Ralph Metzner, LSD and Consciousness Researcher, Dies at 82
By Neil Genzlinger
His wife, Cathy Coleman, said the cause was idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis.
Dr. Metzner, who received a Ph.D. at Harvard in 1962, was a graduate student there when he began working with Dr. Leary and Richard Alpert, who were clinical psychology professors and had begun exploring therapeutic and other uses for LSD, psilocybin and similar hallucinogens. The three later collaborated on “The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead” (1964), one of the core texts of the emerging psychedelic movement.
Dr. Leary and Dr. Alpert (who later took the name Ram Dass) were both dismissed from Harvard in 1963 amid revelations that they had given hallucinogens to undergraduates as part of their research. Dr. Leary became an especially flamboyant figure in the counterculture, coining the catchphrase “Turn on, tune in, drop out.”
Dr. Metzner took a more low-profile path but continued to work in the field, teaching for decades and writing numerous books, including “Maps of Consciousness” (1971), “The Unfolding Self: Varieties of Transformative Experience” (1986) and “The Expansion of Consciousness” (2008).
His interests came to encompass far more than hallucinogenic chemicals and mushrooms.
“It’s not really limited to the field of psychoactive plants and drugs anymore,” he said in a 2015 interview with the New Mexico PBS program “Report From Santa Fe.” “It’s more the general field of consciousness. You might say I’m a consciousness researcher, in all kinds of ways.”
Those could include Eastern meditation, yoga, the spiritual practices of various indigenous peoples — anything, he said, that involved “expanding consciousness for increased knowledge and spiritual connection to the source or sources of life.”
Among his recent interests was whether some drugs that have been demonized, like MDMA (commonly known as Ecstasy), might be useful in treating post-traumatic stress disorder or in end-of-life care.
“Ralph Metzner was part of a generation of researchers who quietly and resiliently kept doing their work for decades as the mainstream of the scientific community more or less repressed research into psychedelics and alternate states of consciousness,” Jesse Jarnow, author of “Heads: A Biography of Psychedelic America” (2016), said by email. “As much as he was a pioneer for his work at Harvard in the early ’60s, he was maybe more important as someone who continued to seriously explore the insights suggested by psychedelics in aboveboard ways when those states were so often dismissed as New Age mumbo jumbo.”
Among those noting his death was Zach Leary, Timothy Leary’s son. “One of the essential anchors of the psychedelic movement,” he said of Mr. Metzner on Facebook.
Dr. Metzner stressed that consciousness expansion was not always a mysterious, esoteric phenomenon.
“Actually, your consciousness expands every morning when you wake up,” he explained in the 2015 interview. “You’re coming out of a dream and you say, ‘Oh, here’s my room, my bed, my wife, my family, my dog, my job.’ That’s a series of consciousness expansions. And every night when you go to sleep you kind of close in. And that’s a perfectly normal thing, to expand consciousness and to also be able to contract consciousness and focus.”
“The ideal,” he added, “is to have them be under your intentional control.”
Ralph Humphrey Guenther Metzner was born on May 18, 1936, in Berlin. His father, Wolfgang, owned a publishing house, and his mother, Jessie (Laurie) Metzner, had worked for the League of Nations. His mother was Scottish, and after World War II he alternated between schools in Scotland and Germany before attending the Queen’s College, Oxford. After receiving a degree there, he went to Harvard in 1958 to continue his studies.
In one experiment in which he was involved, inmates at a maximum-security prison were given psilocybin, a hallucinogen derived from mushrooms, to see if it reduced their recidivism rate. As with other experiments done by the Leary group, the tradition of giving the subjects a drug and then watching their reaction was not followed.
“We took the drugs with them,” Dr. Metzner recalled in 2017 in an episode of a podcast Zach Leary hosts for the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies. “I had about 10 or more psychedelic experiences with a group of convicts.”
Colleagues thought they were crazy to take drugs with dangerous felons, but Dr. Metzner said the concerns had been unfounded. “There was never, ever a single moment of violence in the entire time, by anybody,” he said. “Not even a single moment of fear.”
He said the researchers in this and other studies had taken their work seriously. “We would collect data,” he said. “We had questionnaires. It wasn’t just tripping. It was science.”
Zach Leary, whose father died in 1996, came to appreciate Dr. Metzner as a stabilizing influence in those early-’60s explorations.
“During his years working with Timothy and Alpert/Ram Dass,” Mr. Leary wrote on Facebook, “it’s my feeling that he acted as the needed conduit to ground both the research and the extreme personalities of Leary/Alpert.”
Dr. Metzner became a psychotherapist in the Bay Area and in 1975 joined the faculty of what was then the California Institute of Asian Studies, now the California Institute of Integral Studies. He taught there for 31 years, serving as academic dean from 1977 to 1989. He took emeritus status in 2006.
Dr. Coleman, whom he married in 1988, said his interests over the years included astrology, alchemy, actualism and more. Among his many books exploring such subjects, she said, “The Unfolding Self” seemed to strike a particular chord with many readers, blending “psychology, philosophy, consciousness and numerous other topics from a cross-cultural, cross-traditional spectrum.”
In the preface to a 1997 reissue of that book, Dr. Metzner explained that the transformative experiences he wrote about could have effects beyond the individual.
“It appears natural for individuals, after having liberated their own minds to some degree, to want to share their insights and learnings with others and to apply them in social, economic, and political relationships,” he wrote.
Dr. Metzner’s first marriage, to Susan Homer, ended in divorce in 1964. In addition to his wife, he is survived by a daughter, Sophie Metzner; a stepson, Elias Jacobson; two brothers, Robin and Ken; two half brothers, Guenther Metzner and Otto Metzner; and a half sister, Anna Metzner.
One of Dr. Metzner’s interests was consciousness-raising as it applies to planetary health. In 1989 he and Dr. Coleman created the Green Earth Foundation to promote education and research “dedicated,” as its mission statement says, “to the healing and harmonizing of the relationships between humanity and the Earth.”
It was a subject he addressed in a 1999 book, “Green Psychology: Transforming Our Relationship to the Earth,” in which he wrote of participating in a ceremony with an indigenous people in southern Mexico that involved drinking balché, a mild intoxicant.
“I noted that I was feeling a profound affection and admiration toward these people, whom I don’t know and can’t even understand,” he wrote. “I also felt affection emanating from them toward me and toward each other. Those not participating in the ceremony were also included in this empathetic web, as were the creatures and plants of the forest all around us — indeed, the whole world of sky and earth, rain and sunlight, wind and rocks, and trees.”
By Neil Genzlinger
- April 4, 2019
His wife, Cathy Coleman, said the cause was idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis.
Dr. Metzner, who received a Ph.D. at Harvard in 1962, was a graduate student there when he began working with Dr. Leary and Richard Alpert, who were clinical psychology professors and had begun exploring therapeutic and other uses for LSD, psilocybin and similar hallucinogens. The three later collaborated on “The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead” (1964), one of the core texts of the emerging psychedelic movement.
Dr. Leary and Dr. Alpert (who later took the name Ram Dass) were both dismissed from Harvard in 1963 amid revelations that they had given hallucinogens to undergraduates as part of their research. Dr. Leary became an especially flamboyant figure in the counterculture, coining the catchphrase “Turn on, tune in, drop out.”
Dr. Metzner took a more low-profile path but continued to work in the field, teaching for decades and writing numerous books, including “Maps of Consciousness” (1971), “The Unfolding Self: Varieties of Transformative Experience” (1986) and “The Expansion of Consciousness” (2008).
His interests came to encompass far more than hallucinogenic chemicals and mushrooms.
“It’s not really limited to the field of psychoactive plants and drugs anymore,” he said in a 2015 interview with the New Mexico PBS program “Report From Santa Fe.” “It’s more the general field of consciousness. You might say I’m a consciousness researcher, in all kinds of ways.”
Those could include Eastern meditation, yoga, the spiritual practices of various indigenous peoples — anything, he said, that involved “expanding consciousness for increased knowledge and spiritual connection to the source or sources of life.”
Among his recent interests was whether some drugs that have been demonized, like MDMA (commonly known as Ecstasy), might be useful in treating post-traumatic stress disorder or in end-of-life care.
“Ralph Metzner was part of a generation of researchers who quietly and resiliently kept doing their work for decades as the mainstream of the scientific community more or less repressed research into psychedelics and alternate states of consciousness,” Jesse Jarnow, author of “Heads: A Biography of Psychedelic America” (2016), said by email. “As much as he was a pioneer for his work at Harvard in the early ’60s, he was maybe more important as someone who continued to seriously explore the insights suggested by psychedelics in aboveboard ways when those states were so often dismissed as New Age mumbo jumbo.”
Among those noting his death was Zach Leary, Timothy Leary’s son. “One of the essential anchors of the psychedelic movement,” he said of Mr. Metzner on Facebook.
Dr. Metzner stressed that consciousness expansion was not always a mysterious, esoteric phenomenon.
“Actually, your consciousness expands every morning when you wake up,” he explained in the 2015 interview. “You’re coming out of a dream and you say, ‘Oh, here’s my room, my bed, my wife, my family, my dog, my job.’ That’s a series of consciousness expansions. And every night when you go to sleep you kind of close in. And that’s a perfectly normal thing, to expand consciousness and to also be able to contract consciousness and focus.”
“The ideal,” he added, “is to have them be under your intentional control.”
Ralph Humphrey Guenther Metzner was born on May 18, 1936, in Berlin. His father, Wolfgang, owned a publishing house, and his mother, Jessie (Laurie) Metzner, had worked for the League of Nations. His mother was Scottish, and after World War II he alternated between schools in Scotland and Germany before attending the Queen’s College, Oxford. After receiving a degree there, he went to Harvard in 1958 to continue his studies.
In one experiment in which he was involved, inmates at a maximum-security prison were given psilocybin, a hallucinogen derived from mushrooms, to see if it reduced their recidivism rate. As with other experiments done by the Leary group, the tradition of giving the subjects a drug and then watching their reaction was not followed.
“We took the drugs with them,” Dr. Metzner recalled in 2017 in an episode of a podcast Zach Leary hosts for the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies. “I had about 10 or more psychedelic experiences with a group of convicts.”
Colleagues thought they were crazy to take drugs with dangerous felons, but Dr. Metzner said the concerns had been unfounded. “There was never, ever a single moment of violence in the entire time, by anybody,” he said. “Not even a single moment of fear.”
He said the researchers in this and other studies had taken their work seriously. “We would collect data,” he said. “We had questionnaires. It wasn’t just tripping. It was science.”
Zach Leary, whose father died in 1996, came to appreciate Dr. Metzner as a stabilizing influence in those early-’60s explorations.
“During his years working with Timothy and Alpert/Ram Dass,” Mr. Leary wrote on Facebook, “it’s my feeling that he acted as the needed conduit to ground both the research and the extreme personalities of Leary/Alpert.”
Dr. Metzner became a psychotherapist in the Bay Area and in 1975 joined the faculty of what was then the California Institute of Asian Studies, now the California Institute of Integral Studies. He taught there for 31 years, serving as academic dean from 1977 to 1989. He took emeritus status in 2006.
Dr. Coleman, whom he married in 1988, said his interests over the years included astrology, alchemy, actualism and more. Among his many books exploring such subjects, she said, “The Unfolding Self” seemed to strike a particular chord with many readers, blending “psychology, philosophy, consciousness and numerous other topics from a cross-cultural, cross-traditional spectrum.”
In the preface to a 1997 reissue of that book, Dr. Metzner explained that the transformative experiences he wrote about could have effects beyond the individual.
“It appears natural for individuals, after having liberated their own minds to some degree, to want to share their insights and learnings with others and to apply them in social, economic, and political relationships,” he wrote.
Dr. Metzner’s first marriage, to Susan Homer, ended in divorce in 1964. In addition to his wife, he is survived by a daughter, Sophie Metzner; a stepson, Elias Jacobson; two brothers, Robin and Ken; two half brothers, Guenther Metzner and Otto Metzner; and a half sister, Anna Metzner.
One of Dr. Metzner’s interests was consciousness-raising as it applies to planetary health. In 1989 he and Dr. Coleman created the Green Earth Foundation to promote education and research “dedicated,” as its mission statement says, “to the healing and harmonizing of the relationships between humanity and the Earth.”
It was a subject he addressed in a 1999 book, “Green Psychology: Transforming Our Relationship to the Earth,” in which he wrote of participating in a ceremony with an indigenous people in southern Mexico that involved drinking balché, a mild intoxicant.
“I noted that I was feeling a profound affection and admiration toward these people, whom I don’t know and can’t even understand,” he wrote. “I also felt affection emanating from them toward me and toward each other. Those not participating in the ceremony were also included in this empathetic web, as were the creatures and plants of the forest all around us — indeed, the whole world of sky and earth, rain and sunlight, wind and rocks, and trees.”
The Untapped Promise of LSD
Psychedelics are a potential cure for everything from depression to addiction. Why did we ban these drugs in the first place?
https://thewalrus.ca/the-untapped-promise-of-lsd/?utm_source=digg&utm_medium=email
Jason McBride
https://thewalrus.ca/the-untapped-promise-of-lsd/?utm_source=digg&utm_medium=email
Jason McBride
Mushrooms are the safest safest recreational drug.
INSIDE THE MIND OF AMANDA FEILDING, COUNTESS OF PSYCHEDELIC SCIENCE
If LSD is having its renaissance, 75-year-old English countess Amanda Feilding is its Michelangelo.
AUTHOR: MATT SIMONBY MATT SIMONAMANDA FEILDING, COUNTESS of Wemyss and March, also known as Lady Neidpath, sits cross-legged on a bench on a tiny island at the center of an artificial pond in her English country estate, a 15-minute drive outside of Oxford. At her feet is a tiny pure-white cloud of a dog, which traipses around chewing on the grass, only occasionally coughing it up.
Feilding is 75 years old. She wears a black skirt and knee-high boots and grips a tan shawl around her shoulders, on account of this being a gray November morning. From her ears hang jewelry that looks like green rock candy. Her light brown hair is frizzy but not altogether unkempt.
In the distance, peeking over a towering hedge, is her castle, built in the 1520s. “In the ’60s we called it Brainblood Hall,” she says in a posh accent that periodically turns sing-songy and high, à la Julia Child. “We always saw it as the masthead from where this change would happen.”
Article from Wired: https://www.wired.com/story/inside-the-mind-of-amanda-feilding-countess-of-psychedelic-science/?mbid=synd_digg&utm_source=digg&utm_medium=email
AUTHOR: MATT SIMONBY MATT SIMONAMANDA FEILDING, COUNTESS of Wemyss and March, also known as Lady Neidpath, sits cross-legged on a bench on a tiny island at the center of an artificial pond in her English country estate, a 15-minute drive outside of Oxford. At her feet is a tiny pure-white cloud of a dog, which traipses around chewing on the grass, only occasionally coughing it up.
Feilding is 75 years old. She wears a black skirt and knee-high boots and grips a tan shawl around her shoulders, on account of this being a gray November morning. From her ears hang jewelry that looks like green rock candy. Her light brown hair is frizzy but not altogether unkempt.
In the distance, peeking over a towering hedge, is her castle, built in the 1520s. “In the ’60s we called it Brainblood Hall,” she says in a posh accent that periodically turns sing-songy and high, à la Julia Child. “We always saw it as the masthead from where this change would happen.”
Article from Wired: https://www.wired.com/story/inside-the-mind-of-amanda-feilding-countess-of-psychedelic-science/?mbid=synd_digg&utm_source=digg&utm_medium=email