Home / The Far-Off Land / Nine Sessions
Part Two of the book
Between August 1959 and October 22, 1960, Seaich recorded nine sessions, two with mescaline and seven with LSD. Each journal is timed to the minute. This page gives the date, theme and a line from each; the full entries are in the book.
Updated
These records belong to the legal and scientific context of 1959–1960. They are history, not guidance: nothing in them is medical advice, and the substances are controlled today in most jurisdictions.
Session I · August 1959
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.
Session II · November 8, 1959
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.”
Session III · November 21, 1959
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.
Session IV · December 17, 1959
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.”
Session V · January 3, 1960
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.
Session VI · January 23, 1960
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.”
Session VII · February 28, 1960
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.”
Session VIII · March 5, 1960
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.
Session IX · October 22, 1960
LSD
The last journal, written after a seven-month pause. It closes the record of the experiments.
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The full journals