BRAVE NEW WORLD (WITH STATISTICS)
LSD, Marihuana, Yoga and Hypnosis – Theodore X Barber
What do LSD, cannabis, yoga and hypnosis all have in common? No, it’s not a joke from the Cosmic Pancakes! Christmas cracker collection – although maybe it should be… They’re all the preserve of the middle classes? None of them made any of Guy Ritchie’s more recent films any more tolerable? They’re all preferable to a visit to a Wetherspoon’s pub? They’ve all been banned by “the church”, you know, for reasons?
The real answer, of course, is that none of them cause an altered state of consciousness. But if you’ve been reading Cosmic Pancakes! for a while then you probably could have already guessed that. And, in case you missed it, all of them were (circa 1970) the subject of serious misinformation. They still are today. I’m wondering, as I write this, which one is subject to the most misinformation today? I’ll guess it’s hypnosis. It’s always hypnosis.
So let’s start with the lies. The press would tell you, certainly in 1970 but probably still today, that LSD and cannabis (or ‘Mary Jane’ if you were born stateside), will put you into a trance and then fuck up your life. “Don’t do drugs.” “Just say no.” “If it fits in your mouth it can’t kill you.” “If it’s legal then do all of it (because it’ll be shit).” Admittedly, the last two came from a drug dealer I used to know – Hi Jim! – and may or may not be true. But then, the first two are clearly false and likely came from the Rupert Murdock “newspapers for underdeveloped adults”.
No, it turns out that LSD is just a drug. And weed really is just a drug. Yes LSD lasts longer, messes with your sleep, and is wildly cheaper, but otherwise they are both hallucinogens. Yes, technically, they are in the same category, but nobody would know this if they just read the tabloids or if they just listened to street chatter. And neither of them will make you hallucinate; at least not with your eyes open, and at least not in the way that TV and film would have you believe. LSD clearly upsets vision – in the really neat way of separating out the many visual filters we have so that some work now and some work later, and some work delayed while others work overboard – but the stats say that if you take enough of the purple haze then that would do something similar.
Maybe at this juncture, it is worth being honest about personal experiences? I’ve never done yoga. Yep, sorry to have to admit it. It was a difficult time; I’d been drinking; mistakes were made (on all sides); youthful exuberance overtook rationalism; it was cheap and easily available; my friends were all doing it; there was A LOT of peer pressure. But, while I might suit lycra (some would say lycra suits me) I’ve never succumbed to yoga. It just seemed so unbelievably silly.
Cannabis, on the other hand, I’ve been using since I was a first year uni student (on and off; mostly on; in fact, the only time I really stopped was when my dealer moved to the Caribbean and I was too paranoid to buy it from anyone else, but still). I just thought it was a magical drug that helped me focus, cleared my mind of randomness, calmed me down, helped me cope with difficult situations and overstimulation, made music more interesting, found novel solutions to coding problems, and generally provided much needed enthusiasm to continue with long-term research projects. It turned out – amazingly so – that I am autistic and I was self-medicating. This was finally confirmed when I took my autism diagnosis to a UK cannabis clinic and got myself a legal weed prescription. Apparently my fondness for White Widow is because it perfectly addresses the symptoms of my neurodiversity! Isn’t the world a funny place?
Kev’s notes from Trip 2.
And LSD. Well, I was a late-comer to this bombshell of a drug, waiting until I was the wrong side of 40, originally partly out of concern of what it might do, partly out of concern that I might like it a bit too much, and partly just lack of availability. But then, as most ageing socialists find, if you buy enough drugs from a mate, eventually they will offer you some LSD. I say “offer” but it was a cocaine-fuelled “doyouwantsomeofthisstuffmateitsfantasticIgotitfromafriendandIdidsomebutIwouldntdoallofitbutIboughtsomeandnowIvegotloadsbutyoudloveityoushouldhavesomedoyouwantsomedoyoudoyoudoyouyoureallyshouldyoudloveit.” We’ve all been there (haven’t we?), so of course I ended up taking some home. It was wrapped up in tinfoil and it lived in a box for about six months. Then one Friday night we got a bit early-evening-Champagne-tipsy and thought we’d micro-dose it – that’s what people do today, isn't it? They have a small amount each day; it makes them a superhero or something. So yeah, after lots of (expensive) alcohol, we had a quarter each.
Of course, there are no weights and measures when it comes to street LSD. Not like Barber’s lab-based LSD that can be very precisely measured out. So, maybe a whole trip (a square with a silly image) contained a standard dose (270µg so I’m led to believe); or maybe a whole trip contained half that, or a quarter of that, or less. Maybe none? Literally, who knows? But all we know is that half an hour later (I blame the Veuve for the lack of patience) we felt nothing and decided it was weak (maybe inert?) and that maybe we needed to micro-dose another quarter. And after another half-hour, decided maybe it was weak-ass-shit (I’ve seen The Wire) so we smashed in the remaining half each.
And then all of time dissolved into nothingness. Like, All Of Time. Dissolved. INTO NOTHINGNESS. Either everything that had ever happened had all happened at the same time, or nothing had ever happened, ever. We giggled. A lot. I mean, I’ve never giggled like I’ve giggled for that 45 minutes. Was it 45 minutes? Yes, we had clocks so we’re pretty sure; although we had turned off our phones for obvious reasons. And then I had visual disturbances just like people have on LSD. Not like in the films – I didn’t hallucinate a perfect rendition of Beyoncé in my living room – literally nobody does. But the various visual filters lost their synchronisation so it looked like the floor and walls (and curtains) were “breathing” (a common description). It was as if the blue cones had one anchor point, the red cones had another, and the green had their own, so any amount of fixed concentration on a point, or any amount of moving focus, caused the images (for want of a better word) from the three filters to overlay each other, while being off by a small and variable amount. Honestly, you could look at that FOR HOURS.
But time came back and the breathing stopped. And then we giggled. And then it started again. We got hot. We sweated. Most noticeably, we stayed up for about 36 hours after taking it, which was already at the end of a day, so a long time. I didn’t like worrying that I was going to be tired afterwards, but that didn’t really materialise in fairness (the tiredness; I was definitely worried, but not so much that I didn’t find it hilarious). There are lots of things I could recount here (I have copious notes), but suffice to say, the first time was the funniest; the second – which we took notes on, pictured – was the most interesting; and the third [which Kev did alone – Ed] was a bit dull/weak TBH. I sort of think that Timothy Leary and Aldous Huxley would have recognised that I was beyond the fascination stage and ready for some serious adventures, but really I was mostly worried about not getting enough sleep. Wait, how much research was done with middle-aged people?!
Amy’s notes from Trip 2. Our wedding was delayed due to Covid, so getting ‘Cosmic Married’ was us putting our wedding rings on. I presume Uncle Derren made an appearance to remind me that I’m already married on the Astral Plane, as witnessed by Karen Carpenter (real name) and a whispering Kurt Cobain teen-poster-altar-turned-shrine in 1994 during my first acid trip. I could claim that it’s created quite the situationship… but Barber, science – and my Earthly Husband – can prove otherwise!
Back to the book. Barber brings a phenomenal review of scientific literature to these experiences. Everything (academic) written about LSD, weed and stretching (yoga) has been analysed, digested and reported. In a nutshell, apart from fleeting issues over the fabric of space-time, LSD doesn’t really do much of any concern. It amplifies the phosphenes that you can see with your eyes closed, and interprets the images through filters that are slightly off. Given anxiety and paranoia (that the less experienced might succumb to) these could be described as hallucinations, but they’re just visual artefacts. And they do get boring eventually (or LSD degrades when stored in a box?), but maybe they’re novel every time for some people? See, that’s why we need statistics and not case studies…
Cannabis, as mentioned, is much more chill unless you take a God-like amount. And then it can be a bit like a much-shortened LSD trip. Psilocybin (from magic mushrooms) and mescaline (from peyote) have similar effects at doses between the two, but both are much more likely to make you nauseous unfortunately – as Doug Stanhope famously said, God doesn’t want everyone playing with the stuff at the back of his medical cabinet.
I don’t want to write about yoga for fear of “harshing the buzz”. But, ultimately, nobody in the West does it like they do in the East; none of the words mean the same things; the goals are quite different; and they may as well be entirely separate things, where the Western version is just stretching (lycra if not muscles). Even mindfulness is separate.
I’m not entirely sure why Barber wrote this book, but I feel it was because of rampant misinformation (something this post has avoided at every turn – Ed). I feel he felt that the nonsense talked about hypnosis was also often talked about these other, and quite different, things. And that none of them had been apprised in a purely scientific manner. Barber is a true hero of psychology if only for describing, at every turn, how to do scientific experiments properly and how lots of studies are complete bunk. He could sometimes do with more participants, but his random allocation, his control groups, his controlling of variables… it’s just beautiful in a way that only mathematicians could appreciate. He was beyond his time and the world didn’t deserve this book then or now.
Personally, I’m looking forward to Barber’s unfinished book: Heroin, MDMA, Cuddling and Meditation, but his untimely death means I’ll have to read his thoughts about birds instead in our newest book purchase. (It looks amazing!)
