Written by Lee Schneider, founder of DocuCinema
Recently my son Dean was describing a movie he saw called “Altered States.” It came out in 1980 and starred William Hurt as a Harvard scientist who experiments with LSD while floating inside a darkened tank. As Dean talked through the movie I realized that he was telling the true story of John C. Lilly, a Harvard scientist who took LSD and developed the float tank. In a float tank you are suspended in water, in the dark, swimming in the soup of your consciousness. In that environment, Dr. Lilly said, he left his body and traveled to other universes. Going inside got him pretty far out there.
Lilly believed that dolphins were advanced beings, possibly sent from outer space or another dimension to help us. His colleagues at Harvard pretty much thought he was nuts. But, despite the controversy, certain truths of his discoveries in the dark may yet come to light.
When LSD was legal (yes, before 1966 it was legal to do scientific experiments with LSD) the elegant
movie actor Cary Grant, of all people, participated in LSD-assisted psychotherapy once a week. In his autobiography he wrote that relaxing conscious control allowed him to access dream states. “These dreams, since they appear to us in symbolic guise, are fantasies … inside every one of us, waiting to be released, aired and understood.”
Enter DMT, known as the “spirit molecule.” Dr. Rick Strassman believes that this powerful psychedelic is at the root of naturally occurring psychedelic states, including psychosis and mystical experiences. He believes that when pineal gland releases DMT at 49 days after conception the event marks the entrance of the spirit into a fetus.
But before I lose you here, let’s back up a little.
Whether we think of ourselves as the human agents of higher powers or just incredible biological machines, our waking moments are pretty much ruled by one thing: A quest for dopamine. This is a chemical associated with pleasure. When your endocrine system is pumping dopamine into the bloodstream … well, in the words of James Brown, “I FEEL GOOD! Uhhh!”
So why jump out of a plane to generate thrills (and dopamine) when you can pop a pill? Why endure a 10-day silent meditation when you can do a little DMT and feel some ecstasy right now? Is the link between pharmacology and enlightenment really that simple?
Well, there could be a link altered states and healing. Roslyn Dauber is making a documentary called “Annie’s Psilocybin Therapy.” It’s about a study at UCLA. Scientists are offering psilocybin (aka “magic mushrooms”) to terminally ill cancer patents to see if the drug helps them deal with their anxiety. Researchers at NYU and Johns Hopkins also have psilocybin studies. Roslyn tells me that the initial results of these studies have been very positive.
Can drugs like DMT or LSD or mescaline (found in peyote) be used in a controlled way to heal people? Got to get back to you on that. But I do know that I will try a sensory deprivation float tank in the near future and will let you know how it goes, provided that I return to the body that I am using now.
Jesse // Jul 2, 2009 at 5:29 pm
Hey, I did a paper in college about Dr. Lilly and his Dolphins on LSD experiments. Really an intriguing topic. This is the first time I have heard about this in many years. Interesting stuff.
Lee Schneider // Jul 2, 2009 at 6:19 pm
Hi, Jesse, thanks for commenting! I think Dr. Lilly would make for a great biopic documentary. His story covers so much terrain.
Bob Ellal // Jul 2, 2009 at 5:36 pm
Hi Lee,
I’ve never experimented with psychedelics, but I have been doing a pineal gland meditation for a number of years. It’s supposed to stimulate this gland, after which you will have heightened sensitivity to various types of phenomena. In monasteries, where they meditate all day, monks reputedly have developed powers of clairvoyance and healing after years of training. You are supposed to ignore these powers, as they are stumbling blocks on the path to enlightenment (the ego gets involved).
I have noticed, even with my relatively limited training, an increased sensitivity to psychic phenomena. I never had one psychic experience during the first forty-five years of my life. In the past few years since my divorce, I’ve rented a house and apartments and have run into some very angry ghosts. I really don’t know what to make of it; perhaps it’s the meditation, or perhaps I’d never lived in a haunted house before.
It would be nice I suppose to get the effects of meditation from a substance and skip all the work. But the training I’ve put in has given me the discipline to face down some tough situations–and you can’t get that from a pill.
Best regards,
Bob
Lee Schneider // Jul 2, 2009 at 6:21 pm
I’m inclined to agree – it’s the journey, not the destination. We learn so much getting there that we might feed robbed of an experience if we popped a pill and just arrived in an instant.
Ingrid Von Burg // Jul 2, 2009 at 9:46 pm
Steve Ross does a workshop called Ecstatic Breathing that supposedly is a natural way to come very close to the effects of LSD. It’s a rapid deep breathing exercise that I have only seen him lead. It’s fun, a little scary, and certainly worth trying
.
Lee Schneider // Jul 2, 2009 at 10:24 pm
Yes, worth checking out. Any time I’ve done breathing work in yoga it’s always been powerful. (Or at least makes me dizzy.)
Frank Rodriguez // Jul 3, 2009 at 7:32 am
Let’s not forget that the float tank provides an excellent means of accessing dream states while awake (theta brainwaves), as well as increased sensitivity, due to greatly reduced stress (i.e. distractions).
Jeff Schneider // Jul 3, 2009 at 8:15 am
Wow, this topic brings back memories. I can remember hours of debate back in college about the value (or not) of altered states and “higher levels of consciousness” on the human experience. Remember Andrew Weil’s “The Natural Mind?” His book was an attempt to legitimatize all of this, to prove it wasn’t just a bunch of kids fooling around with drugs.
Maybe the secret is with the dolphins. They’re laughing at us all the time because we haven’t figured it all out yet.
Lee Schneider // Jul 3, 2009 at 10:53 am
I’m going to look further in the Lilly dolphin research. There might be a secret with the dolphins!
realitysurfer // Jul 3, 2009 at 9:40 am
Please check out my LSD Documentary. posted at youtube
Link to part one of four from POWER AND CONTROL LSD IN THE SIXTIES
GROUCHO ON ACID, DOC ELLIS PITCHES A NON-HITTER WHILE HIGH, CIA LSD BROTHEL AND MORE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZdz0G4lG6k&
Bruce Shlain co-author Acid Dreams // Jul 11, 2009 at 3:17 pm
Some promising areas of LSD research were with alcoholism in Canada — it brought on the DT’s, or final stages, and had a lower recidivism rate than anything else tried, and also with autistic patients. To me the most interesting work was with terminal cancer patients, by Dr. Stanislas Grof in what was then Czechoslovakia. He gave them intravenous injections of LSD while wearing dark eyeshades. He developed a detailed psychic map of where his patients traveled, but it was largely ignored by the medical community because he posited that intra-uterine memories were involved. One of Grof’s books on this work is The Human Encounter with Death, which is quite powerful. And just this week, LSD was in the news, the NYT published LSD inventor Dr. Albert Hoffman’s letter to Steve Jobs after hearing that Jobs owed some of his most creative thinking about the cyber-revolution to his psychedelic experiences. Here’s a link to that story.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ryan-grim/read-the-never-before-pub_b_227887.html
Lee Schneider // Jul 11, 2009 at 4:26 pm
Thanks for jumping in on this, Bruce. Roz Dauber also called me attention to Dr. Hoffman’s letter to Jobs.