Ketamine and Quantum Psychiatry Dr. K.L.R. Jansen Asylum Magazine, Vol 11 (No. 3) 1999; 19-21 Contributors: Karl Jansen, Stanislav Grof, Rick Strassman, Sylvia Thyssen, Lester Grinspoon, James B. Bakalar, Dale Pendell, Jon Atkinson, Louise Theodosiou, Kevin Brunelle, Dave Cunliffe. The word 'psychedelic' was invented by an English psychiatrist (Humphry Osmond) and means 'mind-revealing'. A psychedelic drug may tell us more about how the mind constructs reality, personality and a sense of meaning and sacredness. It is sometimes said that ketamine is not a psychedelic drug because it has anaesthetic properties not seen with LSD, DMT, psilocybin and mescaline. Nevertheless, it can access all of the realms of consciousness mapped out by psychiatrist Stanislav Grof on the basis of LSD research. Ketamine is mentioned in (for example) Psychedelics Encyclopedia, Psychedelic Drugs Reconsidered and The Essential Psychedelic Guide. Ketamine is relatively safe when used in hospitals. There is a wide margin between the top end of the medical range and a lethal dose. Psychedelic doses are usually only 10-25% of surgical doses, given by the same route for the same person. At these levels, it behaves more like a stimulant than a sedative and does not usually suppress the breathing or heart rate, although exceptions do occur. The higher brain is switched on rather than shut down. This state is different from being unconscious, where the light-bulb is turned off and if the person goes too far they may stop breathing. There are cases of accidental injections with 10 times the amount required for surgery, with no obvious, lasting ill-effects. When ketamine is taken outside a medical setting, the main dangers arise from the physical incapacity it produces. Near-Death and Near-Birth Experiences A 'near-death experience' (NDE) is a report of leaving the physical body, and sometimes going through a tunnel towards 'the light'. Ketamine can reproduce all aspects of the NDE, including the conviction of being dead, having a telepathic communion with God, seeing visions, out-of-body trips, mystical states, entering other realities, re-experiencing old memories, and a life review which may have therapeutic value Most NDE's occur in people who are not physically near death. Where do these experiences originate? I have written at some length about the physical basis for them in the past. In this article I will consider more speculative suggestions that the brain can act as a transceiver, converting energy fields beyond the brain into features of the mind, as a television converts waves in the air into sound and vision. Advances in quantum physics suggest that certain drugs, and the conditions which produce NDE's, may 'retune' the brain to provide access to certain fields and 'broadcasts' which are usually inaccessible. This retuning is said to open doors to realms which are always there, rather than actually producing those realms, just as the broadcast of one channel continues when we change channels. The Quantum Mind Some people believe that ketamine is a mental modem which can potentially connect the mind to 'everything else', allowing a peek behind the curtain at the inner workings of this and other realities. In the old Newtonian universe, the mechanical view declared that all possible forms of energy and fields had already been discovered; that the ordinary, everyday perception of space, time and matter and energy was the only scientifically correct reality; that all people were separate from each other and the rest of the universe; and that consciousness could not exist without a living brain. Some of these declarations can be reassessed in the light of new discoveries in physics. A subatomic particle can be in many different places at once. When a photon changes in one place and time, it's 'linked photon' changes simultaneously, even if it is on the other side of the universe. It's as if there was no space between them at all. This means that some physical boundaries could be arbitrary. A messy explanation for this is tachyon theory, faster-than-light particles which carry messages between the photons. Bell's theorem is more attractive. This involves a hyperspace where all realities exist at a single point, so no messages are required. If entry can be gained to the quantum realm, awareness (the 'disembodied eye') might travel through different realities without the body itself going anywhere. It was like a cosmic assembly line that was constantly churning out the alternate universes that some physicists theorise about in which every conceivable possibility becomes an actual reality. I even had brief flashes in which I experienced some of these alternate realities as they sprouted forth out of this cosmic womb...quick glimpses into what felt like other incarnations, other lives I could have led, darting journeys through seas of pure information. (Trey Turner, 100 mg ketamine i.m.) A person is not a photon, and it is a real quantum leap to go from the subatomic world to human events. Nevertheless, to improve our understanding of psychedelic experience we may need to reconsider some of the material which has been dismissed as hallucinations, psychosis, suggestibility, stupidity and fraud. Hallucination is only another descriptive term - it doesn't really explain anything. 'Quantum' based explanations for certain mental states have started to appear, and we should be wary of dismissing these new theories out of hand. Some of the most significant advances were opposed by the most renowned scientists of the day. Einstein himself opposed quantum physics, declaring that God did not play at dice. Einstein described this physics as 'absurd, bizarre, mind-boggling, incredible, beyond belief...' and 'the system of delusions of an exceedingly intelligent paranoiac, concocted of incoherent elements of thought'. However, Einstein was wrong. The 'system of delusions' worked very well, and its 'psychotic' advocates won many Nobel prizes. Subatomic particles could indeed behave as if time and space were non-existent. It was next observed that there are similarities between quantum processes and human thought processes. Leading physicists suggested that consciousness may involve quantum events, with profound implications for understanding certain altered states of being. Professor Stephen Hawking, who sits in Newton's former chair at Cambridge, believes that the universe has no boundaries in space or time, and is made up of super-strings which vibrate in 'extra dimensions', balancing vibrations in the usual dimensions: positive and negative energies cancelling each other to produce the our universe, based on a 'new' kind of symmetry called 'super symmetry'. The latest atom smasher may provide evidence of this super symmetry, producing the world's most expensive Yin-Yang symbol. Has the division between physicists and psychedelic mystics become one of whether instruments or the mind itself is used to make the same observations about 'the ground of being'? The language of LSD trips can resemble the language of the older quantum physics, involving white light and dancing particles, but new reports in physics journals use terms which are much closer to 'the language of ketamine'. Super-string theory is being supplanted by the discovery of whole groups of extended objects called p-branes . These may be viewed as types of membranes, with a string being a one-brane as its only dimension is length. There are other types of 'branes' with far more dimensions. Becoming an across-the-universe membrane is a typical ketamine effect. Before p-brane theory was widely known, ketamine and isolation tank explorer John Lilly MD wrote: At the highest level of satori from which people return, the point of consciousness becomes a surface or a solid which extends throughout the whole known universe. This used to be called fusion with the Universal Mind or God. In more modern terms you have done a mathematical transformation in which your centre of consciousness has ceased to be a travelling point and has become a surface or solid of consciousness...It was in this state that I experienced 'myself' as melded and intertwined with hundreds of billions of other beings in a thin sheet of consciousness that was distributed around the galaxy. A 'membrain'. Thus transpersonal events may be possible within the new physics, if subatomic events are involved in consciousness. Ketamine may be a drug which 're-tunes' the brain to allow awareness to enter the quantum sea. If this is indeed the case, then we may have to regard some of the reports of eternity, infinity, multiple universes and linkage with other beings as phenomena demanding a more sophisticated explanation than a brief dismissal as 'hallucinations and mental illness' requiring no further consideration. Ketamine Psychedelic Therapy (KPT) Over the past 15 years, ketamine has been given to over 1,000 patients in St. Petersburg as an aid to psychotherapy, mainly to assist in the treatment of alcoholism in well-planned trials with proper clinical control groups. The scientific rigour of these studies is impressive. Long-term follow-up of patients has been very encouraging, and the treatment has been extended to heroin addicts and some forms of neurosis. Not a single patient has had complications such as prolonged psychosis, flashbacks or non-prescribed use of ketamine. This work has been carried out by psychiatrist Dr. Evgeny Krupitsky and his team. Evgeny is Chief of the Laboratory, and was recently awarded an honorary Doctor of Science. He spent a year with the ketamine research team at Yale, sponsored by the conservative National Institute of Drug Abuse. Sessions are supervised by two physicians, a psychotherapist and an anesthetist. A return to normal usually began after 45 minutes to an hour, with a recovery period of 1- 2 hours. In addition to very good rates of sobriety at one and two year follow-up compared to the control group, on tests of personality change there are significant improvements in many scales including depression, anxiety and ego strength.