I
The Buried World
Memory, Consciousness, and Primal Experience
Why the drugs seemed to open the deepest, earliest layers of memory, and what that suggests about the mind.
Home / The Far-Off Land / Inside the Book
The Annotated Edition
Inside the book
In 1959, years before LSD was outlawed, the Utah pharmacist and scholar Eugene Seaich took LSD and mescaline and recorded what he saw as it happened. The Far-Off Land pairs his philosophical essay on memory, perception and the unconscious with nine dated experiment journals (August 1959 – October 1960). This Annotated Edition restores the text from the original typescript and adds commentary connecting his observations to later research.
Updated
Part One · The philosophical essay
Eleven chapters
Seaich’s argument, chapter by chapter. Choose an interest to see where to start.
Find your chapter: what draws you to this book?
II
The Far-Off Land
Childhood, Lost Paradise, and Innocence
Childhood as our first vision of the world, and the myths of a lost paradise found in every culture.
III
The Sacred Intoxicant
Global History of Altered States
Sacred intoxicants from Soma and the Eleusinian mysteries to opium and hashish, and why people have always sought them.
IV
Chaos and Creation
Archetypes and Pre-Rational Being
Archetypal images, the pre-rational mind, and the line between visionary experience and breakdown.
V
The Naked Religion
Matter, Spirit, and Sacred Phenomenology
Nature encountered as a religious experience, with D. H. Lawrence’s “vast old religion” of New Mexico.
VI
First Contact
Phenomenology of Psychedelic Perception
What the first hours feel like: familiar objects taking on new meaning and the world seen as if for the first time.
VII
The Inner Light
Luminescence, Radiance, and the Neuroscience of Light
Light as the oldest symbol of consciousness, and the radiance that fills the visions.
VIII
The Mirror of Self
Ego Dissolution and Existential Anxiety
Doubt, the loss of meaning, and the “absolute nimbo of zero-nothingness” at the bottom of the psyche.
IX
The Dark Night & New Dawn
Nirvana, Despair, and Liberation
Passing through emptiness to renewal, with Zen, Mozart and the return of joy.
X
Beyond Huxley
Scientific and Anthropological Implications
Where Seaich parts company with Aldous Huxley, and what psychology and anthropology could learn from the drug experience.
XI
The Perennial Religion
Spiritual and Existential Restoration
The poetic vision as a way back to the sacred, closing with Aeschylus on heaven and earth.
Part Two · The experiment journals
Nine sessions, August 1959 – October 1960
Timed entries written during each session, with the author’s later notes.
The first session
Mescaline
The opening entry runs from mid-morning into the night. Nausea gives way to color, then to music: he notes a long stretch of “sheer bliss with music (Wagner)” before visitors break the spell.
Journal · August 1959
8:00City lights (in darkness) look like jewels. Very intense and colorful.
The threshold
LSD
A deliberately small first trial of LSD. At first he believes the drug is not working; by mid-afternoon he records music playing in his mind “much more palpable than usual daydreaming.”
Journal · November 8, 1959
4:30Poetry (T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets) seems to have much more intense meaning.
Testing an antidote
LSD
Seaich tests whether a vitamin, nicotinamide, can blunt the effects. It barely does. A walk at dusk ties the experience to childhood memory, the book’s central theme.
Journal · November 21, 1959
5:30Went for a walk in the dusk. The winter scene had a novel freshness about it. Seemed to be pervaded by a long-forgotten childhood sensation.
The first full mystical experience
LSD
The longest and most intense of the early sessions: kaleidoscopic visions, Mahler’s Third Symphony, and an evening by the Christmas-tree lights in which he recreated “the sensation of Christmas as I knew it in childhood.”
Journal · December 17, 1959
3:45Can hear crickets chirping — am back in a childhood scene — a summer evening — this most unusual!
A challenging experience, and recovery
LSD
Bliss with Mozart turns into emptiness and “utter zero-ness.” Then the mood lifts again. Seaich records the difficult hours as plainly as the good ones.
Journal · January 3, 1960
2:40World seems cold, strange, empty. Can’t make my inner self work this time.
The great childhood-memory session
Mescaline
After an hour of regret and nausea come color, flame-like visions and a sense of “creative energy, revitalization.” He ends the day in “a harmonious emotion of outpouring goodwill and happiness.”
Journal · January 23, 1960
1:30All splendid fire and heat; a divine force pulsating in vision beyond all description.
A threshold-state experiment
LSD
A small-dose experiment in mood. Listening to Tristan, he finds childhood recollections “trying to draw me back against my will into their sinister magic.”
Journal · February 28, 1960
5:00A strange world of otherness, neither euphoric nor dysphoric, ensued.
A lesson in set and setting
LSD
Telephone calls and interruptions cut across the peak of the session, and he records what was lost. The entry reads today as an early account of why setting matters.
Journal · March 5, 1960
4:00Light! Pure light! Just to sit and stare into translucent Being!
The closing entry
LSD
The last journal, written after a seven-month pause. It closes the record of the experiments.
Journal · October 22, 1960
3:05Suddenly noticed a beauty in the sky which I had long forgotten. A cloud formation recalled some distant notion of adventure.
Part Three · The apparatus
Everything you need to read a 1959 text today
- Editor’s commentary boxes linking each chapter to current research
- Numbered chapter notes and a key-subjects summary for each chapter
- A timeline of psychedelic history from pre-colonial use to 2026
- A glossary and an annotated bibliography
- A biographical index of the people Seaich cites
- A guide to research organizations and centers
- “The Documented Record” of the author’s training
- “What He Got Right,” ten correspondences with later research
- A parallel chronology and a topical guide
- Facsimile pages from the 1959 typescript
- “In the Author’s Words,” Seaich’s own account of how the book began
Details
- Author
- Eugene Seaich (1925–2006)
- Written
- Salt Lake City, Utah, 1959
- Journals
- Nine dated sessions, August 1959 – October 22, 1960
- Substances
- LSD and mescaline, legal at the time
- Edition
- Annotated Edition, 2026
- Editor
- Eric Hendrickson, the author’s grandson
- Publisher
- Seaich Legacy Publications, Salt Lake City
- Formats
- Paperback (6 × 9 in, 259 pages) and Kindle
The 1959 typescript
Facsimile pages
Paperback · Kindle