 43. Drugs, Social |
Equally as curious as peyote are the sacred mushrooms which produce visions, as reported by R. Gordon Wasson and his wife. Mr. Wasson, a vice-president of J. P. Morgan and Company, and his late wife, Valentina P. Wasson, M.D., had been studying mushrooms for more than thirty years. In 1955 in a Mexican Indian village Mr. Wasson and a friend took part in a religious ceremony which involved eating "sacred mushrooms." Later his wife and daughter also ate similar mushrooms. All of them experienced unusual visions. Mr. Wasson described his experiences of vivid harmonious colors, and then scenes more vivid than anything ever seen with his own eyes. The daughter reviewed her childhood in detail. Mrs. Wasson visited the court of Louis XV and identified herself and her sister with a tiny pair of elegant miniature china figures who were dancing to Mozart's music. Later a tribal shaman, or medicine man, after eating mushrooms described what the Wassons confirmed to be an accurate clairvoyant vision of their son's actions in New York City.
Mr. Wasson reports that mushrooms have a strange history which is entwined with legend and the supernatural. The Dyaks of Borneo, the natives of New Guinea, the peoples of China and India, as well as the Indians of Mexico and Central America used mushrooms in religious ceremonies. As Wasson puts it, "In man's evolutionary past, there must have come a moment in time when he discovered the secret of hallucinatory mushrooms. Their effect on him, as I see it, could only have been profound, a detonator to new ideas. For mushrooms revealed to him worlds beyond the horizon known to him in space and time, even worlds on a different plane of being, a heaven and perhaps a hell."
More details on the mushroom as a stimulant to psychic sensitivity are presented in a book by Andrija Puharich, M.D., The Sacred Mushroom. Dr. Puharich, noted investigator of psychic phenomena, reports on his work with a young sensitive, Harry Sonte, who while in infrequent trance states wrote Egyptian hieroglyphics describing a mushroom cult in ancient Egypt. The amanita muscaria, the species of mushroom used in Egypt, was found in Maine near Dr. Puharich's laboratory. He gave the mushroom to another sensitive, Peter Hurkos, the Dutch psychic. The results are described in Peter's own words:
"Andrija, I have seen things which I don't believe I could ever describe to you in a million years. I was not here in this room. I don't know where I was, but I was in some far-off place of indescribable beauty. The colors, the forms are beyond description." Peter added that he didn't want to take the mushrooms very often for he might not want to come back.
Fortunately, Dr. Puharich's medical knowledge of the drugs contained in the mushroom enabled him to supervise the experiments without serious danger to the participants. An overdose of the amanita muscaria might make it impossible for a person to return to consciousness.
One of the most powerful and widely used of the hallucinogenic drugs is LSD. It was discovered in 1943 by Dr. A. Hoffman in a Swiss laboratory. Hundreds of scientific papers have been written on experiments with is, some dealing with hospital treatment of insanity, others with the treatment of alcoholism, and still others with depth psychotherapy. Effort has been made to keep the distribution of LSD under medical supervision. In 1962 experiments to measure the depth of religious experience under the drug were made the basis for a Ph.D. thesis at Harvard.
Robert S. Davidson, Ph.D., a clinical psychologist who wrote the introduction and appendix to Exploring Inner Space by Jane Dunlap, says of LSD, "The drug does have the power to expand consciousness and to make one aware of a fundamental unity of all life processes."
