for Altered States of Consciousness in Antioch Portfolio (1976)

Linked from Psychedelics

1. Describe the learning setting. Include where it took place, the role of other persons who were involved with you, and any materials and methods employed which assisted your learning.

About March of 1965 I was getting tired of the academic grind at Stanford, and there were rumors going around the student union that LSD was being administered at the VA Hospital, and you could get paid $5 for taking it. I never found out if it was LSD or not. I experienced extreme elation for a day or two and then depression for a day or two. There was no medical follow-up.

About the same time I tried marijuana for the first time and had some pleasant aesthetic and emotional experiences. During the next quarter I smoked a lot of marijuana, passed only one course, and started a small rock band. Then later in the year a friend who was working with Fritz Perls, recording his workshops for him, offered to take me to Big Sur and introduce me to LSD. That was to be the first of about 31 sessions. These took place primarily in the San Francisco Bay Area, with one in Los Angeles in 1968, and two in Tennessee in 1971.

Other people involved included friends and members of my various bands and communes over that time. Some of the formats included 1) A Fritz Perls dream seminar, 2) small parties and gatherings, 3) the Acid Test happenings in 1965, 4) watching and performing at rock dances, 5) one to one situations with women, and 6) meetings at the communal farm in Tennessee.

2. Describe your participation and responsibilities in this setting.

My participation and responsibilities are described under the 31 individual sessions in the addendum to this activity.

3. Describe new skills and/or knowledge derived from this learning activity which contribute to your Degree Plan.

I will make a distinction between the learning acquired in the experience itself and the learning acquired in doing this write-up.

The first session, at Big Sur in 1965, contained the most important experiential learning of the entire series. In gazing at the sea I experienced for the first time what I shall call “The Watcher Disappears.” (I think there is a parallel between this and what is called in Zen “Body and Mind Fallen Away.”) When I told my friend that I had become one with the sea and thereby with all existence, it was already too late. The watcher had reappeared. But I was very much struck by the sense that for the first time in my life there was no observer standing between me and the perception. In directly contacting the world as presented, I felt contact with this specific reality as contact with all reality.

This unitive first experience may be somewhat unusual, I find from reading the literature and talking with my evaluator, who wrote her master’s thesis utilizing the LSD literature. It is usually seen as a sign of a healthy personality, having worked through psychodynamic layers which would otherwise interfere with such an experience. I believe that this unitive experience in my first session was partially determined by the fact that I had been preparing myself by reading Watts, Leary, and Huxley on the religious and cosmic effects of psychedelics.

My degree plan defines the goal of this searching through alternate life styles in terms of communal living. I believe that in the S/K headings of the individual descriptions I have addressed myself to this aspect of the sessions. But I have found that in doing this write-up a whole new level of learning has taken place. These sessions were primarily undertaken to break out of a world-view that was overly intellectual and symbolized. Now in writing about them, and talking about them with my evaluator, I have had to bring in an intellectual component to what had been purely emotive experiences. In this way I have begun to balance a previously one-sided area of my personality. This reassessment from a more intelligent perspective is in addition to the original learning. See the S/K section of the individual sessions for a running account of the learning. This running account is primarily based on the experiences themselves, although there has been from four to ten years to reassess what the learning actually was.

4. Self-Assessment: Evaluate this learning activity. Mention such things as the quality of the experience itself and its personal significance to you.

To most people the consensual definition of selfhood is what they experience as ultimate unquestionable reality. LSD was for thousands in my generation the first glimpse of a mode of experiencing in which the self is not only not the center of the universe, but does not even exist, except as a fiction. This perception is usually associated with a sense of more direct apprehension of reality, not limited by any conceptual screens, including that of the self or ego. To me this has been the primary significance of all this searching. The wholeness that I experienced in my first trip has never been surpassed, only deepened and stabilized as a viewpoint from which to approach life. The first wave of attempting to “turn on the world,” and force everybody to have the vision we had, finally polarized society too much. The assumption of the next task, in which I am still involved, then followed. This was to honor the experience by seeking to make it a part of one’s life without the use of drugs. Meditation became the chief tool, and the differences between these two ways have characterized the difference between the sixties and the seventies in this country. Only now, after three years of meditation, am I beginning to feel the calm assurance of that first insight pervading even the most structured corners of my life. But this has been through meditative discipline, not through repeated use of psychedelics. It has taken a long time to learn the lesson that Don Juan teaches in “Journey to Ixtlan,” that the drugs were not the message, they are simply a tool which makes the message visible for the first time. For me a major component of the personal significance of this experience has been the understanding that it is not enough just to have a powerful flash to build a self and a community. It also takes a lot of hard work, and most of this work must be done on oneself.

Some of this work could have been done if these sessions had been supervised rather than unsupervised. As it was I acted out on the visions and was finally frustrated. Reading Grof’s “Realms of the Human Unconscious” I can see that some of these years of reality-testing could have been saved if a competent guide to the fantastic inner realms unlocked by LSD had been available. That’s what brought me to Stephen, and Stephen pointed me to Zen, which stabilized me sufficiently that I came to Antioch and began to explore consciously the content of these unsupervised experiences.

5. Describe the methods of evaluation and feedback used during the learning experience itself.

Most of my feedback came from contemporaries or self-styled teachers who were tripping with me, especially Fritz Perls, Dick Alpert, Ken Kesey, the Anonymous Artists of America, members of my various bands, girls that I tripped with, and people on the Farm. I have been encouraged to look further into these experiences through discussions with Mary M. Phillips, my evaluator, who wrote her masters thesis at USC utilizing the LSD research literature.

6. Describe the material products of this learning experience, if any.

None.

7. List the forms of testimony and evaluation that you will include in your portfolio as demonstrable evidence of learning. Please attach these.

Evaluation by Mary M. Phillips MS, MFC.