When I was a grad student more than a half-century ago, I had a roommate who smoked pot—now called weed—during the week and took LSD on the weekend. I tried weed twice, but I didn’t like to put smoke in my lungs. I also found weed smokers—indeed the whole drug culture—solemn and boring. I was leery of trying LSD because I had heard stories of people going on “bad trips.”
Maybe I was wrong to be afraid of a psychotic episode. In a recent issue of the Times Literary Supplement, the eminent British philosopher Galen Strawson says that “people can . . . have bad experiences [taking LSD], but the positive consensus is extremely robust.”
Many famous people have taken LSD, including Steve Jobs, Cary Grant, Bill Gates, Aldous Huxley, and André Previn, but I don’t plan to take it because I’m not keen on its purported effect. According to Strawson, in taking it “we lose what Iris Murdoch calls ‘the fat relentless ego.’ ” Why would I want to lose my ego?
LSD is called a psychedelic drug. The word “psychedelic,” which was coined in the late 1950s by the English psychiatrist Humphry Osmond, means “mind revealing.” Osmond called an LSD trip “an enlargement and expansion of mind,” but most trippers speak about the joys of losing their mind. Cary Grant said: “I’ve had my ego stripped away.”
Strawson says psychedelic drugs “dissolve the standard self-system, interrupting what [William] Hazlitt called the ‘long narrowing of the mind to our own particular feelings and interests.’ ”
LSD, though, seems to encourage grandiose personal feelings. Strawson quotes Michael Pollan, the author of How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence, who says that psychedelic drugs—LSD is the main one—return us to the wonder of “unencumbered first sight, or virginal noticing, to which the adult brain has closed itself.” Strawson also quotes another tripper who says: “My awareness was flooded with love, beauty, and peace beyond anything I ever had known or imagined to be possible.”
Reading what trippers say about their experience, I remember what Samuel Johnson said about James Macpherson’s poetry: “Sir, a man might write such stuff for ever, if he would abandon his mind to it.” Strawson admits that “there’s a terminally weary group of words used to characterize psychedelic experience.” He prefers to use X to denote “whatever it is that is most powerfully positive in psychedelic experience.”
LSD enthusiasts would probably say that words cannot describe what it feels like to drop acid. One woman who calls herself a “solid atheist” said that when she was tripping she felt “bathed in God’s love.”
LSD is clearly a mind-altering drug—not a mind-revealing one.
Reviewing Pollan’s book, Tom Bissell says many trips “begin with an ordeal that can feel scarily similar to dissolving, or even dying. What appears to be happening, in a neurological sense, is that the part of the brain that governs the ego . . . drops away.”
My grad-school roommate gave me five pages he had written when on LSD. I read them and said: “This is gibberish.” He replied: “You have to be on LSD to appreciate it.”
Strawson doesn’t say that he has taken LSD, but he is persuaded that it may be good therapy for depression and alcoholism. Clinical studies, he adds, show that it “can have extraordinary value in allowing people who are terminally ill to live what remains of their lives well.”
But I like my fat relentless ego—at least most of the time. I might take LSD when I am dying, but until that time I prefer to live a non-psychedelic life. I have no desire to feel cosmic love; I’m okay with loving family and friends. When I hear about cosmic feelings, I always think of the following joke. Question: What did the Buddhist say to the hot dog vendor? Answer: Make me one with everything.
