Authors: David Jay Brown,Rebecca McClen Novick
RMN: What about people who have developed a powerful physical and mental addiction, for example, to crack and cocaine, in some cases: even killing or stealing in order to fulfill their craving for the drugs.
JOHN: They'll kill and steal without the drugs, they live that way. The drug just gives them an excuse to do it. Read Freud on cocaine. He really knew what cocaine did but he was never able to say it in the presence of the psychoanalytic people. Psychoanalysis is all based on his cocaine experiences, every bit of it.
DJB: What do you think about this whole "War on Drugs" thing?
JOHN: We've been subject to the delusion that we should suppress drugs ever since Anslinger put marijuana on the narcotics list ill 1937. He was enforcing the laws on alcohol and that was repealed, so he looked around for something new and found marijuana. In an interview with Anslinger the interviewer asked him, "What if you were to smoke a joint?" And he said, "I would kill three people that I know." What a belief system! And he put all that in the law, you see. It's that insanity of certain people who don't understand what's going on.
RMN: What do you think about atomic energy? Do you have any ideas about how we could solve the nuclear waste problem?
JOHN: All the atomic materials should be shot into the sun. We're playing around with something we don't know anything about. This is the stuff of stars, it's not the stuff of a planet. But it's there so we do it and then we get the illusion that we can control it. Well, that's bull. ECCO did something in 1942 that I'11 never forget; it threw LSD and atomic energy at us in one go. I once asked ECCO what they did that for and they said, "Well, we're trying to test out the survivability of the human species."
DJB: So you think that there are areas then that humanity shouldn't mess around with?
JOHN: Right. Well, we've proven it with atomic energy and biological warfare, too. AIDS.
DJB: You think that AIDS is the result of genetic engineering experiments gone astray ?
JOHN: Yeah, you can see it. It's fooling around with biological warfare and something's escaped. Somebody left a sink open and it went down the sewer. Les Chambers, who is head of biological warfare at Camp Detrid is an old friend of mine so I went down and talked to him about it. We went over all this and he said, "You know, someday, somebody's going to make a mistake, and one of those things is just going to go wild all over the world." He knew. AIDS is an artificial virus; it's related to the Bovine virus, but it wouldn't affect humans before. Somebody spliced it so it would.
DJB: You don't think AIDS could be a natural mutation?
JOHN: No. Natural mutations we can handle because we've lived here for three million years and the mutation rate is very slow. Our immune systems are incredible.
DJB: What role do you think science fiction plays in the development of actual scientific research?
JOHN: Well, big brains operate with science fiction and create it. What it does is free up the creative process for a look at a simulated future which may or may not exist, but it's fun making those simulations and some of them are very good. One of my favorites is
Childhood’s End
by Arthur C. Clarke.
DJB: Are you familiar with Virtual Reality?
JOHN: I've just heard about it. I want to experience it. It shows us what we're doing all the time--constructing realities. You change the chemistry of the brain, you change the realities. Sometimes that can get very scary. Once on ketamine I had an experience that scared the hell out of me, and then I realized, hey, this is happening all the time! Why should I be scared of something that's happening all the time?
DJB: What do you think about the potential of using ketamine in conjunction with psychotherapy?
JOHN: They did it in Iran. One hundred patients. Got them all out of the hospital in one trip. They programmed in that which the patient feared most. Did I tell you what happened to me with that? I went and looked up the Iranian reprint at the UCLA Medical Library and the Albanian one which confirmed the Iranian study.
This whole business about keying in that which is feared most stuck out. So I came back here and took 200 mg of ketamine. Suddenly I was transported to the year 3000 by ECCO and they removed my penis bloodlessly. I screamed in terror and Toni, my late wife, came running out of the bedroom. She looked at me and said, "It's still attached." So I looked up at the ceiling and said, "Who the hell is in charge up there? A bunch of psychotic kids? And the answer came back, "Dr. Lilly, you were at the UCLA Medical Library this afternoon and we programmed in for you that which you feared most. It was in your unconsciousness."
RMN: What do you think is the purpose of fear?
JOHN: From Orthonoia to Metanoia through Paranoia. Orthonoia is the way most people think; they're creating simulations that everyone accepts. Metanoia is where you leave all that and you're experiencing higher intelligence. But the first time you do this, you're scared shitless.
On my first acid trip in the tank, I panicked. Suddenly I saw the memorandum from the National Institute of Mental Health: "Never Take Acid Alone." One investigator who tried to take acid alone got eaten up by his tape recorder. That's all I could think of. Luckily I was scared shitless, had no idea what was going to happen and boy, that was rocket fuel if ever there was one! I went further out into the universe than I've ever been since. So the paranoia is rocket fuel to get you into Metanoia.
Before I did the tank I was frightened by water. I sailed a lot in the ocean and feared sharks. I had a continuous phobia about this. Finally I got in the tank and went through that horrible experience, being frightened to death, you know. And after that I was never afraid of water.
DJB: Do you see a similarity between lucid dreaming and ketamine experiences?
JOHN: No. Lucid dreaming is never as powerful as ketamine.
DJB: Well, one nice thing about ketamine is that you can maintain the high for as long as you want.
JOHN: When people start talking about "higher" states of consciousness I say, "In outer space there's no up or down."
DJB: It all becomes relative.
JOHN: No, it isn't even relative.
DJB: It isn't even relative?
JOHN: It isn't anything you can describe.
DJB: Now I'm thoroughly confused.
JOHN: If you stay around me long enough you're going to get a whole new language. Some people stay around me for a while and run away. I can't keep a woman here. They all get frightened sooner or later. I'm crazier than hell.
DJB: So are you writing these days? What are you doing?
JOHN: I never say what I'm doing. My analyst said it very well. I came in one day and flopped down on the couch and said, "I just had a new idea this morning, but I'm not going to talk about it." And he said, "Oh, then you understand that a new idea is like an embryo. A needle will kill an embryo, but if it's a fetus or a baby then it's just a needle-prick." So you have to allow a certain amount of growth before you talk.
RMN: What do you think is the best therapy for people?
JOHN: The best therapy for people is to hit them over the head with a hammer.
DJB: Maybe we could start running workshops at Esalen.
JOHN: I've been hit over the head several times. We had a big hot tub out here. I stood up too fast and the circulation left my brain and I fell face down. Three days before, Toni had read how to do mouth-to-mouth resuscitation in
The National Enquirer
, and she did it. So many people have saved my life, it's incredible. I finally figured out that ECCO doesn't want me to go yet. I asked them to let me go at times. They keep saying, "You've got to teach, you've got to learn what it is to be a human." So, I'm spending all my time now trying to learn this. You know, it just gets to be fun. I realized that certain humans have a lot of fun. On some day I said, "What is it to be human?" And they said, "To laugh more."
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Stepping into the Future
with Nina Graboi
Nina Graboi has had a remarkable life which covers over seven decades of some of the most transformative years in human history. Born in Vienna, Austria in 1918, she fled the Nazi takeover of her country and spent three months in a detention camp in North Africa. Through a mixture of ingenuity and good fortune she managed to escape and came to America with her husband in 1941.
Arriving as a penniless refugee, she went on to become a society hostess in an exclusive Long Island community. At the age of 36 she was living what most people considered the epitome of the American Dream, yet Nina felt a great void in her life. In search of this missing link, she plunged into the study of esoteric subjects and became an avid practitioner of meditation. When she was 47 she left her husband and became deeply involved in the counter-culture of the sixties.
Nina had her first psychedelic experience in the company of Alan Watts and she frequently spent time at the famed Millbrook estate where a group had gathered around Timothy Leary to study the mind-expanding effects of LSD. She was the Director of the New York Center of the League for Spiritual Discovery , a nonprofit organization which operated to help and educate people engaged in exploring the potential of psychedelic consciousness.
In 1969 she opened a boutique in Woodstock and lived there for the next ten years. Her recently published autobiography,
One Foot in the Future
, chronicles her remarkable spiritual journey and has been described by Terence McKenna as "an extraordinary tale of humor and hope. " Today, Nina lives in Santa Cruz and gives talks on the relationship between the psychedelic experience and the spiritual quest. She is a frequent radio talk-show guest and is the subject of a television documentary entitled,
Voices of Vision
.
We interviewed Nina on January 12, 1992, on a rainy day at Two Bat Ranch, in Malibu. Her face dramatically contradicts her 72 years and she presents the demeanor ofa woman who is in the spiritual prime of her life. Nina talked with a gracious calm in the warming glow of a log fire, about the politics of sexuality, the use of psychedelics and the future of the human race.
RMM
RMN: Nina, in the fifties, when you were living in Long Island, you had what most people would consider the pillars of success--wealth, social status, a loving family--and yet you gave it all up. Why?
NINA: When I was the woman who had everything, I realized that everything is nothing. I had been busily pursuing the American Dream, and when I had it, it tasted like ashes. I was raised in an atmosphere where success was the goal and only superstitious peasants believed in anything beyond the physical. But unless I could discover that there is more to it than being born, getting married, having children and scrambling up the ladder of success, life lost all meaning for me at that time. I felt a yearning for more so profound that I was ready to die if I could not find it. That was in 1956. There were others who searched as I did, but I did not know them. I was very alone. Books were my only source of information, and for the next twelve years I read my way through psychology, psychic research, philosophy and comparative religions. This brought me to Buddhism and Hinduism, and I felt I'd come home.
RMN: You were divorced at a time when far fewer couples than today split up. Didn't that take a lot of courage?
NINA: It wasn't a sudden decision, you know. My children were both in college, and I had planned for a long time to end my marriage once the kids were on their own. But yes, it took a lot of courage to end a marriage of twenty-seven years in those days. Aside from the emotional toll, I had no legal rights because I was the party who wanted the divorce. Feminism was still a long way off, and the fact that I'd helped build the business, raised the children, and taken care of the home, counted for nothing. As I had no marketable skills, my financial future could not have been more bleak. It took courage, but it was the only thing I could do if I wanted to continue to grow.