Journeys into the bright world

To date, no one has had a "bad trip," although not all were enthused over the experience. Most psychedelic sophisticates have reported that this was the most pleasurable drug experience they have ever had and have wished to continue their explorations. A few still preferred LSD or some other substance. Virtually everyone has commented on the impossibility of describing the dimension of being to which the mind was transported. Yet when these people do start groping for words it is apparent that the levels of consciousness through which they have passed bear a remarkable similarity to those described in this narrative as well as to each other. One has the feeling that they are describing the same phenomenon, albeit from differing points of view.

The question of proper dosage was one we had to answer for ourselves. For a while we started most of our subjects with the standard fifty-milligram trip, which was where we ourselves began. For a large well-grounded person this works exceedingly well. However, some individuals were jet propelled so far out on this amount that they were unable to bring back enough of the experience to be meaningful. Consequently, we now start out with twenty-five milligrams, working up to larger doses on request.

The more experience we gained working with others the more convinced we became that there are no "standard" reactions. Once we gave a 160-pound youth fifty milligrams on his second appointment and he was too "blown out" to make anything of the experience. Chastened we gave the next subject, a woman who also weighed 160 pounds, a twenty-five-milligram shot and she complained that nothing was happening. A twenty-five-milligram booster shot still produced no particular reaction. Only after a third twenty-five did she feel anything like an altered state of consciousness.

For my own part, an initial twenty-five-milligram shot followed by an equal-sized booster is still the most efficacious and will usually produce a deep meditative state in which bodily consciousness fades out.

The actual psychological effects have been amazingly varied. This may be because the drug can act like a dye which reveals the cellular structure of a cross-section of tissue spread out on a microscope slide. The pattern that shows up is simply a more vivid depiction of what is already there, including the pathological elements. One should not blame the coloring agent if a carcinoma is thereby exposed. If a person would rather not view the cancerous tissues of his own personality then he is best advised to stay away from ketamine. If the medicine actually is a kind of truth serum then it must be dealt with on these terms.

In his book The Joyous Cosmology, Alan Watts puts his finger on this issue in the following words:

I wish to repeat that drugs of this kind are in no sense bottled and predigested wisdom. I feel that had I no skill as a writer or philosopher, drugs which dissolve some of the barriers between ordinary pedestrian consciousness and the multidimensional superconsciousness of the organism would bring little but delightful, or sometimes terrifying, confusion. I am not saying that only intellectuals can benefit from them, but that there must be sufficient discipline or insight to relate this expanded consciousness to our normal, everyday life.

The following accounts, composed by various people with whom we have worked, show the results of some of our experimentations.

Lani Mitchell

My name is Lani Mitchell. I am married and we have two children. My home is in Seattle, Washington, and I work as a secretary for a large corporation. I am a student of astrology, metaphysics and the occult, have taken a mind control course, and meditate on a regular basis. In this lifetime I have been blessed with a gift for healing and clairvoyance. Through hypersentient age regression we found that this interest in healing has evolved over a period of several incarnations. In one existence I was an Indian woman who was the tribal medicine woman. Before that I had been a heavy, round-faced, gray-haired doctor in Rome where I also taught medicine.