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Psi and Psychedelics: Psychedelics, Parapsychology and Exceptional Human Experiences
by David Luke
At the beginning of the 1950s the developed world began in earnest its psychedelic research era. Since then these profoundly mind-altering substances have been inextricably associated with paranormal experiences—such as telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition and out-of-body experiences—by many of the researchers who have studied their effects.
Currently however, virtually no research is being conducted in this area despite the recent revival of research into the potential therapeutic benefit of psychedelics in humans. This paper briefly discusses some of the author’s research to date in this field: a review of the literature on parapsychology (the psychological study of apparently paranormal processes) and psychedelics, a survey of paranormal experiences associated with different psychoactive substances, and correlation of self-reports of the number of consumed psychedelics with performance on a precognition task.
The word psychedelic, meaning ‘mind-manifesting,’ was created by Dr. Humphry Osmond in correspondence with Aldous Huxley in 1956. Four years earlier Osmond had published an article in the Hibbert Journal with his colleague John Smythies in which they proposed that a new theory of mind was needed that could account for both mescaline experiences and what they considered to be the scientifically-proven fact of extra-sensory perception (ESP). Huxley read this article and requested that Osmond, who like Huxley hailed from Surrey in England but lived in North America, should visit Huxley and give him mescaline.
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