Psychedelic Phenomena LSD Psychedelic and hallucinogenic drugs explained

Psychedelics, Technology, Psychedelics Bernard S. Aaronson and Humphrey Osmond The Introduction to PSYCHEDELICS, The Uses and Implications of Hallucinogenic Drugs edited by Bernard Aaronson and Humphry Osmond, Doubleday & Company 1970. Copyright Aaronson and Osmond. Any culture may be regarded as a ramification of a particular technology applied to the particular set of local conditions within which that culture is situated. The term "technology," as used here, refers to the entire set of devices, whether mechanical, chemical, or linguistic, by which adaptations of individuals to their environments are enhanced. Plows, clubs, radios, airplanes, fertilizers, drugs, breakfast cereals, grammars, and concepts are each implements and instances of technology, which influence and are influenced by one another. Some implements operate by directly altering the environment in response to the demands of the individual, as when we turn on an air cond...

We are told that, in those moments immediately preceding death, the world of our earliest infancy frequently opens up to us. We are also assured that senile reason passes readily into a state of second childhood, wherein the light of rationality is obscured by the resurrected past, experienced as fully as if the intervening years had rolled away. Normal adults occasionally dream of long-forgotten events, which have otherwise passed into oblivion. These facts, together with Freud’s rediscovery of the unconscious mind, suggest that within each of us the past slumbers on, occasionally reasserting itself in the fragments of a sudden recollection, the perception of some haunting perfume, or the unexplained appearance of an ancient face in our dreams. Most striking, however, is the fact that it is this earliest layer of the human memory that persists to the moment of death, even after the adult memory and its powers of reason are gone. Knowledge recently gained disappears, while that mysteri...