A criticism of your sermon: you allow the "deepest experience that there is"—"The kingdom of heaven is within you"—to be uttered by Timothy Leary. This sentence, quoted without the indication of its true source, could be interpreted as ignorance of one, or rather the principal truth of Christian belief.

One of your statements deserves universal recognition: "There is no non-ecstatic religious experience."…

Next Monday evening I shall be interviewed on Swiss television (about LSD and the Mexican magic drugs, on the program "At First Hand"). I am curious about the sort of questions that will be asked…

A. H.

Muri/Bern, 24 May 1973

Dear Mr. Hofmann,

Of course it was LSD—only I did not want to write about it explicitly, I really do not know just why myself.... The great emphasis I placed on the good Leary, who now seems to me to be somewhat flipped out, as the prime witness, can indeed only be explained by the special context of the talk or sermon.

I must admit that the perception that we must descend "into the flesh, which we are"

actually first came to me with LSD. I still ruminate on it, possibly it even came "too late"

for me in fact, although more and more I advocate your opinion that LSD should be taboo for youth (taboo, not forbidden, that is the difference…).

The sentence that you like, "there is no nonecstatic religious experience," was apparently not liked so much by others—for example, by my (almost only) literary friend and minister-lyric poet Kurt Marti.… But in any case, we are practically never of the same opinion about anything, and notwithstanding, we constitute when we occasionally communicate by phone and arrange little activities together, the smallest minimafia of Switzerland.

W. V.

Burg i.L., 13 April 1974

Dear Mr. Vogt,

Full of suspense, we watched your TV play "Pilate before the Silent Christ" yesterday evening.

… as a representation of the fundamental man-God relationship: man, who comes to God with his most difficult questions, which finally he must answer himself, because God is silent. He does not answer them with words. The answers are contained in the book of his creation (to which the questioning man himself belongs). True natural science deciphering of this text.

A. H.

Muri/Bern, 11 May 1974

Dear Mr. Hofmann,

I have composed a "poem" in half twilight, that I dare to send to you. At first I wanted to send it to Leary, but this would make no sense.

Leary in jail

Gelpke is dead

Treatment in the asylum

is this your psychedelic

revolution?

Had we taken seriously something

with which one only ought to play

or

vice-versa…

W. V.

10. Various Visitors

The diverse aspects, the multi-faceted emanations of LSD are also expressed in the variety of cultural circles with which this substance has brought me into contact. On the scientific plane, this has involved colleagues-chemists, pharmacologists, physicians, and mycologists—whom I met at universities, congresses, lectures, or with whom I came into association through publication. In the literary-philosophical field there were contacts with writers. In the preceding chapters I have reported on the relationships of this type that were most significant for me. LSD also provided me with a variegated series of personal acquaintances from the drug scene and from hippie circles, which will briefly be described here.

Most of these visitors came from the United States and were young people, often in transit to the Far East in search of Eastern wisdom or of a guru; or else hoping to come by drugs more easily there. Prague also was sometimes the goal, because LSD of good quality could at the time easily be acquired there. [Translator's Note: When Sandoz's patents on LSD expired in 1963, the Czech pharmaceutical firm Spofa began to manufacture the drug.] Once arrived in Europe, they wanted to take advantage of the opportunity to see the father of LSD, "the man who made the famous LSD bicycle trip."

But more serious concerns sometimes motivated a visit. There was the desire to report on personal LSD experiences and to debate the purport of their meaning, at the source, so to speak. Only rarely did a visit prove to be inspired by the desire to obtain LSD when a visitor hinted that he or she wished once to experiment with most assuredly pure material, with original LSD.

Visitors of various types and with diverse desires also came from Switzerland and other European countries. Such encounters have become rarer in recent times, which may be related to the fact that LSD has become less important in the drug scene. Whenever possible, I have welcomed such visitors or agreed to meet somewhere. This I considered to be an obligation connected with my role in the history of LSD, and I have tried to help by instructing and advising.

Sometimes no true conversation occurred, for example with the inhibited young man who arrived on a motorbike. I was not clear about the objective of his visit. He stared at me, as if asking himself: can the man who has made something so weird as LSD really look so completely ordinary? With him, as with other similar visitors, I had the feeling that he hoped, in my presence, the LSD riddle would somehow solve itself.

Other meetings were completely different, like the one with the young man from Toronto. He invited me to lunch at an exclusive restaurant—impressive appearance, tall, slender, a businessman, proprietor of an important industrial firm in Canada, brilliant intellect. He thanked me for the creation of LSD, which had given his life another direction. He had been 100 percent a businessman, with a purely materialistic world view. LSD had opened his eyes to the spiritual aspect of life. Now he possessed a sense for art, literature, and philosophy and was deeply concerned with religious and metaphysical questions. He now desired to make the LSD experience accessible in a suitable milieu to his young wife, and hoped for a similarly fortunate transformation in her.

Not as profound, yet still liberating and rewarding, were the results of LSD

experiments which a young Dane described to me with much humor and fantasy. He came from California, where he had been a houseboy for Henry Miller in Big Sur. He moved on to France with the plan of acquiring a dilapidated farm there, which he, a skilled carpenter, then wanted to restore himself. I asked him to obtain an autograph of his former employer for my collection, and after some time I actually received an original piece of writing from Henry Miller's hand.

A young woman sought me out to report on LSD experiences that had been of great significance to her inner development. As a superficial teenager who pursued all sorts of entertainments, and quite neglected by her parents, she had begun to take LSD out of curiosity and love of adventure. For three years she took frequent LSD trips. They led to an astonishing intensification of her inner life. She began to seek after the deeper meaning of her existence, which eventually revealed itself to her. Then, recognizing that LSD had no further power to help her, without difficulty or exertion of will she was able to abandon the drug. Thereafter she was in a position to develop herself further without artificial means. She was now a happy intrinsically secure person—thus she concluded her report. This young woman had decided to tell me her history, because she supposed that I was often attacked by narrow-minded persons who saw only the damage that LSD

sometimes caused among youths. The immediate motive of her testimony was a conversation that she had accidentally overheard on a railway journey. A man complained about me, finding it disgraceful that I had spoken on the LSD problem in an interview published in the newspaper. In his opinion, I ought to denounce LSD as primarily the devil's work and should publicly admit my guilt in the matter.