Expansions of Collective Consciousness – The 1940s

I believe that the end of World War II and the explosions of two atomic bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 will be seen by future historians as the cusp of a new post-atomic era. It marked the beginnings of an awakening of global human identity, and the beginning of a series of cultural movements of expanding consciousness.
Already in the 1930s, and even earlier, there had been significant expansions of the Western worldview through the work of the cultural relativism school of anthropologists, including Franz Boas, Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead. They argued that we needed to abandon the ethnocentric superiority stance of Western science and scholarship toward the so-called “primitives,” and instead adopt the method of “participant observation.” In 1947, the Dead Sea Scrolls, dating from the time of Christ, were discovered near Qumran in Palestine; they belonged to the ultra-orthodox Essenes, and shed new light on the historical origins of Christianity. Archaeologists too were enlarging our awareness of human origins: in 1942, Ice Age cave paintings, depicting shamanic animal themes, were discovered in Lascaux, France, and dated to 15, 000 years BP (before present), thus vastly extending and deepening our conception of human prehistory.
The increased frequency of UFO sightings in the 1940s attracted public and media attention, raising the astonishing possibility that Earth civilization may not be alone in the Universe. There were reports suggesting an alien craft crashed in the New Mexico desert in 1947; and much later disclosures that some alien technologies were reverse engineered by ultra secret government programs. Reports of UFO sightings, alien contacts and secret government military cover-up programs continued over the following decades, and clearly represent, for those who take them seriously, an expansion of our collective worldview.
After the war, as US veterans return home, the birth rate increased by about 20% – the “Baby Boom” generation was born. Millions of new parents read Benjamin Spock’s The Commonsense Book of Baby and Child Care, forever changing Americans' attitudes on child rearing, making it less controlling and more respectful – with far-reaching positive consequences for the health and well-being of families and communities.
In an astounding synchronicity, the discovery of LSD, in April 1943, occurred within months of the first controlled nuclear chain reaction, which lead directly to the development of the atomic bomb. Was this most profound mind-altering substance destined to provide some kind of psychological counterpart to the nuclear death weapons? When Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann discovered the consciousness expanding properties of the drug LSD, he compared the experience to his mystical experiences in Nature as a child. His discovery marks a convergence of medicinal chemistry with the ancient tradition of spiritual development known as alchemy, from which it had become disconnected in the break between science and religion in the 16th century. The first research into the possible applications of LSD was performed by the military and the CIA, as one would expect from a scientific discovery made during war time and in the immediate post-war climate of cold war confrontation. The first civilian applications were in promoting understanding of psychosis – the psychotomimetic model, and as an adjunct to psychoanalytic therapy, for loosening of neurotic defenses and bringing about insight – the psycholytic model.
In considering the significance of this birth of a modern consciousness transformation movement and its subsequent spread, we can note that Hofmann found LSD in the fungal realm -- he was working on ergot alkaloids, and ergot is a fungus that infests rye and other grains. Having identified, on his own person, the profound convergence between science and mysticism that this substance afforded, he published his findings in the scientific literature of his profession, thereby bringing this modern version of the philosopher’s stone into the light of public knowledge. Attended by many paradoxes and mysteries, it was as if he had stumbled upon a remedy for an illness of civilization, that we didn’t know we had.