Hi xxxxx,

    I remember now how I ran across the comment about Richard Feynman having tried LSD. Some time back I was thinking about the phenomenon of "Cargo Cults" as an example of how people can misinterpret things that they see and I recalled at the time that Feynman had talked about "Cargo Cult Science" in some of his writings and interviews and that happens to be the title of the last chapter in his book; "Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman". While looking through that book at the time I found that chapter but I also noticed the preceding chapter titled; "Altered States." There he describes meeting John C. Lilly (M.D.) when he (Feynman) went to give a lecture at the Hughes Aircraft Company.

    This caught my eye because I was quite familiar with Lilly's work on sensory deprivation and altered states of consciousness having bought and read a few of his books back in the mid-seventies. Lilly was a trained physician and psychoanalyst and got into research on such things as sensory deprivation, while floating in isolation tanks, and its effects on the mind. The movie from 1980 titled "Altered States" was based on his work. Anyway, he was one of the few people I had heard of back in the early 1970s, when I got into experimenting with marijuana, etc., who was studying the effects of LSD and other psychotropic drugs and trying to approach the subject as scientifically as he could. As I mentioned, I was less interested in the social and party uses of drugs and was much more interested in understanding what my mind was and how it worked. John Lilly's book "Programming and Metaprogramming in the Human Biocomputer - Theory and Experiments" (1967), in which he describes experimenting with LSD-25 and sensory deprivation, became a primary source of inspiration for my own experiments with marijuana for a while (I had been programming computers for a few years by then so the metaphor just clicked with me!) His later book; "The Center of the Cyclone" (1972), in which he describes his own quest for other methods of developing Higher Consciousness also helped me to consider that there must be more to our minds than tossing a few chemicals into our brains might reveal.

I had heard it said, "there is a Great Mountain of Enlightenment with many different pathways leading toward its summit." Most people are unaware of the existence of this mountain though they may have some vague sense of it. When I began using drugs I experienced many wondrous emotions and imagined myself climbing out of the fog of ordinary life and ascending toward that elusive summit. Each new drug experience seemed to reinforce my belief that I was becoming a more enlightened being. As I immersed myself in these experiences however they always seemed to end in confusion just as I felt I was about to grasp some great truth. Some ended in disastrous "falls" when the route seemed to take an unanticipated turn or reach an apparent dead end. Each time I would stop using the drugs for a while but I told myself that these setbacks were only missteps along my particular path.

After many repetitions of these experiences I became quite adept at using the drugs to return to my place on the "Mountain". Slowly it dawned on me however, that these experiences no longer had the strong sense of progressing upward that they at first seemed to have. Then one day, after another period of drug use, I had a vision.

Believing myself to be near the summit of the Great Mountain, but still sensing there was something missing, I saw an image of myself gazing back down into the valley of fog. Suddenly across the valley I became aware of something I had missed in my previous ascents. I wasn't on the Great Mountain at all, but only on a small hill that allowed me to see somewhat beyond the fog to the real summit. The drugs had brought me great dreams but these were only imperfect images. As I contemplated my predicament it became clear to me that there was no shortcut up the Great Mountain and that I must leave the drugs and the small hill and journey back into the valley of fog to seek my true path.