1 James' Fadiman Transpersonal Transitions: The Higher Reaches of Psyche and Psychology Born May 27, 1939 • James Fadiman graduated from Harvard and Stan- ford universities where he met and worked with Richard Alpert, who later became known as Ram Dass. It was Alpert who introduced Fadiman to psychedelics, with life-changing results. Fadiman's ideas about the mind, identity, spirituality, and society were transformed, and he set about reori- enting his life accordingly. Fadiman joined Myron Stolaroff and Willis Harman at the Interna- tional Foundation for Advanced Study to investigate the effects of LSD on personality and creativity. From this work came his doctoral thesis and a series of important research papers. After psychedelic research was banned, Fadiman directed his energy into a variety of projects. Seeing the need to expand psychology beyond its limited behavioral and psychoanalytic views, he helped inspire the birth of transpersonal psychology. This new field incorporated the best of con- ventional psychology with previously neglected arenas, such as spirituality and post-conventional growth, as well as Asian psychologies and wisdom. Fadiman was one of the founders of the Association of Transpersonal Psy- chology, the Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, and the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology, which is now an accredited doctoral graduate schoo!. He served as president of both the Association of Transpersonal Psychology and the Institute of Noetic Sciences, he sits on the boards of several corporations, and has his own management consulting firm. James Fadiman has also published widely. He has written the textbook Personality and Personal Growth (with Robert Frager); the self-help books Unlimit Your Life: Setting and Getting Goals, and Be All That You Are; an anthology, Essential Sufism (with Robert Frager); and a recent novel, The 25 26 REsEARCH Other Side of Haight. He is a popular teacher, consultant, and lecturer, with a delightful sense of humor, who has been called "the quickest wit in the west." I'D HAVE TO SAY that I'm one of the inadvertent psychedelic pioneers. I was an undergraduate at Harvard, and ended up in a small tutorial with a young, dynamic professor named Richard Alpert. We became friends and ended up renting a house together for the summer at Stanford, where I worked for him on a large research project. After my senior year at Harvard in 1960, I went off to live in Europe. The following spring, Dick showed up in Paris with Timothy Leary. They were on their way to Copenhagen to deliver the first paper on work with low-dose psilocybin. Dick was in great condition and said to me, "The most wonderful thing in the world has happened, and I want to share it with you." I replied, as anyone would,"Of course." Then he reached in his jacket pocket and rook out a little bottle of pills. My first reaction was "Pills? Drugs? What kind of weirdness is this?" I really had no idea what he was talking about. But that evening, I rook some psilocybin from that little bottle, sitting in a cafe on a main street in Paris. After a while I said to Dick, ''I'm feeling a bit awkward because the colors are so bright and sounds are so piercing." He hadn't taken anything himself, but he responded,"That's the way I feel just being in Paris." So we withdrew to my hotel room where he was basically a sitter for my session, Out of that experience came my first realizations that the universe was larger than I thought, and my identity smaller than I thought, and there was something about human interaction that I had been missing. It was definitely a powerful bonding experience between us, and afterwards, a lot of my attachments seemed a little more tenuous. However, this session did not involve a dramatic stripping away of levels of reality. That came later. One week later Dick was in Copenhagen and I followed him, some- what like a dog that gets lost hundreds of miles away, and then finds his master. I showed up there, and we had another evening session. Out of that came the realization that when human beings are dose to one another you can ask anything of each other, because you take into account the James Fadirnan 27 other's needs first. You would not ask anything that would be a true impo- sition.And so there was a kind of Three Musketeers consciousness that seemed to arise out of that. Soon after, I returned to the United States, due to my draft board. I had received a letter from them basically saying, "Would you like to join us in Vietnam? Or might you consider the alternatives open to you by law?" One of these options was graduate school, and I'd been accepted to Stanford the year before. At the time I'd told myself, "I'll just put a hold on that because I would rather take some time to travel the world." But when my draft board wrote me, graduate school seemed to be the much lesser of two evils. I showed up at Stanford as a first-year graduate student somewhat embittered, because I was truly there to dodge the draft.I felt that the United States government would make a terrible mistake having me as a soldier, due to a combination of my distaste for war, not wanting to kill people I didn't know, cowardice, and a number of deep philosophical truths which I didn't yet fully understand. I started my graduate work feeling disappointed with psychology, because now I'd used psychedelics and I knew there was a lot more. I didn't know what that "more" was, but I sure knew that psychology was not teaching it. But hidden away in the back of the course catalog I found a "graduate special" called "The Human Potential" taught by Willis Harman who was, of all things, a professor of electrical engineering. The little write-up said, "What is the highest and best that human beings can aspire to?" and suggested various kinds of readings. As I read it I thought, "There is something about psychedelics in here. I don't know what it is, but this man knows something of what I know." At that point I was divid- ing the world into people who knew what I knew-which wasn't very much, but more than I'd known two months earlier-and those who didn't. For instance, I'd look at Impressionist paintings and I'd wonder, "Did this person see what they were painting, or were they copying other Impressionists?" And somehow, I knew. Whether I knew correctly or not was totally beside the point to me at that time. Anyway, I wandered into Willis Harman's office, which was a typical associate professor of electrical engineering office in a building as drab as a hospital, and said, "I'd like to take your graduate special." He gently replied, "Well, it's full this quarter but I'll give it again. Perhaps you would be interested at a later date." I looked at him and said,"I've had psilocybin i------------------------------------------~------------------------------------------------------------------ 28 RESEARCH three times." He got up, walked across his office, and closed the door. And then we got down ro business. As it turned out, I had guessed correctly. This course was his way of dealing with the question, "How do you teach about psychedelics in a manner that doesn't get you either discovered or fired?" After talking for a while, we decided that not only would I take the class, bur I would kind of coteach it, because unlike him, I was willing to be open with what was happening with me. I had much less to lose. So we taught it together, beginning with the question,"What is the best and highest a human being can be?" Gradually we moved from psychology to philosophy, then to the mystics, and eventually to personal experience. Around that time I started to work with the International Foundation for Advanced Study. Funded by Myron Stolaroff, this foundation had been set up in Menlo Park, California to work with psychedelics. Willis Harman was involved, as were a few other people. They had no psychol- ogist on their team, so I became their psychologist. This was a little ludi- crous, since I was about two months into my first year of graduate work at the time, and hadn't studied psychology as an undergraduate. We began by working on a paper together, "The Psychedelic Experience," which described the results of the foundation's LSD therapy sessions. While we were waiting for that paper to be published,Willis asked if I'd like to have a session with them. There I was, filled with my Dick Alpert- Tim Leary-human-closeness-Iow-dose-psilocybin-experience, and I said, "That would be great!" I showed up on October 19th, 1961 at the foundation's headquarters, two living room-like suites above a beauty shop looking out over a parking lot. I was offered the opportunity to take some LSD with Willis as a sitter, a lovely woman professor as a sitter, and a physician,Charlie Savage. Charlie basically did his physician-ness of giving me the material and then left to resume his psychoanalytic practice down the hall.I rook the material and looked around and said to my sit- ters,"Well, aren't you folks taking something?" --because that had been the model with Dick and Tim in the other sessions I had before. I think Willis took a little amphetamine just to keep me cool.