Posted by Q (198.64.206.92) on July 27, 2000 at 09:57:14:
In Reply to: OK I had to have my say too... (suprise) posted by Flash on July 26, 2000 at 08:05:23:
LSD: Completely Personal
speech delivered to the 1996 Worlds of Consciousness Conference in Heidelberg, Germany
Dr. Albert Hofmann
translated from the original German, LSD Ganz Personlich, by J. Ott
-------------------
<<< excerpt about halfway through >>>
Here I should like to cite two short extracts from our correspondence of that time. In my letter of 16 December 1961 I had allowed: ŇA further disquieting thought which follows from the ability to influence the highest spiritual functions (consciousness) with minimal traces of a substance, involves free will. Highly potent psychotropic substances like LSD and PSILOCYBIN possess in their chemical structures a very close relationship to natural bodily substances which occur in the brain and play an important role in the regulation of its functions. It is thus thinkable, that through some such disturbance in metabolism a compound of the type of LSD or psilocybin is formed in place of a normal neurotransmitter, which can alter and determine the character, the personality, its worldview and its actions. A trace of a substance, whose occurrence or non-occurrence in our bodies we cannot control with our wills, is capable of determining our fate. Such biochemical considerations might have led to the sentence written by Gottfried Benn in his essay Provoziertes Leben:11 "God is a substance, a drug!" Standing out above all in the reply from Ernst Janger, in his letter of 27 December 1961, is: "insinuates that we are beginning to develop procedures in biology, just like those in the field of physics, that can no longer be conceived of as progress in the established sense, but which rather intervene in evolution and lead beyond the development of the species" I suspect that this is a new era, that begins to work on the evolution of types. Our science with its theories and inventions is thereby not the cause, but rather one of the consequences of evolution! Wine has already altered much, has brought with it new gods and a new humanity. But wine stands in relation to the new substances like LSD, as classical to modern physics. These substances should be tried only in small groups. I cannot agree with the idea of Huxley's, that hereby the masses can be given possibilities for transcendence. This does not involve comforting fictions, but rather realities, if we take the matter seriously, and few contacts suffice to lay roads and connections." Janger here advocates the opinion that a new consciousness cannot be expanded through mass consumption of psychedelica, this must rather happen to an elite. We have since complemented such theoretical discussions on magical drugs with practical experiments. One such, which served for the comparison of LSD with PSILOCYBIN, took place in the spring of 1962. The following session happened in the Janger' house, in the erstwhile forester's home of the Stauffenberg's castle in Wilflingen.
<<< see link for full report >>>