Personal psychedelic experiments and anthropological influences described in a memoir excerpt

psychologist, William James, and was studied using fieldwork by anthropologists such as Bronislaw Malinolowki as described in his classic book, Magic, Science and Religion. Wa hopeless, without materialistic solutions and trapped in a belief system of spiritual nihilism? Was this a brain chemical transcendence escape and spiritual delivery system for the suprapsychological survival of those in dire need? As the 13" Century Islamic mystic, Jelaluddin Rumi, has written, “lf a tree could fly off, it n wouldn’t suffer the saw...” and more concretely, “...if you can’t go somewhere, move into the passageways of the self...,” a spiritual escape via a neurobiological road to the God-space within. What followed were a few years of occasional exploration of an “inside out” understanding of the mystical states evoked by the entheogenic family of chemicals. There were varieties of settings for these personal experiments. | found myself LSD-lost, circling endlessly in the tall silence of a Northern California redwood forest. | tried on Hunter Thompson’s mescaline lenses for the experience of Las Vegas unfiltered. | was expertly mentored in these quests by a distinguished collection of guides: Cultural anthropologist Michael Harner who taught me about the yage and datura use among the shaman of the Jivaro; Social anthropologist, Barbara Meyerhoff introduced me to the personal renewal rituals of the peyote cactus-using Huichol Indians of the Southwestern Sonora Desert; Neurochemically sophisticated Sidney Cohen, founding director of the National Institutes of Health’s Institute on Drug Abuse, told me stories of his involvement with Aldous Huxley and Barbara Brown in the Los Angeles covey of early American LSD explorers; organic 90 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_013590