PSYCHEDELICS - Sciencemadness.org

P A R T I I
T H E N A T U R E O F T H E
E X P E R I E N C E
The fundamental reason for taking psychedelics is the experiences
they produce. These experiences may be of many
kinds. Walter Pahnke (1967) has recently classified them
into five types: psychotic, characterized by fear, paranoid
symptoms, confusion, impairment of abstract reasoning, remorse,
depression, isolation, and/or somatic discomfort; psychodynamic,
in which unconscious or preconscious material
becomes vividly conscious; cognitive, characterized by "astonishingly
lucid thought"; aesthetic, with increased perceptual
ability in all sense modalities; and psychedelic mystical,
marked by all the characteristics of spontaneous mystical experience
observed in the literature. These experiences may
be the cause for the effects of psychedelics on behavior. They
are also the fundamental thing that must be explained if
psychedelics and their effects are to be understood.
In the papers that follow, samples of experience with the
major psychedelic drugs are presented. No claims are made
with respect to their representativeness. The experiences are
grouped by drug, so that states produced by different drugs
may be compared. Examination of these accounts suggests
that the differences among the experiences are less than their
similarities. The entire range of phenomena listed by Mas-
ters and Houston (1966) as occurring in the course of psyche-
delic experiences appears among them. It is also apparent
that the set of the subject toward the experience, and the
setting in which the drug is taken, are of overriding signifi-
cance in determining the kind of experience achieved.
The mescaline papers deal with what may be regarded
as psychotomimetic experiences. The paper by Humphry Os-
mond is a reprint of one not generally available, which gives
a sense of the impact of these chemicals in the early days of
their use and provides a sense of the excitement aroused