I am so glad I took LSD
Dr Susan Blackmore's Preface to Albion Dreaming
We are delighted to share Dr Susan Blackmore’s Preface to Albion Dreaming by Andy Roberts with you - with grateful thanks for her permission to do so.
I am so glad I took LSD. Albion Dreaming reminds me why, as well as telling me many things I never knew about the ultimate psychedelic and how its story played out here in Britain. This turns out to be quite a different story from the better-known tale of LSD in the USA. Acid was, after all, a European invention and there were many Englishmen involved in its early use, including Aldous Huxley who famously asked for it as he lay dying of cancer.
No wonder its discoverer, Albert Hofmann, called LSD ‘My Problem Child’. More than any other drug I know, LSD has the capacity for the extremes of insight and joy as well as the bleakest and most fearful of depths. This may be why it can be such a great teacher and I guess this is the main reason I am glad. I was also very lucky to have good guides for my earliest trips and the opportunity to choose wonderful settings. For me the ideal has always been to take it early in the morning and spend a day on the cliff tops or the beach or the woods or even my own garden. I may have overindulged a bit in those early days in the 1970s – after all, it was all so exciting! But most of my life I have wanted it only once every few years when the time or the need seemed right.
In January 2006 I went to Basel in Switzerland for the symposium to celebrate Albert Hofmann’s 100th birthday, and what an event that was and what an amazing man. I glimpsed him the first morning there as I was going up an escalator and looked round to see him halfway up. Crowds were hovering around him as though in awe or even worship. Part of me rebelled as I so dislike heroes turned into semi-religious figures but then I too was captivated as he stepped off at the top and I was looking into his bright, warm, intelligent eyes. He radiated a kind of presence that I have never seen before, and then moved steadily off amid an enormous crowd of admirers.
How can someone live to a hundred and be so fit and well? Did it have anything to do with the drugs he synthesised, tested and used? Perhaps it had more to do with his earlier spiritual or mystical experiences as a child, experiences that arguably led him to the ‘mishap that was not a mishap’ as he put it, to the intuition that the apparently innocuous 25th compound in the LSD series was worth a second look. Or was it, as he suggested, his daily breakfast of raw egg? We cannot know. Yet this hundred-year-old man participated fully in the three days of the conference. As he walked up onto the stage for the first time, he wobbled a little and steadied himself with his stick. Then he turned and apologised ‘I’m sorry for being a little unsteady but I must remind myself that I’m no longer in my nineties’.
I was lucky enough to meet him briefly face to face. As well as just enjoying the event I was recording interviews with many of the people there, hoping to make a BBC radio programme and write articles on LSD. Like lots of other journalists and researchers I had asked for, and been politely refused, an interview with the great man himself. Then one afternoon, to avoid the melee, I had snuck away into a relatively quiet corner to interview Martin Lee, author of Acid Dreams. What I hadn’t realised was that the innocuous looking door behind us was a secret way through from the conference centre to the hotel next door, and right in the middle of the interview I saw a small group coming towards us – the organisers escorting the birthday boy to this door. I was introduced right then and there to the centenarian who put aside his stick and warmly shook my hand. I went completely pathetic and mumbled what I tried to say in the most appalling German. Yet of course he understood for I was only saying what everyone else there wanted to say. Thank you Albert.
This deep gratitude is just one of many hints that LSD invokes something akin to mystical or spiritual experiences – leading to the vexed question of whether these experiences are really the same or ultimately different – whether a simple drug that affects the brain can really create true spirituality. Is laughing at the ‘Cosmic joke’ and delighting in sheer acid joy the same as mystical joy? Is the sudden understanding of the power of love the same as that met in prayer or contemplation? Is the involuntary review of who we are and all we have done, with its descent into fear or disgust at our own shortcomings, the same as the ultimately freeing acceptance reported in near-death experiences? Is the terror of letting go of self, or the joyful realisation that ‘I’ am not other than the universe, the same as the oneness reached in mystical experiences. Is this loss of self the nonduality that can take years of meditation practice to find? Or are these just tricks of the ultimate trickster drug? I cannot answer this deepest question about LSD any more than anyone else can, although my own intuition is that the answer is ‘yes’.
The tragedy of LSD, as this and other books explore, is how it became abused, made illegal, and ultimately denied both to those who wanted to explore its spiritual dimensions and those could have benefited from its therapeutic potential. I get upset to think how differently things might have turned out. In my dream world I live in a society in which all recreational drugs are legally available, regulated and controlled; a society in which a culture of serious drug use rather than drug abuse grows up and matures. Just imagine being able to seek out experienced guides to take you, or your children, or your best friends, into that first trip. Just imagine a world in which professionals know how to guide people through bad trips and terrifying ordeals, and how to avoid the psychological damage that LSD can undoubtedly sometimes inflict. But I ask myself whether it could ever have been this way. Was the abuse and misunderstanding inevitable? Might we ever reach this dream world, and in my lifetime?
I do not know but I keep hoping. And in a country where more and more people want to see the end of the war on drugs, perhaps we can do it. I’ve read many histories of psychedelic drugs and met many of the characters involved, but Albion Dreaming gives us something new by showing how the history of LSD played out differently here in Britain from the way it did in the USA. This is one of the reasons I enjoyed it so much, and it may perhaps give us hope for LSD’s future here in Britain.
Order your copy of Albion Dreaming: A Popular History of LSD by Andy Roberts here. You can also discover more about Dr Susan Blackmore’s fabulous research and books on her website.
Thank you so much for sharing and Susan Blackmore for allowing its distribution here 🙌 beautiful read to start my day.
Thank you for this article. Really enjoyed reading it. Amazing stuff.