Albert Hoffman and His Discovery of LSD

A book excerpt from "Mystic Chemist: The Life of Albert Hoffman and His Discovery of LSD."

I wonder how this book compares to Hoffman's own book, "LSD My Problem Child: Reflections on Sacred Drugs, Mysticism and Science."

A couple of personal reflections on LSD:

I only did LSD once, my first psychedelic experience, it would have been around 1980, blotter with the artwork of a blue dove.  Although I had only one experience (vs. probably more than a hundred experiences on psilocybin), I would be tempted to say that there was something more absolute about LSD.  Something more intellectually perfect, less emotional than mushrooms, more perfectly abstract.

Under the influence, I played my best game of Asteroids, a primitive arcade game, hitting a high score that I don't think I ever exceeded.  I think that was related to the fact that "I" was out of the way.  Reminds me of baseball's Dock Ellis pitching a no-hitter on LSD.

I also recall that during the peak of the experience I was unable to understand music.  I could hear everything, I just couldn't make sense of it.  The problem was that I couldn't really perceive anything that was outside of the present moment.  Music requires that you keep in mind such things as continuity, the rhythmic expectation of the beat, and melody, the sense of placing one note after another in a context within a harmony.  But I was unable to conceptualize those basic things, so I could only hear the individual sounds in each moment, as if they existed only as noise without the context of melody or rhythm.

Also some visual difficultly in terms of separating one object from another.

All of these things jibe well with my understanding of things after a lot of experience with mushrooms and meditation.  I look back on it and think, "I was so close!"  I wish I had known to just stay home, lie down and close my eyes, raising the odds of having a genuine mystical experience.  That might have changed my life significantly.  Oh well, I guess I had to wait a couple of decades.  At the time, it was just a fun afternoon and evening.