Toward a Psychedelic Medicine1

Richard Yensen, Ph.D.

Yearbook for Ethnomedicine and the Study of Consciousness,

Issue 1, 1992, pp51-69. ©VWB - Verlag für Wissenschaft und Bildung, 1995.

Introduction and Goals

Definition and Historical Context

"By means of the magical plants and the chants and the search for the roots of the problem, the subconscious of the individual is opened up like a flower, and it releases these blockages. All by itself it tells things. A very practical manner... which was known to the ancient's" (SHARON, 1978 P. 46).

"Our subjects, include many who have drunk deep of life, authors, artists, a junior cabinet minister, scientists, a hero, philosophers, and businessmen... Most find the experience valuable, some find it frightening, many say that it is uniquely lovely. If mimicking mental illness were the main characteristic of these agents, psychotomimetics would indeed be a suitable generic term. It is true that they may do so, but they do so much more... I have tried to find a more appropriate name" (OSMOND, 1957).

Analysis of Current Research Methods

"[There is a] curious symmetry between people who abuse drugs and people who study them. The person who is convinced that highs come in drugs, if he is negatively oriented toward society, becomes a drug abuser; if he is positively oriented toward society, he becomes a drug researcher. But the two are essentially the same, because both arc laboring under the identical materialistic illusion. Only their mutual antagonism keeps them from realizing they are two poles of the same way of thinking" (WEIL, 1972, P. 70, 72).

"It is an inherent property of intelligence that it can jump out of the task which it is performing, and survey what it has done; it is always looking for, and often finding, patterns. Now I said that intelligence can jump out of its task, but does not mean that it always will" (HOFSTADTER, 1979, P 37).

A Case History in Psychedelic Medicine

"Many great physicists over the years have become deeply absorbed in the role of the mind in constructing reality. Schrodinger, for instance, remarked that exploring the relationship between brain and mind is the only important task of science. He once quoted the Persian mystic Aziz Nasafi: 'The Spiritual world is one single spirit who stands unto a light behind the bodily world and who, when any single creature comes into being, shines through it as through a window. According to the size and kind of the window, less or more light enters the world.' Western thinking is trying to objectify everything, Schrodinger said, 'It is in need of blood transfusion from Eastern thought.' A Hindu sutra proclaims, 'There is nothing in the moving world but mind itself,' a view echoed by physicist John Wheeler: 'May the universe in some strange sense be brought into being by the vital act of participation?"' (FERGUSON, 1980, PP. 172-173).

Notes

2) The development of three competing paradigms for understanding psychedelics is discussed in detail and at some length in a prior paper: From Mysteries to paradigms: Humanity's journey from sacred plants to psychedelic drug (Yensen 1989). (back)

3) This shortcoming in the scientific literature is not merely some lack on the part of the psychedelic researchers involved, but the fact that in order to have reports of psychedelic research published researchers are forced to fit the presentation of results into the dominant paradigms held by editors and reviewers of scientific journals. (back)

References

Allegro, John M.

1970 The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross; Fodder and Stoughton, London.

Ferguson, Marilyn

1980 The Aquarian Conspiracy; Tarcher, Los Angeles.

Furst, Peter T.

1976 Hallucinogens and Culture; Chandler & Sharp, San Francisco.

Hofstadter, D.R.

1979 Godel, Escher, Bach: An eternal braid; Basic Books, New York.

Kuhn, Thomas S.

1970 The structure of scientific revolutions; University of Chicago Press, Chicago.

Osmond, Humphrey

1957 A review of the clinical effects of psychotomimetic agents; Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, p. 66; pp. 418-434.

Schultes, Richard E. & Albert Hofmann

1979 Plants of the Gods; McGraw-Hill, Maidenhead.

Sharon, Douglas

1978 Wizard of the Four Winds: A Shaman's Story; The Free Press (Macmillan), New York.

Wasson, R. Gordon

1968 SomaThe divine Mushroom of Immortality; H.B. Jovanovich, New York.

Wasson, R. Gordon, Albert Hofmann & Carl Ruck

1978 The Road to Eleusis; H.B. Jovanovich, New York.

Weil, Andrew

1972 The Natural Mind; Houghton Mifflin, Boston.

Yensen, Richard

1989 From Mysteries to paradigms: Humanity's journey from sacred plants to psychedelic drugs; in: Chr. Rätsch, Gateway to Inner Space: pp. 11-53; Prism Press, Bridport, Dorset.