blaise
New
Alex,
If I understand what the Skinnerians believed at the time, the concept was that the psychedelic would get the subject past all of his prior social programming. Essentially leaving him a blank slate. Then he could be re-programmed in what ever way Skinnerians wished. Yes, that is definitely a materialist view of things.
However, what psychedelics actually often did [do] was/is get the subject past prior social programming and ego limitations such that he becomes open to a spiritual perspective. The spiritual awareness seems as though it always existed, waiting to be accessed, and is the natural state, but for social programming and ego limitations. It's like the default position once the ego has been reduced.
The psychedelic aspect of MK Ultra failed for this reason. Subjects opened to the spiritual are not predisposed to become programmable drones.
This one of the main reasons I have such a beef with Forte's conspiracy theories. By the 1960s it was known what psychedelics actually tend to do. Huxley knew. Leary most certainly knew. We don't have to guess. His research is available and we can read it. Leary's psilocybin experiments with prisoners (an approach to reducing recidivism rates) wasn't based on classical conditioning; nor even operant conditioning. It was based on using the drug to get past the prisoners' ego tape loops so they could see new spiritual potentials. And then talking about it with the therapist; as in sit on the couch Freudian or Jungian methods.
On a side note, when I say 'spiritual" I don't necessarily mean "The Light", peace, love and rainbows. A skilled shaman of the dark side could use psychedelics to get himself and his people to attune to lower earth bound vibrations or even evil itself. Fortunately, most people know better than to go there - just saying that it could, and certainly does, happen.
Hi Eric
I think the whole thing with the CIA research at the time was based on trying to understand how the North Koreans and Chinese managed to turn
UN "Allied"POW's in the Korean conflict so well into Commies. Psychedelics were a small part of the mix with the CIA , to me the scary CIA tests were the isolation ones which were very effective. Most of these experiments were tied into Pavlov's studies (he was big buddies with Stalin). An interesting sidebar is what happened to Pavlov's dogs when his lab was flooded and his dogs were forced to swim around in the cold and dark for quite some time (large trauma)....their conditioning (read habits) disappeared, I guess you could juxtapose psychedelics in there as they have a similar outcome with respect to habit. As I understand things this was one of the scary anomalies the CIA was looking into.