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LSD Guru Dies - Skrufff.com

Reported by Tristan Ingram on May 2, 2008

Psychedelic genius Albert Hofmann who synthesized LSD 69 years ago and became the first human to take it four years later, died of a heart attack this week, aged 102.

The Swiss scientist sampled 250 micrograms of LSD after accidentally ingesting a microscopic amount days earlier via his finger tip, going on the have a mind altering full blown trip as he cycled home from the lab.

Going on to relentlessly champion LSD for its potential in psychoanalysis and psychiatry, he later criticized illicit users for ‘failing to appreciate its very deep, deep, psychic experiences’, though nevertheless always stressed the importance of psychiatrists taking it themselves before giving it to patients. And discussing the impact of his own LSD experiences in 1984, Dr Hoffman said they’d provided him with ‘a new concept about what reality is’, enlightening him to value his own imaginary realities as much as everyday life.

“It was very helpful for me to see what is really, objectively, outside; something that you cannot change, something that is the same for everybody. And what is produced by me, homemade, what is myself, that which I can change. What is my spiritual inside that can be changed,” he told Stanislav Grof.

“This possibility to change reality, which exists in everyone, represents the real freedom of every human individual. He has an enormous possibility to change his world view,” he said.

US pharmacologist Charles Grob interviewed Dr Hoffman in 1996 and asked him his views on rave culture, discovering that the then 90 year old believed the decline of traditional churches was a factor in the development of the scene.

“People need a deep spiritual foundation for their lives. In older times it was religion, with their dogmas, which people believed in, but today those dogmas no longer work,” he explained.
‘Not all young people are looking for money and power,” he added, “Some are looking for a happiness and satisfaction which is of the spiritual world, not the materialistic world.”

In the same interview he admitted being ‘terribly, terribly pessimistic for the near future’ and launched a prescient attack on the values of today’s societies.

“I believe that what is occurring in the material world is a reflection of the spiritual state of mankind. I fear that many terrible things will occur around the world, because mankind is in spiritual crisis,” he suggested,

“Young people must learn by their own experience, to see the world as it was before human beings were on this planet. That is the real problem today; that people live in towns and cities, where everything is dead. This material world, made by humans, is a dead world, and will disappear and die,” he predicted.

“I would tell the young people to go out into the countryside, go to the meadow, go to the garden, go to the woods. Open your eyes, and see the browns and greens of the earth, and the light which is the essence of nature.”

Albert Hoffmann died on April 29.

http://tinyurl.com/5kysbf (Stanislav Grof interviews Dr. Albert Hofmann, 1984)

http://tinyurl.com/57znm5 (‘A Conversation with Albert Hofmann’)

Jonty Skrufff (Skrufff.com)