Born in 1939, Joe Mellen went to Eton and Oxford University and was preparing to start a career in the City of London when he decided that life had more to offer. He had been reading Huxley, Ouspensky, Hesse, Jack Kerouac etc. He dropped out and started smoking marijuana. This led to a search for psychedelics. He took mescalin in 1964 and the following year he met Bart Huges in Ibiza. Bart, who was Dutch, had made the first LSD in Europe not produced by Sandoz the pharmaceutical giant. He had also trepanned himself in 1962. Joe had heard about this on the grapevine and thought he must be crazy. He took his first trip with Bart, found that he was the sanest person he’d ever met and then, becoming his first disciple, helped him put his discoveries into English, a collaboration over a few months which provided him with an education in the esoteric knowledge of what goes on in the brain when high and the mechanisms of concentration and repression with which the Ego controls the coordination of brain functions. He was delighted to have found a cause worth spending the rest of his life serving, to spread this knowledge to the world. In 1970 Joe trepanned himself. He subsequently wrote a book “Bore Hole” about meeting Bart and the trials and tribulations involved in trepanning himself. Bart had coined the term “brainbloodvolume” for the total volume of blood in the brain capillaries. Though at first Joe found this a cumbersome and ugly word, eventually he grew to love it, because it puts in one word what it’s all about!

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