Persons in LSD delirium, whose condition could have given rise to such indignant condemnation, have never personally come into my sight. Such cases, attributable to LSD

consumption under irresponsible circumstances, to overdosage, or to psychotic predisposition, always landed in the hospital or at the police station. Great publicity always came their way.

A visit by one youn American girl stands out in my memory as an example of the tragic effects of LSD. It was during the lunch hour, which I normally spent in my office under strict confinement—no visitors, secretary's office closed up. Knocking came at the door, discretely but firmly repeated, until eventually I went to open.it. I scarcely believed my eyes: before me stood a very beautiful young woman, blond, with large blue eyes, wearing a long hippie dress, headband, and sandals. "I am Joan, I come from New York—you are Dr. Hofmann?" Before I inquired what brought her to me, I asked her how she had got through the two checkpoints, at the main entrance to the factory area and at the door of the laboratory building, for visitors were admitted only after telephone query, and this flower child must have been especially noticeable. "I am an angel, I can pass everywhere," she replied. Then she explained that she came on a great mission. She had to rescue her country, the United States; above all she had to direct the president (at the time L. B. Johnson) onto the correct path. This could be accomplished only by having him take LSD. Then he would receive the good ideas that would enable him to lead the country out of war and internal difficulties.

Joan had come to me hoping that I would help her fulfill her mission, namely to give LSD to the president. Her name would indicate she was the Joan of Arc of the USA. I don't know whether my arguments, advanced with all consideration of her holy zeal, were able to convince her that her plan had no prospects of success on psychological, technical, internal, and external grounds. Disappointed and sad she went away. Next day I received a telephone call from Joan. She again asked me to help her, since her financial resources were exhausted. I took her to a friend in Zurich who provided her with work, and with whom she could live. Joan was a teacher by profession, and also a nightclub pianist and singer. For a while she played and sang in a fashionable Zurich restaurant.

The good bourgeois clients of course had no idea what sort of angel sat at the grand piano in a black evening dress and entertained them with sensitive playing and a soft and sensuous voice. Few paid attention to the words of her songs; they were for the most part hippie songs, many of them containing veiled praise of drugs. The Zurich performance did not last long; within a few weeks I learned from my friend that Joan had suddenly disappeared. He received a greeting card from her three months later, from Israel. She had been committed to a psychiatric hospital there.

For the conclusion of my assortment of LSD visitors, I wish to report about a meeting in which LSD figured only indirectly. Miss H. S., head secretary in a hospital, wrote to ask me for a personal interview. She came to tea. She explained her visit thus: in a report about an LSD experience, she had read the description of a condition she herself had experienced as a young girl, which still disturbed her today; possibly I could help her to understand this experience.

She had gone on a business trip as a commercial apprentice. They spent the night in a mountain hotel. H. S. awoke very early and left the house alone in order to watch the sunrise. As the mountains began to light up in a sea of rays, she was perfused by an unprecedented feeling of happiness, which persisted even after she joined the other participants of the trip at morning service in the chapel. During the Mass everything appeared to her in a supernatural luster, and the feeling of happiness intensified to such an extent that she had to cry loudly. She was brought back to the hotel and treated as someone with a mental disorder.

This experience largely determined her later personal life. H.S. feared she was not completely normal. On the one hand, she feared this experience, which had been explained to her as a nervous breakdown; on the other hand, she longed for arepetitionof the condition. Internally split, she had led an unstable life. In repeated vocational changes and in varying personal relationships, consciously or unconsciously she again sought this ecstatic outlook, which once made her so deeply happy.

I was able to reassure my visitor. It was no psychopathological event, no nervous breakdown that she had experienced at the time. What many people seek to attain with the help of LSD, the visionary experience of a deeper reality, had come to her as spontaneous grace. I recommended a book by Aldous Huxley to her, The Perennial Philosophy (Harper, New York & London, 1945) a collection of reports of spontaneous blessed visions from all times and cultures. Huxley wrote that not only mystics and saints, but also many more ordinary people than one generally supposes, experience such blessed moments, but that most do not recognize their importance and, instead of regarding them as promising rays of hope, repress them, because they do not fit into everyday rationality.

11. LSD Experience and Reality

Was kann ein Mensch im Leben mehr gewinnen

Als dass sich Gott-Natur ihm offenbare?

What more can a person gain in life

Than that God-Nature reveals himself to him?

—Goethe

I am often asked what has made the deepest impression upon me in my LSD

experiments, and whether I have arrived at new understandings through these experiences.

Valious Realities

Of greatest significance to me has been the insight that I attained as a fundamental understanding from all of my LSD experiments: what one commonly takes as "the reality," including the reality of one's own individual person, by no means signifies something fixed, but rather something that is ambiguous—that there is not only one, but that there are many realities, each comprising also a different consciousness of the ego.

One can also arrive at this insight through scientific reflections. The problem of reality is and has been from time immemorial a central concern of philosophy. It is, however, a fundamental distinction, whether one approaches the problem of reality rationally, with the logical methods of philosophy, or if one obtrudes upon this problem emotionally, through an existential experience. The first planned LSD experiment was therefore so deeply moving and alarming, because everyday reality and the ego experiencing it, which I had until then considered to be the only reality, dissolved, and an unfamiliar ego experienced another, unfamiliar reality. The problem concerning the innermost self also appeared, which, itself unmoved, was able to record these external and internal transformations.

Reality is inconceivable without an experiencing subject, without an ego. It is the product of the exterior world, of the sender and of a receiver, an ego in whose deepest self the emanations of the exterior world, registered by the antennae of the sense organs, become conscious. If one of the two is lacking, no reality happens, no radio music plays, the picture screen remains blank.

If one continues with the conception of reality as a product of sender and receiver, then the entry of another reality under the influence of LSD may be explained by the fact that the brain, the seat of the receiver, becomes biochemically altered. The receiver is thereby tuned into another wavelength than that corresponding to normal, everyday reality. Since the endless variety and diversity of the universe correspond to infinitely many different wavelengths, depending on the adjustment of the receiver, many different realities, including the respective ego, can become conscious. These different realities, more correctly designated as different aspects of the reality, are not mutually exclusive but are complementary, and form together a portion of the all-encompassing, timeless, transcendental reality, in which even the unimpeachable core of self-consciousness, which has the power to record the different egos, is located.