"There is more to reality than meets a normal eye." "Behind the curtain of everyday consciousness is hidden another unutterably strange mental universe." "It's the realm of mystical experience." "And those who've been there describe the visit as the most significant event of their lives." "Until recent times that was a world known only to holy men, to saints, or perhaps to the insane." "Then a generation ago this drug, LSD, escaped from the laboratory, and was consumed by millions of young people." "To some it's a doorway to the mystical universe, chemical ecstasy, enlightenment in a bottle." "To others it's a dangerous and subversive poison." "The drug challenges our very conception of reality and its turbulent history raises sharp questions about the dividing line between private experience and public policy people who would benefit most of all are professors." "I think it can be extremely good for almost anybody with fixed ideas, with a great certainty about what's what to take this thing." "LSD is the most dangerous drug that we have in the world today." "Acid is good for you, its goals" "If you can reach a firm verdict about the right to use this fascinating, beneficent but dangerous drug, purely from personal experience, I envy you." "The remarkable effects of LSD were discovered by accident in Switzerland during the second World War." "Albert Hofmann was then a young chemist working in the laboratories of Sandoz, a large pharmaceutical company." "The program I was involved was to study the active principals of medicinal plants." "And one of these medical plants we were studying was ergot." "Ergot is a fungus that grows on corn." "For centuries midwifes have used it to stimulate the uterus in child birth." "At Sandoz, Hofmann was experimenting with ergot trying to refine its effect." "On the 16th of April 1943 he was in his laboratory preparing a fresh batch of a compound he'd first synthesized five years before." "It was lysergic acid diethylamide, LSD." "At the end of the synthesis I got in a very strange psychic situation." "A kind of dream-world appeared." "Quite a... a feeling of a... of a oneness with the world." "A very strange experience which reminded me to some experience I had in childhood." "Sometimes when I was in nature, in the forest, in the wood that I had some kind of I would say mystical experiences." "The feeling of oneness, to be one with nature." "The feeling to see now the true aspect of nature." "The "beautience" and which filled me with happiness." "Could it be that his present dream-like state was in some way connected with the crystals of LSD that Albert Hofmann was purifying that afternoon?" "He'd certainly not eaten any but his fingers might possibly have brushed against a few traces of the compound." "If so then LSD was a remarkably potent drug." "He decided to experiment on himself." "Being cautious man and I thought I would start with the smallest smallest quantity which even it could have any effect" "Namely I started with 0.25 mg and at intention then to increase dosage get then to see that something would happen." "But this very small dose, the first dose of my experiments I've planned, was very very strong." "Feeling increasingly unwell, Hofmann was obliged to return home." "It was war time, he went by bicycle." "As the journey progressed, the external world began to look stranger and stranger." "By the time he reached home, normal reality had disintegrated." "When I entered this room I was really astonished how this room had changed!" "The room itself and the objects in this room had quite a different form, different color, different meaning." "And the objects like this chair had... was..." "like if he was a living object." "It became moving from inside." "That was so unusual that I really got afraid that I had become insane." "A kind next-door neighbour brought milk as an antidot." "das ich fantastich milch, doktor" "She too was malevolently transformed." "The bizarre and terrifying hallucinations continued all evening." "At times Hofmann felt that he was dead and had arrived in hell." "But, at last, six hours after taking the drug he felt himself returning to the normal world." "Two days later, now fully recovered, Hofmann reported his discovery to the head of the laboratory." "One teaspoon of this new drug, LSD, could render 50,000 people temporarily insane." "I, myself, and also of course medical department here realized immediately that was very important agent which could be useful in psychiatry and in research." "Sandoz distributed LSD to psychiatric hospitals as an experimental drug called "Delysid"." "No one really knew what medical use LSD might have, but this extraordinary substance deserved further study." "Research soon showed that LSD closely resembles powerful natural chemicals in the brain used to exchange messages between nerve cells." "The drug acts like a false signal, disrupting the normal flow of information." "One specific effect is to disable the region of the brain that filters information arriving from the senses." "A flood of signals reaches consciousness and is experienced as an overwhelming deluge of sensation." "The impact on the mind is profound." "It's as if reality was suddenly uncensored, revealing a world exquisitly or horrificly transformed." "All the senses are affected." "Colors particularly are brighter and more vivid." "Sound, too, is strangely transformed." "Sights are smelled, and sounds are seen." "Motion becomes a web of frozen moments." "And often the world is strewn with bizarre distortions of reality." "But hallucinations and pretty colors are only part of the story." "LSD also affects the subconscious mind." "In the early 1950's, psychiatrists began to investigate this aspect of the drug." "All over the world scientific papers appeared reporting the use of LSD in the treatment of psychiatric patients." "The leading center was Powick Hospital in England." "Here in a purpose-built facility, known as the LSD Block, hundreds of mentally ill people were treated with LSD." "The consultant psychiatrist who pioneered this work was Ronald Sandison." "For a decade he ran the Powick unit." "Today the LSD block has been converted into offices." "Doctor Sandison returns there to recall the past:" "This is where we worked thirty years ago?" "Yes it's, I don't quite remember it as being this sort of shape," "I remember something different; an entrance from the corridor." "We meet with Dr. John Whitelaw, a colleague from the LSD days." "This, remember, was a trolley area where the nursing staff used to set up the LSD ampules." "They'd draw the LSD up with a syringe, and you know we had those little bits they poured it into distilled bottles, um, uh, added to it." "They just used to stand where you are..." "Most people noticed that the first effects came on after about twenty minutes, and somewhere in the first hour, they would retire to their own particular room which had been allocated to them." "And looked at from the outside you might think there was nothing going on because LSD doesn't have a marked effect on behavior, most of the effects are seen internal mental processes." "– we used to have a little..." "um..." "little bed in the uh... – single bed..." "The point of giving patients LSD was to release suppressed memories and mental conflicts, that psychoanalysts believe are the root cause of mental illness." "LSD was perhaps a key to unlock the unconscious mind." "There's a curious kind of artifact in the early stages of LSD that people often have a great tendency to laugh and that seems to be a sort of side effect..." "And..." "I expressed myself when I took LSD." "I wasn't quite sure...you know, it wasn't funny..." "I wasn't laughing at anything but I just had those, those, those things." "So that, sort of, sets a scene for experiencing greater emotional intensity." "But with our patients there was very often a great deal of fear, a great deal of crying, sobbing" "And then of course one would want to move in and try and get the patient to relate that to what they were actually experiencing in themselves." "Given the reputation LSD has today it's natural to wonder whether any patients were harmed by the drug." "We don't believe that anybody had a long term psychosis." "I know certain cases have been reported from other parts of the world." "But we examine our consciences pretty carefully in that respect." "And I don't believe anybody was permanently damaged." "Extraordinary, as it now seems, thousands of people were given LSD in psychiatric hospitals during the 50's." "According to several independent studies there were surprisingly few bad side effects." "And a second group began to experiment with hallucinogenic drugs around this time." "They were artists and intellectuals." "And their inspiration came from the British writer Aldous Huxley." "Huxley was fascinated by mystical experience and believed that a drug called mescaline might be a means to achieve it." "Mescaline is found in a cactus called peyote used by the Huichol indians in Mexico." "They regard peyote as a sacrament." "And they've consumed it in religious ceremonies for centuries." "Subjectively the effects of mescaline are identical to those of LSD." "The drug precipitates a charged and overwhelming journey of the soul." "In 1953, Aldous Huxley sent an invitation to a British psychiatrist who had suggested a link between the effects of mescaline and the symptoms of schizophrenia." "He'd asked me, um, down there for many reasons but one of them was that he hoped that I'd give him mescaline." "He'd been cleared by his doctor." "This seemed to be one way out on my part." "I was disconcerted that he'd bought a grey autograph." "And so I had no way out really." "And so as I... um, on las--, on second last day of my visit," "I stood staring at the mescaline which has a strange oily swell, and I wondered if I would be remembered: this is a man who'd gone to California and driven Aldous Huxley mad." "And I thought it'd really be a rather invidious reputation." "Thus it came about, one bright May morning," "I swallowed four-tenths of a gram of mescaline dissolved in half a glass of water and sat down to wait for the results." "After a while I became aware of a slow dance of golden lights." "I was looking intently at a small vase of flowers." "My eyes traveled from the rose to the carnation, to the smooth scrolls of sentient amethyst which was the iris." "I was seeing what Adam had seen on the morning of his creation the miracle, moment by moment, of naked existence." "I looked down by chance, and went on passionately staring by choice, at my own crossed legs." "Those folds in the trousers... what a labyrinth of endlessly significant complexity!" "This is how one ought to see, how things really are!" "Now someone produced a phonograph and put a recording on the turntable." "These voices were a kind of bridge back to the human world" "The uneven phrases of the madrigals pursued their course, never sticking to the same key for two bars together." "And suddenly I had an inkling of what it must be like to be mad." "I found myself on the brink of panic, disintegrating under pressure of a reality greater than a mind accustomed to the cozy world of symbols could possibly bear." "None too soon I began to return to that reassuring but profoundly unsatisfactory state known as "being in one's right mind"." "The man who comes back through the door in the Wall will never be quite the same as the man who went out." "The world he saw that May morning in 1953 profoundly impressed Huxley." "A name was required for a substance that could provoke such revelatory experience." "Aldous suggested "phanerothyme"." "Phanero - "to reveal" and Thymos – "the soul"." "And he then wrote this little rhyme:" ""To make this mundane world sublime Take half a gram of phanerothyme."" "And I thought this is wonderful word but rather too difficult for most people." "It was a Huxley word." "So I wrote back to him, having looked up in a dictionary the word "psyche" of course was available and so was "deloun" – "to reveal" and about half a dozen others." "But I fixed on psychedelic." "And wrote back:" "To fall in hell or soar angelic You'll need a pinch of psychedelic." "In your book about mescaline recently you talked of a valuable state of heightened perception, being induced by... by drugs, by proper drugs." "Do you think imaginative of writers would benefit by that?" "Well I think the people who would benefit most of all are professors." "And this I think it would be extremely good for almost anybody with fixed ideas, with a great certainty about what's what, to take this thing and to realize that the world he's constructed is by no means the only world." "That there are these extraordinary other types of Universe which we may inhabit, and which... we should be very grateful for inhabiting I think." "Not everyone shared Huxley's enthusiasm." "The British writer Arthur Koestler responded in an essay with a parable." "He likened consumers of psychedelic drugs with those who drive to the top of a mountain instead of climbing it step by step." "The view, he concluded, may be identical but the vision of the climber is different from that of the motorist." "Such criticisms, however, only encouraged interest in Huxley's account of his mescaline experiments." "And others began to follow in his footsteps." "Well then, here I am in my home, and before I take the drug, doctor Osmond's got one or two quite unrehearsed questions " "I have no idea what they are - to put to me." " All right Christopher?" " Carry on." "Could you tell me the date today please?" "– The date?" "– Yes." "It was Friday, the..." "2nd of December." " In 1955, Christopher Mayhew, M.P. and TV presenter" " Right." "I want you to repeat this sentence after me." "Now listen carefully:" " took mescaline under the supervision of Humphry Osmond." " "To be rich and prosperous, a nation must have a safe secure supply of wood."" " The BBC filmed the experiment." "This is the first time it's been shown." " "To be rich and prosperous, a nation must have a safe secure supply of wood."" ""To be rich and prosperous, a nation must have a safe secure supply of wood."" "After initial psychological tests the experiment began at noon." "Shall we go right ahead then?" "– Oh I'll take it – Yes, there she is." "Well, I'm feeling perfectly fit at the moment, as sane as I ever am, and I'll take the drug now." "An hour and a half later there were definite effects." "Could you perhaps tell us any particular color which you think...?" "Yes." "There's this color just behind camera." "This color of a... damn, I warned you, Humphry, that... on colors my vocabulary's bad." "Are you talking about the reddish curtain behind camera?" "Yes, and in fact it has the most extraordinary gradations of mauve." "And uh... and uh... and lights..." "Sorry, this just my own poverty of vocabulary." "I can't describe it." "Would it surprise you if I said it looked to me a rather dullish red curtain which has..." "Actually I'd be amused, Humphry, yes." "Now who would you feel in the situation was..." "whose judgment would you feel sounder?" "Ah, now your asking me..." "this is the sixty four dollar question." "Whether I'm seeing the curtain more nearly as it is or whether" "I'm intoxicated and seeing pink elephants." "Which is of course, the thing that fascinates me about it." "Well, all I can say is it's still the sixty four dollar question." "I'm looking very hard now." "Beyond the camera." "Today, elevated to the House of Lords, Christopher Mayhew watches the film with Humphry Osmond." "...and I see that... the sentence I..." "meant to say, can't be said." "I think this is the most interesting that I've ever done." "And I say that after thirty years in which the whole ghastly business, you know, is being depretiated, when drugs are being abused, when this is our major social problem." "I mean I do know all that, and I hope and pray it never helped anybody to experiment with drugs." "Nevertheless, the actual experience seems to me to have been profoundly interesting and thought provoking." "The time is now just on fourteen hundred." "And in the last half hour or so Christopher has been preoccupied to a very great extent with time." "We had numerous discussions on this." "In the interval he tried to instruct me as to how to work his recording machine." "And unfortunately we were quite unable to work it." "He has also been listening to a certain amount of music." "Now I'm going to ask him once more to go over the ad hoc sentence as I did and also to take away seven from a hundred." "Now Christopher would you be prepared to do that for me please?" "Well, you've got me at what I would call my period of time when I'm capable of doing it." "All right." "Well I'll now repeat the sentence:" ""To be rich and prosperous, a nation must have a safe secure supply of wood."" ""To be rich and prosperous, a nation must have a safe secure supply of wood."" "I've got thee too." "Well done." "Now would you like to take away seven from a hundred again?" "Ninety three, eighty six, seventy nine, seventy two, sixty six, sixty..." "Ah, seventy two, whatever it is, sixty five, uh, fifty eight, fifty one, uh forty..." "I can see what I'm facing still, forty four, thirty seven, thirty, twenty three, twenty three..." "Now I'm off again Humphry." "In my period of time I'm off again for a long period, but you aren't noticing I've gone away at all." "Perhaps half a dozen times during the experiment," "I would be withdrawn from my surroundings and from myself, and have an experience, a state of euphoria, for a period of time that didn't end for me." "It didn't last for minutes or hours, but for months!" "I do try and assure you that from my point of view between the time that" "I, perhaps, begin this sentence and the time that I end it" "I shall have gone... a long time... something and uh..." "The psychiatrists afterwards and common sense they all say," ""This is nonsense; you couldn't have had these experiences, because there was no time as the film shows there is no time for you to have them in."" "And the psychiatrists would speak and I accept this, that I was simply showing the symptoms what they call "the disintegration of the ego"" "I accept that too." "At the same time they didn't have the experience." "And, when I look back even now after thirty years, when I remember that after experiment I remembered that afternoon... not as so many minutes spent in my drawing room interrupted by these strange excursions in time," "but as years and years of heavenly bliss interrupted by short periods in my drawing room." "When I recall it and when I recall various other symptoms," "I think the simplest explanation is that I had these experiences, that they were real, and that they took place outside time." "I am moving at this moment from one time into another time and back again." "And I'm..." "I'm not so conscious, I feel moving myself in space, but I'm extremely conscious... of moving in time." "Of things having no succession." "And that there be no absolute time, no absolute space." "It is simply what we impose on the outside world." "The BBC was worried." "Could the film be broadcast?" "Mayhew himself was all in favor." "But viewing the footage it was hard to judge the true significance of his experience." "Expert advise was called for, and a special committee of psychiatrists, philosophers and theologians assembled." "Amongst those shown the film was Cannon Basset from Cambridge University." "From a religious standpoint he felt Mayhew's mystical adventure had been obtained on the cheap." "The others agreed." "And the committee had no hesitation in reaching a verdict." "When asked by the BBC whether or not Mayhew's experience was valid." "The film was never shown." "I think that the experience was valid." "I think, for the reasons I've given that you can dismiss it as a dream-like hallucination, which lasted a fraction of a second, owing to the disintegration of my ego and so on." "Or you can say with me: it was a real experience which happened outside time." "And that is my view." "And that is... and for various, sort of associated, symptoms" "I would say that, on that occasion, by shortcut," "I did visit the world known to mystics and some mentally sick people." "And, therefore, to that extent, I'd say it is valid." "Huxley, too, was attacked by theologians." "The Roman Catholic scholar Arsey Zeina wrote an article dismissing "The Doors of Perception"." "He argued that wide differences in people's response to the drug cast doubt on individual claims to enlightenment." "So that he could write with authority, Zeina arranged to take a dose of mescaline himself." "Overcome by hysterical laughter, he found the experience to be spiritually empty." "And he concluded that Huxley's claims had no more credibility than the delusions of a lunatic." "Zeina maintained that the visions of the great Christian mystics were something entirely different." "Those who believe in the value of psychedelic drugs see no clear distinction." "I believe that the experiences one be, one has under LSD are very similar, even identical with mystical experiences." "There has been discussion along with scientists." "But if you compare the reports of mystics, of the saints, the text reports, with reports on people who had mystical experience under LSD, you cannot find any difference." "Can the mystical experience of saints really be duplicated by chemical means?" "Thirty years after Arsey Zeina raised the question, his successors at the University of Oxford are still debating it." "One of them is Richard Swinburne of Oriel college who is Nolloth Professor of the Philosophy of the Christian Religion." "Taking drugs to get into the presence of God is barging into the presence of God." "And if you just go and have an experience, you're simply not equipped to recognize the experience for what it is and to react to it in the right way." "So... uh for that reason, no, I wouldn't take drugs." "There's so much more to religion, indeed almost everything more to religion, than having experience." "It's a dedication to a way of life which indeed can be very much reinforced by experience, but experience isn't the point of it." "Spiritual self-transcendence was hardly the ambition of another group interested in LSD and mescaline during the 1950's." "The American government were attracted to hallucinogenic drugs for less savory purposes." "Former intelligence officer and author John Marks has uncovered the CIA's secret research with LSD." "In the early 1950's, the CIA and American military intelligence were funding the lion's share of the research on LSD..." "You can give the intelligence agencies an awful lot of credit for starting a field of experimentation into these sorts of drugs." "Through the Freedom of Information Act" "Marks has obtained copies of classified CIA documents that reveal why the agency was interested in LSD." "The essence of the intelligence business is control." "This was an instrument or potential instrument for breaching people's control, for making them commit acts against their will." "In 1963, the CIA produced an internal report so sensitive, only one copy was made." "It concerned MKULTRA, a project that involved the testing of LSD on unwitting American citizens throughout the 1950's." "They wanted to know how a diplomate might react if given LSD at a party, how foreign leader might react if given LSD just before he was to get up and give a speech, how it might be used in interrogation of prisoners" "or something of that sort." "Given the fact that the CIA felt it had to do that kind of testing they had to find unwitting test participants, who, by definition, couldn't be told they were being given the drug." "And so what the CIA did is it looked for people who were..." "let's say on whose lifes they put less value than on the life of an American scientist or businessman or someone of that sort." "The CIA turned to people like drug addicts, prostitutes, prisoners, inmates in mental hospitals and used them as test subjects." "People who did not know what happened they believed that they became insane and... all kind of accidents happened following these kind of ingestions." "That was really a crime;" "to give people without their knowledge with agents is a crime." "The American military were also experimenting with LSD as a potential weapon." "Here is a group of normal soldiers responding correctly to a series of routine drill commands." "After receiving a small dose of LSD they are confused and undisciplined." "The idea was to spray the drug on enemy troops." "The dose, however, proved rather difficult to control." "And there was a different kind of fallout from these experiments." "One that took the Army and the CIA entirely by surprise." "Civilians exposed to LSD began to do strange things." "I believe with the advent of acid, we've discovered a new way to think." "And it had to do with piecing together new thoughts in your mind, that produced people like Bob Dylan and John Lennon and William S. Burroughs." "They were using new images together in a way that jarred the mind and produced images that were latent in our consciousness but were not being brought about by reading Vanity Fair or Woman's Home Companion." "In 1960, CIA funded researches of the Menlo Park hospital in California were paying students forty dollars a day to take LSD." "One volunteer was Ken Kesey." "Psychedelic promoter, author of "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest", and today, a farmer in Oregon." "You were in a little room pretty much by yourself" "There was a window with a wire grating on it and through that window you could look out and see a lot of people out there who undestood a whole lot more what you're going through than these doctors." "And my metaphor for the thing was it's as though these people had discovered a room." "And they thought there was something in that room of value to them, but they didn't wanna go in there." "So they hired students to go in there, and after enough of those students came out with" ""wow" look in their eye they said," ""Close up that room and don't let anybody else go back in that room."" "And that's when I found that my key fit the doctor's office, and decided that this was too important a business to leave in the hands of the government." "Awed, by the power of the drug, Kesey began to distribute it to his friends." "Across America LSD was leaking out of the laboratory." "I've always thought that this is one of those things that proves that God has a sense of humor." "That if Gabriel come up and says," ""Hey ah, chief, the Americans are really messed up down there." "We're gonna have to do something to straighten them out." "They got a nose dive karma going on."" "And God says, "Well, send them some of that stuff you've been working on... that... acid stuff." "And have the CIA distribute it."" "You can hear the celestial laughter when you realize it was the CIA that really "turned on" America." "In the early 1960's, twenty years after Albert Hofmann bicycled unsteadily home from the laboratory, his discovery was poised to kindle a revolution among the young of the west." "For the father of LSD, it was an alarming prospect." "I knew from the use of this kinds of substances in old cultures, the indians, there's a taboo on these substances." "They are only used in religious... setting... and in the hands of the shaman, not in the public." "And the shaman in our society is a psychiatrist and they should remain in the hands of the shaman." "And therefore I was really became immediately" "I become skeptical and anxious that bad things would... could happen and it happened indeed by the unwise and uncontrolled use of this substance." "Next week, in the second of these two programs" "Everyman follows the bizarre and sometimes tragic events as LSD exploded on to an unsuspecting world."