Early in 1965, I heard of someone who had drilled a hole in his head to get a permanently high {sic}. I put it down as another crankish idea and didn't think much about it. Later that year I went to Ibiza, looking for mescalin or LSD. I knew a few people who had taken acid and said it was even greater than mescalin.
In Ibiza I met an American girl called Fran, in whose house stayed Bart Huges, the Dutchman who had drilled the hole in his skull. Bart was away at the time, but due back soon with some acid. I asked Fran what was behind the operation and she said it was done to increase the volume of blood in the brain. I said you couldn't increase the volume of blood without decreasing the volume of something else, but Fran knew no more than she told me. It was not until later I found out from Bart that there is a corresponding decrease in the volume cerebrospinal fluid. That is the water, in which the whole brain and central nervous system floats, and the decrease, in its volume has no detrimental effects.
When Bart arrived with the LSD he said, "take sugar with it, and extra vitamin C". The three of us took trips together. For Fran and me it was our first trip. Bart brought a huge two-kilo bag of sugarlumps and some lemons and we squeezed the juice from the lemons into saucers and dipped the lumps of sugar in it before eating them. The trip lasted all night long, an ecstatic parabola, with gravity bringing the brain blood down again as the sun was coming up. Understanding the mechanism of brain blood volume enables one to take LSD or other hallucinatory drugs without harm and gives one control over the expansion of one's own consciousness. Once you know the mechanism you can increase the brain blood volume in innumerable ways and any number of laws cannot prevent you putting your own blood in your own brain when you wish.
Having fully understood the mechanism I was excited at the prospect of releasing the news to a breathless world. I saw no reason to doubt that other people would be glad to hear it as I had been. Bart warned me that it had not been so for him in Amsterdam. It was three years since he had discovered the mechanism, but still the world was totally ignorant of the fact. He had conducted a publicity campaign, but the scandal journalists had fastened onto the sensational aspects of the operation and completely ignored the explanation. The mechanism was never mentioned.
What was it that was so important about the discovery of the mechanism of brain blood volume? Before understanding that you need an experience and an explanation. You must increase the brain blood volume to experience the state of expanded consciousness. This can be done in many ways, for example by yoga headstands, or breathing exercises, by smoking pot, or jumping out of a hot bath into a cold bath, which puts you on total adrenal constriction and squeezes you high in a few seconds. Some people can put themselves on adrenaline at will with a magic formula.
Having experienced life at the highest level, that is maximal brain metabolism (with a far greater area of contact between bloodstream and braincells than in adult man more glucose and oxygen is taken from the blood than normally), it is very likely that you will want to repeat the experience. A trip above the clouds to the mountain top can give you a taste for heights, but to build a house and live up there you need to know all about local conditions. The LSD movement got off the ground simultaneously in Europe and America. In the United States the "high priest" was Timothy Leary. Bart Huges' actions has always two prime objectives, to enlighten the adult and to empty the mental hospitals of all but those with organic diseases. The effect of Leary's actions was to fill the mental hospitals with sugar-lack flip-outs.
The discovery of the mechanism of brain blood volume has revealed the reason for the success of trepanation in the treatment of insanity. The operation has been performed since prehistoric times. By restoring to the intra-cranial arteries and capillaries the pulsation which dies when the skull seals at the end of growth, the benefits of youth are perpetuated, the ability to learn new skills and understand complicated explanations, the energy and enthusiasm to pursue dreams to their realization. Some get these gifts by accident; fractures of the skull, mastoid operations, the loss of sight in both eyes or only one, all produce more blood in the brain.
Just as society now has the task of casting off the yoke of tyranny by reducing government to a manageable machine to serve its purpose, so the individual must free himself from the tyranny of his ego, not by losing it altogether, so that there's no one at home in the head to give orders to the limbs, but by reducing its importance to the level of an efficient civil servant. The talking ape needs an ego like a car needs a driver. The adult's ego, like his government, becomes the instrument of repression. In the adult's brain the ego feels threatened by anything which attracts attention (blood) away from its own province, the speech system. By increasing the amount of blood in all parts of the brain you dispense with the need to squeeze blood into the speech system by constricting the arteries leading to other parts of the brain. There is enough there anyway without depriving the rest of the brain of its share. This is the benefit of trepanation.
The performance of trepanation is rightly the duty of the medical profession. Bart could find no one to perform it for him, so he did it for himself. He was a medical student and had sufficient knowledge of operation techniques to do this. I was able to do it only after studying the subject very carefully. My advice to other people is "find a doctor to trepan you".
-Joe Mellen