The Biological roles of Hallucinogens: Afterword

Bruce McConnell PhD 

In Part 1 an interpretation of LSD recall of a physical birth memory was presented in terms of a simple brainstem model for memory consolidation.  In Part 2 the results of later LSD trials were presented as seminal finding of the true pharmacology of LSD acting as a surrogate to the endogenous hallucinogens in support of human parturition.  Obvious conjectures have emerged as plausible research projects for examining the RaRN model in terms of some well-documented effects hallucinogenic drugs in therapy related to PTSD (MAPS study), the origin of neuroses (Grof) and the relation between REM sleep and depression (Shapiro).  These conjectures, e.g., the biological role of REM sleep and spontaneous flashbacks, including the hypothetical model, hinge upon the assumption that the 5-HT1a receptor of raphe nuclei within the brainstem is the central player, whose inhibition of serotonin neurons by hallucinogenic drugs begins the process of controlling hidden memory.   This could be wrong, but may be tested by modern methods such as fMRI and PET tomography along with more historical applications of a large selection of specific agonists, antagonists and enzyme inhibitors for related neurotransmitter systems and established memory substrates.  Now, we turn to issues less testable, but pervasive in the world of hallucinogens. This commentary embraces 1) consideration of what influence hallucinogens seem to have on the lives of some self-experimenters, 2) the effects of Twilight sleep birth might have had on the adult subject and 3) the issue of spirituality associated with hallucinogens and REM sleep.

The Hallucinogen Club.

It isn’t hard to find examples of enthusiastic, but occasionally erroneous writing by creative individuals, who have tried hallucinogens. This monograph may be included.  Yet, some of these writings contain valuable insights that have been or could be verified scientifically, as if the author had been given access to "true knowledge" with the use of a hallucinogen.  On the other hand, it could be a more simple explanation that the person suffers from an exaggerated belief the he or she was on to something really important.  Nevertheless, one common denominator of hallucinogen self-experimenters seems to be our obsession with examining these correct or incorrect insights for presentation to the world. It’s as if the encounter with hallucinogens has marked us for many years, if not for life by imparting "great meaning" into our preoccupations under the influence.  An early experiment generally known to "mycophiles" (mushroom-liking persons in the vernacular of the hallucinogen club) was undertaken by a group of artists, writers and scientists to see if one LSD trip would influence their view of their professional goals. Although few of these wanted to do it again, there were distinctly new and revelatory approaches seen by some as a result of their experiences. In other cases, this transition or transcendence into new mental realms pertaining to one’s avocation doesn’t need hallucinogen intake. A few years ago the "Humanist of the Year" award was conferred on Murray Gell-Mann, who won the Nobel prize for his discovery of the quark. Dr. Gell-Mann’s dinner speech was about a meeting of celebrated artists, scientists and musicians to discuss the origins of their lauded creations. Possibly to the chagrin of some Humanist attendees, the consensus that emerged from this meeting was that these creative advances did not arise from rational thought, but from something else, often communicating the "eureka" idea as they awakened from a good night’s sleep.  Retiring in the evening after a day of struggle and seasoned preparation of the question, the correct answer descended all of a piece the next morning by some means totally unknown to any of these conferees.  Suddenly, the worker knew exactly what to do.  This happens frequently with computer programmers.  Whatever the process was, it occurred naturally while sleeping or aimlessly walking.   Apparently, there is a gold mine in the brain, whose blessings to a person are bestowed into consciousness as a result of involuntary and unconscious processes.  Mining this mother lode may require the obsessive bent of the creative individual concentrating on a problem or looking for insight. Two Haight-Ashbury LSD-eating Hippies may have derived something similar, as one of them helped to start the Internet and is vice president of Google and the other conceived and developed the Apple computer.   

There is one more trait that appears in many hallucinogen takers, which is shared by pundits of the enligntened state, more recently exemplified by the thoughts of Eckhart Tolle.  It is the dawning realization of these individuals that there's something seriously wrong with our human practice of living and the next thought that this error lies within a collective mind that has not tasted the potential ability to see very far.  Their answer to this problem is to expand upon the cultivation of this high state for the masses.  The "Perennial Philosophy" lives on.

Obviously, these intrepid influences awakened by the hallucinogen are related to the power of suggestion.  This suggestibility under the influence solidified a crazed dedication for the Charles Manson girls to the point of murder and life imprisonment.  This same suggestibility provokes good scientists to produce scientifically verified ideas, some of which are rejected or ignored by a scientific establishment that is (always) under the dictates of one or two refractory leaders within a given sub-discipline. To spare these scientists and anthropologists, their references have been omitted, although both accurate and mistaken contributions can be cited. Many of the usual suspects probably appear in References as ample evidence of extremely valuable results obtained from a dedication possibly linked to an encounter with this category of drug.  The itch to pursue stays for years.  The most famous example: Albert Hoffman’s inadvertent experience with LSD-25 leading to his intuitive desire to revisit the synthesis six or seven years later.

Looking at these characters from the purview of the RaRN model leads to some surprising questions, if not outright predictions.   The foregoing comments about the gold mine, zealous enthusiasm and deep meaning are too seductive in relation to REM sleep and the RaRN model to resist the obvious questions. The model simply provides a pharmacological way for the reversible planting and retrieval of memory that stays hidden within a substrate or storage crypt to modulate daily thought and behavior.  It has been proposed that the process for opening this substrate starts with hallucinogens, which might be secreted each night to take us into the REM state.  Might this be the “Eureka” process unknown to Dr. Gell-Mann’s conferees?  It is said that creativity requires a calm mind (free of primate aggravations; see below).  Often, calm alertness is an earmark of the hallucinogenic state.   If Jean Satre could write his Nobel work under the influence of a drug, then why not try four hours of creative work with the mushroom (provided the effects don’t take other directions)? 

On the down-side, the RaRN model points to a very deep, hidden kind of memory, whose storage nucleus is open only by whatever induces a pharmacological state like 5-HT1a agonist secretion.   The powerful influence exerted by this memory via unconscious pathways is seen in PTSD.  Similarly, does the RaRN model point to a kind of deep, hidden memory that would account for the chronic inspiration of writers and the unswerving dedication of the Manson girls?  As argued here, information can be planted as well as revealed during the influence.  Seemingly at the core of being, a repository of belief has been entered with the drug to plant belief anew within a new context of suggestion.  Does “belief” belong to the same new memory category as trauma defined here?  Is the power of suggestion intrinsic to the RaRN model of memory control?   Having a paradigm such as the RaRN model may be useful in understanding these kinds of behavior.  Charles Manson and his girls brought into LSD use lifetimes of noxious personal baggage from parental neglect and vicissitudes of an unkind world.  This baggage was released into conscious awareness from the LSD-opened substrate, now ready to receive the suggestions of a charismatic leader, which gave agreement to the baggage.  When the substrate or memory nucleus was closed, a new belief system emerged that was refractory to the executive functions within the cerebral cortex.  Their minds were closed.  Again, this influence can be implanted without the hallucinogen.  Certain East Indian Fakirs are known to ruin a life with a look.  Is hypnotic suggestion a mode of the hallucinogen’s effect, in which external signals learned by the Fakir elicit DMT secretion in the victim and plant unshakable belief in the implications of his look?  As with the Fakir, external signals can produce the physiological chaos in the war veteran hearing an exhaust backfire.  Recalling the previous arguments for hippocampal memory of this kind, can one similarly suspend the belief to eliminate pain, as achieved in dentistry or hypnotic birthing?  The Raphe magnus is involved here. 

A darker point can be made.  In the section on Spirituality below, speculations will be tentatively supported on the strong influence of one’s mental history on the outcome of hallucinogenic effects.  The darker side is idea that inner hallucinogens may be at work within our physiology to release hidden memory and to be secreted by the influence of external signals.  The Vietnam veteran recapitulates physiological chaos when hearing the exhaust backfire years later on Main Street.  This vet had a “channel” for activating recapitulation always open to any kind of sensory input that identifies with a component of the hidden memory.  One can extrapolate to anyone receiving sensory information that is associated with his or her noxious baggage.  No matter how balanced in mentality, it is likely that all of us have a certain “button” that can be activated by a benign phrase from another person.  Sore points can render anyone a victim.  Exploitation of the intrepid nature of this kind of memory is seen in the proclivity of certain narcissistic individuals with habitual hallucinogen use to enter into ego inflation so entrenched that their remaining life carries the inability to distinguish between the reality of their selfish beliefs and ethical behavior.  While these beliefs don’t manipulate the practical world, they can alter the psyche of an “uncooperative” individual within the sphere of this narcissist.  Conceivably like the Fakir, a person of this kind can find ways to induce injury in another by, for example, communicating a lie so outrageous and detrimental to the victim’s self image that the latter experiences loss of control over the ability to respond.  To restore some sense of control, the victim argues with the recalcitrant perpetrator, but this only reinforces the noxious input to the memory substrate, now opened by the DMT.  Now, the memory contains the association of resistance to the injustice, so that resistance only induces more DMT secretion and exacerbates the toxicity of the memory . The victim emerges with a new belief that is detrimental to its health and well-being and would last for years.   An involuntary machine runs to recapitulate the incident and further resistance to control the uncontrollable in the victim’s mind simply puts more sand into the memory.  Resistance to this is most vulnerable in the morning after awakening.   At this time the hypothetical substrate is still opened by the residue of DMT from REM sleep to receive more noxious ruminations about the injustice.    Another example, worthy of somewhat greater respect was Wilhelm Reich, a psychiatrist with a strange irascible personality, who died in jail under the charge of transporting his rain machine across state lines.   The opinion of other psychiatrists courteously avoiding Reich was that there was no better clinical therapist than he.  Reich had this uncanny ability to penetrate the defenses of his patients and get them to blurt out their deep feelings.  His tactic was to induce anger with an outrageous accusation of some sort that stimulated the patient. Do verbal attacks on a person’s view of him/her self penetrate into deep belief in long-term storage controlled by the receptor? 

The model is a way of seeing whether the hallucinogen qualifies as a powerful tool both internally as externally, as it can be used with effect for good and bad intentions: Not so much a two-edged sword, rather, a two-edged psychic light saber.  Clinicians and therapists, beware. 

The Survivor of Twilight Sleep (TS)

Unfortunately, it’s hard to say if there’s any connection between M’s fetal deprivations from TS and his adult characteristics, because there were many other possible causes for a child born during the great depression of 1929 to 1941, including atrocious parental advice from "experts", ubiquitous toxic food additives, poor surgical procedures and the carbonaceous snow from Pittsburg steel mills. Times were hard and the mother, pregnant with M, took barbiturates, smoked cigarettes and was allergic to alcohol. Also, other hazards may lurk in the practice of Twilight sleep. M and his mother were separated for several weeks immediately after delivery to allow the mother to die from peritonitis (she didn’t). Young M had a mild form of rickets from Andrew Carnegie’s skies, serious asthma, allergies to many grasses and a delayed puberty.  Anything definitive about the connection between M’s neuroses and his inability to store a fetal memory is improbable.

One possible connection was M’s slow onset of puberty, which didn’t appear until age 15.  As discussed in Part 2, two considerations arise from the repetition of (adult) fetal activation and movement with LSD: 1) the loss of sensory feedback the fetus may need from its own muscular contractions and 2) the interruption of progress in hypothalamic secretions according to the "constellation" idea, i.e., the opening of a new neural function following the destruction or exhaustion of the previous function as labor proceeds. As to the second, it was cited that volunteers given DMT by injection release pituitary hormones in a particular sequence (Strassman and Qualis, 1994).  Their emergence in the blood of the DMT volunteers followed the order, corticotrophin = beta endorphin (5 minutes), prolactin (10 min.) and, lagging far behind, human growth hormone, reaching a plateau at 60 minutes. By embracing the argued assumption that DMT obeys the demands of parturition by activating the hypothalamus-pituitary- adrenal-gonadal axis, the secretions associated with the newborn’s development, i.e., growth hormone, gonadotrophin, leutinizing hormone and follicle stimulating hormone, would follow well behind that of the birth-supportive hormones, beta endorphin, oxytocin, and corticotrophin (for ACTH), with prolactin’s appearance in an order appropriate to inducing the production of breast milk in the mother or continuation of support in labor by the fetus, as discussed earlier (See Biology of Parturition, Part 1c). If it can be inferred from M’s repeating fetal activation with LSD that hypothalamic activation stopped at this point in the normal progress in the chain of secretions, then delayed puberty might be accounted for.

A more whimsical sign of a deficit from the lack of sensory feedback for the (non) struggling fetus might be the over-riding lack of self-confidence mentioned in almost every work evaluation by M’s superiors. This was the main exception to otherwise satisfactory recommendations at times when M wasn’t fired. It seems that M took on too much (for him) and his work ethic resembled more the hapless bull fighter in Woody Allen’s movie, "Zelig", the story of a congenital coward forced by absurd circumstance to over-achieve. The deficit seems to fit a certain fantasy. By lacking the memory of fighting to be born, it didn’t exist as a source of the unconscious knowing that fights and struggles aren’t as bad as one anticipates. And, of course, lazy relatives raise genetic questions.

On the other hand, there are signs that favor an organic problem.  A fiesty and competitive fellow graduate student, newly a fellow postdoctoral, tried to kill M by dragging him on to dangerous roads for long-distance running.  One can understand the source of M’s paranoia, but after staggering and wheezing for a few miles and still alive, he felt wonderful for the first time in his sick life. Quickly and not a moment too soon, he turned from aimlessly writing prime numbers at his work desk to diving into vigorous research activity and publishing two quick publications. No doubt, the joy of his postdoctoral advisor was inflated by the contrast between the early lassitude of this melancholy man and his Phoenix transformation, all thanks to natural pain killers secreted on the hot macadam. A glowing recommendation resulted, with the usual disclaimer about self-confidence. But for the erstwhile sadist on the road, M would have wound up without a laboratory.  It was the brainstem again.

The Portal to Transcendence

"The road to Heaven –is—Heaven" (St. Catherine of Sienna)

The combination of LSD effects M experienced is only one of many within the larger domain of what could be called "the personal unconscious", consisting of long term memory, part of which is hidden as more or less noxious and unconscious influences on the adult.  When combined with the human proclivity for entanglements the colloquialism "personal baggage" serves well as shorthand.  This baggage appearing consciously or spontaneously by dreams or by drugs seems to have a paradoxical connection to the so-called spiritual or numinous domain-- again, attained spontaneously, or in dreams or by drugs. This connection is proposed here to have two attributes: 1) access to both the personal unconscious and the spiritual experience may involve similar neural mechanisms in the brain and 2) issues of the personal unconscious must be resolved before conscious dialog occurs with the spiritual domain. The work of Rick Strassman and Carl Jung will be cited as evidence.

In Strassman’s book, "DMT: The Spirit Molecule", his description of the DMT trip for various volunteers seems to follow their respective life styles, attitudes and personalities, all in place well before their submission to the study. In one extreme case of habitual negativity and misanthropy, the volunteer was unable to complete the study, owing to the questionable and negative quality of DMT influence.  On the other extreme was the beautific cosmic experience of a volunteer, whose life was immersed in his practice of psychological therapy and religious studies. This example was so outstanding that it was saved for the book’s epilogue. Experiences representing life-styles in between these two extremes, including those having had LSD experiences previously, might be placed on a scale between good feelings towards "guides" and more sinister encounters with insect-like beings. Seeking a spiritual domain through casual hallucinogen use is a toss-up, depending on one’s history.  A prediction emerges from this rough correlation: Any approach to dialog with the spiritual level depends first upon extensive practice in cultivating an overall state of the CNS that concentrates on spiritual and wholesome mental activity representing the values of compassion and moral conduct.  Apparently, this life style of spiritual practice must be cultivated for the long-term and the novice must learn along the way that which works and what doesn’t. The procedures for spiritual practice have been outlined for millennia for this cultivation, in which moral and ethical behavior is really spiritual practice as a method to attain restraint.  The idea must be that the less-used (un-spiritual) domains of the mind will give way to strengthening the spiritual domain.   Recent functional imaging studies have shown that activation of specific brain areas involved in the concentration for one theme or problem is accompanied by de-activation of areas not involved.  Apoptosis will prune out much of the less used brain areas.  Passing a camel through the eye of a needle is not possible when concentrating on making money. Use it or lose it.

Jung’s empirical scientific perspective for the personal-spiritual connection can be taken from part of his work on dream analysis. His analysis of as many as 400 sequential dreams of a given individual revealed a gradual progression in dreams from initial domination by personal baggage giving way to an inscrutable "center" related to the numinous or mystical.   As described in his book, "Psychology and Alchemy" (Jung, 1943), his scientific procedure involved a time for de-briefing of the dream soon after the dreamer awoke by an interview that was recorded by a trained person other than Jung himself. Whether a dream was personal or numinous could be determined by symbols within the dream. That a dream originates from the personal baggage can be recognized by the appearance of a precisely delineated symbol set apart from the otherwise distorted imagery.  This object or symbol was recognizable only to the dreamer from a real incident that occurred in the dreamer’s past.  Jung’s earmark for the onset of spiritual dreams was the "archetype", a psychic code or imprint giving rise to certain universal (collective) symbols, such as the mandala, unicorn, wagon-wheel diagrams, swastikas, etc. Having decided that these archetypes could not have existed by auto-suggestion, Jung discovered their historical precedence in the writings of medieval alchemists.  These driven seekers were generous with their graphic illustrations made within the intense spiritual context of their experiments. This progression from the personal to the archetypal in dreams implies that this personal aspect of dreaming is a spontaneous healing process, consistent with earlier points made here on the biological value of REM sleep.  Perhaps “spiritual” work is done as we sleep.

The Spiritual Seeker

"The fault, dear Brutus, lies not in the Stars but in ourselves---" W.Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar”.

As to the spiritual seeker, the difficulty and pitfalls in spiritual practice can be traced to a single fact that has nothing to do with "Evil".  The ancient sages who said, "Man is born in sin", didn’t know about Darwin.  A more instructive confirmation of their adage is that man is born as a primate, closer than we think to a bonobo or a chimpanzee.  If the seven deadly sins could not be practiced by our primate progenitors, then there would be no humans, not to mention Lucy, lemurs, baboons and gorillas. The seven sins had great survival value to those inclined to practice them, an inclination that is hard-wired into our brains.  The extent we human primates practice these seven sins seems to be dependent on the conditions we face.  When the lack of resources becomes life-threatening, we –any one of us -can be turned into vicious rapacious murderers like the chimpanzee on occasion and can fall into the kind of lassitude toward others that eliminates any social contract, as seen in alpha male baboons and more recently in oil company CEOs clutching their stupendous retirement bonuses. They have no interest in where they came from, which is the main point.  Another condition would be a hopeless state, where one eats, but has no future prospects.  Desperate young men in the Middle East are legion and, wanting to make life worth something, they join the Jihad, the only answer.  Status and the powerful primate demand of racism, not the 27 Virgins, provokes these teenagers into killing as many as possible with bombs strapped to their chests.  Another condition is the worst, that of finding oneself in a hideous hell at wartime.   Here, we see incredible acts of courage in helping others, e.g., the MDs, who looked forward to terrible beatings every day, because they resisted sending their dying cholera patients back to work on the railroad at the river Kuai, or the odd German saving of hundreds of Jewish children from Hitler’s death machine.  Do these heroic acts belong to the spiritual domain?  Aubrey in his book, “African Genesis’ tells of two chronically depressed fringe males (the Alpha baboon gets all the girls) going after a leopard threatening the tribe.  Before they are torn apart they manage to kill the cat.  The alpha male couldn’t care less.  Then, there is the condition for us lucky Europeans and Americans, comfortable and complacent in our ignorance about the other conditions.  It is this condition that poses a danger for the spirit and the world.  We are consumed with ourselves.  The worst danger, now obvious to everyone, is the primate habit of the political and social elite, who make self-serving laws and would take us to war over “their” oil.  The last refuge of the scoundrel is patriotism, as someone said.

 Obviously, the ancient sages’ "born in sin" adage was put forth as a constant reminder that, clearly, something's wrong within our natures that militates against decent behavior; we must be mindful of our tendency.   To ignore reminders of so fundamental a truth that each of us is a primate is a hilarious irony, kept in place by the very reason that determines the behavior of our "lower" relatives, i.e., Status and racism.  Ask the question to anyone, even an evolutionary psychologist, and the pious reply is that we are far from being primates; just look at what we can do. Quite true, but then, ask them to look at the bottom line, the state of humanity and the planet now and throughout history. Then, it becomes apparent that the human (primate) brain is simply not designed to persist in maintaining the wholesome complexities of peaceful civilization for the advertised length of time. Too many primate brains distort economic maintenance by underestimating the power of primate agendas. There’s always a way to get around oversight. The influence of our primate mandates on the brain is so powerful and invisible that it is not difficult to suspect that political deciders really have no idea why they exercise certain executive privileges, their elaborate rationalization notwithstanding.  One and a half millennia before Darwin, the neoplatonist Plotinus of Alexandria (400 AD) knew and greatly feared the devious implanted influence of the seven sins as inimical to attaining a decent spiritual life, so much so that his disciples were forbidden to walk down town, ere a woman be glimpsed.  Many are called, but few are chosen. The many, the non-elite who don't run things for everyone else, are exposed to the temptations of neo-alphas and do damage.  Machiavelli’s (“The Prince) and Hobbes’ “Leviathan” reveal how dangerous are the masses, and the Florentine’s recipe was to get them to love the Prince,  as they are capable of love and great compassion and are often mindful of the "right thing to do".  Among these masses truly remarkable men and women enter our lives expressing their far-seeing wisdom with kindness and understanding.  For the general good, they are too few.  Is there even remotest possibility of making more of them and transforming the rest of us before it’s too late?  Perhaps Jesus and John the Baptist asked the same question.

If the spiritual life calls, hallucinogens in a holy context may be useful, as seen in the care in keeping agreements and loss of alcoholism in the Native American peyote cult.  Like those in the “Hallucinogen Club” (above), even one encounter with the drug can has a lifetime impact. But there are caveats.  This can go bad, as seen in the life of Squeaky Fromme.   And there are questions.  For one thing, one can’t really say that the drugged, unprepared brain is as balanced as that of a practiced monk lost in the glorious opening of the heart chakra.   Furthermore, there are probably thousands of people, whose lives were changed by a spontaneous experience that gave them a real taste of the numinous, but they are silent.  An external hallucinogen is not necessary.  Furthermore, M was lucky. His drug-induced trauma was slight enough for complete “erasure” on recall, while that of another may be a sleeping giant awakened by the hallucinogen, leading to years of PTSD or depression. Obviously, opening the portal leading from personal baggage to spiritual realization aided by the hallucinogen is too dicey at this point without much serious and compassionate research generously supported by society at large. Don’t hold your breath.  One exception would be a law that requires any politician running for high office to submit to two weeks of hallucinogen evaluation.  This would disqualify sociopaths before they could do serious damage and provide new perspectives for the ones that pass.

To this author, the lesson of Strassman and Jung is: Drug or no drug there’s no free lunch in spiritual pursuits, but we may be getting help from some secret persistent source.  Against seasoned results to the contrary, it was proposed here that REM sleep might be a spontaneous state designed to erase trauma naturally each night producing dreams, like flashbacks, as evidence of the healing.  Now the un-testable (or has it been tested already?) flirts with the precipice of intellectual and scientific bad taste, but spurred on by parsing these Jungian ideas.  Taking Jung’s personal-to-archetype dream continuum seriously, this natural process must be going on nightly throughout our lives and has a beginning and an end to its progression from the personal unconscious to the numinous realm as the end game.  Jung had found that the end-point is present from the start, as opposed to existing only after completion of the dream progression.   The numinous aspect, initially obscured by the cacophony of the personal unconscious, becomes more apparent as personal memory is “erased”.  It follows that the dream progression might involve a mechanism that uses the terminal state as a reference, from which the amount of trauma to erase is estimated.  A crude analogy would be the temperature difference to determine the rate of heat flow.   Incredibly, this end-point embodying the completely indescribable "center" of our psyche is alive and well, it’s within all dreams and, further, with us unconsciously every moment.  It operates each night.  In Jung’s words, "To the best of my experience we are dealing here with very important ‘nuclear processes’ of the objective psyche---"images of the 'goal' as it were, which the psychic process, being goal directed, apparently sets up of its own accord, without any external stimulus" (Jung, 1943 p 221 RFC Hull’s Translation).  However, there's a catch. 

The question arises as to how the Jung progression can be assisted in its nightly work.  Unfortunately, when the ego sees a problem of this nature to solve, we encounter the paradox of a seriously incompetent agency finding a solution totally outside its domain.  But, like a mercifully ignorant grad student, we press on.  The "center", recognized by archetypal symbols, is always present within the collective unconscious that permeates the psyche of each unknowing individual.  The problem emerges in conditioning ourselves in a way that would promote success in the Jung progression.  This may be extremely unlikely, because the reference itself might be corrupted by its evaluation of the personal unconscious.   Since Strassman’s lesson is the presence of one’s imprinted personal style, we have work do on ourselves as prescribed by the old teachings or by hallucinogens.   Since the latter may not be safe for everyone and the old teachings are so darn slow, is there a third way? 

Presently, the established religions are in place to take this “numinous” notion to the masses.  However, Jung, a devout Christian, was disappointed in the Church that treats the Almighty as an external object accessible only through the clergy.  Changing the ways of the clergy would threaten their primate hierarchies, freedom from taxes and immunity from social accountability, i.e., their power.  They would be forced to become mortal enemies to this idea, as they have been throughout history towards all non-sectarian holy men like Jesus.  This extends to all established religions.  The last thing they want us to know is "The Kingdom of Heaven is within you". 

But there may be wisdom here.  Inevitably, numerous and contentious sects would proliferate like those, which threatened the Christian Church ca.400 AD.  We parishioners aren’t ready for attainment on our own and Buddha’s and St. Peter’s admonition to simply live right is taken to collective advantage as seen in the throngs of mostly decent people in the square outside the Vatican on Easter. 

As an empiricist, Jung refused to explore the nature of this "center", but it would appear from the RaRN model that we, as humans, may be doing spiritual practice while we sleep!  Jung’s "center", seen only by archetypal symbols, is always present within the collective unconscious that permeates the psyche of each unknowing individual.  But, dreams showing archetypes are extremely rare. To remove corruption in the reference and fulfill this "goal", we listen to Buddha and simply live a good life with regular meditation.  Nightly REM sleep will do the rest.  Then again, if you see the Buddha on the road, kill him.

The punch line is:  All of us are members of the Hallucinogen Club. We are acid-heads, partaking in spiritual and psychological healing each night, albeit unknowingly. The “mycophobes” can now wonder if hallucinogens are all that bad, since they are acid-heads, too.  It seems likely that hallucinogens, as external or endogenous drugs for access to the unconscious, may deserve the better reputation, now seen to have an effortless nightly role in our spiritual path, in addition to the time-honored sacred strictures in native practice that would take us on a new course that would render our primate path subservient to edicts within “The Kingdom of Heaven”.  Shall we pursue Hallucinogen spirituality and therapy?  We are doing it each night in REM sleep.  All we have to do to turn our daily preoccupations towards cultivating a calmer mind, already prescribed by time-honored spiritual rules and that celebrated practice, meditation.  The primate brain is narcissistic and will seek Gurus and clergy, but not themselves.  One might forget about the primate ego’s preoccupation with “goals”.  In his book of aphorisms, the second century BC sage, Patanjali, tells that the highest yoga is meditation, but don’t expect to get anywhere in the next million lifetimes (unless, of course, you meet a real guru).  According to the “use it or lose it” principle, corruption of the reference would wither away to get us back on the track of the Jungian progression.  A new spiritual belief: the plasticity of the brain, Buddhas’ Eight Fold Way and nightly REM acid trips may be the only way to transform the ape into a human in the best sense of the word, if it isn't already too late.  As to feasibility, it has been shown recently that certain Buddhist monks celebrated for their happiness are unusually well endowed in a region of their medial prefrontal cortex.