John Selby - Blowing Americas Mind: A True Story of Princeton, CIA Mind Control, LSD and Zen

This book is an expos of what the CIA is capable of doing to its own people and institutions; a unique Princeton love story; an insider exploration of the power and dangers of mind manipulation, hypnosis and psychedelics; and a controversial view of Princeton kids becoming men in the rugged 1960s.

Were currently moving through a strong resurgence of interest in cognitive remodeling, consciousness expansion and psychedelic exploration. This resurgence follows a long period of rejection of mind-chemicals and hypnosis to induce altered states of awareness. After The War on Drugs had effectively shut down LSD research for decades, new scientific research on LSD is now being conducted throughout the world, and Silicon Valley executives openly talk about taking micro-doses of LSD to spur creativity. The founder of Apple even claimed publicly that he would never have come up with his tech breakthroughs without the help of psychedelics.

Blowing Americas Mind warps back fifty years to expose some of the very first psychedelic research ever conducted and shows dramatically just how strange the early years of psychedelic and hypnotic research became. In addition, our account of the untold student culture of all-male Princeton in the late 1960s aims to probe deeper into a dramatic rendering of the core issue of what consciousness is and how we can manipulate it for better or for worse.

When first trying to work together to make sense of our Princeton/MK-ULTRA experiences, we felt passionately that this unique Princeton story, and especially the account of our MK-ULTRA misadventures at the New Jersey Neuro-Psychi-atric Institutes Bureau of Research, had to be revealed for public scrutiny. However, our early years of sporadic writing became overwhelmed by a tsunami of books and films all purporting to be the ultimate 1960s story of Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out it all blurred into a media-distorted tapestry.

While we were still struggling to make sense of our Princeton experience through writing, the Vietnam War ended and society moved on to new obsessions computers, wealth accumulation, womens and gay rights, cell phones and the Internet. We always felt, however, that our true story had something important to offer that differed from all the other 1960s material. We aimed to capture what it was really like, from the inside-out, to be caught up in MK-ULTRAs grip.

The New Jersey Neuro-Psychiatric Institute had several aspects. On the one hand, there were incurable psychotic permanent residents in buildings on part of the grounds. However, there was also a Department of Experimental Psychology, which was headed by Humphry Osmond, MD, and Bernard S. Aaronson, Ph.D, the men who co-authored Psychedelics: The Uses and Implications of Hallucinogenic Drugs. At this research institute, both LSD and hypnosis were being used to explore altered states of consciousness but when we became involved, we certainly were never told that we were being used as subjects in the CIAs highly-classified MK-ULTRA mind control project. MK-ULTRA had supposedly ended a few years prior to our misadventures, but later research established that it definitely had not been terminated, and we were two of the guinea pigs.

That news of MK-ULTRA broke for the first time in 1977, almost a decade after our involvement. Headlines blazed about the participation of both Princeton and Columbia University in CIA mind-control research. Media exposure resulted in the overlords at the New Jersey Neuro-Psychiatric Institute being removed from their positions, along with several complicit professors at Princeton University.

However, before this was all exposed, as unwitting college students we underwent a great many hours of deep hypnosis, and also micro-dose LSD sessions, in order to explore the outer and inner reaches of consciousness, from the expanded perceptions of psychedelic euphoria to the dark, demented recesses of schizophrenia. The stated purpose of these studies was to distinguish mind-contracting experiences like schizophrenia and paranoia from mind-expanding perceptions induced by psychedelics. Humphry Osmonds deeper intent was to demonstrate that psychedelics (a term coined by Osmond) did not bring on states of insanity, but rather a sort of temporary super-consciousness.

Needless to say, as young vulnerable students our lives were shaken by participating in such radical research. The idyllic aspects of our Ivy League life were seriously disrupted by our involvement in surfing the chaos as Timothy Leary liked to say.