Now It Can Be Told! Secret Medicine of the Global Elite Increases Intelligence and Boosts Longevity!
That clickbait headline is both true and radically false. First of all, LSD is no secret. Psychotherapists discovered as long ago as the 1950s that it can purge traumatic memory all the way back to birth trauma. Studies suggest it operates as a cellular purge too, with benefits to health and longevity.
However, it remains prohibited as a dangerous drug with no approved medical use. An official secret, in a sense. The result is that the drug is more available than public information about how to use it safely and therapeutically. The renewal of interest in therapeutic use of the psychedelics has led me to try to address this need by offering some practical guidelines. Rules of thumb.I am not prescribing the psychedelics to anyone. For some people they are notoriously worse than useless, at least outside a professional psychiatric context. For most people the psychedelics represent an alternative way to pursue ecstasy which is safer than alcohol abuse, the opiates, meth and so on.
Nothing I am about to say is particularly new. These suggestions will be unnecessary for anyone familiar with the classic texts in the field, Stanislav Grof's Realms of the Human Unconscious, and LSD Psychotherapy, published in 1975 and 1980. In my opinion, the first book is still the best introduction for anyone interested in the auto-therapeutic use of LSD, a map of the territory one proposes to explore. Essential, really.
Birth trauma can be described in familiar terms as the deepest (and presumably universal) layer of post-traumatic stress, on which theory the goal of therapy is a ground or rest state, of minimal unnecessary arousal or zero alarm: in other words, total relaxation. On this picture, the therapeutic process can be described as 'learning to relax.' (the classic sources are Selye, The Stress of Life; Benson The Relaxation Response) In computational terms, one could compare the psychedelic purge of memory to a simple restart which terminates hung processes and empties RAM caches, or to the purging of corrupted and inaccessible files on a hard drive, the result being the functional equivalent of a computer cleared of un-needed data in working and long-term memory respectively.It was already clear in the 1950s that the LSD effect is an important piece of evidence for the dependence of thought on states of the brain, which is to say for the computational model of consciousness, and that any such model must account for it in a general sense. At the same time, a detailed explanation of the sensory and memorial effects was beyond the capabilities of first-generation computational (or 'cybernetic') models.
By the 1990s a new generation of neural network models provided just such an account, which benefits this discussion of the practicalities of LSD therapy because it fills in the missing details while broadly confirming the cybernetic (or information-theoretical) model of memory recovery.
The bottom line is that we can set aside further discussion about whether and why LSD works as a medicine and focus on how to make it work in therapy and auto-therapy. (Further discussion—of theory, philosophy, mysticism, religion, etc.—is confined to Part 2 of this presentation, Theoretical perspectives on LSD research:
from cybernetics to complexity theory.)
Where the typical recreational 'trip' involves congenial setting elements such as nature or music, and goals of ecstasy, mirth, joy, and so on, Grof's recommended technique for purging memory entails higher doses, reclining with eyeshades and headphones with music, and in general diving into the kind of 'bad trip' against which novice users are typically warned.
The extreme sensory restriction can be compared to an enforced type of meditation. The benefit of this 'interiorization of the experience' as Grof calls it, is that there is no question that any unusual or alarming state will have to be recognized as the product of one's own mind. Moving through the purge of birth trauma material can take ten to fifty or eighty high-dose sessions, so it can be said to resemble a series of meditations or acts of meditation.
What is an act of meditation? one might well ask. Probably the most typical one to arise during a psychedelic session would be a moment of fear or remembered pain. Often this will be accompanied by the subject holding his breath, in which case the meditative act would consist of becoming aware of that state of affairs and remembering to breathe. Speaking generally, the psychedelic meditation might be said to consist of paying attention to the process.
One might, in all seriousness, say that the three rules of LSD therapy are:
Simply watching the breath is a traditional meditation technique. Buddha said: "Let your short breaths be short breaths and your long breaths be long breaths." Each breath in requires muscular effort. Each exhale is an example and a model of relaxation. Benson asserted that relaxation is learned and compared it to walking down a flight of stairs to a lower arousal baseline.
The techniques of meditation involve the simplification of thought by restricted input and focus, for example on the breath, mantra, or visualizations. Psychedelics more-or-less force one to pay attention to one's thoughts, while increasing the effectiveness of meditation techniques. Observations like the quote from the Buddha can be treated as empirically valid or useful theory-fragments which need little or no translation into the scientific context (or paradigm) within which the therapeutic goals of relaxation and emptiness are conceived.
This implies not a touch of the exotic, but practicality. For example, one could say that Grof's standard protocol utilizes Shivasana (the dead man meditation pose, or reclining supine) without further worship of Shiva (the Hindu god.)
The quote from Buddha is similarly practical and scientifically sound: any degree of PTSD entails inappropriate baseline arousal and a sympathetic global response (that is, contraction or tension.) This will cause interrupted, restricted, shallow, or fast breathing so that just by watching the breath one can observe one's own level of PTSD or physical tension, at least in principle.
When it comes to handling the flow of physical sensation and visions which accompany the purge of memorial material, it often proves useful to reach into the armature of pranayama, the yogic science of breath, for accelerated breathing, or breath-of-fire. The passage through difficult material can be facilitated and accelerated by a variety of rapid breathing techniques.
Pranayama is a tool of yoga or meditation. Patanjali in his yoga sutras says that the ten-thousand nadis (channels) are cleared with pranayama. During psychedelic sessions, breath can be used aggressively during periods of strong or disturbing physical sensation. One can visualize breathing into areas of pain, darkness, coldness, constriction, and so on. Where the recreational user is encouraged to avoid uncomfortable material, the active self-therapist or prepared therapeutic subject will begin to actively search out and breathe through it. Examples of this kind of breathwork, which is effective even without psychedelics, can be found on Youtube by searching for Grof's holotropic breathwork or rebirthing.
Timothy Leary, the LSD evangelist, once wrote that LSD is fundamentally a relaxant. Possibly he was attempting to shock, since its reputation is as a uniquely profound stimulant, but the comment reflects its use by experienced users and, significantly, therapists like Grof.
According to his protocol, after some hours of sensory restriction and reclining, during which the subject experiences the peak of the drug effect, the session continues and completes the therapeutic purge by the deliberate employment of techniques such as bodywork, yoga and stretching, hot soaking, music, and pranayama.
With the insight that LSD and the other psychedelics can fruitfully be combined with relaxation techniques, it is possible to make some recommendations about creating ideal conditions for auto-therapeutic use of LSD.
Be prepared. The ideal subject will have practiced meditation and have some background in yogic stretching (hatha), and in particular have practiced pranayama, including use of the syllable or mantram AUM or OM, which is the natural product of vocalization with one's mouth going from open to closed. One breath-of-fire technique is to mix short periods of accelerated breathing with vocalization.
Appropriate setting is extremely important. Grof's sessions can be described as containerized, that is, private. Intimate musical gatherings are more appropriate than large festivals, where young people often have their first experience with psychedelics. Many experienced recreational users prefer wilderness for their sessions.
One sensible tactic which emerged during the 1950s is to begin with small dosages and work up until a comfortable level is found. It should be recalled that Grof's subjects who took dosages of 200 mcg. and more practiced sensory restriction for several hours, even though they had the most expert assistance. One of the most useful points in Grof's books is his discussion of the need to prepare subjects for the sheer intensity and strangeness of the potential effects of LSD. A deliberately therapeutic approach to the introduction of psychedelics can at least allay the element of surprise. I would compare this to teaching a child to swim; it generally works just to throw a child into the deep water, since humans float and swim instinctively. Mostly. But sudden full immersion can be frightening and therefore counterproductive if the goal is a happily swimming child.
This is not deny that psychedelics are reliable producers of spontaneous ecstasy, or that they may be interesting or useful in sports, coding, wilderness camping, various kinds of talking therapy, and so on. From a therapeutic point of view, however, and with all due respect to set and setting, instead of intensifying a music or sports experience, the goal is to intensify relaxation. A design for an optimal introduction to psychedelics would combine small-to-moderate dosages, soaking in a hot tub, the practice of pranayama, bodywork, and stretching.
The value of hot soaks can't be overemphasized. Soaking induces a whole-body relaxation which the LSD amplifies and which can be alternated with periods of stretching, body work, and self-massage. The introduction of LSD as a relaxant rather than as an unpredictable ordeal may make the penetration of deeper layers of repressed material more comfortable.
In short, meditation is not the goal as such, meditation is a technique or an attitude. "The goal of meditation is pure consciousness." This is equivalent to the therapeutic goal of the totally relaxed state, which is the ideal state for playing music, or giving a child one's total attention, for example.
The therapeutic approach—backed by robust scientific models—says (in part): first let's take out the trash. And there is more trash than is generally recognized. There are other ways, as Grof points out, but psychedelic therapy is based on the insight that LSD is an aid to relaxation, and the combination of LSD, pranayama, and hot soaking is particularly efficient. The act of relaxation itself, as Benson established, is a learned and conscious process.
So, the rules of thumb:
One could fairly characterize this list as a translation of Grof's "lab" protocol into a recommendation for home use. I didn't say they were my rules of thumb. But this is a far more ideal introductory procedure than the common one of taking psychedelics in large crowds at music festivals.
According to Grof, holotropic breathwork alone is sufficient to evoke and clear birth trauma, suggesting that the combination of moderate dosages and relaxation techniques represent a range of potential treatment modalities which would be easier to implement than the high-dose model. (Part 2 contains some suggestions about making psychedelic therapy more efficient, mainly of interest to therapists and the truly adventurous.)
If I were running a business which promised instant results from a single LSD experience, as proprietors are doing with psilocybe in some jurisdictions, I would acknowledge that Grof typically employed "ten to scores" of high-dose sessions to complete the therapeutic process. One session which introduced clients to intensive relaxation techniques (pranayama, soaks, yoga etc.) would equip clients with the tools to begin using psychedelics therapeutically on their own. (Incidentally, a home bathtub is better than nothing, and a hot shower can turn a difficult moment during a session into bliss.)
Part 2 documents(for those interested in such things) how developments such as complexity theory (cf. Zurek ed.) and Edelman and Tononi's neural group selection theory have deepened the scientific explanation of the LSD effect. The golden age of psychedelic medicine should be at hand.