ABSTRACT
The Psychedelic Training Center at Zihuatanejo was organized and run by the Harvard- International Federation for Internal Freedom (IFIF) Research Project. The training center in Zihuatanejo operated for two summers, 1962 and 1963. Psychedelic drugs are seen as interfering with or counteracting these reductive processes so that the subjects are able to experience immediately, beyond the limits of the learned cultural programs. The Harvard-IFIF group does not see the psychedelic session as a medical procedure or as a curative intervention. The psychedelic experience is seen as a tool like a telescope or microscope which brings other space/time dimensions into focus. The psychedelic state is so sensitive that any action, however innocuous, by guides and observers can swirl consciousness off in unplanned-for dimensions. The psychedelic session whirls the subject through eight hours of unimagined experience—to use William James’s phrase, the drugs “open a region though they fail to give a map.”.
