When Reb Anderson asked me to come to speak at the Zenn Center, and he was prompted by a mutual friend, Gabriella Lichtenstein, who heard me speak about another subject, I gave Reb a list of areas that I had been a student of for many years, and he chose the subject of death and dying. And we further explored this area because my experiences with death and dying have been quite varied, and I told him that the core of my experience in this area related to work I had done at the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center, a center that was involved with various kinds of research using homicidogenic substances. And Reb encouraged me to speak about this work. I don't speak about it very often these days. I'm in another

[01:04]

mode. However, the work there was that two-degree shift in my personal life and my professional life, which opened me very, very easily. And that work began for me in 1972 and continues until this day, however, I do not use the substances as I continue to work. I was somewhat shy when we talked about it. I said I didn't even like to put LSD on my little bio blurbs as I go around lecturing about this and that, because there are so many preconceptions and misconceptions about the use of hallucinogens, that it's a red flag in people's minds, and there are enough red flags waving in the air. I'd rather address the subject and rather than deal with people's attitudes and opinions, he encouraged me to speak about the work in

[02:11]

a very direct way, and I'm pleased to do so this evening. I don't see familiar faces here. This is not an open lecture. This is a program for then practitioners, practicers, and students and beginners, and supposed individuals who are... That's okay. That's just how it goes, right? We'll be here until four in the morning otherwise. And so I'm really happy to have only one good friend here, my dear friend Tony Lilly, with whom I have adventured for many years, and today was another adventure. She made it possible for me and Reb and his wife to swim with the dolphins at Marine World, and my heart is

[03:12]

very warm and my feet are very cold. It was an experience of life that was exquisite. So I'm very, very happy to be here, fresh faces, and to share what I know, and let me say that I speak frequently, and frequently I'm galloping as I speak, so I encourage you to move beyond your polite reserve and raise your hand and interrupt my discourse if you feel the impulse to do so, to ask a question, a clarification, or to pursue an area further. This is important for me because I've been giving talks about death and dying for ten years now, and the freshness always comes from the questions out there. So please don't be shy about asking anything. As I speak, in the more you come to know me, you'll understand I'm rather uncooked, in spite of how I'm dressed tonight, and I hope to become more uncooked as time goes on.

[04:14]

So become uncooked with me. I would really appreciate that enormously. We'll keep this thing raw and fresh and really quite live for me. By training, I'm a medical anthropologist, or actually I'm an anthropologist who ended up as a medical anthropologist, who is no longer an anthropologist. I use my profession basically as a front, and I'm quite comfortable doing that. It's been very illuminating. It's been a way for me to enter into many worlds which are me and are not quite me at all. I started off in cross-cultural anthropology, and ten years later ended up getting a PhD in medical anthropology and working in various medical settings as a medical anthropologist and as a clinical anthropologist. I had two years of medicine the first two years that any poor desperate medical student has to go through, I without any training in the so-called hard sciences. So it was great

[05:19]

sadness, but fortunately I had been trained in the computer sciences in the early 60s and mid-60s, and so I had some sense of discipline which allowed me to approach medicine with a great deal of enthusiasm when I found myself both as a student and as a so-called teacher. And it was there at the University of Miami School of Medicine where I ended up, oddly enough after a year in Africa, I got desperately ill and ended up at the medical school as a patient and then suddenly as a faculty member, that I had my first really meaningful encounter with dying and death. Peripheral encounters are not uncommon for Westerners in the sense that we've had relatives who have died, and basically most of us have been protected from that experience. We've watched television and we've seen death on television. We read about it in newspapers. But to be in a proximal relationship,

[06:25]

intimate relationship, with someone who's dying, and we're all in one because there's one thing we have in common, and that's we're all terminal. We're all dying. But the immediacy of that is generally not very available to us. We walk on this planet in a state of high immortality, and we're 50% correct in that experience, I believe, but 50% that is not correct in that experience of life is generally the one that's living the life but not realizing what's going on. So that when I began to work with people who were dying in the medical school, I was first horrified by my own reaction, truly. I had had no spiritual training. I suppose you did at a certain point in your life until you came to some understanding. Most of us,

[07:27]

our Western experience has had very minimal training in the spiritual realm. And we have been protected from death. And so that I saw quite clearly that as a professional anthropologist and as a personal person, I was definitely shocked by death as I began to work in the field. My first real encounters came with people who were in the burn unit. I had an appointment in psychiatry and became a general consultant in the entire hospital system. The burn unit is not a very popular unit. It's a crisis area. It's a very painful place. People die there rather quickly. It's a warm place because air conditioning is very uncomfortable for people who are acutely burned. So it's physically very uncomfortable to be there. But

[08:30]

psychologically, it's really uncomfortable to be there. And my experience there was of chronic crisis. People who looked as though they were going to survive in a period of very few hours just die out of fear or pain, precipitated, of course, by the burn, but also by something more subtle. And generally, it was a psychological reaction to an interaction or a response to the condition of being so severely traumatized and losing the envelope that surrounds the body, that is, the skin. And I felt good about being in that unit because I realized everybody was in emergency. That is to say, the professionals worked in a way that was quite astonishing. They were like demons and the team was very, very closely knit. And there was a really, if you

[09:41]

understand spiritual practice from the point of view of working in a hospital, there was a putting away of I in a very big-mind way. And I loved working there because I disappeared as their I disappeared. And it was extremely helpful. But when I became involved on the oncology unit, death was a little bit different there. It took longer. And so that one had the opportunity to become more upset. If you're terribly busy, and the hospital can be a rather busy place, the mind is engaged in all sorts of finite exercises, so one doesn't have the opportunity to allow a disturbance to arise. And in the oncology unit, one had a greater opportunity to do so because it takes longer to die if you were dying of cancer. And then I saw that medical professionals were not really very well equipped to deal with dying. Their job was much more oriented towards the

[10:43]

prevention of death. And that as a matter of fact, many of the heroic efforts that I witnessed that were done supposedly on behalf of patients seemed to be done more for the sake of the healthcare professionals, in many instances, than for the patients, so-called. That what I observed was a great effort in every way to prevent death. And in essence, this became for me a manifestation of a massive denial of death. Years later, I was in a conversation with a good friend, Rondoff, who he had given a lecture and I had given a lecture on death and LSD work. And he was, in a wonderfully charming way, abusing what we were doing at the research center somewhat. And he said, well, really, you should be trying to heal people. And again, I, you know, wasn't spiritually trained. I was

[11:50]

extremely naive and it seemed to me perfectly clear that the biggest healing you can do with a person who's dying is to help them die. And so I said to him, well, I think we're doing the right thing. You know, basically the biology of the individuals with whom we're working is so terribly ravaged that I think that we're supposed to help them die. That's the purpose of our work, she said naively. Years later, he has something called the dying project. And we had a wonderful exchange recently in Eugene where he and I and Chakdut Tsukur Rinpoche and Gyaltsal Tsukur Rinpoche spent a day in a large gathering talking about death and dying. And we spoke about this conversation. And yes, if someone's dying, an effort to heal them is quite absurd. It's a denial of what's happening. And that the kind of most relevant and the correct thing to do is to help them die, of course. And actually to help

[12:55]

someone die, in many instances, takes very little. It's rather effortless once you've come to a certain condition within yourself. Now, the LSD work was quite a shock to my system. Working with dying people in a regular medical setting and being a bit of a missionary is great. You know, you're muchly appreciated in general. You're welcomed frequently because working with the dying is not very gratifying for people in the healing profession. It's not the objective, necessarily, of a medical situation. So that when my position as a so-called medical anthropologist felt, I felt very useful. And one likes to feel useful. When I began to work with people who were dying, however, at the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center, I was dealing with a whole

[13:58]

other kettle of fish. And that has to do with an even more profound intimacy with that experience of death. Because people in a situation of using LSD as an adjunct to psychotherapy, you're not just being a nice person and comforting and sometimes relevant and even occasionally correct in your actions. You're diving into the middle of the soup with them. Please come in. Thank you. So that when a person's psyche is exploded, that is to say the unconscious mind, the mind that is below the level of conscious awareness is brought into the level of conscious awareness. The dreams, the fantasies, machio, that sense of everything that is underneath it all comes up. And a lot of

[15:04]

death is there. And it's been sat upon quite efficiently for the individual's entire lifetime. Moreover, they're dying right there in a way that's quite obvious to you. Something else moves. It's double what it is normally. And that is to say that it is very good to minister, but to penetrate is something else again. And quite frankly, it was in that work that my whole situation began to erupt somewhat. It's a bit like sitting. You know, you think you'll just sit. And suddenly you find that your mind is moving. And suddenly you think, well, no, wait a minute. This is Zazen. My mind should be still like the surface of a

[16:04]

pond. And your mind is like an ocean in a storm. And not only that, there are demons in those waves. And not only that, your body's feeling it. And not only that, you know, everyone else is very quiet and looks very peaceful. So you're acutely self-conscious. And that ocean is affecting, very deeply affecting. And so I thought I was not supposed to have that ocean erupt from me. But however, when the ocean starts moving, it just takes over. And yeah. I'm going to get to that very, very specific thing. Is everything from a paleopathologist, that is someone who studies bones, to someone who works in clinical anthropology, that is working along with a healthcare professional, or someone in psychotherapy as a co-therapist. Okay, and the field was established in the early 1930s and has grown massively. Quite interesting field. The LSD work will be described in detail

[17:15]

because I think it's a model which has some relevance for work that all of you will be doing in one way or another. In any case, the description of my internal situation is also relevant from the point of view that one of the things that we must deal with in working with the dying is the arising of our own situation. And it happened very powerful, in a very powerful way with me. And basically what I became was a student to people who were dying of cancer. And my practice was death. And it was the most important thing that's ever happened to me. Because it's a situation where if your practice is death at a certain point, it kind of gives you up. And that's a relief in a certain way. It gives you up. Yeah. It just gives you up. It becomes a thing that is not the central

[18:26]

focus of your waking conscious mind, nor is it a worm burrowing through the mind that is not conscious, or the mind that is not in your conscious awareness. It is not the subject of your dreams in an acute way. It is not a source of fascination. It is not something that you seek out. It simply is. And only if I'm asked to speak about it do I care to, because it's no longer foreground, nor is it the background. It just settles into a place where it's no longer like a pin that's pricking you, either in your awake state, in terms of fascination or fear, or in a sleep state, in terms of fascination or fear. It kind of settles in with everything else. Helpful. I've had somewhat of a political life as well, and I used to

[19:33]

say in lectures to people, I think everybody should go to jail. It's really quite helpful. It's a great experience. So I would like to say about working with people who are dying, everybody should do it. And I say should in the way of the superego. It's really important to do. And it's so important that it should be required. I mean, it's just necessary, I believe, in order to come into a true sensibility, like the dolphins today. It's just, it's just an is kind of thing, a being kind of thing. Not important. But until you do it, it's kind of important. Being a student of dying people for some years, there were four questions that came up. And I'd like to ask these questions of us here, in the way of a reflection, of a contemplation. I'd like to give you these questions. They're very simple. And I'd like to spend just some few seconds with these questions, and then I want to move into the

[20:42]

LSD work. And we'll plow through it like good students, looking at the history and how it works and why we did it and the results and so on. Okay? Come in and sit down if you'd be more comfortable. Yeah. Okay. Fine. Hi. So, why don't you just make yourself comfortable. I'd like to ask these questions. And if you'd like to close your eyes, that's fine, too. I don't care how you receive them. But I'd like you to ask these questions of yourself, if you will. They're questions that we don't necessarily ask of ourselves. We don't generally take the opportunity to bother. We don't even know to ask them until it's rather a bit down the line. So, they're very simple. Most questions are of this nature. And the first question is simply this. If it was your time to die, and death came and said, it's time. And sometimes death does

[21:57]

manifest as an entity coming to take one away, what reasons or reasons would you give for staying? What have you got to do? What's your job? What's really the important thing to do? The second question is equally simple. How should you die, not how will you die? What do you want to do with your death? What is your right in dying? R-I-G-H-D and R-I-T-E, perhaps? How should you die? What do you want to create in terms of your own death? The circumstances.

[23:07]

R-I-G-H-D and R-I-T-E, perhaps? How should you die? What do you want to create in terms of your own death? The circumstances. And what do you want to do the last day of your life? Socrates said, since I ignored the artist in me, I wish to spend the last day of my life as an artist. Do you have a finite preference? If so, what is it? And the last question, one that came up very frequently in the work with people who are dying, how am I afraid to die?

[24:31]

What is it about dying and death that is frightening for me? In non-Western societies, the view of dying and death is frequently quite different than in our culture. In so-called primitive cultures and even in old high culture, death is looked on as a transformation, a transfiguration. And there are many forms which make it possible for individuals to give body to this aspect of dying. There are cartographies, maps that the soul, or journeys that the soul takes after the individual has died, and there are whole maps describing exactly the path that the soul pursues.

[25:50]

And the whole topology or topography of this afterlife state. In the world of shamanism, for example, and I've worked a great deal with shamans, and even written a couple of books in the area, it's absolutely fascinating how relevant and how conscious the attempts to enter this area are for the shaman, first as an initiate, and then as a practicing healer, ecstatic. The belief that there is some kind of process with the geography is common throughout all cultures. Funeral rites also have intrinsic in them codes which denote the fact that individuals believe that there is some place that people go after they're dead. This is sometimes interpreted as a manifestation of ambivalence on the part of survivors, of the living, that a lot of funeral behavior in our culture and in other cultures is a way of resolving conflict.

[27:01]

With regards to our fear of death, or the fear that the deceased will return to the world of the living, and bother the living. And so a lot is done to push the deceased over into the realm of the dead. It's also a way to hasten or to facilitate the journey of the deceased, and I think the Tibetan rites are particularly interesting, and the Buddhist rites in general, in terms of the passage of 49 days. Which is a basic journey that the soul takes from this state of waking life consciousness into another state, perhaps back into reincarnation, into rebirth, perhaps not. The belief in reincarnation is extremely interesting, which is basically a non-Western belief, although it was part of early Christianity until 543 A.D. when it was kicked out.

[28:05]

But reincarnation, or beliefs about monads coming back into bodies, being reborn, is something that occurs not only in the Hindu and Buddhist world, but also very common in Native American traditions, and is found in many cultures in Africa, and in Oceania. It's something that I didn't realize until I was a little later into my anthropological studies, and I began to get more interested in religious studies, to find how common the beliefs of rebirth, beliefs related to rebirth are, and reincarnation. Beliefs in the ancestors, which are very common in shamanic cultures and primitive cultures, and also in old high cultures, indicate again a way of participating in the world of the dead, of bargaining, of negotiating, of engaging deceased individuals in one's religious life. Old high cultures, that would be different from what I call so-called primitive cultures. That would be primarily Asian cultures and Central European cultures.

[29:20]

That is where you have rice agriculture, more evolved forms of substance activity, stratified societies, and so on. So all the cultures of Southeast Asia would fall into that domain. A form, which we call rites of passage, is another way that individuals can participate very dramatically in the whole realm of death and dying. Rites of passage are ritual events which occur periodically throughout an individual's life, at birth, at puberty, at first maturity, at second maturity, and at death. They also occur in terms of an initiation into a religious order, or a geographical passage, or even in terms of a healing ritual. They're rituals which occur at these boundary points, limits, threshold places, whether it's age-graded or by virtue of one's physical or mental or social condition.

[30:23]

These rites of passage have been extensively studied by psychologists and anthropologists, and they're extremely interesting because they have great relevance in terms of their lack in Western culture and their presence in every other culture in the world. Their lack in Western culture is rather recent, but they provide a means where an individual goes through a kind of rehearsal of death in an initiatory experience, which is frequently extremely dramatic. It occurs periodically, so an individual rehearses this experience of dying and death. Some of these experiences are so outrageous that, in fact, people die in the course of them. Sometimes one individual is sacrificed in the course of an initiation rite. This is not a light affair. I remember one gentleman, Walter Houston Clark, a theologian, made a remark. He said, Christianity is like a vaccination against the real thing.

[31:26]

Religious culture in the West is pretty pale compared to religious culture in other cultures, and religious activity in other cultures. Rites of passage are a very extreme example and very important example of ritual processes which allow for the opening of the unconscious into the level of conscious awareness in a very deep and sometimes awesome and terrifying way. And yet, years ago, when Margaret Mead and I spent some time together in Austria at a conference in the Berg-Weidenstein, we were dealing with these problems of the lack of ritual in our own culture, particularly rites of passage, which allow for the exercising of very deep psychological energies within the human psyche, and what this does in terms of the display of these energies, these configurations, in secular culture in a kind of willy-nilly way.

[32:31]

And I was most interested in this in relation to individuals' experiences of dying in Western culture where I had seen quite a few people die in a rather unpleasant psychological condition and feelings that people were extremely ill-prepared to die in our culture, whereas in non-Western societies, particularly since I've worked in so-called primitive cultures, I had seen people die in another way, rather well. As a matter of fact, I had been inspired on a number of occasions in Africa where I saw maybe 10, 15 people die of wounds or of age, you know, old age or disease. The going seems, you know, quite sane to me, but the going I experienced in hospital settings seems quite insane, and I didn't quite understand why this was until some years later. Certainly, the lack of a mythological framework in Western culture, in addition to a lack of ritual process in our culture, makes it difficult for us to know dying in a way that is relevant.

[33:43]

And then two other areas in non-Western cultures which I think are really important. The first is the books of the dead, whether it's the Egyptian books of the dead, because it wasn't just one book of the dead. Everybody who died died once, and this book was basically a manual that the deceased used in their journey in the afterlife, and yet it was well-known by those of us who were living in that time. Many of you were living in that time. It was, you know, part of sacred culture, so that the cartography of the afterlife scene was well-known. The Tibetan book of the dead, which is a very important manual, I think both from the point of view of meditation practice and also from the point of view of the psychophysiology of death, and the so-called posthumous journey of the soul, which takes on a whole other dimension in the descriptions which are both physiological and psychological and mythological in the Tibetan book of the dead. And the translations of the Tibetan book of the dead by Sufis and Americans into something that has been quite useful for some Western individuals.

[34:53]

And it's difficult for some of us to penetrate into the more arcane references in the Tibetan book of the dead, and yet Trumpa's translation is quite relevant in many ways for people in the West, a little more than Evan Wentz's translation, which is more classical. And I'm sure there will be further transliterations of the Tibetan book of the dead which will make it even more useful. The final aspect which I'd like to bring up has to do with what happens at this place, I'm sure. And it happens in every boundary and holy situation, and that is what anthropologists refer to as communitas, the sacred community, the sangha. It is where people live together, have a shared practice and belief system which gives relevance and direction to their lives.

[35:57]

And an individual dies, and that dying is supported by particular behaviors which help support and guide the individual through this experience. The account of Gregory's death, Gregory Bates' death, was very, very beautiful to me as an old friend of Gregory's, an old buddy, and also as someone who had worked with many people who had died. I felt really so happy that the respect had been given to him and the faith and support had been given to him, and that it happened in a place like this for people like you. It was really, for those of us who weren't here, it was great, I mean really great to read about it because you read a lot and you experience a lot of the opposite kind of things. And so that, knowing that it can happen for Gregory, it can happen for anybody. And that the practice that came through so strongly with Gregory is something that, in the account in Co-evolution Quarterly, it inspires many people beyond this sangha to try.

[37:04]

And that trying is very important. Now there are a number of reasons why we don't want to work with people who are dying, and one that it just seems, if you're in a pragmatic materialistic society like ours, it's sort of futile. There's really nothing you can offer a dying person. And basically the mechanical prolongation of life, which is the most often response to someone who's dying in a way that's very unpleasant, makes you terribly uncomfortable because it hits the pocketbook. And all sorts of economic outrages come up around dying that make people like us, who are probably very nice, feel uncomfortable. And it's really quite interesting how much money is spent in providing a very poor quality of life. On the other hand, how materialistic we are. It's a kind of paradox in Western culture. And that we're sort of doing this thing, which is probably a deep insult to the body, to the psyche, to the spirit.

[38:11]

And on the other hand, many people are feeling, the living, if you will, the more living, are feeling horribly resentful about it. And it's something that you see very frequently in working with dying people, an economic concern coming up, or a materialistic concern. And it's something that's rather challenging to work with, and rather, rather difficult. So there is this aspect that you can't really do very much that's relevant, mechanically prolonging a person's life. So, you know, really, what can you do? Another reason why it's not very popular is that a lot of intense emotions get involved. Not only you're working in an intense emotional feeling, people get really crazy sometimes around dying. Not only persons dying, but family members. And it might seem sort of plain and simple, except that if you're working in it in a hospital setting, it is really affecting for everybody involved, even including you, no matter how peaceful and spacious you are. To watch people become really attached and clinging, not only to the dying person, but the dying person's clinging to life.

[39:17]

The medical professions are clinging to their techniques, and it's just absolutely wild. And it can get absolutely bizarre. So, you know, people don't necessarily want to work in such a highly charged emotional field. Better, we should work with carrots, you know, vegetables. These are a little less emotional. And you don't want to get your emotions aroused after all. Ultimately, something does happen in working with the dying, which makes it even less popular. And that is that it brings up one's own fear of death. And in general, we have not been given the training. Perhaps you have as then students. But most individuals have not been trained in such a way that they've resolved their feelings around death. It's not even coming to the level of consciousness. So that it's, you know, it's really quite bizarre when all of a sudden a lot of fantasies and dreams related to death start coming up.

[40:18]

Tremendous amount of fear and anxiety starts coming through. I saw it happen many, many times with first medical students with whom I worked. And then later with people in the healthcare professions, physicians and nurses, who just got crazy about the whole situation. I'm reminded of a terrible saying that Woody Allen wrote in one of his calendars. I worked for some years for Joseph Campbell, the mythologist. And every day I'd go into his little studio, and one day I walked in and he had this calendar, and he was laughing. I said, what's so funny? He said, well, I have this Woody Allen calendar, Joan, and every day there's another saying. And he said, do you want to hear the one for today? I said, great, what is it? He said, well, today's is, I'm not afraid of dying, I just don't want to be there when it happens. And that pretty much characterizes the Western attitude toward death. In my experience of working in a non-ven situation, but of just a pure hospital field.

[41:24]

That is, the patient gets snowed, the dying person gets snowed with all kinds of medications, which takes away the opportunity for being awake at the moment of death. The family network gets snowed with regards to a tremendous amount of blah, blah from the medical profession with regards to the reality of the person's dying. And then the medical profession's snowing themselves, in terms of a tremendous amount of frantic activity for long life. So it's a very peculiar thing, the effort that people manifest in relation to not getting down to what's going on. Well, one of the few things in the early 70s, the late 60s, that seemed like a fantastic alternative, that is getting right down with death, was the work with psychedelics. And I'm now of a somewhat other mind, because I found out almost too late that death involves an altered state of consciousness anyway. You don't have to give people 600 micrograms of LSD to have their minds open wide.

[42:27]

As a matter of fact, all you have to do is be dying, and it happens. It's really quite predictable, and usually it's handled as a psychiatric complication. So that if your attitude's correct, and you've opened up the possibility of being there, then you don't have to use these extreme measures to help individuals. But nonetheless, the extreme measures were extremely instructive, and I'm very grateful for having had the opportunity of participating in their use. The suggestion that hallucinogens be used directly with dying people actually came from a physician, a woman called Valentina Pavlovna Watson, who's the Russian pediatrician wife of Gordon Watson, who was later herself to die of cancer. And in 1955, she and her husband, then a banker, took psilocybin mushrooms with Maria Sabina in Mexico. And after her experience, she had this illuminating idea.

[43:31]

She said, my goodness, this experience is just profound, she said, and I think it would help a lot people who are dying, people who are narcotics addicts, people who are alcoholics. And it was odd that some 10 years later, in fact, projects were conceived using LSD and other substances as an adjunct to psychotherapy with precisely these groups of individuals. It was astonishing that it was not discovered that it was Dr. Watson who thought about it until 1975, when Stan Groff and I visited Watson. His wife died in 1963. He was the same year that Huxley died. Not sure. When did Huxley die? Uh-huh. Oh, really? Uh-huh. Hmm. That's why. Hmm. Well, that's a way out. Someday. Someday. Groff and I were in the Watson household,

[44:34]

and we picked out this thing that says, I Ate the Magic Mushrooms, this little leather-bound book, and we opened it up, and there was an article by Dr. Watson making these recommendations in 1955, and we were absolutely amazed that, in fact, she was the one who thought of it first. We were sure that it was Aldous, and had talked extensively about Aldous being the one who thought about it, but, in fact, it was Valentina Pavlovna Watson who set the record straight. Huxley was the second person who thought about it seriously, and I think, to a major part, he was inspired by the death of his first wife, Maria, who died of cancer, and who was a very spiritual person, and he facilitated her dying in a way that is described in Laura Huxley's book, this timeless moment, this very beautiful description of her passing. And it was through his experience with her that he made the connection, after he took mescaline,

[45:35]

that perhaps these substances could take the most physiological, to quote him in a letter to Humphrey Osmond, physiological of all human experiences and transform it into a spiritual event. This, however, was not done finitely until the mid-60s, and it actually was done, first, by a man studying pain. It wasn't done for any philosophical or transcendental spiritual reasons. It was learned that, for a peculiar reason, LSD seemed to produce in certain individuals a kind of anesthesia effect. So Eric Haas, the pharmacologist, ran a very peculiar set of experiments in 1965, giving LSD and not telling his patients, right? You can imagine, to cancer patients, people with herpes zoster and gangrene, and did a series of three tests in a double-blind, fascinating,

[46:37]

using dilaudid and riparidine and LSD, and found out, number one, that LSD, for some peculiar reason, was a more effective analgesic in some instances than these other two analgesic agents. And he noticed that some people had some kind of spiritual experiences, and not only that, their attitude towards LSD was with a woman who was extremely sensitive. It became a big deal at the center because we didn't have the permission to use it with people who were dying of cancer. Nonetheless, they gave it to this woman, Gloria. She had a very powerful experience. She indeed died of breast cancer, and her death was meaningful to her, to her family, and to everyone with whom she worked. And it looked as if she was going into a deep reactive depression, and in fact the LSD turned that depression around and she participated in a conscious way in her own dying, in a magnificent way. It was then that in 1967,

[47:39]

the project was begun at the Research Center in Maryland, which was designed specifically to work with people who were dying. And that project continued until 1973, when it was proved conclusively that LSD is very beneficial for people who are dying of cancer. A white paper was written about it by the National Institute of Mental Health, thus proven it was no longer possible to continue the research so that nobody can have LSD if they have cancer anymore because it's been proven. You can only do research with the substances. I don't think you can even really do that now with the subjects involved. I don't know. In any case, the work dealt with the following areas, and it dealt not only with treatment of pain, we also addressed fear of death, medical management, depression,

[48:41]

and anxiety. And this was a methodologically well-designed and perfectly carried out experiment. Let me just say at this point, ten years later, one could pull one's hair out, quite frankly, about lost opportunities. But I'm a sort of opportunist, and so we did the best we could, at least I did the best we could, under the circumstances of being constantly peered down upon by various governmental agencies. I remember working with one man, Dean, who's called Ted in Human Encounter with Death, a young black man who had cancer of the colon. And just before he died, and this is great sitting here because I know he's listening somewhere, he got so clear. He was really in terrible shape physically, but his mind was so still, he was so spacious. I said to him, I didn't know a pig about Zen Buddhism,

[49:44]

I hardly know anything now, but in any case, I said to him, I wish that I could find a Zen master who'd come visit you. You'd teach that guy something. I mean, really, I've never seen anybody so clear before, during, or since, except this man. He was exquisite, and it was not a state of consciousness which was at all grippy, if you will. There was no sap in that gaze of his. It was just space in that gaze. And in that gaze, and we toward the end of his life, the last month of his life, I spent a lot of time in that gaze, and it was great. It was beautiful, and it was very, it was medicine for me. And everyone around him, all his black friends kept saying, well, what's wrong? You know, he's dying. I feel like I'm the one who has the problem. And his wife would say,

[50:46]

well, Joan, I mean, how come he's so peaceful? And I'd say, well, Flora, I don't know. I can't say. Ask him. And then Flora would say, well, Dean, why are you so peaceful? And Dean would say, it's okay. And he'd just smile. When you're that peaceful, you just can't explain why. There's no question anymore about it. He was great, yes. Well, he was not on LSD, but it was post. He had three sessions. I almost brought a film, and I thought, since he's in it, he's the patient in this film. He wasn't on it, but let's say that before the treatment, he was, I want to tell his story, okay? He wasn't on it when he died. Aldis was, but he wasn't. And basically, my feeling about dying is

[51:48]

as little medicine as possible. Dying is an altered state of consciousness. You don't have to give anybody LSD. They're tripping already. They're on the trip. It's a journey. This reality, they're losing it. You're losing it. You don't need anything to help you lose it faster, except support, a sense of foundation, which that's going to go to, but it's a sense of being, it's okay. So they're giving somebody something to help them die, like a medicine. And there's only one medicine you can give them, truly. I mean, I hate to say it, but it's love. That's the only medicine I know. You know, anything else is absurd. In my experience, it's absurd, quite frankly. But I'm embarrassed to use the word love here. I don't know why. But I tell you, it's the only thing that works, I promise, okay? But what helps love open up,

[52:50]

in other words, the dissolution of fear, in my experience with many people who died of cancer, and we worked with over 100 individuals, all of whom died. It was 100% attrition rate, okay? Our sample is no longer on the planet. Everybody went. And let me tell you, that's something to deal with, too. Oh, hmm. But I want to talk about service, because it's an interesting thing, but later. In any case, the thing that I learned is that very deep psychological work prior to dying, it's like meditation. It's a rehearsal. It's practice for that moment when you do it. So if you practice really good, then there's no difference between practicing and life. And you just, you just, you're there. So that in a culture without rites of passage, without a mythos, which gives direction to one's life, without practice, let me tell you,

[53:51]

you're in there like a last-ditch effort with your LSD. You're, you know, you're racing. Or you're, you know, if you've gotten something else, you're hurrying to provide something to help the individual to not cling and to not develop many illusions. There are lots of stories about death. Oh, let me tell you. There's the melodrama. And there are many religious ideas to support the melodrama. It's a cosmic western you can make out of death. Really. Before, during, and after. And the thing that I keep saying is that it's just, that's not what you want to pull in either. You don't want to increase the dream reality. You don't want to build up the cosmic western. You want them to work through the cosmic western before or to cut it so that when you're dying you're there for it. You're not spaced out, so to speak. And that's really hard in our culture because we divert

[54:52]

our situation either with wonderful dramatic stories, beliefs about things, or dream realities that come up, or we're clinging. And let me tell you, for those of you who have never seen somebody die who doesn't want to die, please, if you have the chance, experience that. You talk about attachment. You know, you could be attached to Oreo cookies. That's okay. But being attached to life when your job is to die is just outrageous. Metaphysical fear. I mean, looking into the eyes of someone who doesn't want to die is like looking into the mouth of hell. Truly. Pupils all dilated. Escaping hole screaming. It's really something to witness because you're not immune. That thing shoots right into you. Because you can trip out

[55:54]

into wonderful places or into awful places. You can go to heaven or hell when you die. I just want to be sure. Let me just, because pain is something else altogether. Yeah. Do you understand what I'm saying? Right. There are many ways one can experience it. There's not just one way. You bring a lot to dying. A lot. And that's why the pushing down of death in our culture means that you're bringing even more to it. A lot of misunderstood ideas, if you will. And also, you brought up the whole thing about pain which is a very problematic area. Pain is suffering. I'm sure many people here

[56:56]

have experienced acute pain. Most of us have. And it is a place where your consciousness can be completely attracted. You're just fixed in pain. Period. That's where you're locked. And many of the people with whom we worked were locked into pain. That was all they knew. You know, television wasn't interesting. Life wasn't interesting. The only thing they knew was pain. And it's terrible when you see it or if you've known it. And so that the alleviation of pain, physical pain, I see in terms of two situations. One has to do with the mind is a magnificent instrument, or the brain, the CN, central nervous system, CNS, is an incredible instrument. And there are ways that the brain can deal with pain. And one of the ways that's very paradoxical that we encourage people to get into is really strange

[57:57]

was to get into pain more. I mean, sometimes cancer moves into the nerve flexi and the situation is that you are in acute pain and all the morphine and the heroin in the world is not really going to stop it unless it kills you. But they're giving you to stop the pain and that's just to take you over. And I've seen in several instances people both on LSD and off LSD use their mind as a way of going right into the center of their pain and killing it. But to do it, most of us are trying to get away from pain. Anything to avoid pain. Again, ideas, diversion, and so on. The other is using heroin. And I approve completely of this because of my experience at St. Christopher's Hospital. I went to London and met a wonderful woman called Stephanie Saunders,

[58:58]

very nice Christian lady who started the hospice movement. She's great. We've got all these ideas how terrible heroin is. I'm telling you, pain is a drag. There's just nothing about pain. And ultimately, that I think that's great when you're in that situation. It is really unhandy. And people I've had, you know, I'm sure you have too, people have shown up at my lectures or at my home with these wonderful spiritual and transcendental ideas about pain. How pain teaches you. Well, that's all well and good, but try a big dose of pain. It's awesome. So I was at St. Christopher's Hospital and here are all these people, these linings, every kind of person there. They're all sitting in bed. They were taking their heroin. You know, everybody was very happy. And I thought, well, this is fascinating. How does this work, Dr. Saunders? And she said, well, it's really good.

[59:58]

You know, the thing is is that if you regulate the dosages then in such a way so that the irritation in the nerve plexi, for example, if the cancer is in the gastrointestinal system and the pain can get really bad there. Okay, once the pain irritation starts and the signals are going to the brain, it's really hard to stop the signals. If you get in there fast enough and you stop the signals, then you don't have to give a lot of heroin which makes people very dozy. And you're on a sort of low dose which keeps the signals from going to the brain and the brain is saying, hey, I hurt. And it's absolutely incredible that it works, but it works. And so the work at St. Christopher's provided not only people who were suffering from acute pain relief from pain but also was an amazingly supportive atmosphere. Yeah? Oh, until they died. Yeah. But the idea was that sometimes, yeah.

[61:00]

But what's addiction if you're dying? Do you know what I mean? That's exactly it. But, I mean, you see, when you're dealing with the legislators, they're saying, what do you mean these cancer patients are going to get addicted? Huh. I think I have in a way by saying that the mind, in some instances, is a very, or the brain is with the mind involved in it, can control pain. But not always. And when you see a person in acute pain, it's like a person who's very thirsty. You give them water. It's correct when an individual is in an absolute situation

[62:02]

of intractable pain that you do whatever you can to assist them. Now, my only objection, I mean, a lot of people disagree with this, all right? Where I draw the line is in one place only, and that is the consciousness becomes clouded by the medication. The consciousness is clouded by the pain. And this you have, you see, I don't think you've had acute pain. That's the thing. No. Because in low dosages, these substances, I've never had heroin. I've never had morphine. I've had some painkillers because I've had some mean accidents in my life in the field, but very, very little because I have a fearful, nasty mind. Be willing to try. I like to experiment with myself. So I'd rather take the opportunity to try something. But in the degrees

[63:02]

that we're talking about with regards to these people's experience of pain, in fact, in Cecily Saunders' work, the amount of heroin that these people took and my interaction with them, my observation of them, because I've worked with heroin addicts before, it's very different than the heroin addict who's nodding out. All the people with whom I related were very bright, very clear, and very much with it. And moreover, they didn't have done to them what many people who die in the West have done to them, which is a hard hit of morphine in the drip bottle. I don't know if you know about the conspiracy among nurses and doctors. Many Americans in hospitals die of morphine. All right. So I mean, I understand. I have real strong feelings about abuse. However, the correct use, the correct use of these substances, I believe, can be extremely beneficial.

[64:03]

Let me illustrate this with a story, if I may. We worked with a woman. She's called Susan in the book, Suzanne. Her name was Linda. She was my age. She had massive gynecological cancer, metastasized everywhere in her pelvis. Beautiful woman. In fact, to look at her, you didn't know she had cancer at all. She's just really gorgeous. That is, if you looked at her face. To look at her body, you could, you know, she was really, she had had many operations and they just kept digging away at her body. Somehow she kept this vital flow. She's a very intense, beautiful person. Her pain was enormous and so she was sent into the treatment program and because she had a choice and her choice was this. She was in acute physical pain. She couldn't think of anything else. She was in a severe depression. She wanted to kill herself. And the only alternative they could come up with because the dosage of medicine that they wanted to give her

[65:05]

was so great was an operation called chordotomy. Now, chordotomy is a rather peculiar operation and it means that you cut nerves in the spinal area which block off the pain in the pelvic region from the waist down. However, most people who have or many people have chordotomy end up crippled. Generally, they can't walk afterwards. It's not infrequent and they're incontinent and it's a drag. Okay? So, but when pain is your only reality then you'll you know you're going to look for an alternative. Yeah. But, you know, I tell you even when you're going to die in a few months a lot of people have not really acknowledged that. Okay? Many people aren't even told. So, in any case, Linda came into the project. I felt just great

[66:06]

with her. I mean, it was just she was like a school chump like all young women I'd been to prep school with. And it was just I looked at her and I thought, whoa! And it's one thing to work with, you know, men and old people but to work with women your own age, God! You know, really, it's different. Every type gives you a thing and you go, oh boy. So, plus, working in this way, you know, you're not a you know, I'm not sitting there in a white coat either. All right? So, nor am I defended between, you know, you all and there's this two foot table and then there's me. You know, you're sitting magically in bed with a so-called patient or you're at their house or you're literally holding them. You know, I found myself in the bed with more cancer patients than I did by the bed. All right? Something else again which we'll talk about. You're infinite. I mean, you go all the way with these people

[67:06]

because dying also makes you acutely sensitive and there is so much excuse me, bullshit around dying people. Once you kind of understand what's going on, you realize that the only thing you can do is be completely there in the experience. All this ritual behavior in the medical setting is ridiculous. There's only one thing you can do is be authentic because you can. So, you know, I'm looking at Linda and I'm going, whoa, and I'm saying, Linda, this is outrageous what you're going through and she said, it's awful. I'll do anything and anyway, I'm glad my doctor referred me to you. I said, well, gosh, I am too because I want to come to know your experience. So, she took a substance with us called dipropyl tryptamine, DTT. It was injected and it's a short-acting psychedelic, 4 hours instead of LSD which is 8, 10, 15 hours long to spend with a person in their session. And in the session,

[68:07]

after about an hour, she was in acute pain and I said to Stan, my then-husband, Stan Groff, I said to Stan, Stan, is this helpful with regards to Linda's experience of acute pain? I mean, it's one thing to have pain in a sort of straight state of consciousness but in an altered state, if you've ever had a psychedelic, it can be really awful and she's screaming and she's saying, please do something. Finally, I said, Stan, I insist on giving her morphine. You know, we had injectable morphine. We gave her morphine and she got out of pain. I couldn't stand it myself. You know, once you get close to somebody, you know, what can you do? You're going to do everything to help them. Even though it might not be helpful, you try. So, we gave her morphine and I'm going, oh God, did I do the right thing? You know. She came out of her session and she said, well, I've made up my mind. I know what to do. I said, well, Linda, what are you going to do?

[69:08]

She said, well, for sure, I don't want to live in pain all the time. It's just true. I can't think of anything else but pain. I've tried every psychological trick in the book, every practice, none of them work. It's so bad. So, I think there's only one thing to do. I said, what's that, Linda? She said, I'm going to have a chrodotomy. She said, I don't care if I'm crippled. She was really upset about being crippled before. I said, I don't care if I'm crippled. It's great. So what? At least I'll have my consciousness back. At least, you know, I won't have pain and I can, you know, have some life left in me. You know, the world will come back to me. And I said, great. Fantastic. Have a chrodotomy. Well, you know, she went and had a chrodotomy. The day after the operation, she walked down the hall. Perfect. Just perfect. Perfect operation. She died. Yeah, sure, she died. But she didn't die in pain. She died awake. She was clear. She just, she was like, ha! Now,

[70:10]

I want my consciousness back. Okay, great. Fantastic. You make a decision. It can be really scary. You don't know what the outcome's going to be, but you just, you just do it. If you go into it not accepting the consequences of what possibly could happen, no, no, not so good. But if you have the whole range available to you, including the heroin thing, what if my consciousness is going to become cloudy? How am I going to deal with that? At St. Christopher's Hospice, across my heart, those people were like, you know, birds. They were just so chipper. Nobody was sitting in bed like that. It just wasn't the case. I said, good. Then I'm not afraid to say to you today that I support the use, correct use of heroin for those people who are suffering from intractable pain. That's it. And you all might disagree, and I don't blame you. I personally would rather

[71:11]

we do it another way. But the other thing has to do in my response to you with regards to Western science and technology. I don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater. I also don't want to be invaded totally by technology. What I'd like to see is a correct collaboration between these two realms of my own body's wisdom and the fantastic help that science can offer me. But the one who's going to know it better than anybody else is me. And how do I come to know it? Well, that's a problem. Any more questions before we... Okay. Could you name the first person you died in a car accident? Oh, God. Tons. Okay. At the time of death or before? Okay. Death can become an incredible melodrama. A person can become totally involved in their own dying and create

[72:12]

an incredible piece of theater out of it. It can be great theater. It can be not so great theater. It can be something where you're sending... You're literally creating psychological theater in the sense of you're angry at everybody or you can develop all sorts of illusions and delusions with regards to your own dying. Now, examples. I don't know which one. And most people die rather melodramatically in the sense that there's a lot of tension and a lot of unclarity around their experience of dying. And their experience includes not only the healthcare professionals who are working there but also the family system. And what that leaves is just a horrible situation afterwards. I'd like to talk about Dean just briefly and the melodrama that evolved and then how it changed. Dean was a young man who's black

[73:12]

who had cancer of the colon. Six years prior, he had been operated on, had a colostomy. And in the course of the operation, they looked at him and they said, Oh, terminal cancer. We'll close him back up. And that's it. Nothing to be done. He lived for six years. Now, interestingly enough, or horribly enough, the physician told his wife that he was dying of cancer. But the healthcare professionals in relation to the family members decided not to tell Dean. However, in a conversation outside his hospital room, Dean heard the physician and an intern discussing his prognosis. The prognosis was that this man will be dead in three weeks of cancer of the colon. But nobody told him directly. So he then decided not to tell anybody that he was dying. Because after all, in a mind of a person

[74:13]

who has extremely low self-esteem, who wants to be around somebody who's dying of cancer? Now, this man had fought in the war, had been, had a terrifically negative war experience. He'd been a murderer, really. And this came out later in the LSD work. He had been put in foster homes when he was a young kid and passed from, you know, foster home to foster home. Had been terribly abused. Had been a juvenile delinquent. I mean, just a life loser. So, you know, from the hospital's point of view, when we encountered him, he was a black, terminal cancer patient. Now, notice this. Black, terminal cancer patient who was a heroin addict. Therefore, a terrible problem. And it's just amazing what happens to people who find themselves in those kinds of categories. It's bad enough being a terminal cancer patient, as if we all aren't terminal. You know? Or we all don't have cancer. So what's so special about cancer?

[75:14]

You know, we're all producing cancer cells all the time. Some of us get, as one good friend just said to me, riper with cancer than most of us. Or some of us. But in any case, you know, we're all terminal patients, for sure. So, you know, we're thrown into this bag, plus you're black, plus you're a heroin addict because, after all, he's in acute pain and he's, you know, sitting in the hospital taking juice. And out of the hospital, too. So he's referred into the program. And his first session he had was Stan and a nurse. And in that LSD session, essentially what happened was he had a severe paranoid attack. And in that, he was projected onto the nurse and Groff that these two people were foster parents who had beaten him. And he became absolutely terrified and felt that the whole world was evil trying to get him. And then, of course, in the middle of the session was the one and only fire drill in the history of the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center. I'm really happy

[76:15]

to be here on your campus. This is, you know, you want a Cosmic Western? I'm happy to give it to you. All right. Still, he doesn't know he has cancer, right? Because the wife had said, I will not, only for his pain, I will not let you get near my husband if you tell him he has cancer. But, well, you know, when I got on the project, Joni Big Mouth, I mean, you know, I'm not going to work with anybody who doesn't know what's going on for Christ. But anyway, you know, sometimes they just didn't do it. So, anyway, the firemen show up and this guy's freaking out, plus the psychiatric nurse is pregnant and she's already had one miscarriage and he's threatening her physically and it's a great show. In fact, it's all on videotape. I think the research center degaussed it. I wish I had a copy of the tape. It's a classic Cosmic Western. But that's not exactly the Cosmic Western we're talking about. In any case, essentially, what happened was he got calmed down and, you know, the LSD worked more often. Things sort of got put together. But, oddly enough, he didn't have any more pain. That's peculiar.

[77:18]

Moreover, he said that it somehow helped him. Now, how that could help anybody is beyond me. But he felt as if something had happened, had been exploded in his life. And actually, I'll tell you, in the videotape, there were two firemen standing at the session door with their fire helmets on. I mean, that's how bizarre the scene was. You know, Groth is there trying to, you know, deal with them and he wants them to take this guy's, can't even walk, you know, but he's, you know, gangling around the roof out to, you know, for the fire bill. Anyway, I mean, I'm just amused. Really, weird. So, okay, so, after all that, he says it helped him. Not only that, it helped him so much that he went to work. He started working in a mother and infant care place, you know, doing some kind of paperwork, right? Plus, he's kind of happy. Well, you know, how weird.

[78:19]

Okay. Well, that happened, that thing happened in June and November, we get a call from the wife. He's severely depressed and he's in pain again. Can we help? By that time, I'm on the project. So, I say that, you know, I believe in home visits. I mean, I really feel that sometimes it's better to do things at home than it is to take people away from home. But it depends on the home. And I spent a lot of time at the medical school in Miami getting these residents and doctors to go on home visits. Just an anthropologist, you know, toting them out into the backwoods of Dade County. And so, I said, look, let's make a home visit to get in your car and drive to the bad part of Baltimore, you know, like this. But it was fantastic and you really, you know, get to know some stuff like the kids. Counts. Or all the buddies who are hanging out, you know, in the front steps. I mean, it's great. So, you're sitting in these really far out funky circumstances and you're like, oh, so this is what this man's life's about and this is what the family's about. And gosh, you know,

[79:19]

they're as crazy as he is. I mean, everybody's disturbed in this situation. And nobody's telling anybody that anybody has cancer. I mean, that's what's even more bizarre but this man has his colostomy and his bag and, you know, everybody's acting like for six years nothing's happened. And you can't believe it. So, okay. So we start talking and I realize that not only is it bizarre but this man has fathered a child by another woman during the six years. Moreover, his wife has gotten pregnant by another man. They're still hanging in there. Moreover, the kids, they have three beautiful children but they're just crazy right now. They don't know what's going on. So we talk with Dean and I say to Dean alone, I say to Dean, do you know what's going on with you right there? He says, yeah. I say, well, what's going on with you? He says, I got cancer. He's not supposed to know. I say, oh. I said, does your wife know you know? Does your wife know you have cancer? I say, I'm lying slightly

[80:21]

knowing she fully well knows. Oh no, who wants to take care of a man who's got cancer? Who wants to be with a guy who's got cancer? All right. I swallow and I say, might I encourage you to tell your wife, I say. I just waggle up. He said, no. I said, okay. I said, but you know, it's interesting. I mean, really, something has happened to your body. It's obvious. Everybody knows and maybe you should share it with her. You know, maybe you'd get along better. He said, hmm. Start a separate conversation with Flora. You know what's going on with your husband. Don't you think you should tell him that you know what's going on and help him? You know, I mean, obviously the cancer is progressing. He can't take it. I mean, you know, he'll kill himself. He just can't take it. Flora, let me encourage him to do it. So we get Dean and Flora together. Da-da-da-da. And of course, he's outraged. Why haven't you told me I have cancer? Why haven't you told me I have cancer? Okay. So,

[81:21]

you know, the family theater, that piece gets resolved and it's extremely incredible because Matt are on the same side of the table. Now, it sounds, I'm telling it as if it's funny, but at the time it was funny, but it wasn't really very funny. It was insane. It was a real conspiracy. So then he had his second LSD session because he's in pain and the family's all participating in it. And in this one, he went into a very transcendental place. I mean, he went into a place that formed not very Zen-like. It was more of a place of cosmic consciousness. I mean, he saw the divine and he went into a place of, you know, primary clear light maybe. I don't know. I mean, he just saw this world full of God and these jewels and he blissed out. And then he saw very cozy scenes of me and Stan and him and Flora around a fireplace and then he saw a big bushel of apples and there was a rotten one in it and he was a rotten apple. And then he got sad

[82:23]

because he felt like he'd ruined his family. And then he wanted to know if he could do anything. And then I held him and hugged him a lot and we kind of, you know, got close to each other. And he relaxed about being a rotten apple. I said, I thought he was a pretty great rotten apple if he was a rotten apple. And we laughed. And it was a nice thing. And he came out and he was very beautiful. He was like, you know, it's sort of like he came home and he felt good. And there was, sort of the level of theater diminished a little bit because he didn't become, now one of the things that can happen in this work is that or when you're dying it's all of a sudden you become Christ. You know, you take on a mystical identification. But he just got cozy with bliss. So he went back to work. Then the BBC shows up and it ends up that they want to take, you know, a film. A lot of people wanted to do films but the only people

[83:23]

we ever let film on doing our work was the BBC. And this is his third LSD session because he wanted to document his death. He had already realized he was dying for years and years and years and years. He knew it. So he just was very aware that dying people don't get very well treated in the world. So he proceeded to make, we gave him a tape recorder and he'd talk into the tape recorder and talk about what it's like to die. Then we'd have him transcribed up and then he'd give them to all his friends or he'd invite them to the psychiatric research center where he'd have his sessions all videotaped and they'd watch his films and he'd give lectures on death and dying. I mean, it was really fantastic. You know, he said, look, I want to make something of this thing. There's nothing else I could do with my life. I'm so wrecked. So why not try to make something good out of this? So when the BBC called up, I said no and then I said, wait a minute. This guy has got this idea and he's doing it about teaching people about dying through his own experience. Maybe I should not be so protective

[84:24]

and say, ask him if he'd like to do it. He said, yeah, I'd love to do it. Are you kidding? It's great. So his third LSD session was with the BBC filming and by this time his physical condition had diminished rapidly but he was in a very nice place and the BBC came and I had gone through the things they'd flown over from London with all their cameras. You cannot disturb this man at all. You have to be invisible. We'll go to his home and meet him because he wants you to come there but if anything happens that puts any pressure on him and you're asked to leave by me or his family or anyone working here, please do. That's our agreement. Fine. So we go to the home and drive up, knock on the door. Floor opens the door. Where's Dean? Oh, he's out back polishing the car. So great. So he, you know, he really brought himself out to the experience and basically what he did was to create a fantastic physical revival to further communicate on television and in his LSD

[85:25]

situation at the research center a day and a half later he was fully present though he switched between the first session and the second session. He went through deep experiences of despair and I asked the technicians to leave because I thought they might be contributing to his dysphoria and he pulled the mask up and he said, call him back. He said, it's okay. Then he'd go back into his despair. He said, this is what you told me to do, the rest of it being my experience. I said, oh yeah, right, okay. He said, they should know this part. I went, oh, okay. Then he got into a crisis of trust. Now, crisis of trust is when, he was in the theater of his situation but he wasn't dying yet so it was okay to be in the melodrama. Crisis of trust is when you perceive the world to be against you but when working with people in altered states, whether it's with or without substances, telling them about this thing where people in an altered state of consciousness can perceive you as doing something terrible to them, you'll say,

[86:25]

this is what you call a crisis of trust. If you move into that realm, a very good strategy is to say, I'm not trusting you and that puts you back on the same side of the table and it works. It really works. I mean, what you're saying is I'm not trusting you but the metacommunication is that I trust you so much that I can tell you I'm not trusting you and then what we'll say to you probably is to look within for those experiences which have given rise to this feeling. So he got into a crisis of trust, was totally there, absolutely floridly paranoid. I again asked the technician to leave. He pulled up and said, it's okay, I'm just in a crisis of trust. He pulled the shades back down, you know, and he went on with his paranoia and he just completed the thing. He just saw what it was, he got it, you know, he was in the experience totally, he wasn't trying to push it away. I'm the one who's defending him. You know, they're filming away and I'm going, oh well, it's all right and then, you know,

[87:25]

he just finished it. He's not cutting it off, he's just completing the thing and he comes out and he's just, he's there and where he was is as I told you, he was, except for one thing, he died before he died one more time. He stayed very, very clear. I mean, he was so wonderful to be around and we'd smooze on the telephone for hours and I'd visit him every day and, you know, he'd talk into his tape recorder and sometimes he'd get really lonely because his wife would be away and the kids would be away and, you know, he's just, you know, your buddy. And so basically, what happened was that he had only one kidney left because the cancer had done in one and the ureter to that one kidney had occluded so he was auto-intoxicating which is how a lot of people die. You just die in your own bodily poison and it's not that bad a way to die. I mean, in about one-third of the way through it's not great. It's really uncomfortable but there's a point where you get that you're

[88:26]

so polluted by your own body weight that so is the brain field and what happens is that you're you're, you know, you're in an altered state of consciousness. You're not in your body so much yet. Can I answer that? Will you ask me that question when I complete this? Okay, hang on to that one. In any case, Dean, the situation around Dean became another melodrama. Nine days after this situation developed he was put into a hospital, of course, and he is delirious and then he's out and then we get a call at five o'clock in the morning. Dean is dying because the hospital didn't want to operate because he's going to die anyway. Why bother? So, Stan and I get to the hospital and we're around the bed

[89:26]

and basically there's a lot of family people and I'm doing something, a sort of transliteration of what Albus Huxley said to his wife Maria at the time of her death and something is just amazing happening there and we're just letting him go and you can feel him letting go and then all of a sudden I hear the rattle of a gurney. A gurney is, you know, movable. What you do with these? Carch. And then they come and they pile them under the gurney and they rush into the operating room and pank. In they go and open up the whole, you know, area and they put a little tube into him and they, you know, make it possible. I saw all the people I've ever hurt in my life. He was terrible. I can't believe. And then he talked about suffering, his suffering and the suffering that he had, you know, created in other people's lives and he said, you know, I feel like I've paid for it and I don't have to see that anymore. And I thought, hmm.

[90:28]

You know, from the point of view of eschatology, it's what you could call the life review. Right there, or the last judgment. Karmic review. There it is. Life review, you know, from, you know, Raymond Moody and Russell Moyes, we can call it karmic review, whatever. There it was. I don't have to do that anymore. How do you feel? He says, I'm tired. He says, yeah. Okay, well, I guess you can sleep, yeah. Fine, I'll see you later. Things get very simple when you move to that one. And then, you know, he's fine. He just had this tube in him and out his body waste came and then he had another hole and out other body waste came and he could kind of eat. He's getting very thin and he's getting very clear. He's very beautiful. He's very peaceful and that's the state I described earlier. We were talking much earlier. And he died as follows. He called his wife, who was still working, and he said, come to the hospital, I need to talk

[91:29]

to you. She came to the hospital. He talked about how much he loved her and he said, look, I want you to go home and get me a pair of clean pajamas. She walked out of the hospital, out of his hospital room. A few seconds later, a nurse walked in and he was dead. Gone. Period. No, you know, strange expression on his face. You always ask, you know, what was the expression on his face? What were the hands doing? Easy. Easy. So, all through Dean's experience, there was social melodrama and even in the clinical death, there was a psychological melodrama into which he could have become involved. But he kept saying, you know something, the thing that I have to tell you is that dying is just like an LSD experience. And he said that in the ICU as well. I said, he said, I'm really glad that I've learned how to work. It's good training.

[92:32]

So, to avert the melodrama, looking at this stuff sometimes is really important. And going into the melodrama before the drama is happening, so that at the point when it really counts to be clear, you're not passing over with a tremendous amount of baggage. Because all that stuff is going to come up, or it can come up at the point of death, as I've seen it happen. Yes, your question. I have a very good experience in working with apathetic people. So,

[93:35]

I can't answer that question. .

[93:38]

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