The Castalia Foundation - Transcendental Experience

Book Reviews

The Psychedelic Review, Issue No.9, 1967

THE VARIETIES OF PSYCHEDELIC EXPERIENCE
By R.E.L. Masters And J. Houston
One man's glowing rose, this book says, can be another man's epiphany. In presenting a rich and comprehensive catalogue of the varieties of psychedelic experience, the authors are also putting down the varieties of "psychedelic swamis" — that growing herd for whom "empathy becomes mystic unions depersonalisation becomes the Body of Bliss; and spectacular visual effects, the Clear Light of the Void. Without having gained the stability, maturity, and elasticity to assimilate Eastern values, the leap from Western games is usually into a nebulous chaos seen as Eastern truth."

For some, psychedelics have wonderfully multiplied all the devices for self-evasion. This book, among other good things, could be a primer for people who have a high stake in their own gullibility. They have readied an agreement with the leaders of the Psychedelic Revolution based on a misunderstanding. However free these followers are of the hostile and militant forms of complacency they are opposed to, no form of complacency is altogether benign.

The authors feel that psychedelics offer the best access yet to the contents and processes of the human mind; the book's dust jacket says this is the first comprehensive guide to the effects of LSD on human personality. Both statements are true.

Here are the authors' points of view on issues of immediate concern:

Although "research has been directly injured by a messianism as it is undesirable," it must, of course, be continued. Equally important — and here they must be given full marks — it should continue without the crippling limitation of control by a single profession. Research into the phenomena of the psychedelic experience so for contraindicates confinement to the shrunken world of psychiatric medicine or the even more terrestrial realm of laboratory psychology.

Anthropology, parapsychology, comparative religion and mythology, philosophy and the creative arts are finding this material of urgent relevance.

Indeed, specialists in these fields who ore awake to this urgency have been educated and live their lives in precisely those areas of which medical men are most ignorant, and often most afraid. As someone once said, science makes major contributions to minor needs. There are more things in heaven and earth than are discernible by orthodox scientific, and particularly medical, methods.
It is no longer a controversial issue whether or not persons who have token the drug should be disqualified for research. On the contrary, they are for better equipped.
It is not LSD, but the mishandling of a session, which is the key factor in LSD psychosis.
One of the most clear-cut lessons from psychedelic research is that hospital and clinical settings should be avoided. They create more paranoia, more bodily symptoms, and restrict travel to fewer dimensions. Instead a qualified guide, and a natural, or otherwise congenial, setting are necessary.
Psychedelics. however, should not be made available to everybody. Indiscriminate use with unstable subjects and people of low intelligence can be either dangerous or futile. The experience has proved most rewarding for deeply honest, introspective individuals who are highly motivated toward growth and expansion.
Psychedelics provide access to symbolic integral levels of the psyche beyond those touched by psychoanalysis and psychotherapy where the encounter is usually with literal life history and related affect.
Therefore, psychedelics open up possibilities of work on these levels that aims not at restoring the sick to health, but at enabling comparatively healthy individuals to realize growth potentials which science has net yet bosun to describe, much less understand.
"Instant psychotherapy" is in fact possible at certain levels of the experience.
Psychedelics also make religious and mystical exparionms passible — with qualifications.
The true psychedelic mystical-experience is higher and fuller than those achieved by the traditional methods which follow the path of obliteration — the via negative. Retreat from the phenomenal world, and the contraction of consciousnese is less sure than the psychedelic expansion which includes wealth of phenomena.

Nonetheless, the book is non-mystical. The authors' phenomenological approach to the psychedelic experience is given an exclusively Western orientation. There is, of course, an obvious irony in of this as an antidote to the prevailing East winds. The West. with its addiction to conquest and oxtroversion, and its obstinate intellectual compartrnentalism is, in fact, being undermined by the continuous movement of Siva's seductive dance.

In an admittedly clumsy fashion, the West wants to join in. There are hunger pains and growing pains evident in shifting social values, political philosophy, and the creative arts. In impressionistic terms, there is a movement from Yang to Yin; from doing to being; from action to delectation; from form to content; from game to play; from dominance to complimentation; from the dialectic to the paradox; from manipulation to reverence; from prayer to relation; from power to authority; from force to dignity; from earnestness to gaiety; from scorn to gentle mockery; from drink to pot; and from the battlefield to the bed.

To the extent that this is trims, and to the extent that psychedelics are accelerating the movement in this direction, the authors aro looking bock, not forward.

However that may be, they achieve what they set out to do. They make no attempt to glamorise the experience; In fact, they seem to go out of their way to avoid it. By recording its phenomenology, their stated concern is to make order out of and derive some thing of value from, its wide range of consciousness-changing effects.

The book is based on the work of 15 years and the first-hand observation of 206 drug sessions (both peyote and LSD) plus interviows with 214 voluntary subjects. It therefore includes accounts of guided and unguided sessions, both negative and positive experiences, but favors 'normal' subjects over psychiatric patients.
To other research workers, the authors contribute an abundance of detailod doscription and verbatim accounts. Reports follow the passime through what they describe as new dimensions of awareness to self-knowledge and the transforming experiences which bring about the actualising of latent capacities, philosophical reorientation, and emotional and sensory at-homeness in the world. In stories of rituals and encounters with the exotic, the liberating effects of new dimensions of fantasy ore apparent.

While the authors did not specifically set out to explore the dynamics of ritual and metaphor — each an index of transcendent perception — their records of psychedelic experlonces provide an important part of this necessary raw research material.

In the psychedelic world metaphors can be encountered beyond the language of words and mental images, in the physiological reactions of sensations and movements, where perhaps they originated and when the mind/body split may be healed. The frequency with which exotic places occur is itself a metaphor for going beyond; and the spontaneous (or guided) peydwidolic ritual — like all rituals — is pledge of self-transcendence.

Apart from satisfying the research worker, the book's verbatim accounts of rituals, eidotic imagery, and adventures In synesthesia make up the sort of surreal circus that will delight the image-collector. Them is a "cacophony of Buddhas", on "olfactory Walpurgisnadd", a diamond cat with a staccato nteeyow" —— and many more inside. For lovers of this fey there are even elves that speak in verse.

In the book's first Acosta there is a long and comprohensire list of this psychological effects of LSD and peyote. For some individuals ail of those effects would also apply to marijuana. It was therefore all the more strange. to read In the second chapter that the authors are ignorant of this, and in comparing it with other psychedelics underestimate its usefulness.

Centuries ago, a papal pronouncement against the American Indian use of peyote read:

'We the inquisitors against heretical perversity... by virtue of apostolic authority declare, inasmuch as the herb called peyote has boon introduced into them provinces... it is an act of superstition condemned as opposed to the purity and integrity of the Holy Catholic faith. The fantasies suggest intervention with the Devil, the real authority of this vice."

If The Inquisition were not still with us, large scale rewards would be allowed to keep pace with private explorations in these areas and would also be able to reach back in history to man's long and varied use of consciousness-exporsding matorials.

The fact that marijuana has been known and used boneficially for at least 5000 years and is still legally condemned by a culture that is almost totally ignorant of the full range of its effects, is in the spirit of The Inquisition. And the author's ignorance — either of the effects or the intelligent use of marijuana — is a direct outcome of this constraint.

Marijuana can also be a helpful diagnostic for initiates to the LSD experience. And again after sessions, for analysing and sustaining its effects. It can work with effective persistence to correct, balance, expand all mooch of personal impedance and behavior. It is therefore a useful therapeutic tool; it can be an aid to memory recoil and drawn analysis; to proper breathing that Mods to greater lucidity and higher states of awareness; for the conscious dispelling of long-hold muscular tensions, sensory deadness and sexual difficulties, among other things.

Marijuana can alter the negative body image — and the body with it. It has boon widely used at a spur to imagination and to humor through paradox. And as an entree into the complex world of groat poetry, painting, music. It can effect an orgy of comprehension of lasting value.

Ihe chapters which follow the introductory and historical openers accelerate in momentum and richness, each — appropriately for the subject — more than the last. As a guide to guides, the ground is well covered and the organisation of the material is excellent.

Joan Houston, who is largely responsible for evolving this approach to the psycheddelic experience might do well to write another book designed specifically as a manual. I suspect she is more than capable of filling it with imaginative games — far both subject and guide —that would carry the subject into transition states and beyond. It could include fuller descriptions of these transition states — like maps that indicate crossroads.

The four stages could profitably be described with more examples that would include a cross-section of different intellectual, professional, emotional and physical types of individuals, The psychedelic experience of the body can be regarded as anything from a rogrottable necessity to a source of wonder; a temple of the spirit or a mere machine. An entire chapter is given to the phenomena of the body image — of distortions both positive and moodye involving whole or part of the body. There on descriptions of changes in six. and configuration; the transformation into pure energy or dissolution into no-body; weigh&ssness; and levitation; the fight of eternity and the Body of Bliss; metamorphosis into animal form; "thing-ification"; and transmutation into other substances.

Consciousness can be localised in a particular part of the body which may coexist with the subject's usual consciousness, or the usual consciousness may "shift its place of residence."

There may be 'internal awareness" (their quotes) of body functions, or an experience of the "Internal landscape" (mine). The body may also become involved in a Wonderland of micro-and macrocosmic experiences.

Of increasing therapeutic import is the additional evidence given in this chapter that not only may a distortion of tht usual body image occur, but a normalising of a previously held distorted body image.

In this connection the mirror image is susceptible to manipulation by either subject or guide. Others who have spent psychedelic time with a mirror and have recognised it as a powerful transforming therapeutic instrument, will find confirmation in the authors' work on the reflected body image. A psychedelic game with infinite regress, like the subject looking at his body looking at his body looking at his body — or the projection of consciousness away from the body — can all be done with mirrors.

But the authors have found that for a large percentage of people, mirror-gazing results in unpleasant negative distortion. What this implied antipathy literally reflects of a culture alienated from the body is unfortunately left unexplored. The authors — at least in the presentation of their material — are shy of social criticism.

It is probably for this reason that the reader is sold short in the succeeding chapter dealing with the subject's experience of other persons. Since, for many people, the psychedelic experience itself abounds with insights into the dynamics of interpersonal relations, it is all the more disappointing that the authors instead remark only upon the new or revived awareness and appreciation of others, and of the obvious link between hostility and negative distortions, and between love and positive distortions.

Although they give full warning of the dangers of solipsism and miscolled experiences of empathy, there is no depth analysis of the dynamics of relationship. On the interpersonal level, extraordinary aberrations, both perceptual and conceptual — in and out of psychedelic sessions — are often the result of a failure to see one's own behavior as a function of the other's. LSD can also facilitate a good look into those strategic games that achieve desired identity-for-the-other at the expense of self-alienation.

The imaginative alertness and quick recognition of lilt signals required of a guide are well described, and many tips are given for diverting the subject either from chaos or the preservation of normal categorical orientation. With some subjects for example, it may be necessary for the guide to extend the initial stage of sensory awareness and to lead them into synesthesias in order to create a "working liaison" between sensory and psychic realms before inviting them to explore the psychodynamics of the second level.

The method of guiding is based on a pattern of "descent" corresponding to major levels of the psyche. Those have already been described as being the sensory, the recollective-analytic, the symbolic, and the integral. This functional model of the drug state is given with suggested techniques that permit access to deeper levels where more rewarding transformative experiences occur.

The guide must respect the fact that each experience is in significant ways very Individual. He should be aware of the importance of expectation, of set and setting, and of preparation prior to the session. He must be highly literate and have psychedelic experiences of his own in order to best structure the experiential context of the session in relation to the subject's goals.

The guide can trigger metamorphoses both physical and psychological. He can suggest descent, guide fantasy and when necessary, effectively divert negative feeling and imagery. He must steer a course of gradual intensification and expansion. By using traditional symbolic devices he can facilitate participation in allegorical dramas. His knowledge of mythology must be sufficient to make a choice of mythic structure for the third level of the experience based on the preceding recollective-analytical materials.

Like Virgil, the guide can load the subject to the realm of changeless eternity and there show him the manifold aspects of reality. But the guide's participation must stop at the threshold of the integral level lust as Dante was left at the portals of the "realms of bliss". The integration of early eidetic imagery into a purposive ideation-image-sensation-affect complex is of great importance in achieving the final transcendent, transforming state.

Each of the four levels of the psychedelic desceitt are described and documented with verbatim accounts in separate chapters which comprise the second half of the book. (These correspond for the most part to the Leary.Alpert-Metzner Bardo levels, minus the re-entry.) The perceptual feast and abundance of eidetic images characterizing the sensory stage, should have as its major function the deconditioning of the subject. With heightened perception, the subject no longer sees objects in terms of the labels and functions which usually vitiate the immediacy of full visual perception.

The authors regard images as "clothed affect", and in sharp disagreement with Aldous Huxley, they justly see the significance of the eidetic image rat simply as identical with its own being, but as an unemployed player awaiting recruitment into the subject's personal drama.

Symbolising the environment marks the transition into the next stage and Is the "gateway phenomenon" which indicates that the voyage inward hat begun. This is the recollective-analytic stage of reflections and memories. It is on this level when the world can be seen without deceit or illusion, and when memories formerly misinterpreted or preserved In invalid form can assort themselves with accuracy, that "instant psychotherapy" is first possible.

The symbolic level which follows can compensate for the relative paucity of rites of passage In our society. Now the subject can participate in mythic and ritualistic dramas which represent to him — in terms both universal and personal — his own place in the world.

The book describes the myths which, because of their continuing potency and relevance to the human condition, occur most frequently. Among them are myths of Creation, of the Sacred Quest, of the Eternal Return, and of Paradise and Fall. The myth of the Child Hero striving toward self-realisation, and the encounter or identification with the Trickster or Wise Fool with his tragicomic revelation of the essential paradox, produce some of the most rewarding insights.

Participation in myth and ritual is found to be more profound than participation In historical events or in the evolutionary process which also occur at this level. And it is the total involvement In these dramas that is required to charge the experience with transformative potency.

At the fourth and final level there occurs a confrontation with what is variously described as the Ground of Being, God, Noumenon, Mysterium, or Essence. To qualify as a true or full religious experience this encounter must be charged with "intense affect which rises to emotional crescendo climaxed by death and purgation of some part of the subject 'and rebirth into a new higher order of existence." Only a very small percentage of the authors' subjects experienced this. And like individuals who qualify as student-candidates for Kabalistic teachings, they are all over 40, with a highly integrated, perceptive intelligence.

A considerable effort is made to sort out the ambiguities inherent in mysticism and to distinguish the various types of mystical and religious experience from their symbolic analogues. The authors ore strict in their criteria for what constitutes the encounter with the Other on the integral level, and what teary describes as the religious experience is in large part dismissed as part of the exotica of psychedelics.

They are also cautious concerning Leary's "seductive" Idea of the ecstatic state as a parallel of current scientific discovery, and take a don't-know attitude to "unlocked genetic codes, revealed nuclear enigmas, and perceived infinities of intracellular communication." But they suggest instead that new scientific knowledge may be providing the stuff of myth-making and may constitute the present domain of sacred knowledge. The authors are equally wary of parapsychology. if their work has involved imaginative thought and experimentation in these areas, the book deliberately conceals it.

Straight professional criticism, and criticism that derives from temperamental preferences are distinguishable only at the most superficial level. It is below that level that I feel the commitment to work with LSD grows out of an impatience (to put it mildly) with the dispensable, distorting, and crippling limitations that inhibit human potential.

The true leaders of the Psychedelic Revolution are those whose happiness is dependent on dynamic change or progress — and whose despair is really the desperate need for unfamiliar terminals. They know that LSD can be a powerful force for social change and for undermining existing corrosive value systems.

They are those who are more at home with uncertainty and impermanence than with dogma and stasis. Unable to forget the extent to which we are each inhabited by uninvited guests — parents, educators, politicians — they know that LSD can help discover these occupants and the ways in which they use truth as a convenience. The leaders are those who have peered long into their own darkened hands until they burst into flames and filled their vision with a dazzling light. Their work is part of the universal rumble of enslaved conscious. ness that is just beginning to be heard.

Since society has agreed to denigrate malcontents, when malcontents themselves are mystified by this Indictment, they become either society's sleeping giants — or its inmates. It is good that this book leaves the limits of potentiality undefined; but not good that there is nothing of the trenchont criticism of social values implied by the widespread use of psychedelics.

LSD is not a panacea. Neither has it been proved to cause irreversible damage. But even if all the LSD research and private exploration should end now, enough has been learned for us to deal snore effectively than before with the destructiveness of arbitrary limits. The authors take a vow of anti-messionism, yet their book — which is well beyond any of the other recent books on the subject — presents at the same time some of the strongest evidence of the miracle powers of psychedelics.

They have indulged in some gentle chiding of Aldous Huxley and Alan Watts (with too little praise to suit their fans), but unlike Huxley and Watts they have agreed to numb their visionary powers.

I am speaking from the point of view of what might be called meta-or parthanthropokily. Society cuts its own pattern out of total reality. It forbids travel into areas it chooses to ignore and demarcates its boundaries with taboos and dome. signs. The psychedelic experience can be the equivalent of a voyage to a strange lend — an exploration of a world beyond what any given society arbitrarily calls reality.

The records of psychedelic experiences (and of transcendental psychosis) are the travellers' tides of today. From this standpoint the function of both modnets and psychedelics is to break the constraining binds of artificial or arbitrary boundaries, and ge beyond them. When psychedelic symbols and experiences are put together in on anthology, they are. in a functional sense, being used as signs.

It is essentially for this reason that while I respect the authors for fulfilling their obligation to do well what they set out to do, I balk at the resemblance the book bears to a text. It is difficult not to appraise it by comparing the forces that press upon the authors with the forces they release. Theirs is seriousness, but not 'hies' seriousness.

The reader is consequently forced to search exposition and style for clues to the motivating factors behind this research; this reveals a lock of vision and of affect appropriate to the subject. One day when computers are assigned the task of assembling information dispensers, academic writing will be, liberated to an extent unknown today, and Intellectuals will be allowed the luxury of disclosing their deepest driving forces and their wildest dreams. The style with which vision is presented should bear the some intoxicating challenge and conviction as Stolen had when he said, "I demand that he who still refuses to see a galloping horse as a tomato should be looked upon as a cretin."

The final stages of every revolution have been chocked by timidity, pragmatic compromise, and a failure of imagination. In future writings about psychedelics, the new information which stems from an experience of total Involvement and delight with richness should have a corresponding style. Not a repetition of the old but a response to challenge, not a comforting, canine indulgence, but a finely directed radio transmission.

Neither the enemies of LSD nor the fence-sitters should be permitted to dilute the new awareness or con us out of the fullest expression of it. Timothy Leary may have issued a moratorium on psychedelic sessions to appease our elders, but new information requires a new medium of expression, or we kill it by being kind to others.

When the Galileo of Ereches play, intoxicated by the new vision of the heavens he had mode possible, was told by his assistant to calm himself, he turned and said, "Andreas, exdte yourself I" For those confused by polygonal reviews, the book is great. Rood it and see. The book is published by Holt, Rinehart and Winston. New York, Chicago, Son Francisco. $7.95 — Jean Wescott THE PEYOTE RELIGION AMONG THE NAVAHO. by David F. Abed.. This monograph is a splendid example of American social science at its massive best. 430 pages of small type, dozens of statistical tables and charts, detailed discussions of and lengthy quotations from the works of other scholars, elaborate attempts to "classify" poyotisms:

"Unlike many supernaturally-oriented movements generated by American Indian groups after conquest, the church is redemptive, rather than transformative or even reformative."

The book includes a lengthy and detailed history of the Navaho tribe, as well as of the peyote cult in particular. It presents detailed descriptions and history of the tribal and outside opposition to peyotism and the spread of the religion in spite of this rejection:

"Much evidence has been discovered that indicates that members of the Native American Church are seriously and strongly committed fe their religion, including its use of peyote, and that if necessary they will suffer imprisonment rather than abandon the church and will fight cases through the courts, whether tribal, state or federal, so tong as they experience legal restrictions."

A Publication of the Wonner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. Inc. Aldine Publishing Co., Chicago, lit 1966. Pp 454. $10.00
BRAIN AND CONSCIOUS EXPERIENCE
This book is a reprint of conference papers and discussions on:

"the most important questions that man can ask about himself and his relation to the material world."

The contributors are outstanding world experts in their fields. To mention only a few as examples; "Sensory mechanisms in perception" by R. A. Grants, Professor of Nourophysiology. Stockholm; "Speech, perception and the cortex" by Prof. Wilder Penfield of the Montreal Neurological Institute; "Brain mechanisms and states of consciousness" by Prof. H. H. Jasper, University of Montreal; "Conscious experience and memory" by Sir John Eccles; "Conscious Control of Action, by Prof. D. McKay; "Ethology and consciousness" by Dr. W. H. Thorpe.

Differing in quality and clarity, as well as in approach, these papers nevertheless provide some fascinating pieces of information and occasional flashes of Inspired formulations. No coherent picture of the brain-consciousness situation emerges, most of the contributors still struggling with the old Cartesian body-mind categories, but the sidelights from the neurologists, the biochemists, the ethologists and pathologists are often illuminating. Published by: Study Week Sep. 28. 4, 1964, of the Pontifka Academia Scientiorum. Edited by Sir John Eccles. Springer Verlag Now York, 1966. Pp 591. $16.80.

THE MARIHUANA PAPERS.
Edited by David Solomon.
Introduction by Alfred Undesmith, Ph.D.
Dave Salomon, who earlier edited "LSD: The Consciousness-Expanding Drug", has gathered together all the most important papers on the "holy herb", thus correcting finally and inexcusable lack of public information. This is the basis reference book on marihuana. Included are extracts from historical, sociological studies by Norman Taylor, Howard Recker and Alfred Undesmith; Timothy Leary's Town Hall Lecture; literary pieces by Rabelais, Gautier, laucklaire, Paul Bowles, Terry Southern, Allen Ginsberg; the complete Mayor's Report —— the outstanding, long out of print authoritative study of marihuana; several scientific papers on the nunlikel and therapeutic uses of cannabis; as well as the Marihuana Tax Ad of 1937.

To quote Humphry Osmond on this book (published by Hobbs-Merrill Co., Inc., Indianapolis. Pp 448, $10.00):

"Every reader will learn something surprising, disconcerting, and, even more often, puxiling about the hemp plant's long, strange, ambivalent association with mankind. Most readers will find... that some of their preconceptions must be modified or even extensively revised in the light of this excellent book."

LIGHT SHOW MANUAL
by Bob Beck.
This excellent little manual contains a wealth of extremely useful, practical information for anyone involved in color-light shows of any kind. It includes a description, with advantages and limitations, of the major commonly used systems; "wet shows", colorsound translators, color organs, "crystal trips", "Programmed image systems", projection kaleidoscope, overhead projections, strobe lights etc. It also contains a guide to equipment and where to get it, bibliography, names of color-light artists, lists of relevant patents, and advice by Jean Mayo, Dr. Henry Hill. Robert Williams, circuit diagrams, pictures etc. Highly recommended for any "psychedelic artist". The book is privately printed and available from the author at 1540 Coosa Place, Los Angeles, Calif. 90028. $3.00

SESSION GAMES PEOPLE PLAY
by Lisa Bieberman
This little 36-page booklet, "Session Games People Play: A Manual for the Use of LSD", is probably the best simple, straight-forward introduction to the use of psychedelics available. The games described include "Get Me Out of This", "This One Doesn't Count", "Baby", "Let's Have an Orgy", "Mind Reader", "Messiah" and others.

Essentially the model proposed for taking LSD is one of gaining understanding or insight into self. No mention is made of the possibility of death-rebirth or mystical experiences. However as a preliminary manual, for someone with no prior acquaintance with either psychedelics or mystical experiences, this booklet is highly worthwhile. IT is

We hope that high-school and college-students who are considering experimenting with LSD would read this first. It is available from The Psychedelic Information Center, 26 Boylston Str., Cambridge, II. [It can also be read online here.

MESCAL AND MECHANISMS OF HALLUCINATIONS
By Heinrich Myer
This book is a reprint of Kluver's important 1928 monograph Mescal, plus a paper on Mechanisms of Hallucinations, first published in 1942, subsequently reprinted in Psychedelic Review #7

Professor Kluver, whose work as a professional psychologist has centered mainly on the relationship of brain alterations to various perceptual and cognitive processes, here addresses himself to an analysis of the structure of drug-induced sensory changes. He asks the question: are there any constants in hallucinatory phenomena, features that cut across the manifold individual differences? His answer is then are certain form-constants, viz:

Grating, lattice, fretwork, filigree, honeycomb or chess-board,
Cobweb,
Tunnel, funnel, alley, cone.
Spiral.

Moreover, these form-constants are also found in other states, such as hypnagogic hallucinations, entopfic phenomena, insulin hypoglycemia, or in looking at rotating discs with black and white sectors.

The recent work of Gerald Oster suggests that these form-constants may be aspects of the physiological structure of the eye which become visible under psychedelic drugs. In a valuable new introduction to this important and stimulating book, Kluver suggests that if we look beyond these formal constants:

"variability and inconstancies appear to be the most constant feature of hallucinatory and other subjective phenomena.It would be even more challenging to consider, on the basis of a still broader psychological analysis, that instability, fluctuation, and oscillation are characteristics that various subjective phenomena, including hallucinations, share with olfactory, emotional and sexual phenomena."

Published by: University of Chicago Press, 1966, Pp 108, hardcover edition $3.95, paperback $1.50.

LSD
R. Alpert, S. Cohen & L. Schiller
This book gives an admirable picture of the complete breakdown of communication between the advocates and opponents of LSD. Three dozen central questions are answered Independently by Cohen and Alpert, the former emphasizing the dangers, the irresponsible uses, the alarming social implications; the latter stressing the creative and evolutionary potentials of the psychochemicats.

The photographs in this large-format volume, taken by Lorry Schiller, who was responsible for the Life essay on LSD, show various group trips. The Life picture showing a girl in agony are seen here in the context of the whole trip, in which the agony was a small part of an overall ecstatic experience.

Most of the pictures, taken as they are with little or no awareness of the subjective effects of LSD, are pretty unconvincing, except in showing that people under the effects of LSD still look like people. Published by New American Library, 1966, $1.95.

1 IN 7: DRUGS ON CAMPUS
Richard Goldstein
This study by a reporter was widely serialized in major news. papers across the country. Based on interviews with students, administrators, police and health officials, it presents a more or less straightforward picture of the drug-use patterns in various colleges. Giving the current jargon for each college, as well as the relevant geographical locations and common procedures for connecting, it may be considered a sort of manual for the college student aspiring to be a "head". Presumably this is a feature of the book not intended by author or publishers ( Walker & Co., (New York), 1966, $4.95.)

For the sake of completeness, four recent paperbacks on psychedelics may be mentioned here:

THE LSD STORY By John Cashman
Fawcett Publications, 1966, 50c Warren Young and Joseph Hixson,
LSD ON CAMPUS. Dell, 1966, 60c William H. Bischoff.
THE ECSTASY DRUGS. University Circle Press, 1966, 75c Donald B. Louria,
THE NIGHTMARE DRUGS. Pocket Books, 1966, $1

These books represent primarily quick exploitations of a current interest by the paperback publishers. Typically they ore written in a few weeks, and based on already published newspaper and magazine articles. For anyone who has been following the psychedelic scene they do not hold anything new.

Cashmon's and Young and Hixson's volumes stress recent developments and present extended discussions of the career of Timothy teary.

Louria, who is Governor Rockefeller's advisor on narcotics, and self-appointed state-export on LSD, makes a misguided and ignorant attack on LSD, attempting to link it to narcotics. Most of the chapters in the book deal with drugs other than LSD.