Daniel P Brown, Altered States, Psychedelics and the CIA (Updated)
- 2 days ago
- 15 min read
Updated: 2 days ago
TLDR: chronicles Dan Brown´s involvement with and views of psychedelics, assembled from his public statements and some background information. Shows his early role as "fierce protector" that later would be expanded. Shows the role of the state to crush the peace movement, the start of the "war on drugs" and points to the role of the CIA in psychedelic research as seen by Dan Brownb.. Includes some information on Stan Grof.
Note: this post has overlaps with a former post comparing Dan Brown and Culadasa.
A mysterious gap in the biography
Daniel P Brown died in 2022. The American Journal of Clinical Hypnosis published a glowing memorial.
However, the memorial entirely omitted one aspect of his life: Dan´s early fascination and work with psychedelics as mind-openers and healers.
The obituary´s omission is a bit strange, as hypnosis is equally a form of altered consciousness - a related area, as Dan´s later career in hypnosis showed. But perhaps, the memorial would have been too long. Perhaps, his friend did not know or was not a friend of psychedelics.
Daniel P Brown met psychedelics twice. In both he had a protector/helper role:
in the content of the 1960s music festivals and Vietnam protest
in the context of the late 1990s LSD research for the dying
And in both encounters, he met the oppressive state
in the Vietnam protests, as provocative agents of the drug administration
in the hospital, he later was informated that work at the research centre had been CIA/MKUltra funded
Both encounters with psychedelics show Dan Brown in his role as "fierce protector": clearly a role that the aspired to and lived.
The term "fiercely protective" is used by Dan Brown in the comprehensive Sacred Sundays interview:
In the mind of a fully enlightened Buddha, there are 21 types of conduct. And that's in the metaphor of the 21 Taras. There's not 21 Tara deities out there. Each one of those is a metaphor for a certain type of what's called enlightened activity. And one of those 21 forms of enlightened activity is fierce protectiveness. Fierce protectiveness. Is that anger? You don’t want to be on the recipient end of that. It's absolutely fiercely protective. Like a lioness and her cubs. But it's fiercely protective of everyone equally.´My root lama was like that. He was Mongolian.
And other people saw this in him, for example, Terry Patton:
He's a regular guy, an Irish working-class son who still roots for the Boston sports teams and relishes a good meal as well as fighting the good fight against corrupt institutions (Terry Patton 2013)
This article gives some background information. It is an updated and consolidated version. of earlier posts.
The video short version
(If you want a partial context delivered in 7 minutes by a NotebookLM video, take this. This will be updated)
A timeline overview
The 1960s meditation teachers and psychedelics: Zig-Zag Zen
Psychedelics were one important early influence that opened Daniel P. Brown to altered states and likely contributed to his later interest in meditation, even as he later judged meditation as the deeper and more reliable path.
This is the typical development of many spiritual teachers of his generation. All of them had made significant experiences with altered states, including the "Buddhist" phenomena of ego-loss and one-ness, or non-duality, for which they then found a non-drug equivalent.
A good early record of this, and of the associated conflicts in the Buddhist community, is recorded in the book "Zig Zag Zen" which the author assembles a few leading articles on psychedelics and Buddhism. These are a few of the better known names
Shinzen Young ("The Science of Enlightenment")
Jack Kornfield
Ram Dass
Joan Halifax
Alan Watts
Culadasa ("The Mind Iluminated")
Since then, there is a huge overlap of research and writing in the field of psychedelics and meditation, both in neuroscience and in cognitive science. The most recent edition of this is the theory of predictive processing, with a good intro presentation by Chandaria.
Daniel P Brown and psychedelics - the evidence
Dan Brown publicly rarely spoke about psychedelics, and only once write about them: that was the academic context in his 1981 dissertation, where he - for good reasons - spoke only very guarded about research on "hallucinogens".
The best source for a more livey view is are later interviews when the psychedelic renaissance was already under way and terms such as micro-dosing had become popular.
Here spoke about it here:
An interview in 2019
An interview in 2022
An unattributed interview with Suraya Das
There is no public corroboration of this part of his biography that I could find. However, through a co-incidence I once met Stan Grof, who remembered Daniel B Brown clearly. At the time, I did not ask Stan Grof directly about their collaboration in psychedelic LSD research in the late 1960s before the ban.
But, Stan over a coffee, in his 90s , talked matter-of-factly about him in the context of "his time before he became interested in Tibetan Buddhism" (that was in the late 1960s).
I have written about this meeting here - the connection came through one of Dan´s translations that I had given Stan Grof as a present.
1969-1971: Daniel P Brown at the music festivals: strynin-laced LSD, federal agents, and tear-gassing helicopters
Dan Brown, like so many others of his time, encountered psychedelics in his youth.
First, as a user, but also in a helping role for other users at concerts. He did not speak much about his experiences as a user other than in broad terms, but he mostly focused on his helper role.
And I also was a product of the 60s. So I went around in the late 60s and early 70s and organized the medical tents and all the big rock concerts. I did everyone except Woodstock.But we did May Day and other big concerts like that. So the hallucinogens is something I know a lot about.
This is a curious parallel to the nearly same age later medtitation teacjer Culadasa ("The Mind Illuminated"), who also was known as "trip doctor", according to Culadasa´s own words.
In another interview with Suraya Dass (unattributed) he went into more detail.
That night, we had 35,000 people on strychnine acid. Halfway through the night, we stopped picking up the kids and started finding out who was dealing this stuff. We brought in the dealers, who turned out to be two guys with DEA badges working for the government. They were trying to give the rock concert a bad name.
By 4:00 a.m., helicopters flew overhead and tear-gassed everyone—200,000 people—causing chaos. Around the same time—not at Woodstock—I was traveling around the country organizing medical tents for big rock festivals. The biggest rock festival we did was the march on Washington with a million people, including a concert of 200,000 people. It was an ugly night. We had people on strychnine acid. We were going in with stretcher bearers, seeing people spasm and convulse. We took them to ambulances and hospitals.
The details align chronologically with the May 1971 protests in Washington, where authorities cleared encampments at dawn using helicopters and tear gas, producing the largest mass arrest in American history over 12,000 people detained in a single operation.
The medical details also align with historical facts.
I think it´s worth directly quoting NotebookLM research Dan´s claim of government involvement. These events most likely were another input for this later aversion to state tactics, the CIA and the Church.
NotebookLM Deep Research: Federal agents—identified retrospectively in Daniel P. Brown’s accounts as DEA agents—played a clandestine and highly disruptive role in the countercultural assemblies of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Their involvement is described not as traditional law enforcement, but as a form of tactical sabotage aimed at discrediting the youth movement.
The specific roles and tactics of federal agents during these events included:
Pharmacological Sabotage: The most significant claim involves agents actively distributing "strychnine acid" (LSD adulterated with the toxic alkaloid strychnine). Brown recounts identifying two individuals with federal badges who were dealing this tainted substance to the crowd. The goal of this poisoning was to induce mass medical emergencies—potentially affecting up to 35,000 people in a single night—thereby creating a public image of "heedless excess" and "chaos" that would justify a militarized police intervention.
Strategic Disruption: Agents acted under a broader strategy to "give the rock concert a bad name". By introducing dangerous substances, they aimed to destroy internal trust within the counterculture movement and overload its self-organized medical infrastructure.
Psychological Warfare: The sources note the likely use of agent provocateurs to incite panic and disorder, particularly during vulnerable times like 4:00 a.m.. This was intended to turn peaceful gatherings into "theaters of war".
Tactical Clearing and Militarized Response: In addition to undercover work, federal agents and police utilized aerial surveillance and chemical weapons. During the 1971 May Day protests, which align with Brown's descriptions, helicopters and federal troops were used at dawn to disperse crowds with massive amounts of tear gas. This tactical clearing often occurred while thousands of individuals were already suffering from the effects of the "strychnine acid," exacerbating their physical distress.
Historical Context (The DEA Anomaly): While Brown identifies these agents as "DEA," the sources clarify that the DEA was not officially established until 1973. The agents involved would have historically belonged to the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs (BNDD) or the Bureau of Drug Abuse Control (BDAC), operating under the umbrella of domestic surveillance programs like COINTELPRO.
In summary, the role of federal agents was to weaponize the health and safety of the protesters to create a media narrative that would alienate the public from the spiritual and political aspirations of the youth, eventually helping to justify the official declaration of the "War on Drugs".
The "trip doctor" Culadasa ("The Mind Illuminated") in the summer of love
It wasn´t always that bad during those years, except for the bad trips.
And in a curious parallelism, Dan Brown was not the only later spiritual teacher who involved himself in a helper role for trippers during these years.
Another well known author of a widely known meditation handbook (John Yates/Culadasa "The Mind Iluminated") describes his involvement during the summer of love in San Francisco in Episode 3 of his Youtube life journey interviews.
Culadasa
"People who had ingested psychoactive substances would not infrequently have experiences that were so shocking to them that they would be, they would have a bad trip. And it was sort of this kind of spontaneously self-reinforcing thing, sort of like somebody who's had panic attacks, if they believe they might be having a panic attack, it'll trigger one, right?
If somebody believes they're having a bad trip, it'll trigger a bad trip. And I was especially good at just talking people into, hey, you know, don't fight it, just accept it. Everything's going to be all right.
And I was sort of already prepared in advance to deal with the tricks the mind can play. "
And exactly like Daniel P Brown, Culadasa later saw psychedelics as valuable mind openers, which then needed stabiliisation and integration. Useful, but not absolutely necessary and not sufficient.
1971: Daniel P Brown in the hospital, researching LSD for the dying
Dan Brown´s early encounter created a deeper interest in the possibilities of psychedelics, and as a young student, he took an opportunity. He talked about it in the EO360 interview
In the early 1970s, Dan Brown joined the staff of the Maryland Psychiatric Research Centre, where psychedelic studies were conducted. He worked for the famous LSD researcher and founder of Holotropic Breathwork, Stanislav Grof.
He had the amazing opportunity - and must have earned it - to work for one of the most experienced LSD researchers at the time, Stan Grof.t
NotebookLM Deep Research: The Recruitment and Integration of Stanislav Grof
The involvement of Stanislav Grof in the Maryland Research Unit represents one of the most significant intellectual transfers in the history of psychiatry. Grof, a Czech psychiatrist, had already established himself as a preeminent researcher of non-ordinary states of consciousness at the Psychiatric Research Institute in Prague, where he had conducted thousands of LSD sessions.
Recruitment from Czechoslovakia
In 1965, Grof was offered a stipend to work in the United States, a recruitment effort that reflected the high value placed on his expertise in the therapeutic application of LSD. Although the communist authorities in Prague initially hindered his departure, they eventually relented on the condition that he report on his activities. Grof arrived in Baltimore in 1967 to serve as a Clinical and Research Fellow at Johns Hopkins University and the Spring Grove Hospital Research Unit.
His transition was supported by the Foundations Fund for Research in Psychiatry (FFRP), a New Haven-based organization that provided his initial scholarship..
The Impact of 1968 and Permanent Residency
The 1968 Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia served as a definitive turning point for Grof. While he was in the United States, the communist regime ordered his immediate return to Prague. Recognizing that his research and personal freedom would be curtailed under the new regime, Grof declined the order and opted for permanent residency in the U.S..He was subsequently appointed Chief of Psychiatric Research at the MPRC and Assistant Professor at the Henry Phipps Psychiatric Clinic of Johns Hopkins Universit
The Maryland Research Center itself had since the 1950s been a center for psychedelic research, and after the ban remained one of the last survivors until 1973.
So, Dan Brown got experience with psychedelic research, and psychedelics possibilities, at the very top of the profession.
This is Dan´s description:
So I wanted to see what they were doing in a more formal research training program with high doses of LSD, which is 400 micrograms and dose plus MDMA, which is about a thousand times more powerful than what the kids were getting on the street. Well, when I went down there, it's off the charts.
And then when I went down there, the month before Walter Pahnke had died, he was staying at a summer college in Maine. He never came back. He went by himself, which is one thing you don't do.
So I showed up there and losing my man , taking over the program was Stan Grof. And I worked with him two summers. And we were doing about four trips a day, high dose trips with terminal cancer patients as a team, guiding them through the 16-hour session.
And they would open up a whole world of the mind, because psychedelic means mind manifesting, manifesting the full potential of the mind. And often people who were terrified of dying because they were in early stages of dying from cancer, all of them had end stage cancer. They would open up a larger vision of seeing that dying was just a phase and they would be well prepared to die.They all died, but we felt that we made a difference. And two years later, they shut down all the research in the country, around the world, and it went out of phase for about until now. In the last three or four years, it's gotten very popular again.
We have some understanding of the neuroscience of this today that we didn't have in 1970 and 71. And it's very similar to mindfulness.
Grof describes the same period on the Grof Legacy Training website in the same terms with a bit more detail:
Stanislav Grof:
In our Maryland program of LSD therapy for terminal cancer patients, we screened out only patients who had serious cardiovascular problems. Out of over 200 patients none died in the session or experienced any physical emergency. And yet, one of these patients died four days after the session. He had skin cancer that metastasized all through his body, but he had paralyzing fear of death and seemed to be desperately hanging onto life.
In the session, he had a powerful experience of psychospiritual death and rebirth that liberated him from this fear. He died peacefully four days later. After some initial attempts, we decided not to run sessions with patients who had brain tumors. Their experiences seemed to be disjointed and confused and they had difficulties with conceptual integration of the content.
In our therapeutic and training programs at the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center, we organized in the late hours of psychedelic sessions family reunions. The patients would invite for these events partners, spouses, family members, or friends of their choice.
We would order meals from a nearby Chinese or Japanese restaurant, which had interesting tastes, textures, and colors, and we all shared a dinner listening to quiet music.
At this time, the clients were still in holotropic states of consciousness, which can remarkably enhance the quality of sensory perception. By directing this “opening of the doors of perception” - to use Aldous Huxley’s term - to objects and activities of everyday life, they learned new ways to experience nature, watch the sunset, taste food, listen to music, and interact with people.
2021: Daniel P Brown´s late shock: CIA , MKUltra and psychedelics at Maryland Research Centre
NOTE:; UPDATE FROM
What Dan Brown did not know: The University of Maryland had been at least partially financed by the infamous CIA programme MKUltra. In 2021, he spoke about it.
So we know that that research was being done in several research centers in the 1960s and early 70s about mind control under a project called MKUltra that the CIA was involved in. And, in fact, I had worked at Maryland Psychiatric Research Center in 1971, and there was a lab there by John Lennox who did work on hypnosis and sensory deprivation and hallucinogens. And we later found out that the whole research center was funded by the CIA. This was one of their sites. None of us knew that at the time.
However, the subsequent revelation that the FFRP was allegedly a CIA funding conduit highlights the pervasive nature of intelligence influence during this era
In my previous blog post, you find more info about MK Ultra at Maryland Research Centre.
1981 : Daniel P Brown, the dissertation and altered states of consciousness
In the later 1970s, Dan wrote his dissertation which was published in 1981. Now, psychedeclic research was banned, and as academic, one could not be seen associated with it. Accordingly, Dan wrote only very carefully about them, still calling them "hallucinogenics" and not mentioning the medical/psychiatric/spiritual research that he himself had been involved under Stan Grof 10 years ago.
Research on hallucinogenic drugs during those same decades demonstrated how this concept applied to humans. These drugs cause profound alterations in the categories of conscious experience, e.g., alterations in perception, memory, time-space organization, sense of reality and sense of self.- Researchers began to sense the implication of this research for a psychologyof knowledge. Some researchers began to write about transcenden realities made available by these drugs. Others began to write on the state-bound constraints of human knowledge.' An individual may have an experience of perception, time-space, and so forth, that bears little continuity with ordinary waking experience, for example, a drug induced experience of circular instead of linear time, or a meditative state devoid of any thinking.
In addition, certain of these states, notably, states induced by hallucinogens and meditative states manifest distinctly different organizations with greater drug dosage or greater meditative experience, respectively. They have "level specificity." Again, one's view of self and world is distinct for each level of hallucinogenic drug experience or meditative experience. Buddhist meditation and state-specific psychology, then, become means to explore the possible forms of knowledge about self and world that come with discrete alterations in consciousness. Both assume what Tart calls, "an interaction of structure and awareness."
2020: Daniel P Brown´s view of the spiritual value of psychedeclis
Eventually, Dan Brown summarised his views of psychedelics in a way that resembles most of his age cohort of spiritual or meditation teachers: they open up, and they increase creativity, but provide no stability, and may seduce to chase states instead of spiritual development.
And I would say that they personally were useful to me, as they have been to other people, to sort of opening up an internal world that you wouldn't know exists to get a larger perspective on life.
That's the positive side. But in terms of what we learned about all that teaching meditation for the last 40-something years, the solution will lead to an attachment to states. People are even looking for more weird and wonderful experiences on the drugs.
And they can't see the whole thing as the dance of awakened awareness. So they develop more attachment to states, and it doesn't lead anywhere useful in that sense. So it's not as simple as take a pill and then you get a mind-altering experience.
And it will help you in a positive sense to change perspectives, to get a larger perspective on life, but it doesn't solve your problems in that sense.
(Interviewer) That's interesting. So there's a, and I'm going to sound a bit like an idiot here, but there's like this nano or micro-dosing. Educate me a little bit on that and tell me about your philosophy on it. Maybe for me and the listeners, what is it?
First of all, on a regular basis, we open up creativity. And it does that in the short run, but then you get attached to certain states of mind and you get less creative over time, and the returns are diminishing.
But if you create similar experiences through your own work in meditation, there's a state of, in meditation, in Tibetan Buddhist meditation, called simultaneous mind, where everything is here all at once. And everybody has the same experience of everybody and everything being interconnected within that same field of limitless, timeless awareness. And if you open that up, it's the source of infinite creativity.
So all the sutras in Buddhism are written that way. So you develop a single-minded thought and about a topic you want to discover. And then once you develop that thought, you enter into this timeless, limitless state of awareness, where everything is interconnected within that same field of awareness.
And as you're coming out of that state, you transition out of it. You pull out of that cosmic database everything relevant to that single-minded thought. In Tibetan, we call it the tok chik, the single-minded thought.
To explore his "Tokchik" suggestion for creativity as alternative to psychedelics, see my post.
This is essentially the same judgement given by Culadasa in a wide-ranging interview on psychedelics shortly before his death.
Resources
Badiner, A., Grey, A., & Batchelor, S. (2018). Zig Zag Zen: Buddhism and Psychedelics (English Edition). Synergetic Press. https://www.amazon.de/dp/B078N8S9G6/
Brown, D. P., & Thurman, R. (2006). Pointing Out the Great Way: The Stages of Meditation in the Mahamudra Tradition (Annotated). Wisdom Publications. https://www.amazon.com/Pointing-Out-Great-Way-Meditation/dp/0861713044/
The book builds on the 1981 dissertation by Daniel P Brown "Mahamudra Meditation Stages".
This text is discussion topic on a "conscious.tv" series
It is also available as PDF here:
Brown, D. P. (1981). Mahamudra Meditation-Stages and Contemporary Cognitive Psychology (Dissertation). https://tinyurl.com/3hm5wh8c/
This dissertation is a free download. It is a massive, highly technical volume that nevertheless gives an unparalleled insight into the education of a yogi.It draws on the knowledge of cognitive science as of the late 1970s, so it is not the newest in this regard.As compensation, Daniel P Brown gives some insight into the experiments with trichoscopy. to which he still referred in his retreats in 2021.The University of Chicago library entry:
Original URL of PDF:
Brown, D. P. (2019, April). EO 360°: A podcast by the Entrepreneurs’ Organization: Transforming The Mind | Dr. Dan Brown. Retrieved December 16, 2023, from https://www.listennotes.com/podcasts/eo-360-a-podcast/transforming-the-mind-dr-dan-h2bHFcdYLJm/
Brown, Daniel (date unknown, probably around 2018-2020), with Suraya Das (not published but available to me)
Culadasa, & Immergut, M. (2017). The Mind Illuminated: A Complete Meditation Guide Integrating Buddhist Wisdom and Brain Science for Greater Mindfulness. Hay House Uk.
Culadasa (John Yates). (2021a, March 24). My Journey: Episode 3 - Experiences don’t mean sh. . . [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E48ByR0Xt6U
Culadasa. (2021c, September 17). Culadasa June 2020 Patreon Q&A N°2 Recording [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a8XJrNx7iN0
On Psychedelics
A previous post
Gebel, T. (2024, January 22). Daniel P Brown, CIA and LSD research: a meditation teacher´s involuntary involvement with program MKUltra. . . Till Gebel. https://www.till-gebel.com/post/daniel-p-brown-cia-lsd-mkultra/
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