In April 1943, Swiss chemist Albert Hoffman ingested a minuscule amount of a liquid called lysergic acid diethylamide (“LSD”) that he had formulated at his laboratory in Basel. After he returned home, its impacts continued, growing far stronger than he had expected. Hoffman recorded afterward that:
“…In one crystal instant, I realized that I was immortal…Suddenly there was white light and the shimmering beauty of unity. There was light everywhere, white light with a shimmering beauty beyond description. I wanted to shout and sing of miraculous new life and sense and form, of the joyous beauty and the whole mad ecstasy of loveliness. I knew and understood all there was to know and understand. I was immortal, wise beyond wisdom, and capable of love, of all loves. Every atom in my body and soul had seen and felt God…There was only cosmic harmony. It was all there in the white light. With every fiber of my being I knew that it was so…”
When he first ingested psilocybin mushrooms in 1960 in Cuernavaca, Mexico, Harvard psychology professor Timothy Leary had a similar experience. In April 1970 in Oberlin, Ohio I did as well. I swallowed a brown tab of mescalin, a derivative of psilocybin, and about twenty minutes later the entire world began to transform. Everything around me, both animate and inanimate, not only everything green and growing but all other kinds of objects as well, now appeared breathtakingly, palpably ALIVE, overflowing with a vital radiance glowing out from within. It was as if curtains had suddenly been torn away from what was actually going on around us all the time. I was eighteen years old.
Half an hour later I was hugging an enormous old elm tree. Yes, it’s embarrassing to admit that now. But at that time that elm appeared to me as a conscious being, like me but far more ancient and wiser. It was hard to believe everyone else around me couldn’t see that too. Instead, they were walking right by it, treating it like just a mere dead “object” ornamenting the square. I could now feel instead the powerful life force emitting from within it. And, most startlingly, that tree was breathing! You could see it. I still remember hugging that stately elm, embracing it close, merging our life with each other, its vital force revitalizing me.
I remember wrapping my arms around that tree and pressing against it. I hugged that darn tree for quite a while. To others, those huge Ohio trees still looked like ordinary trees, not cornucopias overflowing with surging life energy. I realized what I was experiencing as filling everything was an energy present within all of creation, the radiant essence sometimes called “God”. God had gone from an abstract concept, just a word, to being overwhelmingly tangible all around me!
Once those doors of perception swing wide open, they never go back to being fully sealed. You never go entirely back to who and how you were and how you saw things before. I suddenly realized I wanted to learn about “Buddhist meditation”. Those words had appeared as if emblazoned across the sky toward the end of that trip in bold yellow-gold neon-bright lettering. I had no idea what Buddhist meditation or even Buddhism was, so why was this shimmering message flashing out at me from somewhere inside my mind? The next day I bought the Penguin edition of Buddhist Sutras. I dove in and found it thoroughly absorbing. Soon I was attempting my own version of “Buddhist meditation” every day.
The late 1960s and 1970s weren’t the first time to be filled with this kind of holy inspiration, this widespread experience of ecstatic communion with the divine. The creation of the great gothic cathedrals appears to have emerged from a remarkable era known as the 12th Century Renaissance. John of Salisbury’s record of his visit to Paris in 1176 as Notre Dame was being raised:
“When I saw the abundance of sustenance, the cheerfulness of the people, the good conduct of the clergy, the majesty and glory of the entire Church, the diverse occupations of men dedicated to the study of philosophy; it seemed to me that I saw Jacob’s ladder whose top reached heaven and which angels ascended and descended. I was compelled to admit that truly the Lord was in this place and that I had not known it. This sentence from a poet also comes to mind: ‘Happy is he who is sentenced to this place in exile!’”
Later John of Salisbury would become head of the School of Chartres.
The present Chartres cathedral was not the first to be constructed atop the butte overlooking the Eure. Over the centuries it has been destroyed by fire and rebuilt multiple times, each time grander than before. In 834, the shawl believed to have been worn by Mary when she was pregnant with Jesus was presented to the diocese by the grandson of Charlemagne. It is still displayed there today, sealed within a glass case, one of the most revered holy relics in all of Christendom.
In 1148, Chartres once more burned to the ground. To help raise the new one, hundreds of local men and women harnessed themselves to processions of carts bearing endless limestone blocks to Chartres. Even kings, princes, and men of great wealth joined in pulling the carts accompanied by prayers and a shared spirit of deep devotion. Their effort was called the “cult of the carts” and its outcome was regarded as an amazing feat. Hugh, Archbishop of Rouen, recorded that, “The spirit of life was in the wheels.”
Fifty years later, in 1194, the cathedral burned down again. Men raced into the flames to attempt to rescue the shawl of Mary. After three days, they had not reappeared and they and the shawl were believed lost. At the end of the third day, however, they emerged from the crypt, where they had taken shelter carrying the veil and displayed it to an awed crowd that erupted in a celebration that the Virgin was still among them performing her miracles.
Once again Chartres was rebuilt in the form it still has today. Inspired by the miracle of the survival of the veil, all of the many guilds, religious orders, and nobles of the region again joined in the massive work of reconstruction. To the early 20th century alchemist Fulcanelli, medieval France had been a culture that “took pleasure in deep meditations and profound research.” For Fulcanelli, the Middle Ages had been “a time suffused with spirit and with the magnificent outpouring of this same spirit into the world. I was getting a powerful dose of this same spirit, this same presence, on that startling, life-transforming Ohio spring afternoon.
On psychedelic drugs, what are sometimes called “hallucinations” feel like being able to look down inside our own interior dimensions. During one of his earliest “trips”, Timothy Leary described what he had witnessed within his own inner chambers:
“Gone again, gone into
Palace by Nile
Temple near Hong Kong
Babylonian Boudoir, Bedouin Pleasure Tent
Gem Flash Jewel
Woven color silk gown movement
Mosaics flaming color Muzo emerald Burma rubies
Ceylon sapphire
Mosaics lighted from within, glowing, moving, changing.
Hundred reptiles. Jewel encrusted. Hammered
Moorish patterned
Snakeskin
Snake mosaic, reptiles piled in
Giant, mile-square chest
Slide, slither, tumble down central drain
One By One
One By One.”
LSD experiences often include cinematic-type projections of both shifting mandalic patterns and an infinite variety of other scenes that appear as if projected, when your eyes are closed, onto the underside of your eyelids. “Movies” that seem projected onto the underside of your eyelids can appear, many set in long-ago cultures and civilizations. Everyone tended to see different ones, images apparently somehow stored in our collective human subconscious. LSD gave us access to them and triggered their pouring out into our awareness. On LSD, it was all still present inside us as if we were fully “back there.” When the effects of LSD were “peaking” it was easy to get completely caught up in watching those scenes and forget entirely where you really were. LSD seemed to open up a pathway to all that was stored down within our own minds.
Equally dramatic transformations of everything surrounding you could occur when your eyes were open. Nothing looked much like it had before. The room you were in could become one from somewhere far back in time. All these possibilities were apparently there inside the time tunnel within us, waiting to be re-accessed. The impacts of LSD took us right through the usual barriers of space and time. LSD triggered myriads of what were often called “past life flashbacks”. You often found yourself in what seemed to be an archetypal realm of some kind, deeper than ordinary time and space. Epochs of the human past, perhaps your own distant past, can come to life in 360 degrees all around you. Only you aren’t just looking at them. Instead, you are walking around inside them.
Together with all this there was often also surgingly present all around and inside us as well, the inescapably palpable, overpoweringly tangible flood of the presence of God, within everything, uniting it all. It felt as if that invisible “presence” was filling us and everything around us to overflowing as if we were awakening from our slumber and now able to see what was really going on within each thing with the living, magical web of interconnections between all things at all times.
In past centuries, full-blown mystical religious experiences, direct communion, and unity with “divinity”, have always been rare. Now, however, with the aid of psychedelics, hundreds, perhaps thousands were having this same kind of experience every day, totally different from sitting stiffly in church and hearing about “God”. The early and mid-sixties had abounded with speculation over the question, “Is God dead?” By the end of many first trips, however, a large number were confident they knew the answer. God wasn’t dead at all. Instead God, the “Great Spirit”, was manifest and palpable everywhere! The assertion that “God is dead” seemed ridiculous.
Yes, we did “come down” at the end of the day. The height of a typical LSD trip lasted about four hours, followed by a gradual wearing off. “Peaking” lasted for a couple of hours. A typical strong dose was 500 mics. After each trip, we would come 95% or more back down. We were aware though that each of those journeys was also gradually transforming us. Every time, we’d remain maybe 5% not quite as we’d been before.
Friends proffering a dose of LSD promised, “Eat this and you will never be the same again.” For many, this turned out to be true. LSD showed us there is far more to “reality” than we had ever suspected. With psychedelics, normal time dissolves and you enter instead “timeless time”, a dimension where all things past and present seem to exist simultaneously, “eternal time.” We find ourselves in the heart of a mandala containing all times and all places. They are, shockingly, right here with us again, far more re-accessible than we had ever imagined. Of the past times, we felt were re-experiencing, re-connection with Native American culture was especially widespread, perhaps because we were out in nature in the far reaches of North America. During many trips, some didn’t feel they were getting in touch with “God” as much as with the “Great Spirit”.
Psychedelic “trips”, however, didn’t always go well for everyone. On psychedelics, you travel inside yourself. There can be angels or horrors down inside there, Buddha, Jesus, or the Devil. Not everyone enjoys what they find. People you have known for years can transform into unfamiliar beings and creatures. It can feel like their own past lives, or the animal within them is showing right through. There’s the risk of the “bad trip” that can go from mildly unpleasant to downright terrifying. I had only one of those, but many people had more.
After even one “bad trip” many vowed never to touch psychedelics again. A lot depended on planning the experience well. Outdoors in nature on a gorgeous day in a place you knew well and felt safe tended to be ideal. In our explorations on LSD and other psychedelics, an entire segment of a generation found itself diving deep into the normally hidden chambers of our human subconscious and fascinated by what we discovered there. The “counter-cultural” burgeoning that followed reflected the opening of these inner doors openings in a myriad of different ways.
What was the science of how and why all this was occurring? In Changing Your Mind, Michael Pollan writes that under the influence of psychedelics our usual brain activity diminishes and becomes more tranquil. Our usual ego-self steps aside from occupying the center of our awareness and, as our self-obsession diminishes, a tremendous amount of more unfamiliar kinds of input, activity and other kinds of awareness pour in. Pollan describes research that reveals how tightly filtered our usual awareness usually is. Psychedelics sweep those restrictions aside and a greatly expanded kind of consciousness instead flows in. We find, to our amazement, how much is really there to be seen, felt, heard, and experienced.
Psychedelics provided as well powerful access to multiple currents of the secret teachings and lost knowledge that has formed the arcane “underground river” running through the ages. For several decades afterward, a cultural efflorescence flourished in areas revealed by this releasing of long-sealed doors. If the right gateways were swept open, we discovered, it has all still alive inside us. Now, however, materialism and self-absorption have returned with a vengeance. It became much more challenging to find our way to all the chambers down inside ourselves. Many quickly began to lose connection with the place inside us where God dwelled. What had begun to be revealed eventually began to be covered over again. Can we still pry those gates open now? Can we still find and venture down those paths and re-access what is there? Can we still discover God inside us? The answer is up to you.
(formerly NewInvisibleCollege.com / Chartres-sacred-geometry.com; now Chartres.GeometryCode.com)
Copyright 2022 Will Gold.