisdom in their teachings and in
the mystical doctrines of all ages and all cultures. As I sought for words to express my
own ineffable experience I gained a new appreciation for those individuals who had
attempted to communicate their own insights in writing or art. I also became interested in
understanding intuitive ways of knowing.

During the experience, I felt I understood what mystics throughout the ages have claimed
to be the universal truth of existence. I had an academic background in philosophy and
comparative religion, but I realized that mystical teachings had now taken on an added
dimension. My perception seemed to have shifted from a flat, two-dimensional
intellectual understanding of the literature, to a three-dimensional sense of immersion in
the mystical reality.

The perennial philosophy and the esoteric teachings of all time suddenly made sense. I
understood why spiritual seekers were instructed to look within, and the unconscious was
revealed to be not just a useful concept, but an infinite reservoir of creative potential. I
felt I had been afforded a glimpse into the nature of reality and the human potential
within that reality, together with a direct experience of being myself, free of illusory
identifications and constrictions of consciousness.

My book-learning expectations had been replaced by the real thing.

My intellect was seriously tweaked. I learned how much I didn’t know.

a fresh look that would teach us to tap the enormous reservoir of potentialities buried
beneath the threshold of awareness

an experience, nonverbal in character which is simply inaccessible to the purely literary
and scholarly approach

an opening of intrinsic spiritual areas in the human mind that are independent of the
individual’s racial, cultural and educational background

at Harvard, scientific enthusiasm, scholarly fever, experimental dedication (Timothy
Leary’s psychedelic research)

energy, fun, religious revelation, sexual enhancement, aesthetic kick, ecstasy, accelerated
learning

gain an understanding of the origin of many disorders and learn how to diagnose and heal
them

Huxley’s Brave New World—the gap between technology and wisdom, the failure of
education to create a whole man

new chemical instruments for accelerated consciousness, enhancing memory and
speeding up learning

promises new and exciting possibilities for the study and understanding of human history
and culture

that branch of metaphysics termed ontology or the metaphysics of Being: the study of
life’s essential nature

that childlike wisdom which must be learned again before one may enter the kingdom of
heaven

the enormous potential importance of psychedelic research for many scholarly and
scientific disciplines

the new relationship between religion and science that seems to be emerging from the
study of unusual states of consciousness

the very great importance of the eidetic images and the need to study them (the images
seen with the eyes closed)

to dedicate oneself wholly to the true inner universe, the study of one’s own nervous
system, after one has turned on with LSD

to learn how to use psychedelic drugs to create a heaven on earth, to use drugs
intelligently

to throb in harmony with the energies radiating on the sense organs the mark of a sage,
holy man, a radiant teacher

a body so keenly aware that its whole surface and every sense is an erogenous zone,
restoring, too, the sensation of oneness with the external world which we have forgotten
in learning to adopt to our social roles

a legacy of intensely generous insight and teaching whose full value will not be fully
understood nor valued until several years after the millennium (That was Caroline W.
Casey talking about Timothy Leary.)

freedom from the learned cultural mind, the freedom to expand one’s consciousness
beyond artificial cultural knowledge, to move from constant preoccupation with the
verbal game, the social games, the game of self, to the joyous unity of what exists beyond

the deliberately inculcated conservatism of the psychiatric-medical mind, brainwashed
through many years of arduous academic training to perceive any change in functioning
as pathological

the psychological implications of the psychedelic experience, the accelerated personality
change, the rapid learning, the sudden life changes so regularly reported by psychedelic
researchers

to go outside routine modes of experiencing, beyond learned or familiar concepts so that
one was no longer aware of oneself as a social figure, but as another entity, outside
parochial worlds of experience

a beneficial, educational and growth-enhancing experience
a Ph. D. robot
a psychological educational tool
accelerated learning by the use of expanded consciousness
accelerated personality change, rapid learning, sudden life changes
an exciting adventure, filled with discovery and new learning
an opportunity to experience oneself and the world in a new way—and to learn from it
an unforgettable delight and an educational influence
beyond the imprinted, learned structure
consciousness education
ecstatic, insightful and educational
enhancing learning and creativity
learning how to use your head and body
LSD a “learning tool”
new chemicals that exhilarate learning, expand consciousness and enhance memory
one of the richest learning and humanizing experiences life offers
our unconscious mind and the inner teachings that come through it
psychedelic drugs as learning devices
self-education on the nonverbal level
taught me experientially what awe is
the ability of LSD to act as an educational implement
the creativity and power of the brain freed from its learned structures
the educational and occupational assembly lines
the educational potential of psychedelics
the educational value of psychedelics when used intelligently
the educational value of the psychedelic experience
the existing vacuum in the study of consciousness
the extraordinary value of LSD for the education of psychiatrists and psychologists
the healing-educational possibilities of psychedelics
the learning experience when high
the most exciting educational experience of your life
the most profound educational experience in my life
the spiritual dimension sneered at in academic circles
the study of consciousness which Leary calls religion
the value of these drugs as superlative means for the study of religious experience
to expand consciousness beyond the learned mind
to fashion new educational methods based on the imprinting capacities of the mind
to learn how to explore the rooms of his own consciousness
to learn the full potentials of the human nervous system