Journeys into the bright world

It is true, as many will point out, that the psychedelic repertoire has been sadly debased. What was once a sacrament has been profaned, delivered over to the gods of the gutter and consigned to the votaries of oblivion. Ironically, some of the worst drug abuses were perpetrated by academicians in legal experiment. When LSD was first being studied, volunteers, attracted by the promise that they would be paid ten dollars for their time, were left unsupervised in ugly laboratory settings and summarily dismissed when the experiment was finished. Both the Army and the CIA were quick to look for any destructive potential in the hallucinogens, but they soon lost interest, because the effects produced obviously did not lend themselves to warfare. On the whole, underground consumers handled the situation more sensitively, except for the unfortunate circumstance that many of the bootleg drugs weren't pure. Possibly the most disastrous effect of the whole psychedelic fiasco was that a generation of inquirers became conditioned to the necessity of breaking the laws of the land in order to study the laws of their own inner being.

Although ketamine falls into the category of the psychedelic substances, it is qualitatively different and, we believe, superior. It need not be misused, and probably will not be, unless it is summarily outlawed. However, to be a worthy servant of mankind, it will have to be accepted, not just as a way of getting high, but also as a valuable aid to self-understanding. In this respect it seems noteworthy that many of the critics who have labeled the psychedelic substances "unnatural" have made no objections to lobotomies, shock treatments and the widespread practice of drugging mental patients into a catatonic stupor. It may be that these drastic procedures have been condoned, not because they are natural but because the dispensing of uppers, downers, stimulants and tranquilizers has become the norm. Actually, the effects of the various psychedelic agents have rarely been objectionable, except when misused by people whose behavior is objectionable. Rather, what has been hard for conservative people to deal with has been the spiritual implications of the experiences produced by psychedelic drugs.

To date, the official medical literature on ketamine has been pervaded by the assumption that any "emergence reaction" left in the wake of this anesthetic has to be a dream, hallucination or unwholesome symptom. This unwillingness to admit the possible validity of the insights gained is an example of the "medical materialism" that the psychologist William James described in The Varieties of Religious Experience:

Medical materialism finishes up St. Paul by calling his vision on the road to Damascus a discharging lesion of the occipital cortex, he being an epileptic. It snuffs out Saint Theresa as an hysteric, Saint Francis of Assisi as an hereditary degenerate. George Fox's discontent with the shams of his age and his pining for spiritual veracity, it treats as a symptom of a disordered colon. Carlyle's organ tones of misery it accounts for by a gastro-duodenal catarrh…And medical materialism thinks that the spiritual authority of all such personages is thereby successfully undermined.

In the opposite camp, those who have experimented with ketamine deny that they are dreaming or hallucinating, even though the effect can be that of a child turned loose in a surrealistic Disneyland of animated archetypes. Most subjects feel that they are simply altering their usual modes of perception, removing the filters of sensory limitations and opening the windows of consciousness to new and higher levels of meaning. At the same time, they do not regard the outer world as less real, even though they recognize its limitations. Rather, they become aware of the flatness of consensual reality and begin to see through the systematized illusions that have made the mundane plane such a difficult place in which to function. They discover that there are mountains of the mind, and are given the impetus to ascend.