Wandering and Wondering
Rob Faure Walker
Bristol University Press eBooks August 27, 2024 DOI: 10.46692/9781529243697.003 (opens in new tab)
Study at a glance
AI-extracted from the abstract| Characteristics | Historical analysis Peer reviewed |
|---|---|
| Interventions | LSD Psilocybin |
| Key points | The account argues that psychedelic experiences, however profound, are temporary and that Alpert's meeting with Neem Karoli Baba redirected his search for enlightenment from chemical experimentation toward a life of service. It reports that the teacher took a dose ten times larger than Alpert thought safe and showed no reaction, which Alpert took as evidence of an already enlightened state. |
Abstract
In the early 1960s, Harvard Professor of Psychology Richard Alpert gave himself and hundreds of willing volunteers enormous doses of the psychedelic drugs LSD and psilocybin. The states of bliss and enlightenment that they found through these chemicals would have a profound impact on the philosophies and politics that emerged over the next half- century. However, no matter how high they got, or how enlightened Alpert, his colleague Timothy Leary and their fellow travellers like Allen Ginsberg became, they always came down. Even after three weeks of dropping acid every four hours, they came down: ‘Oh, here I am again – Richard Alpert – what a drag!’ As Alexander Beiner also writes of the psychedelic experience in 2023, ‘no matter how much we expand in the moment, we always have to return to the realities of the systems we live in’. In 1967, all of this would change for Alpert when he was travelling through India and met the spiritual teacher Neem Karoli Baba (or ‘Maharaj- ji’). After a few days of getting to know him, Maharaj- ji asked to try some of Alpert's acid. Although Alpert had lost his enthusiasm for dropping it himself, he had been giving LSD to pundits around India in the hope that they might be able to tell him what the psychedelic experience meant. The pundits had been unable to give him an answer – that is until he met Maharaj- ji, who took a dose that was ten times more than Alpert thought sensible or safe. Describing the event 48 years later, Alpert tells us: ‘Nothing happened. He didn't have any reaction, I watched, and I watched, and I watched, nothing happened.’ Nothing happened because Maharaj- ji was already in a state of bliss; he was already enlightened. Asking Maharaj- ji how he could ‘get enlightened’, Alpert was told to ‘serve people and to feed people’. The acid that Alpert had taken before travelling to India had allowed him to momentarily experience something approaching enlightenment and had inspired his curiosity; Maharaj- ji had told him how to live an enlightened life.