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A lost 1959 classic of psychedelic research: a Utah pharmacist and scholar’s philosophical essay and nine dated LSD and mescaline experiments, restored from the original typescript and annotated with later research.

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.

A lost 1959 classic of psychedelic research, memory, and consciousness — restored from the original typescript and finally in print beside the science that has returned to its questions. Years before LSD was outlawed, and before the word “psychedelic” entered common use, a Utah scholar, pharmacist, and Fulbright grantee took LSD and mescaline and wrote down what he saw. It was legal then: he and a few university colleagues studied the drugs openly and ordered their supply by mail. The Far-Off Land is the result: a luminous philosophical essay on memory, paradise, perception, and the self, paired with nine dated field journals that show it was lived, not imagined. Eugene Seaich (1925–2006) argued that these substances open the buried, earliest layers of memory — the “far-off land” of the unconscious — and that what returns is not escape but a renewed encounter with our own real world. In “Beyond Huxley,” he takes issue with Aldous Huxley’s reading of mescaline and offers his own. Six decades later, research on the default mode network, ego dissolution, mystical-type experience, music, and challenging experiences has returned to the very questions he asked.