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Introduction
The theme of this book is the sacramental use of medical technology in raising the consciousness of man. Originally, our intent was to produce a guide to "samadhi therapy" as facilitated by the' anesthetic agent ketamine hydrochloride. However, our accumulating notes soon transformed themselves into an intensely personal account of the stages by which we came to believe that in the right hands this unique substance could be safely, easily and advantageously applied toward the psychospiritual regeneration of planet Earth.
In the past, anesthesia has put people to sleep. Now we have discovered that it can also awaken them to their highest human potential. Medicine need no longer be confined to the alleviation of the symptoms of disease; it can help produce radiant health. We do not mean to imply that ketamine is a placebo, a panacea or the ultimate key to the celestial kingdom. There seems good reason to suppose, when, if we do not soon grow up, we may squeeze ourselves right off this planet.
We believe that people have as much right to accelerate their higher mental development as they have to speed their journey toward any goal—within limits, of course. A traveler is justified in exchanging a donkey cart for a car, but this does not give him the right to drive recklessly. Since we are writing for intelligent people, we expect our readers to use as much common sense as they would when driving on a highway. Even though idiots and drunken drivers do abound, mind trips like car trips can take us to many beautiful places.
For the most part, our narrative has focused on the therapeutic and mind-expanding effects of ketamine, assuming from the outset that these two aims are inextricably blended. That is, achieving a broader outlook on life is inherently therapeutic. Hence, one of our purposes in coining the term "samadhi therapy" is to show that experiencing the blissful state that the practitioners of yoga call samadhi can have practical advantages. Real joy—the lift that springs spontaneously from the revelation of the glory of creation—can be physically and psychologically beneficial. However, as any perceptive reader can see, many related issues are involved. The art of correct dying, the study of archetypes, the analysis of the connections among meaning of existence are all illumined with the light of a new understanding. Essentially, we are investigating the border zone between science and religion, viewing them as intersecting spheres of endeavor, which year by year are being brought into clearer stereoscopic alignment.
We are well aware of the disputable aspects of our research, but we firmly believe that the importance of this work will eventually be recognized. In the meanwhile, we are accumulating data banks, files of transcripts and all the paraphernalia of modern technology, assuming that time will bring a consensus of first-hand observations to support our conclusions. Positive results will tell the story. For now we offer ourselves and a few others as examples, hoping that this start will stimulate further progress.
Many people are justifiably critical of the "instant ecstasy" promised and sometimes produced by various psychedelic substances, and such criticism is justified, because the long-range effects have so often proved disappointing. Fifteen years ago there were many, including Aldous Huxley, Alan Watts, Richard Alpert (Ram Dass) and Tim Leary who believed that LSD might usher in a spiritual dissipated. Why then, should today's drug-sophisticated observer accept the claims of ketamine's advocates, who insist they have found the ultimate high? Obviously, such eulogies sound too good to be true. Like children who know there is no Santa Claus, we have been tuned to spot the worm in the apple, the fly in the ointment, the bluish tinge of rot beneath the bloom on the peach.
To such skeptics we can say only, why not try the substance yourself before passing judgment? Or at least, speak with those who have made the effort to gain such knowledge. People who have adopted this open-minded attitude have not been disappointed.
In the interim, we can assure you that our "samadhi sessions" will be safe and agreeable. Indeed, ketamine is such a well-tested anesthetic that it is commonly prescribed for the fragile patients at both ends of the medical spectrum—for young children and for senior citizens. Even in these cases, the amounts given for anesthesia are six or more times the dosages we have used and are administered intravenously rather than intramuscularly.
The fact that for the most part ketamine has no negative aftereffects has been exhaustively documented over more than a decade of impeccably conducted scientific research. Its demonstrated safety is particularly remarkable, because to date it has been used mainly under distressing hospital conditions in conjunction with narcotics and tranquilizers. By now, enough conscientious and reliable people have taken ketamine "trips" to justify the conclusion (hat hangovers, depressions, and that "freaked-out" feeling are conspicuously absent.
"Yes," some objectors declare, "I would like to expand my consciousness, but I feel that I must do it for myself."
To this, our usual reply is that doing everything for oneself can be an unbearably limiting factor as well as an exercise in egotism. What if we had to weave all our own clothes, grow our own food, make our own paper and so forth! In actuality we accomplish hardly anything manifest interdependence attests to nature's determination to force us to overcome isolationist tendencies. Even our two most essential physiological functions, eating and breathing, serve as constant reminders that in every respect we are obliged to use what lies outside of the confines of the bodily organism.
In the end, we do nothing alone and everything by our selves. Let us remember, however, that these myriad intermeshing "selves" are composite facets of the one transcendent Self in all. If we serve one another, if we accept help from outside agencies, that merely shows our faith in the supreme Identity that constitutes the sum and substance of creation.
People have also objected that spiritual development should not be hastened by "unnatural" means. But what really is natural? If it is permissible to harness physical forces such as steam and electricity, why should we not utilize the heretofore untapped powers of mind and soul? Directing the evolutionary energies of human consciousness need not contravene natural law. Indeed, there may be a spiritual instincts through a deliberate, self-willed forcing process.
It would indeed be gratifying if nature automatically raised us up the evolutionary escalator. Instead, climbing requires hard work. For the most part, we have to ascend on our own legs, slowly, painstakingly, against a multitude of resistances. At the same time, there is an Intelligence that lends a helping hand. We believe that ketamine can be an instrument of that great redemptive cosmic principle that makes us want to move on. The wholemaking impulse called synergy is as natural as the disintegrative impulse called entropy. Curiously enough, however, laziness, dogmatism and conservatism often masquerade as compliance with God's will, while the determination to better oneself provokes howls of protest from those who do not wish to see the old order disturbed.
We know how much drugs can do to enchance sexual behavior. Why then, shouldn't they be used to enhance our moral and spiritual behavior? Why do we insist on the dichotomy between matter and mind, making it permissible to take vitamins for the body but not for the soul7 A hormone that enables a man to make love more effectively is touted in medical journals. But what would be the public reaction to a hormone that simply made him a more loving human being?
It has been amply demonstrated that some psychedelic substances can be therapeutically effective. In cases of alcoholism, depression and terminal disease, LSD has precipitated psychological breakthroughs after all other methods of treatment failed. Rightly and responsibly used, consciousness-altering substances have earned an esteemed place in modern medicine's ever-growing pharmacopoeia. Why then, are the "mind-manifesting" drugs stilI regarded with so much fear? Can it be because modern science still lingers on the threshold of the unconscious, hesitating to knock too loudly for fear of what might be revealed if the door should open?
The politicians of the nervous system have good reason to mistrust the Pandora's box of psychedelia that was opened up in the 1960s, for the universe thereby revealed bears little resemblance to the reassuringly solid world of objects that can be collected, manipulated and controlled. If the arbiters of the various bureaucratic establishments that keep as in our places were to acknowledge the validity of the psychedelic experience, they would have to rethink the ethical systems. People whose most intimate personal experiences have convinced them that everything is interrelated are hardly likely ' to support the armaments race or to wax enthusiastic over the production of bigger and better neutron bombs.
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.
It is our conviction that the fauna and flora of ketamine's magical kingdom are in no way weird or abnormal, even though the substance most definitely does open the gates to alternate realities. Peering through the smog of planet Earth, however, it is hard to escape the conviction that its affairs are out of whack to the point of insanity, are reminded of a story recounted by the free-wheeling guru Ram Dass about the confrontation between a mental patient and his psychiatrist. The patient was convinced that he was Christ, the psychiatrist was convinced that he was a psychiatrist, and each was absolutely certain that the other was insane. In our case, therefore, all we can do is describe what happened to us, our friends, and coworkers, and leave it to the reader to decide who may or may not be deranged. We know that the subconscious is inherently bizarre, but we can still explore it in a sensible way.
For the most part, our ketamine experiences have been set down when and as they happened. Hence, our original desire to organize the material systematically, topic by topic, has been sacrificed to the more artistic urge to convey the continuity of a grand adventure. So we have presented our insights chronologically rather than encyclopedically. The intrinsic properties of our boundary-dissolving elixir lead us to detail its effects in the manner of a tapestry of soft-colored squares.
Books, like wine and cheese, usually need time to mellow. However, the cathartic action of ketamine is so intense that it accelerates all functions. One senses that the very cells of the body are being jiggled into a faster rhythm. The mind churns out new thoughts, while the illumination intensifies the desire to shine on others and warm their hearts.
This quickening of responses has made us peculiarly aware of the urgency of the times. Truly, we are now living in the midst of Armageddon. At this moment of supreme planetary crisis every effort must be made to regenerate the ailing body of humanity, to redeem culture as seeds for future seasons of growth. Out of our concern widi the current world situation, we have decided to publicize our research even before we can vindicate our activities with a mass of meticulously documented statistical studies. In short, we are "blowing our cover," with the full knowledge that we are taking a calculated risk in stirring up resistances before we are strong enough to withstand the opposition. There simply isn't time to fiddle while Rome burns.
A point that must be made clear from the outset is that at no time have we engaged in any kind of illegal activity. There is no law prohibiting the use of ketamine by a licensed physician. It is a commonly used anesthetic that has been extensively tested and found so safe that even in an instance when ten times the normal anesthetic dose was administered there were few negative aftereffects. At the same time we want to emphasize that this is an exceedingly powerful medicine, which should be properly supervised and administered by a trained specialist. We conscientiously inquire into the subject's medical background, monitor pulse and blood pressure. To date, however, there have been no untoward reactions.
In this respect, we have drawn on Howard's unblemished fifteen-year record as a (ull-time practicing anesthesiologist and Marcia's thirty-five years of metaphysical studies. For both, this has been an apprenticeship in dealing with potentially dangerous substances. The hazards of an anesthesiologist's trade are clearly evident, since the patient is suspended just this side of death. As a teacher of hatha yoga, Marcia learned that you don't fool around with necks and knees, much less with heavy-duty breathing exercises. As an astrological counselor, she discovered how to avoid the pitfalls inherent in psychotherapeutic situations. Her work with hypersentience was a further application of powerful mind-opening techniques to ameliorate a variety of human dilemmas.
We both feel that as a result of the care and caution we have shown in practicing these preliminary disciplines, we have been entrusted with the sacred gift of ketamine therapy. Neither of us is preoccupied with money, power or fame. We live modestly, eat vegetarian food, practice yoga, meditate and work long hours, often without remuneration. To date we have taken no money for our samadhi therapy. For years all Marcia's earned income has gone to support the Atlanta Foundation located in Ojai, California and to publish the quarterly Hypersentience Bulletin. Funds derived from our ketamine research will also be plowed back into this humanitarian foundation.
As we broaden the base of our activities we will try to keep our reading audience up to date. For now, despite our initially narrow focus, there is so much ground to cover that we are releasing this first progress report. If widespread interest is aroused the work will go forward that much faster. Presumably, we will complete our follow-up ketamine book which will be an academically acceptable clinical and statistical study. In the meantime here, hot off the fire, are our first impressions. With the hope that this Promethean offering can be utilized for the benefit of humanity, we will try to describe how we began and hope that others will profit from our experiences.