Trip through the Mind's Gate

While I generally veer away from the topic of drugs these days it is interesting to note the pace with which the news of Albert Hoffman's death has been flying around the internet since yesterday afternoon. The inventor of LSD died at the ripe old age of 102, which if anything is some proof that hallucinations aren't necessarily bad for your physical health. What I am most struck by is not the stellar portrait of the late Hoffman by visionary artist Alex Grey, but the realization of the sheer amount of people whose lives have been intimately and psychologically influenced by this man's first accidental trip through the door's of perception.



Personally I stopped experimenting with psychedelics several years ago, focusing instead on subtler, less chemical, and less potentially harmful modes of altering perception (such as yoga, dreaming, literature, etc). I recall that my last several trips, and in all reality the majority of my LSD trips, were fraught with social anxiety, a pressing need to drink water (and then use the bathroom), and an astoundingly exasperating lack of visions. The last time I did acid I ended up wandering in progressively larger circles through the city, went into the graveyard where I passed a herd of thirty deer, sat at the foot of an oak tree, got accosted by the searchlights of police helicopters, and then at the peak saw a spot of brilliant white light hanging in the sky which I thought was like a hole poked through the veil of existence. It turned out to just be another helicopter, and somewhat afraid that there might be a serial killer lurking about I got up from my meditation to run away (unfortunately unlike Buddha) and found within arms length from me a baby deer who led me back out of the cemetery past the strange glowing red lights coming from the tombs. While it was a somewhat wild and almost mythic experience, as most of my hallucinations were, it is worth noting that what these kinds of trips gave me was an increased sense of the interconnectedness of experience, the realization that mind and all its demons has some influence over matter, and at the very least some pretty wild experiences that may never have been able to happen under my everyday modes of perception. Certainly there have been many people who have abused these drugs and found themselves in the dark side of Alice's Wonderland, but what LSD did for me was show me that the world is a much bigger, more awesome place, and that once you've "cleansed the doors of perception" (to take Blake at his word) it is difficult to see things the small way again.