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Psychedelics and Self-Actualization
Roger Walsh, M.D.
From: Psychedelic Reflections, Lester
Grinspoon and James B. Bakalar, editors
©Human Sciences Press, 1983
In their letter soliciting contributions to this book, the
editors wrote, "we came to the conclusion that psychedelic
drugs have influenced both the lives of individual users and
society in general more than is usually
acknowledged—sometimes subtly, sometimes dramatically.
" I was delighted to receive their invitation, since these
words almost exactly expressed my own conclusions after 8 years
of psychiatric clinical and research work. For 5 of those 8 years
I have worked in areas such as the nature of psychological
well-being, non-Western psychologies and religions,
consciousness, and the effects of meditation. I have also
undertaken a personal study of meditative and non-Western
traditions, and I thus have had the opportunity of meeting,
interviewing, and studying with a wide range of people in these
related disciplines.
Whenever I came to know these people closely, the same story
would emerge: that although they rarely acknowledged it in
public, the psychedelics had played an important role in
introducing them to and facilitating their passage through these
disciplines. It occurred to me that this might well be a case of
what social scientists call "plurality ignorance:" a
situation in which each individual thinks he or she is the only
one doing something, although in fact the practice is widespread.
In this case, what seemed to be widely unrecognized was that
large numbers of people appear to have derived, at least from
their own point of view, significant benefits from psychedelics,
despite popular media accounts of their devastating dangers.
This suspicion was deepened by an encounter with the editor of
a prominent psychological journal. In an extensive review of
various Western and non-Western psychologies, I discussed the
data on psychedelics and concluded that there was evidence
suggesting that in some cases people might find them beneficial.
The journal editor was willing to accept the paper provided I
removed any reference to positive effects of psychedelics; he
thought that the journal could not afford to be associated with
such statements. I am familiar with this particular editor's work
and know that he is exceptionally open-minded. It appears that we
have in our culture, even in the scientific and professional
literature, a bias towards reporting only the negative effects of
psychedelics.
How, then, can we get a picture of the effects of psychedelics
when they are used for personal exploration and psychological
growth? One approach suggested by Abraham Maslow, but as yet
apparently untried in the area of psychedelics, is to ask people
who are exceptionally healthy and use them as bioassayers.
Maslow's technique was to identify those individuals who seemed
to be most fully actualizing their potential; he called them
self-actualizers. (1) He listed 13 characteristics, such as a
deep involvement in work, peak experiences, and a good sense of
humor, which identify individuals who have attained exceptional
psychological well-being. While this approach has many
advantages, it is not without its drawbacks and limitations. The
concept and criteria of self-actualization are by no means clear,
and they are largely lacking in research data and support;
individuals are chosen subjectively, with all the possible biases
which that entails. (2) However, in the absence of good empirical
tests of high level well-being, we are left for the present with
subjective judgments.
My research has given me the extraordinary gift of meeting
some very remarkable people: mental health professionals,
advanced meditators, teachers, gurus, holy people of both East
and West who have devoted a large part of their lives to mental
training and psychological growth. I have spent considerable time
with some of them, interviewing and being interviewed, receiving
instruction on various meditative practices, listening to their
talks, and socializing. As might be expected, there is a wide
range of personalities and psychological maturity. I was able to
interview in depth five of the very healthiest Westerners who fit
Maslow's criteria and are also successful and eminent in their
disciplines.
These four men and one woman range in age from their
mid-thirties to their forties. All have university degrees; three
are psychologists, and the other two are highly sophisticated
psychologically. Four are teachers, either of psychology or of
one of the consciousness disciplines such as meditation or
Buddhism. All have strong national reputations, and most have
international reputations; all have published at least one book.
I included the criterion of professional eminence in order to
insure that the people were competent and would not be dismissed
as irresponsible or as dropouts of any sort.
Personal Experience
Each of these five people has had multiple psychedelic
experiences. For three of them the psychedelic experience was
crucial in arousing their interest in the consciousness
disciplines and directing their professional careers. A fourth
received LSD for the first time as part of a legitimate research
experiment during the sixties, had a deep religious experience
which affirmed and deepened previously dormant interests and
values, and subsequently returned to school to pursue those
interests further. All five report that the psychedelics have
been important in their own growth and that they continue to find
them useful in the context of their own discipline. On the
average, they continue to use them two to three times per year,
but all have gone for extended periods without use.
General Principles
On the basis of their own personal experiences and what they
had learned from working with many people involved in various
psychological and consciousness disciplines, they suggested the
following general principles, advantages, and disadvantages of
psychedelics.
All agreed that they are very powerful tools and that the
effects depend very much on the person who uses them and the
skill with which they are used. They took it as self-evident that
there are many people who should not take psychedelics,
especially anyone with significant psychological disturbances.
However, they agreed that used skillfully by a mature person,
they could indeed be helpful. This meant an appropriate setting,
at least at the start, preferably under the guidance of someone
who is psychologically mature and psychedelically experienced; an
appropriate mental set and expectations, including a preceding
period of quiet and/or meditation; and most important,
involvement in a psychological or consciousness discipline aimed
at deep mental training.
Possible Benefits
The first benefit was the simple recognition that there are
realms of experience, modes of self, and states of consciousness
far beyond the ken of our day-to-day experience or our
traditional cultural and psychological models. These experiences
were often said to produce expanded belief systems, making people
less dogmatic and more open to as yet unexperienced or undreamt
realms of being. One common report was that each experience
tended to elicit a deeper realm and a more expanded sense of
consciousness and self, so that the previously expanded belief
system continued opening and widening.
For all five of the subjects mentioned here, and many of their
students, psychedelic experience produced a new interest in depth
psychology, religion, spirituality, and consciousness, as well as
related disciplines and practices such as meditation. All the
subjects believed that their psychedelic experiences had enhanced
their ability to understand these consciousness disciplines. In
particular, the esoteric core of the great religious and
spiritual traditions could be seen as roadmaps to higher states
of consciousness, and some of the most profound material in these
traditions became especially clear and meaningful during
psychedelic sessions. Several of the subjects reported that they
often put time aside during psychedelic sessions to listen to
tapes or readings from these traditions; they found these
experiences particularly important. This is compatible with the
Eastern claim that "Religion is a learning in which a basic
requirement is 'First change your consciousness'." (3)
Most of the subjects felt that the psychedelic experience
could sometimes supply a guiding vision which provided direction
and meaning for one's life thereafter. They mentioned intense
emotions such as love, compassion, or empathy, and the
recognition that the mind can be and should be highly trained.
Three subjects mentioned another residual benefit. Someone who
has had a deep positive insight may be able to recall that
insight subsequently and use it to guide himself or herself
through a situation where it lends an additional useful
perspective, even though it is no longer directly available.
There was unanimous agreement that under appropriate
conditions the psychedelics could considerably speed and
facilitate the process of working through psychological blocks.
In some cases this involved material which was already being
worked on in an ordinary state of awareness, or could be. In
other cases, material inaccessible in an ordinary state could be
brought into awareness, sometimes producing dramatic
transformations including death/rebirth experiences and
alleviation of symptoms. Reviews of the therapeutic effects of
psychedelics have not shown clear-cut results, but of course it
is very difficult to detect experimentally significant effects of
a single intervention.
For some of the subjects the occasional use of psychedelics
provided a continuously deepening marker of their progress. No
matter how much mental training and psychological exploration
they had done, further realms of experience could be revealed by
the psychedelics. With each major advance in their mental
training, a new realm would open to them. An especially common
event was to experience something in a psychedelic drug session
which would recur months or years later in the context of a
mental training discipline and then spontaneously during daily
life. All five subjects believed that both psychedelics and their
mental disciplines suggested that the range of experiences which
occurred in daily living represented only a small slice of a
vast, perhaps unlimited, spectrum.
Traps and Complications
Although they themselves have had few serious problems with
the psychedelics, all five subjects thought that there were a
number of potential traps and complications. They viewed the
major protection against such difficulties as consisting in a
commitment to a mental training discipline and the availability
of an advanced teacher for consultation about both the
psychedelic experiences and the discipline. Not one of the five
subjects saw the psychedelics as constituting in and of
themselves a path which could lead to deep levels of
psychological-spiritual growth or true enlightenment.
Interestingly, the subjects did not see acute painful
reactions, such as anxiety attacks or fear of losing control, as
necessarily adverse. Rather, they held that with appropriate
expectations, previous work, and guidance, such reactions could
lead to deep and valuable insights. This is contrary to the
traditional psychiatric and emergency room perspective which sees
such reactions as purely pathological and requiring medication.
Hedonism was mentioned as one of the traps associated with
psychedelics. Using these chemicals for trivial sensory
stimulation was seen not as wrong, but as unskillful and
unfulfilling. The subjects also noted that it was possible to
become attached to the more pleasant experiences, marring later
sessions by inappropriate expectations and calculated attempts to
recreate those experiences.
Since psychedelic experiences can be extraordinarily intense,
there is some danger of not recognizing a fantasy for what it is.
As one subject noted, it is not always easy to discern which
experiences are valid, especially for people who are
intellectually and psychologically sophisticated. Again, the best
remedy was seen as a commitment to open-mindedness, ongoing
mental training, and the instruction of an advanced teacher.
The same remedy was suggested for the tendency to overestimate
the profundity and long-term impact of insights which may be
mistaken for profound awakenings. This tendency was seen as
decreasing with further experience of either the psychedelics or
a mental training discipline. It was felt that deep exploration
of either would produce many insights, each one adding a small
piece to the gigantic jigsaw puzzle which is the mind.
An inadequate cognitive framework or context was also
mentioned as a limiting factor. Sometimes extremely deep insights
did occur under psychedelics, and in at least two cases there may
have been a transient enlightenment experience. In one of the
subjects it produced a prolonged period of confusion and partial
disorientation which in turn led to meditation training. This
subject experienced a deep level of enlightenment again after
several years' practice and this time found the experience
understandable and beneficial.
One subject thought that the main disadvantage of psychedelics
is the tendency to underestimate one's own role in creating the
resultant experiences. People have too little appreciation of
their own power and see themselves as passive victims of drug
effects rather than as active creators of experience.
One trap for people with limited experience, the subjects
said, is a failure to appreciate the enormous range of potential
experiences and the tendency to assume that all sessions will be
like the first. Many people have made pronouncements about the
nature of psychedelic effects after limited exposure and
therefore have failed to appreciate the extent of differences
between individuals or between one session and another in the
same individual. According to reports by these subjects, as well
as Stanislav Grof (4,5) and others, repeated exposure produces a
gradual unfolding and deepening sequence of experiences.
Summary
Here then are comments on the pros and cons of psychedelics
from five of the very healthiest individuals I have met in the
course of my research and personal investigations of various
psychological and consciousness disciplines. In each of these
individuals the psychedelics played an important yet unpublicized
role in their life orientations and professions. Taken in
conjunction with the similar findings which they have noticed in
their students and colleagues, these reports make it clear that
the psychedelics can sometimes have long-lasting beneficial
impact. While the five subjects discussed here do not see
psychedelics as constituting a pathway in themselves, they do see
them as potential facilitators of development for some people
engaged in a mental training program or a psychological or
consciousness discipline. The experiences and traps associated
with psychedelic drugs are not seen as unique but rather as
features of any mental training program, although the drugs
usually produce them more rapidly and intensely. Needless to say,
the capacity to benefit from an accelerated experience depends on
the maturity and skill of the individual; all five subjects took
it as self-evident that psychedelics should not be used
indiscriminately but should be respected as the powerful tools
they are.
REFERENCES
1. Maslow, A. H. The Further Reaches of Human Nature.
New York: Viking, 1971.
2. Heath, D. The maturing person. In R. Walsh and D. Shapiro
eds. Beyond Health and Normality. Explorations of Extreme
Psychological Wellbeing. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold,
1981.
3. Rajneesh, B. Just Like That. Poona, India: Rajneesh
Foundation, 1975.
4. Grof, S. Realms of the Human Unconscious. Observations
from LSD Research. New York: Viking, 1975.
5. Grof, S. Realms of the human unconscious. In R. Walsh &
F. Vaughan (Eds.). Beyond Ego: Transpersonal Dimensions in
Psychology. Los Angeles: J. Tarcher, 1980, pp. 87-89.
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