LSD? CIA? ETC?

[Otto]

Stan Grof reports of conferences on psychotherapy with LSD in 1965 at the
very beginning of his first book "Realms on the human unconscious" (New York
1975, I think it's his best) and he tells further that the situation had
undergone drastic changes when he returned to the US in 1967. This change
had happened in 1966, which is the important year.
The Grof-Intro is highly recommended to add some information about LSD in
the US at the time the novel tells about.

The interesting thing about LSD & Lot 49 is imo that at the same time when
the hippies where making a sacrament and/or party drug of this powerful
"zeug" (and it was still legal), and the stuff was used by the government
for truly illegal purposes, its real purpose in American Society 1966 still
was psychotherapy, though this was done by shrinks to Californian
housewives. You could get from your shrink back then, from the pharmacy.

some urls:

"Stanislaw Grof assisted subjects in exploring the farthest reaches of the
mind first with LSD and later through Holotropic Breathwork. Grof found that
administering LSD allowed the deeper levels of the unconscious processes to
emerge into the conscious level of mind, where they could be experienced by
the client and studied or treated by the therapist. Grof found that
transpersonal experiences seemed to go beyond generally accepted "objective
reality" and included archetypal experiences, encounters with suprahuman
entities, deities, demons, spiritualistic and mediumistic phenomena.
Occurrences of chakra activation and kundalini arousal were also reported.

Grof discovered that the drug LSD did not create the experiences, but rather
that it simply allowed access to the deeper levels of the mind in a
chemically altered state of consciousness. The memory and the experience
were not created by the drug, but had always been present in the mind."
http://www.lucidexperience.com/HypnoPapers/634.html

http://www.infoasis.com/people/grof/HBinternet.html
bibliography

http://members.tripod.co.uk/spiritmind/synergise/bookpage2.htm

Otto