The Early Psychedelic Years with Dr Bill Richards
My unofficial Vital Student Zine features observations from the course and beyond
Harvard psychology professor Richard Alpert after he took LSD and remaned himself Ram Dass
Dr Bill Richards is a staple of the modern-day mystery school researching psychedelics. He’s worked alongside Abraham Maslow, Stanislav Grof, Walter Pahnke and more. Now installed at the Johns Hopkins Centre for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research, he passed trade secrets on to Vital students.
Week four lecturer Dr Bill Richards volunteered for LSD testing as a restless theology student in post-WW2 Germany. He began working alongside Hanscarl Leuner, the German psychologist who invented Guided Affective Imagery (a perverse form of which was used in the brainwashing sequence of A Clockwork Orange), plus added both art and group therapy to LSD tests.
Richards went on to become the most prolific psychedelic researcher of all time, working alongside Walter Pahnke, Abraham Maslow, Stanislav Grof, and now Roland Griffiths: he was last out of Spring Grove in 1977, first into the fledgling Johns Hopkins Centre for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research in 1999, and is still working today. His book Sacred Knowledge: Psychedelics and Religious Experiences is out now.
See Bill interviewed here plus a bunch more I put on this YouTube resource channel.
These five items I pulled from the week’s research are themed along Vital’s natural element-themed structure.
Approach: The Wisdom of the Human Mind
Therapy: Healing with Laughter
Medical: LSD - Did it Ever Go Away?
Air provides an overview of approaches to psychedelic use, Fire concerns therapeutic applications, Water covers ‘space holding’ – the art of keeping it together, Earth is where you’ll find medical matters, and Ether discusses integration, the process of bringing psychedelic power into regular life.
Next issue: The real ‘new psychonaut’ London’s Dr David Luke reboots transpersonal psychology for the 22nd Century