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ECSTATIC CULTURE From Electric Guitars to Psychedelics A Subterranean Network; Gurus, Yogis, Chemists & Mystics The Evening Star, Doors of the East Realizations of Peyotemind: Road to the Workshop Excerpt from "Drug" an Unpublished Workshop Document and Seminar
In the post-world war two era, Cass-tech High school, the Detroit Institute of Arts, and the energetic Detroit public educational system all led to a strong fermentation of music and art education within a working class baby-boom student population. The legacy of these early institutions and patrons made possible the germination of a highly skilled horde of talented students. |
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The mid-fifties were an era of rapid changes within American culture. Jack Kerouac's On the Road and Robert Frank's road-trip photographic book essay The Americans, document this time in terms of obsessive mobility, speed and the fractured barriers of class and race. Both works explored the American landscape as a collection of highly expressive, energetic and loaded exposures. Rock n' roll and the automobile both convey an almost cataclysmic union of endless space, sexuality and compact design. The road trip and automobile were a unique transcendental escape; an exploration of the temporality of time, a Zen-trip into expanding space, with the landscape rolling by the window like movies in the mind. Kerouac's brand of writing was a form of sketchbook improvisation, and came out of the classic realism of Thomas Wolfe and Herman Melville. Mixed with the syncopated rhythms of Jazz and the Blues, Kerouac molded a language often stereotyped simply as 'beat'. Keroauc and his colleagues Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs and Gregory Corso helped to define this first generation of beat writers. Photographer Robert Frank had a similar sketchbook sensitivity to the landscape, formed from lessons learned under famed FSA photographer Walker Evans and Cartier-Bresson's 'decisive moment' aesthetic. Few contemporary photographers were left untouched by his grand and inclusive vision. Pushing the limits of the snap shot, Frank elevated the medium to rarified heights and showed us the look of our society from the inside out. On another front, changes began in 1943, as Albert Hoffman synthesized LSD in the laboratory. He referred to the chemical as "my problem child" and quickly realized it would have an important impact, as he thought it would help reconnect people to a physical and spiritual universe. The story of contemporary psychedelics, and the growing influence of eastern spiritualism spread across American culture most strongly in the 1960s. This change in consciousness and the opening of mind-awareness had a widespread effect, appearing in various forms and is the subject of this 'Ecstatic Culture' investigation. In situating the Detroit Artists Workshop toward the forefront of this 'psychedelic revolution' or ecstatic culture, we turn to some background history. It was through a strange conjunction and necessity, by a variety of psychedelic as well as spiritual influences that made Detroit a central node for dispelling these energies. The closest way to see into the spirituality of the 60s is by first examining psychedelics and the influence of eastern philosophies. The way in which visionary thought is relayed throughout time can be seen reflected in the unique styles of educators, spiritual leaders and their various manifestations within the arts. |
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Aldous Huxley: To Make this trivial world sublime Take a half a gramme of phanerothyme Humphry Osmond: To fathom Hell or soar angelic, Just take a pinch of psychedelic.(1) The Wikipedia describes the psychedelic experience as "characterized by the perception of aspects of the mind previously unknown, or by the creative exuberance of the mind liberated from its ordinary fetters. Psychedelic states are one of the stations on the spectrum of experiences elicited by psychedelic substances. On that same spectrum will be found hallucinations, distortions of perception, synesthesia, altered states of awareness, mystical states, and occasionally states resembling psychosis."(2) As the term became popularized, "psychedelic" has been used to describe almost any brightly colored object or unusual daily experience. The word entheogen has been slowly replacing psychedelic and hallucinogenic when referring to sacred, religious, or mystical consciousness- expanding experiences onset by artificial or natural drug use. Proposed in the new 1998 edition of Road to Eelusis, the word comes from the Greek (entheos) god -- (theos) meaning within, "and was used to describe the condition that follows when one is inspired and possessed by the god that has entered one's body. It was applied to prophetic seizures, erotic passion and artistic creation, as well as to those religious rites in which mystical states were experienced through the ingestion of substances that were transubstantial with the deity. In combination with the Greek root gen-, which denotes the action of becoming.."(3) The purpose behind an entheogen is to induce an "ecstatic state" in the user: to realize a state of exalted bliss, an intense joy beyond rational thought. One theory has claimed that all religions have had an origin that began with an ecstatic experience brought on by plant intoxication. The earliest entheogen use might have begun with Amanita muscaria, a mushroom containing the psychotropic ingredient psilocybin. Gordon and Valentina Wasson have been researching ritualized drug use in Mexico since 1952, and have published some of their papers in the Harvard Review and early issues of the Psychedelic Review. Wasson's research uncovered 16th century Spanish writers who had observed native Mexican cultures worshipping and using Amanita muscaria. In Wasson's book Soma: the Divine Mushroom (1967), he argues that the ancient ecstatic drug Soma, (mentioned in 120 of the 1000 verses in the Sanskrit holy book Rig Veda, that is the foundation of Hinduism) is actually undisguised psilocybin-laced Amanita muscaria. The similarity between the vivid Hindu visionary illustrations and the recurrence of psychedelic art in the sixties is also discussed. Throughout history, cultures have divided themselves as either positive or negative toward mushrooms. Over 400 pre-Columbian "mushroom stones" have been found throughout the Mayan landscape dating from 500-1000 B.C.E., which point to the existence of an ancient and divine Mesoamerican mushroom cult. Central Mexican temple frescoes dated from around 300 A.D., also clearly illustrate mushroom use and worship. In the 1930s, avant-garde composer John Cage began a study and appreciation of mushrooms which would last through his career. Interactions between the ancient and modern are a constant ongoing investigation. The religious and social enigma's of sacred mushrooms and peyote cults, have shown evidence of practice spread across Europe, Asia, Australia and the Far East. In North America, peyote is easily grown in southern desert climates. Tribal Native American trade routes for peyote have been shown to follow northern Canada, Michigan, upper New York and as far south as Florida and southern Mexico. There is speculation about drug use in ancient Egypt, but it was more certainly used in the Eleusinian mystery cult of Ancient Greece. The origin is unclear, but was possibly an adaptation ritual from early Egypt. During initiation, a mind-bending potion or sacrament known as kykeon was drunk to unlock "the secrets" and bring each initiate into an ecstatic state. After spending a night in the temple, initiates walked away forever changed. It was a change described as a rebirth or resurrection. Aristotle, Plato and Sophocles participated in these mysteries whose temple and ceremony honored the earth mother Demeter. The secret ceremony and ingredients of kykeon were highly guarded and the penalty for revealing the secrets was death. The practice of these mystery religions continued into the early centuries of Christianity, and many elements were most surely influential and adopted by Christianity. The book Road to Eleusis, published in 1972, renders the theory of an ecstatic potion made from the mushroom Amanita muscaria, a similar parallel effect R. Gordon Wasson was looking for in the Hindu drug Soma. During the Eleusinian ceremony, Wasson states, "The initiates often experienced in vision the congruity of the beginning and the end, of birth and death, the totality and the eternal generative ground of being. It must have been an encounter with the ineffable, an encounter with the divine, that could only be described through metaphor."(4) Another theory speculates that the Eleusis potion contained ergot, a grain mold contamination, that afflicted medieval societies in Europe and the New World. Ergot poisoning caused temporary madness, and perhaps contributed as a factor in the Salem Witch trials. Ergot is an acidic mold that grows on rye grain, and is the chief hallucinogenic compound distilled in lysergic acid, or LSD-25 production. Biblical anthropologist John Marco Allegro, was a leading Semitic scholar who in 1953, led a team in reconstructing the Dead Sea Scrolls. During his translation of the scrolls, Allegro underwent a profound change, losing his religious faith. In 1970, the publication of The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross, was at the heart of a large religious scandal. Allegro theorized that Christianity was based on a bizarre Jewish cult practicing psychedelic drug-use and ritual sex. He claims all statements in the New Testament about Jesus were in fact references about the psychedelic mushroom and its cult. Publication of Aldous Huxley's Doors of Perception in 1954 was a major landmark in drug and mind expansion literature. Published during the middle of Eisenhower's administration, the birth of rock n' roll and the MaCarthy hearings, it chronicled Huxley's use of mescaline as a work of controlled research and personal enlightenment. His dive into the study of eastern religions began just after publication of his bestseller Brave New World in 1933, a speculative book in which the dispersal of happiness in the future was centered around the imaginary drug soma. Huxley's visionary work was published twenty years before Orwell's 1984, and a surprising number of Huxley's prophesies have been fulfilled. Considered a contemporary classic, its now read in many high school and college curriculums. The Doors of Perception was an underground bestseller. Its title borrowed from William Blake's visionary poem 'The Marriage of Heaven and Hell' - the book signaled Huxley's interest in divine consciousness and public education. His discovery of the Tibetan Book of the Dead, was referenced in Doors of Perception, and soon became the guidebook and key text for the psychedelic voyager. It placed the soul on a cosmic journey, in search of the 'Clear Light' and the 'Pure Light of the Void'. Huxley helped to resuscitate the exploration and awareness of the soul's potential into modern times. By holding up the ignorance, greed and possessive self-hood of Western outward materialism against the Eastern, inward and psychedelic journey, Huxley deflated and punctured the weft and weave of the "American Dream." The utopian ideal and ‘unfettered soul’ was explored in Brave New World, Doors of Perception and Island: together making a trilogy of consciousness that attempt to reevaluate the utopian and community instinct within society. |
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Blake and Emerson were engrossed with the idea of ecstasy and nirvana- the thought of the individual becoming ascendant, transformed, merging with the universe. In his essay on occult naturalist Emmanuel Swedenborg, also in Representative Men, Emerson refers to the "cosmic voyager" saying, "This path is difficult, secret and beset with terror. The ancients called it ecstasy or absence - a getting out of their bodies to think. All religious history contains traces of the trance of saints, - a beatitude, but without any sign of joy; earnest, solitary, even sad.... This beatitude comes in terror, and with shocks to the mind of the receiver."(6) Emerson was fond of quoting and studying the Vedas, Upanishads, Mahabharata and Ramayana; the sacred works of Hindu thought. He wove these ideas so flawlessly in his writings that he's become an honored and revered sage even in India. Indian historian Protap Chandra Mazumdar has said about Emerson: "Amidst this ceaseless, sleepless din and clash of Western materialism, this heat and restless energy, the character of Emerson shines upon India serene as the evening star. He seems to some of us to have been a geographic mistake, he ought to have been born in India. Perhaps Hindoos were closer kinsmen to him than his own nation because every typical Hindoo is a child of Nature." Knowledge and translations of Hindu scripture was rare in Emerson's time, and something he studied and explored in depth as a Harvard student. The influence of this knowledge spread among his friends, and appears in the work of Herman Melville, Henry David Thoreau and Walt Whitman. The spreading of Indian philosophy in America helped balance the crisis and disillusion found in Christianity, (a crisis that grew aside the explosive growth of science and industrialism). The Eastern experience would help lay down the groundwork necessary for a new theology, an approach to the universe on a more natural and ecological level. Theosophy(7), a form of spiritual discovery mixed several bodies of ideas with the beliefs of founder Madame Blavatsky (1831-1891). Theosophy spread throughout the United States and western Europe in the late 19th century. Like Buddhism, there is no central doctrine or, except for the brotherhood of mankind. Blavatsky's major ideas are explored in Isis Unveiled and The Secret Doctrine, guidebooks to her esoteric philosophy. Dense and arcane reading, they are said to be based on Blavatsky's own initiation in ancient occult societies during her trek in India, and revelations contained in an ancient text she called The Book of Dzyan. Many of Blavatsky's claims have been contested, yet her esoteric influence continued to be spread by famous followers such as Thomas Edison, Gauguin, Kandinsky and Sun Ra. Theosophy introduced the world to Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895-1986) who lectured on changing oneself through the understanding of individual consciousness and by rejecting all spiritual authorities. Krishnamurti stated, "Man cannot come to [truth] through any organization, through any creed, through any dogma, priest or ritual, not through any philosophic knowledge or psychological technique. He has to find it through the mirror of relationship, through the understanding of the contents of his own mind, through observation and not through intellectual analysis or introspective dissection."(8) Krishnamurti's emphasis on personal growth and development of the spirit took root in the 1960s and virtually replaced the earlier occult trappings of Theosphy. Interest in Hindu and Buddhist thought and culture swept the United States in the late 19th and early 20th century, thanks in part to cross-country lectures by Swami Vivekananda (1863-1902), considered one of the most important spiritual leaders of modern India. Vivekanada was the disciple of Sri Ramakrishna (1836-1886) and was invited to speak in Chicago at a World Religion summit in 1893. After his success in Chicago he made lecture trips to Detroit at the invitation of Charles Langdon Freer. Once in New York City, Vivekananda began the formation of the Vedanta society, to disseminate his teachings. Swami Rama Tirtha (1873-1906) was professor of mathematics and a disciple of Vivekannda. Rama Tirtha came to lecture in Japan and in the United States. In San Francisco Tirtha lectured on Happiness Within(9). Paramahansa Yogananda (1893-1952) another influential mystic, arrived in Boston in 1920, and that same year founded the Self-Realization Fellowship (10). He traveled across the United States for fifteen years. In 1946, his Autobiography of a Yogi was published and became an instant bestseller. It has remained in print ever since, and is now considered a spiritual classic. An active member of the 1930s Surrealist network, author Rene Daumal (1908-1944), translated mystical Sanskrit and Hebrew texts to explore the nature of wisdom and utopian thought. His book The Fundamental Experiment was a short essay on mind expansion and altered awareness under the influence of drugs, and is now considered a classic of drug literature. Daumal's unfinished novel Mount Analogue, was a synthesis of Central Asian mysticism and French symbolism. Daumal fell into a small circle of students surrounding the charismatic George Ivonovich Gurdjieff (1872-1949), who became one of the leading mystical leaders of the 30s and 40s. Gurdjieff who was Armenian- Greek, seemed to borrow many of the ideas he found in Theosphy, adding Sufism, sacred dance movements and trance music in this esoteric mixture. Gurdjieff's ideas helped shape western occultism and were influential within psychedelic culture through his championship within the triumvirate of Alpert, Metzner and Leary. Honoring the consciousness of individualism and exploring Eastern philosphy was deeply examined in a group of books that Herman Hesse (1877-1962) wrote between 1919 and 1946. Hesse was among the first Western writers to expound on Eastern and Buddhist concepts for the general public. Damian, Siddartha, Steppenwolf and especially The Glass Bead Game were highly influential works rediscovered by the generations of the fifties and sixties. The works of both Hesse and Huxley had enormous impact, giving a metaphysical map into the minds of a new generation of mental explorers. Philosopher Huston Smith noted that when Huxley lectured at M.I.T. in the fall of 1960, he drew a crowd of listeners so thick they jammed traffic all the way across the Charles River into Boston. Huxley preached in Brave New World, that there was no escape from mankind's savage behavior and acts of barbarism. Many of the ideas and concerns found in Brave New World were first expounded in the prescient Soviet masterpiece We, by Yevgeny Zamyatin, a landmark of dystopian fiction written in 1920. We has been a sadly neglected classic, but is now finding an appreciative audience. Sadly, there is no way to know what Huxley would of thought of the explosive popularity of psychedelics. He died of cancer on November, 22nd, 1963, drifting into liberation on a dosage of LSD, with words from the Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, read to him by his wife Laura on the same tragic day John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas. Both men represented the infinite possibilities and pathways of a visionary future, an era defined by questioning authority and public activism. Kennedy was instrumental in reaching out to the young and youthful spirit of this country. He involved the non-represented in a political system stunted and shamed by the paranoia of McCarthyism and rigid conformity throughout the Eisenhower administration. The idealism that Kennedy projected would find further expression in the sixties generation. Timothy Leary reviewed Huxley's last novel Island, published in 1962, in the third issue of the Psychedelic Review(11), a memorial issue devoted to Huxley. Leary describes Island as "the climax of a 69-year voyage of discovery...it is misunderstood because it is so far in front of its time. It's too much to take. Too much. Island is a continent, a hemisphere, a galaxy of a book... a utopian tract. Huxley's final statement about how to make the best of both worlds. Of individual freedom and social responsibility. Of East and West... body and spirit... religion and the secular... It's a manual of education... a treatise on living, living each moment. And most important and staggering, the book is a treatise on dying."(12) Island was a key text for Leary, who would take up the reigns of metaphysical research left in the wake of Huxley's death. Leary taught psychology at Harvard and in 1960 took his first "trip" on psilocybin mushrooms in Mexico. When he returned to Harvard he began the 'Harvard Psilocybin Project', which was a circle of volunteer artists and writers that included Allen Ginsberg, Charles Olson, Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassidy, Arthur Koestler. From this core group, a wave of new writing and unique expression grew surrounding psychedelic use. The project expanded to include experiments with LSD and other hallucinogens, first on prison inmates and then on Leary himself and his network of friends. When Harvard dismissed Leary in 1963, he set up the Castalia Institute in Millbrook, New York, to continue his studies. Leary distilled many of the ideas that consumed Huxley. He believed in "set and setting," a practice of taking the drug in a controlled environment, as a safeguard against bad trips. He advocated the use of the Tibetan Book of the Dead as guide, coined the phrase "Turn On, Tune In, and Drop Out," and formed the 'League of Spiritual Discovery,' an LSD advocacy group. Richard Nixon described him as "the most dangerous man in America." The Millbrook country house became a psychedelic castle, a meeting ground for the psychedelic elite. After repeated FBI raids, Millbrook closed down within two years. Arthur Kleps, one of the early Millbrook members, founded the Neo-American church in 1965. Kleps's manifesto stated, "psychedelic substances, such as cannabis and LSD, are religious sacraments since their ingestion encourages Enlightenment, which is the recognition that life is a dream and the externality of relations an illusion (solipsistic nihilism)."(13) The idea that psychedelics were part of religious and spiritual use was not a new one, but the fact that LSD was at the center of secret CIA mind-control studies that began in the 1950s, (project MK-ULTRA in effect from 1953-1965) was not widely known. In unclassified memos the CIA considered LSD "a potential new weapon for unconventional warfare."(14) This secret and profane history was reveled in Acid Dreams the Complete Social History of LSD: The CIA, the Sixties and Beyond by Martin A. Lee and Bruce Shlain, possibly the best resource on this dark history of LSD, and its bond and usage to government agents. The way in which psychedelics have changed history must be seen by the actions, testimonials and changes that have effected users of these drugs. The year preceding the founding of the Artists Workshop, was an important one for its members. As the Red Door gallery was getting underway, founding member John Sinclair had his first psychedelic trip. Here is one example of how the psychedelic experience would effect social change and soon create a communal co-op of like-minded artists, poets and musicians. |
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"Under peyote I realized the most profound truths of my life and I know that the realizations will stay with me and influence the course of my life--- they have already made a very discernable mark on my outlook, on my conception of myself, of other people, of my ultimate goal in life." (16) This psychedelic right-of-passage would have a shattering effect, energizing Sinclair's consciousness and forging his self-determination approach to the arts. Already primed with an appreciation of beat poetry, literature and jazz, Sinclair was now poised to help define the consciousness of the unfolding '60s and stake his commitment within a support group of unified artists, musicians and writers. Peyotemind was an interior outline of thought and manifestation of these goals, a Rosetta stone and codex to a psychedelic Midwest. Touching on many of the ideas brewing in Sinclair's mind, the peyote experience was a fuse, igniting his life into action and purpose. In his 1963 notebook, Sinclair makes clear the influence of Aldous Huxley and his admiration for the Doors of Perception, listing the title in his bibliography and incorporating it in his text. "...you don't really ever come down from peyote if you don't want to - the "doors of perception" have been opened, once you have knocked down the blocks, the defenses you have had to set up in your mind because of the societal influences which have formed your patterns of thinking, you can remain at essentially the same level of perception and awareness that you reached under peyote... Writing under peyote, trying to describe and transcribe the hallucinations and horrors one sees is impossible. There are no words exact enough, no words really big enough to describe the horror, the crashing visions you actually see, feel, and even touch. You can talk yourself into believing the fantasies you project onto external objects - if there is only the very slightest stimulus in the objects before projection." Sinclair nails down the primary effect of this experience, "My realization of LOVE colored the other visions I had later and gave me the key to the interpretation of the major hallucinations I had earlier." In this poem cycle, Sinclair emphasized the duality and divisions within consciousness, and the universal nature or "cosmic-connectedness" of the experience. There is also the dream of future possibilities, the blank sheet that stretches before him: You can write everything in the universe every word, every thought, idea, dream- On a blank sheet: and you know Everything is there - all you have to do is search for specifics and you'll find them there. ... Everything is true.... and untrue Wrong and un-wrong Good and no-good all-at-once There are no absolutes in peyotemind every statement, every question has an infinite answer, and you can see at least a million each You know everything! and can see the Jesus brilliant dawn of the new ERA OF LOVE When one day "the century of GREEN LIGHTS" will emerge When "the doors of perception" Will be once and for all OPENED When the hinges will be ultimately Torn from all the worlds doorjambs FOREVER (17)On the recorded version of Peyotemind, quoted above, Sinclair adds the emphatic rejoinder "Kick out the Jams Motherfuckers!" after the last word: forever. His story about doors and doorjambs is an interpretation of the phrase, Kick out the Jams - a phrase made famous by the MC5 to emphasize high energy and berate the rock n’ roll competition, now had a connotation about consciousness, and literally kicking down the physical doorjambs that block perception. Kick out the Jams was the Motor City high powered answer to Break on Through, Jim Morrison's ode to Huxley's mescaline experiments. In the Peyotemind essay, Sinclair's phrase, "A Century of Green Lights", implies endless possibilities, eternity within a blink and total freedom. It is Sinclair's personal vision-quest for a future cleansed by open doors and open minds. Sinclair describes his consciousness under peyote. When his car stopped at a red light, everything seemed to have ended - the world had stopped. When a string of lights then turned green, it set off a chain reaction, opening the mind to endless possibilities-- a society without stoplights, where everything was switched on, moving forward, as Brion Gysin would say, Here to Go. The wave of love and unity Sinclair felt at that time, would lead him in the direction of communal thinking and action. This utopian instinct was set into motion as a direct outgrowth of the peyote experience. The workshop and its later manifestations, all sprang outward from these realizations. Sinclair connected quickly with like-minded artists, and considered the workshop a physical manifestation of a ideas he had been reading and experimenting with, "I don't consider myself as to have ever had an original idea, I'm a synthesis, you know. What I did in Detroit, came from how I would follow everything, read everything I could get my hands on, know what people were doing and then say, well we should do this in Detroit."(18) There is also an interpretation of Sinclair influence as a 'cult of personality'. This has been true in many communal situations, and even members of the Artists Workshop can attest to Sinclair's magnetic leadership position, a demanding nature, and strong influence. He ran the commune in a very efficient and business-like manner, collecting rents, making budgets and scheduling events. He would apply this organizing principle to managing the MC5, getting their equipment together and making sure they showed up and were paid for gigs. Psychedelic culture was still in its infancy, but an influence that would soon seize the art and music worlds in a paradigmatic way. Sinclair was both frightened and awed by his first psychedelic experience. The first words in his notebook recalling the peyote trip, was a summation of the experience as a Pandora warning within a quote by Dante, in large bold type it read: "Behold the man that's been through hell." Sinclair wasn't a large user of LSD. His experience's were traumatic, strange, uncomfortable, and yet oddly liberating. This, more than anything else, was the drug that would help design the sixties. "Yeah, it was the acid man. I hate to keep saying that, but I mean that was a different thing when you think about that period and the things that have come in the forty years since then and now. That was the catalyst. There's these kids with these computers now, (back then) they had an acid experience and they started restructuring the molecules."(19) Divisions between alternative and straight cultures were marked along the fracture lines of the psychedelic experience. "Take LSD a few times and you become physically incapable of having anything to do with it, especially if an alternative into which you can channel your energy exists. Without that alternative people just get messed up - they feel trapped inside forms they can't stand anymore, and they often just flip out. That's why we stress the absolute necessity of creating alternative life forms. Because people get to a point where they can't relate to the death culture anymore, and they move out of it to try and create a new life culture or a new form for their life."(20) Sinclair's code word for changing society was to "freakize" or "turn-on" as many people as possible. By helping create an army of youth, a "Guitar Army" - a nation of passionate and creative freaks, there was the possibility of changing society and the political system in the direction of a more compassionate and openly loving movement. The responsibility of the artist, as beacon light for the community, was something Sinclair and other workshop members saw as an important effort to be aimed at an expanding youth culture. In many (especially non-western) cultures, the artist is seen as teacher, a sensei, someone respected and honored. Sinclair used his position as an enabler, to encourage diversity and expression within the arts. In a compassionate world the artist would be viewed as an important force within the community, a conduit and bridge to greater awareness. The workshop was structured to allow the artist an open, free space and a public forum. By installing the artist within the framework of community, the workshop gave solidarity and respect to its fellow artists, that were uniformly rejected and ignored by mainstream society. At the end of the sixties and early seventies, psychedelic mind drugs were rapidly being replaced with physical "body drugs" like cocaine and heroin. There are conspiracy theories that tie the huge influx of 'death drugs' into a plot by the C.I.A., and government agencies eager to crack open and end the spread of psychedelics and to break up left-wing urban unity projects, and political groups such as the Black Panthers. Soon, the spark of energy and bloom of creativity began to dissolve. Wealthy musicians shooting drugs and overdosing, were a common event and a bad commercial for an excessive, inflated lifestyle. Sinclair describes the divide and anxiety that was forming between the artist and audience: "...so few of the musicians we look up to and live for their music really do anything for the people who make it possible for them to get rich and buy villas and drive psychedelic Rolls Royces that Hitler's goons used to own... "poet is priest," Allen Ginsberg said - and I keep waiting for them to step forward and lead the people to more freedom and more life, because they're in a position to do just that. And then they do just the opposite - they turn out to be running dogs and propagandists for the death merchants, turning themselves into junkies and mindless consumers of all the plastic shit the control addicts turn out..."(21) The workshop never had an official policy regarding drugs, however there were seminars and "rap session" discussions held concerning drug use. Mind-altering drugs (hallucinogens) were seen as tools, accepted as spiritual training and research into a deeper world view. Barbituates, booze, heroin and prescriptive drugs were seen as an outgrowth of "death culture"-the straight nine-to-five world and scorned. These "household drugs" were associated with cloudy bourgeois thinking and discouraged. One of these workshop seminars titled "Drug" was conducted for inclusion in a future issue of Work. It is classic in the sense of how it describes the psychedelic experience and of how open and sincere the members were during the interview. |
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EXCERPT FROM "DRUG" AN UNPUBLISHED WORKSHOP DOCUMENT AND SEMINAR (22) "DRUG" was a taped interview recorded and transcribed by a Workshop member. The entire piece ran almost twenty pages and was intended for a special issue of WORK, but was cut at the last minute. Following are some excerpts from the original DRUG interview made during June of 1965. It shows the heightened degree of analysis and awareness that was happening at the workshop in regards to the meaning and use of psychedelic drugs. A week prior to this interview, at least two of the participants "JS and "JC" had taken a half gram of mescaline sulfate, each, approximately at the same time. The other participants had recently taken quantities of peyote and 125 microgram doses of LSD... JC: I think that I was into a pretty "weird scene." I don't like to use cliché words, it was like a disassociated personality. I was talking like there were- -I was separating the different parts of my personality and using them like they were different people...l always wanted to be there, now. I always wanted to talk to the other part of the person, who was always there, now, not the person who went off into "flights of fantasy" or the person who went to calculating about the past...or future. I don't know if I'd seen any good results. I went off into about a three-day psychosis I'd never been into, in my life! JS: I got into a nice thing with some other people, S... and M...(male and female), as we were walking down in the "ruins" out there on Warren Avenue. We were walking and all of a sudden started talking about this feeling thing. It seemed like--on waves of emotion. We'd express a conceptual thing and a feeling thing together, and a self-disassociated self together. We'd be talking, say, "I-how-we-you feel?" It was a mutual thing. "I" was no longer as involving as "we" at the same time as we were being "we". JS asked JC to elaborate on his statement made during a previous (but largely inaudible) interview: "This is where I always start to flip out, when I can really feel it. When I really know that I am." JC: I would like to talk about that except that I might start to flip out. That's what I'm afraid of. I'm afraid to really talk about this like we were the other day. But then again, I think I have a little more control of myself now than I did then, because-- primarily because I don't disassociate one part from the other. Now, I'm trying to be here, in every sense to be here, and not to be....If you split up your mind into these different categories... well...it's arbitrary categories. You start making up. a little fucking world of your own, because none of them exist. It's not in the nature of the thing that they exist. LW: You think that without splitting up, you could have existed in all those different worlds, and still have been you? JC: I think I could have. That's what I wanted to... but then I wasn't doing that. ... JC: Then again, taking the whole thing into consideration, there were some residual effects...(general laughter)...effects from this LSD. We're all experiencing this getting high. The psychedelic experience is so easy--just going off into it. I believe that there is some area of conscious activity in--what was at one time--unconscious activity, or not-recallable fact. JS: The whole thing sounds like Donald Duck going quack quack, because you're both trying to talk about something that's impossible to express. DC: I think we're expressing it quite well. JS: That's what all language sounds like anymore. Like a lot of Mickey Mouse cartoons. LW: Well, the reality is Mickey Mouse cartoons. It is - It's true! Mickey Mouse is more real than the fucking newspaper, man~ Look at him. He's concerned with Minnie. He's concerned with all those characters. That's what's happening. And Donald Duck Orange Juice is a perversion. Like, it should be Mickey Mouse Orange Juice. (laughter) ......... JC: Well, if the individual is truly honest with this --which is what we were getting into, to a point--I don't think I was ready to get honest with myself. And that's how I started to flip out. When I started getting honest with myself and tearing off all the bullshit structures, then I really started seeing what the fuck was really going on, what really did exist--and I didn't know it... Just hide from the fucking reality. It may be groovier. When you get down to it- the reality you know is fucking meaningless. You have to have a creative quality, too, -- to get away from all of that. JS: What I found out was a more...a closer...interest to, say "total empathy" or "satori " is also accompanied by a greater degree of sensibility. JC: But in that respect, these eastern religious people, who used to get into this, were into it pretty heavily. They never jumped into anything, and it was almost like--a western neurologist who put it in terms--that they were setting up a system of conditioned reflexes and responses. Like they were getting their subconscious mind in order. When they learned, when they were ready, then they could allow themselves--because they had such a beautiful subconscious and such a beautiful memory system set up--they could go off into "trips," then. This might be just a little analogy-story, but it is the way that I'm--sort of--comprehending it. My subconscious is a sort of random process, and all kinds of different things are there, and a lot of it, most of it, I haven't even touched... When you start opening up your nervous system chemically, when you can start roving around in it--or actually, your subconscious plays a stronger role, you're more aware of these things in your subconscious, and your conscious is "wigging out"~ if you haven't got things straightened up, it's going to be a horrifying fucking world, and all of these things were coming out of my fucking mind. It wasn't really happening. JS: Well, when I get into it, I'm still coming up against the facts. Like the scene I told you about, wandering through the street on peyote. I was seeing more than I normally do.... those are the realities. I can see more and react faster and in a much more adequate way toward those realities, if I allow myself to be continually presented with the facts--and in a more relaxed setting.... DC: If you really take everybody else's things in, you can send off things of your own to them. That's what really happens. JC: A lot of times, you automatically get paranoid that things start falling into a pattern in your mind. LW: The most discomfort that I experienced in situations is confusion. That's the one thing--in psychedelic states--that I can't take. My mind usually seems to be so ordered, that when I see a social group in a ...?.. (confused?)-type situation, and that's only been once. At that time, there were a great number of people that weren't on psychedelics~ that were into... a... JS: Funny bag. LW: Not necessarily. What I mean is a characteristic, a young reefer-head situation. I was trying to get out of this. It annoys me. But it was around me. JS: Some people's ego-clinging can be so inflexible, and their hearts so untouchable, that it puts them way out on a limb. They withdraw and act out stereotypes so much, and they can't see why. Like my interacting with Sue the other day. Since-then:-I ve been able to open up a new line of communication with her, and we talk to each other with the heart, and flow along in that manner. JC: I think your concept of psychedelics and ego-loss is an oversimplification. It's sort of hindering the whole thing. For one thing, the terms seem to be taken from a weird para-psychological system that really, I don't think --is applicable to anything. Western psychology takes away from the individual the incentive to understand himself. It gives you this weird system-- at least that is what I've done--taking what they say about psychology and saying "well that's me -that's how I work and that's how I function." And when I get into these psychedelic things, I get all these weird preconditions about..."transcending my ego." But really you get into it better, if you just become conscious of people--and of yourself, and your interactions with them. You know, I don't think the whole thing is bullshit, its just based on the language that's used. Western psychology is really a non-psychology, and all it's really accomplishing is that its making the individual give up the responsibility of being himself-and starting to think in a system. JS: That's just like we were talking about, the other day. In a historical religious view, it seems as though both the eastern and western ideologies are so... negative. They talk about "giving up" the "ego" or "transcending the ego"... whatever they call it-- Its all the same thing. Here we are, sensitive, sensible people trying to live in an antagonistic civilization. I think that a balance is in order, but it is necessary to affirm and emphasize positive values to bring about this balance. There's a much more positive outlook happening. There's this thing about feeling, too. The cat was right when he said that you have to perceive Tao by Mind and Heart, together. The biggest hang-up that I had-- that I still have--although I've adapted to it, now --LSD or any psychedelics, that morning-glory seed experience of mine--these catalysts turn on huge reservoirs of feeling. Male and female who are lucky to be together to let this feeling flow together-- but as long as I am not permitted this experience, I get an extreme reaction-- while under the influence of these catalysts. The expressions of my feeling are not well received. The outflow of these expressions is stunted. I get into extreme reactions, like feeling my skin crawling--nervous tensions--psychosis. If couples do it, they should be able to make it all the way, without hang-ups. JC: ...but when we get into the dark, with all these hallucinations happening, like her eyes are there shining out at you, and her face starts turning different... forms and colors... We stayed about two hours with all the lights out. I forgot that I had a body. It was a pure mind-feeling thing. Just floating around, nowhere in space, nowhere in time. This thing happened, like we'd been here for eternity. When we turned on a light, I was embarrassed to find the realities that were around me-- the room--going back into this thing. DC; That there were actually people outside. JC: It was the same reality, but it was a different--just like a film-layer of it. The whole structure sort-of existed, but in a different way. Parts of it were left out, like material realities. JS: All the needs that people have, all the love that they have to give out, the different types of people--actually each is unique. I'm getting to the conviction that all these situations are unique, of the unlimited possibilities of UNIQUENESS in relationships and situations with people. That's a good point that you made, your experience with a woman. Something I realize more and more, in recent experiences I've had with females. When you get down to basic understanding, then you can begin your relationship. Needs and drives are like a diamond. You look at a diamond from a distance and it looks like...a diamond. Look at it closely, however, and you see tiny facets or aspects of it. I'm beginning to realize that this basic understanding is what's needed first. Then we can build our relationships. .... JC: You've experienced it, and sense-patterns were set up in your conscious mind at the time of experience. That pattern is never left out of the nervous system. It's always there. Like going into trips into your subconscious. These patterns start random-flashing into your conscious, and when you get into these waking-walking psychoses things, like I was on for three days, these things were like... one time when I was down by Joe G.'s house, I wasn't there at all! I was off into somewhere... When I was a child, that's what this place reminded me exactly of. When I was a child, I went into a penny-candy store. I bought about ten cents worth of penny candy. ...it was really a weird thing. It was just these flashes. It came back in the emotion, but it was more then the emotional quality. The emotional qualities were...common to many experiences. The conceptual pattern was just a symbolic representation of an emotional thing. This emotional thing... you know... could have been anything. LW: Its the setting for a stage that's not physical at al1. JS: Why I keep confusing and why I keep misinterpreting what you're saying, is because I've never hallucinated at all. Not on psychedelics, at least. The aural effects, like the "singing" of the light bulbs or the passing of distant vehicles--I can recognize and enjoy these sensations, not become confused by them. I've experienced visual distortion, behind morning glory seeds and peyote, if I block out one or the other eye. JC: I am sure that I never understood what the nature of hallucinations were, until I started experiencing them, just last week. I think that every explanation of every hallucination that I've ever read about was a description by a person who observed hallucination. When you observe a hallucination and when you experience a hallucination are two different things. I'm sure that you've experienced hallucinations, but that they've never come out in fruition. But I was so eager, and was so mind-blown that this thing actually happened to me, that I started to... wanted to describe it and communicate it. If people had let me go on, and an outside observer just sat and watched me, and had me tell him what was going on there at the time, and then had himself look at what was going on, he would have seen that there were two different things going on, and that mine was a hallucination. JS: Well, I'll give you an idea of what my two biggest experiences have consisted of... Simply this; Over a period of time, I feel a gradual opening of awareness (although words are incapable of describing that feeling. I can portray the feeling more adequately on the piano, in fact). Things become more real. The fascination is in this state where things are more beautiful. The height isn't too long after it starts, and I feel the KNOWING in me. I feel that I am just a bodily clothing for the KNOWiNG, a physical manifestation of the KNOWING... It flows through me. I like to give an analogy of sea-waves crashing on a beach. At the bottom of each wave, in the foam, in the very last trickle of water as it flows back, there are ideas. ideas. ideas. Most of the time, I want to form a construction. like a dam or sea-wall, a temporary device to correlate these myriads of ideas with overt reality. Superficially, the appearances of so many ideas or pre-conceptual thought-forms, are very confusing--the complexities are confusing. Yet they demand to be related to the overt circumstances. But behind a deep realization, I mean as I begin to get some really deep insight into myself, I find that the Knowing takes care of itself. This is my own personal experience and evaluation. To conclude, after that occurs, after the apex of my insight has been reached, all I try to do is to begin finding ways (or better-- let the ways find themselves) to adapt my vision, this neural pattern that I retain with my environment. That is the "conclusion" of my experiences. JC: Well, the last few days, or the last evening, it was just a matter of smoking a little pot, and these weird changes start happening again. They went off into psychotic hallucination-fantasies, and then went off into the psychedelic flowing and knowing stages, later. The first thing. ..I always tried to evolve these things by reaching them by way of these fantasies. Like right now, if someone started talking to you, and started agreeing with everything you're saying, and really listening to you. If they were perceptive enough to solve little points where your thinking was leading, and if you were willing enough...they could get you into a weird thing. You get to a point where you start getting very paranoid about what is happening. Then you start getting hallucinations. I'm beginning to think that the beginning of the adrenalin happening is fear. That's the way I've been seeing it. JS: I know what you mean although I went through a non-psychedelic thing--the experience of it. For many years, I reasoned through the existentialist and absurdist positions. Camus, Sartre, Neitchze, Kafka, Dostoyevsky, and the others. I tried to test these ideas experientially, to live them, and I came to a point where I just couldn't act. To paraphrase the Tao, it says that he who thinks does not act; he who acts does not think. Well, I got to the first part, but I couldn't figure out the meaning, the full import of the second part. That's where I was when I first tripped out. I had speculated, for many years, on what satori would be like, and I think I have a hint of what it would feel like. When I took the trip, I found out what the second part of the phrase was about. Learning to think with the heart and feel with the mind--just like hearing with the eyes and seeing with the ears. The first part (of the phrase) is only an aspect of the second part. JC: ...this is a beautiful thing. I'd like to really get to this stage more often if I could learn to control it. But it is like a...very... fluid... thing. You have a lot of control over your mind and you can go any way... JS: This is the final stage before satori, by the way. Doubting. Hubert Benoit speaks of it as metaphysical fear. Gautama runs down the origin of ego-based ignorance, in the Diamond Sutra, I believe. JC: I believe that... I think that my interpretation is as before. The people who want satori, they go through a lot of...they believe something...they have an instructor. JS: They have their own pedagogy for satori JC: I bought this book today, Illusions and Delusions of Supernatural and the Occult, with a forward by Julian Huxley. He said that the cat wrote a very good book, but the problem was, that it got too scientific. Just because you don't have a lot of empirical evidence for things happening doesn't mean that there aren't things happening. Science alone is not going to "solve" all the questions, and research into higher forms of psychic research--such as telepathy-- is not absurd. They're very resoluble and things should be done with them. Huxley said that the co-relationship between psychic activity and nervous activity has never been established. It may be a primitive concept to conceive that your psyche is even a function of your nervous system. Like the cat who wrote an Autobiography of a Yogi. .. The yogi supposedly went into a "transcendent state" in which his body was preserved, and they sealed his tomb some twelve days after. He had "died " and his body supposedly functioned, but he was in some transcendent thing. JS: This is very interesting, because in contemporary religious thought, in eastern thought, yogic practices have been under criticism. Yoga can "miss the point" ..the point being "seeing into ones own nature," and likewise getting high on psychedelics will not be adequately fruitful unless this aspect of insight is recognized. There arises much difficulty and complication in getting at the truth of the matter. JC: When I read the same things in one day, like I read a yogi making a statement, then I read a person like Julian Huxley, who is one of the leading scientific thinkers in micro-biology say the same thing. He says that we should not think that we're going to learn anything from appearances, and since there is no correlation between nervous activity and psychic activity, there is no reason to assume that we can build a science of psychology around neurology. This book, here, is dedicated to some doctor who was a student of Pythagoras, who was the first one to postulate that the brain is the center of mind-activity. But really, nobody has established that it is. Julian Huxley is getting into a thing where each individual cell has its own unit of psychic activity, and he claims that all the brain does is correlate the information to the rest of the body. It's like an inter-communications control center, where one cell can communicate with another cell. They all have their intelligence-life. Our psyche is an accumulation, built up around the cells like a manifestation... an accumulation of... But all these things don't tell us anything. They can straighten our thinking out a lot, because I was thinking in this very strict terminology, for a long time, JS: Alpert and Leary seem to think that we can experience these things, while influenced or stimulated by psychedelic drugs. But my whole experience with these drugs has been an overt thing. Possibly because I've done so much introspection, anyway. JC: The introspection part of the psychedelic things I've been getting into, have brought me to create a disassociation. Probably if I carried that further, I could just create and create and create all types and just split up into infinity. Maybe that's the way of getting back to each cell's individual intelligence. When you operate externally, you have to use an accumulation of all your factors. If you start projecting your internal splits externally, then you get into a lot of confusion. That's what was happening to me. I think that there is a distinction that has to be made between internal and external psychic activity, as well as breaking down the structure of psychology built up on neurology. There is no definite establishment between the two things. So, all this just creates a point of view that we don't really know what's happening. I won't really begin to know what's happening until I start building a reservoir of experience--interaction with other people, instead of trying to impose preconditions upon...happenings. JS: Trying to adapt the vision to personal relations, and to receive the reality of this thing from other people. Learning how to live in an environment where all this is taking place. |
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William Braden's The Private Sea: LSD & The Search For God, draws a connection between LSD and the upheaval of new age religions he calls the "New Theology". Braden questions how "the drug movement appeared to dovetail very neatly with what might be called the Eastern movement, and it might well be asked if this occurred naturally or under duress; that is did the two fit together, or were they made to fit?"(23) The fact was that early government research in the 1950s, didn't produce any evidence or theme of induced religious experience connected with psychedelic drugs. The confluence of the Eastern movement and consciousness movement was an insight to the powerful suggestibility of psychedelics, and almost a century of growing interest in Eastern philosophy, which laid the groundwork for an anti-materialist viewpoint. There is no doubt the psychedelic experience gave first-hand and life-changing mystical experiences for many of its subjects, but there are also many shallow and self-indulgent users attracted to any high that changes consciousness. In The Varieties of Psychedelic Experience, Masters and Huston side with the authenticity of religious experience within the context of a psychedelic drug-state, yet they also concede the susceptibility of suggestion, setting and anticipation in the context of a quasi-Eastern experience. "To at least some extent the responsibility for this seduction of the innocent must lie with the authors as Huxley, Alan Watts, and others who in their various writings imposed upon the psychedelic experience essentially Eastern ideas and terminology..."(24) The seduction of the innocent was an alibi once used to condemn the comic book industry in the 1950s for supposedly inducing violence in its readers due to the graphic content in comic books. Life-changing and psychedelic /religious experience being framed and understood through Eastern thought, was an entirely appropriate response. One criticism (still in effect) of the psychedelic experience is how it presents a threat to rigid monotheistic religions. Alan Watts describes the opposition against psychedelic experience as basically an opposition between mystical values and the traditional religious and secular values of Western society. "The mystical experience is a clear threat to traditional religious concepts. The Judaic-Christian tradition has a monarchical image of God, and monarchs, who rule by force, fear nothing more than insubordination. The Church has therefore always been highly suspicious of mystics, because they seem to be insubordinate and to claim equality or, worse, identity with God. For this reason, John Scotus Erigena and Meister Eckhart were condemned as heretics. This was also why the Quakers faced opposition for their doctrine of the Inward Light, and for their refusal to remove hats in church and in court. A few occasional mystics may be all right so long as they watch their language, like St. Teresa of Avila and St. John of the Cross, who maintained, shall we say, a metaphysical distance of respect between themselves and their heavenly King."(25) The more likely threat posed by a psychedelic experience is that it has lead several generations into self-discovery, self-realization and an aversion of materialism. This largely affluent, highly educated population dove into lifestyle changes, spiritual, cultural and self-improvement pursuits, often loosing focus of political and social changes. The threads of psychedelic culture have been adopted and absorbed by club kids, techno, trance music and the faddish appropriation of 'the primitive' and tribal cultures. The lure of the primitive is one thread related to the 'metaphysical consortium' percolating through culture long before the hippie movement began. Psychedelic and tribal identity is now as close as a television screen or ipod, and is spread throughout commercial design, music and fashion. Commercial culture (Main Street) has co-opted much of the energy and originality of what drove the sixties and has developed an alternative cultural programming to sell it and package it back to new waves of eager consumers. Techinical skill is no longer needed within this karioke environment of dj computer culture and myspace pages. Anyone with an ipod, sequencer and internet connection can reach millions. The history of LSD is an intriguing subject, a "mind-control" product developed ironically and strangely through covert CIA and government programs, to be used in espionage and chemical warfare. The book Acid Dreams, vividly reconstructs this multi-layered secretive history, showing how a handful of "inner space" pioneers interacted with government agents to unknowingly produce massive changes in society. The LSD story is a script so warped by bizarre circumstance and wrapped up in undercover conspiracy and double agents, that a truly balanced view may never reach the light of day. Psychedelic culture was slowly emerging since the late 1950s, edged forward by a maturing “beatnik” culture and a better awareness of civil rights and other social movements. By 1966, the era of "peace, love and understanding" was beginning to blossom full-on, fertilized by the rapid wide spread dissemination of LSD, and the alternative press. The "psychedelic age" opened a metaphysical window throughout the world, and continues to have a strong influence upon modern culture. Before 1966, and the laws banning hallucinogens, the importation and use of these drugs was legal yet difficult to obtain. Evidence of a popular mass psychedelic movement began around 1963 with the publication of the Psychedelic Review, a quarterly review published 1963-1971, edited by Ralph Metzner, Paul Lee and Gunther Weil. A guidebook to the history, chemistry and ethno-biological use of mind expansion drugs, the Psychedelic Review was the first journal to make this information available. High Times magazine was launched in 1974, as an outgrowth of the underground press movement. Begun as a kind of glossy National Lampoon style advocate of the pot-smoking lifestyle, High Times could brag of a monthly circulation of almost half-a-million, achieved without the support of a national distributor. Tomas King Forçade, founder of High Times, was named director of the Underground Press Syndicate [UPS] in 1969 at the 'Revolutionary Media Conference' held in Ann Arbor, Michigan. He pointed to the need of UPS media to "identify some sort of base that the straight press can't co-opt. Either sex, drugs or politics."(26) Taking his own advice, High Times soon became the Playboy magazine of drug use and an alternative forum for civil liberties. Albert Einstein commented on spirituality in 1930: "The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing. One cannot help but be in awe when he contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality. It is enough if one tries merely to comprehend a little of this mystery every day. Never lose a holy curiosity... The finest emotion of which we are capable is the mystic emotion. Herein lies the germ of all art and all true science. Anyone to whom this feeling is alien, who is no longer capable of wonderment and lives in a state of fear is a dead man. To know that what is impenetrable for us really exists and manifests itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty, whose gross forms alone are intelligible to our poor faculties - this knowledge, this feeling ... that is the core of the true religious sentiment. In this sense, and in this sense alone, I rank myself among profoundly religious men."(27) Most of what was lost in the 1960s can be found in Einstein’s statement. In a sense we’ve become a nation of Dead Men; surrounded by fear, lost to curiosity, devoid of mystic emotion and a spiritual nature. The revolution Einstein developed in the sciences was echoed and reflected in time and space changes in the arts and religion; multi-layered cubist and futurist platforms, jazz, theater and later psychedelic and formless "happening" artists, remolded time and space, allowing multiple viewpoints in one glance. Einstein's electric white- haired visage became the poster child for the cosmic bending distortions of the time/space continuum. Some byproducts of this distortion were demonstrated by Jimi Hendrix's note-bending dexterity and tone wavering feedback, or the pulsing optical illusions of liquid lightshows. The process of Einstein's genius was of questioning the mind, of pushing human consciousness beyond its limits. This was the domain of the "Private Sea," a personal time conducive to absorb, feel and know a cosmic truth. In the late 1950s, Milton Cohen, a professor at the University of Michigan began his experiments with what he termed "Space Theater" -essentially an early psychedelic light show that immersed the viewer in 360 degrees of colored lights, mirrors, and prismatic projections. Cohen performed as part of Ann Arbor's Once Group, along with composer Gordon Mumma and Robert Ashley. They would bring their expanded cinematic art and early electronica sound to the Red Door Gallery in 1963, and later to the Artists Workshop where an early version of Megaton for Wm Burroughs (Gordon Mumma) was performed. These alternative forms in art and music, pushed forward the envelope of how far music could take us. These changes came at a dizzying speed, driven by a growing ecstatic culture, mirroring the roots of early modernism and earlier futurist platforms. The overload of sound pushed through psychedelic effects, has tinted almost all forms of music heard today. The development of instruments such as the moog and arp synthesizer coincided with the need to hear an expanded sound dimension. The entire multi-media expansion in the arts fed off the relationship to psychedelics. The psychedelic revolution was a chemical based turning point - a wide sweeping change that has effected both science, poetry, arts and music of its time. As the atomic age was the physical consequence of Einstein's genius, the mass computer and internet age had its foundation set firmly in psychedelia. Its an ironic and perhaps conspiratorial manner, that both the psychedelic movement and internet have their foundations planted in government sponsored programs, never intended for widespread use. In January of 2006, the chemist inventor of LSD, Albert Hoffman, was feted in Basel, Switzerland, for his 100th birthday. Over a thousand people were in attendance. Scholars, scientists and academic seminars examined the drugs contribution to society. Nobel Prize Winner Francis Crick, who discovered the structure of DNA, was said to have been inspired in his discovery by a vision he had on LSD. Attending the symposium in honor of Albert Hoffman, was Apple-cofounder Steve Jobs, who has often been quoted describing his LSD experience as "one of the two or three most important things he has done in his life." In his book, What the Doormouse Said, technology writer John Markoff describes the technological history of the personal computer, and how LSD and the 60s counterculture directly and significantly inspired and shaped the invention of the PC and internet culture. This was one of the first books to cross-check the cultural forces that helped create the advanced technology that would shape our day-to-day lives and the way we conduct daily business. In the late 60s, the computer was transformed from a cold bureaucratic, government controlled tool to the user-friendly personal tool we take for granted today. This transformation evolved out of a small group of Menolo Park/ Stanford University techno "heads" - heavy psychedelic users and computer hackers. Among this group was Douglas Englebart, an early LSD researcher in the 50s and 60s, who was the inventor of the computer mouse. In 1968, Englebart gave a public presentation at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI), where he discussed screen cursors, video conferencing, hyperlinks, cut-and-paste, and eventually placing the computer into the hands of everyday citizens. His "Augmented Human Intellect" lectures at Stanford were light-years ahead in time, deep visionary insights that would eventually have a revolutionary impact.(28) Filming these Englebart lectures was Stewart Brand, a graduate of Ken Kesey's Acid Tests and full-on member of the Merry Pranksters. Inspired by Englebart's vision of the personal computer, Brand would create The Whole Earth Catalog. In 1968, this was essentially a print version of what the internet would become. The Whole Earth Catalog was an influential counterculture publication, a deep philosophical mail-order catalog of do-it-yourself alternative culture, experimentalism, and universal connectivity that led to the creation of Earth Day and the mass environmental movement. In a conversation with Markoff, Brand cites an LSD vision as giving him this visionary idea in 1966: viewing the earth from space. At the time, NASA would not release images of the earth, and Brand saw the image as an iconic and powerful symbol that people needed to see. This set about a campaign helped in part by Buckminster Fuller, and in 1972, the earth-in-space photo was released and became the cover image of the Whole Earth Catalog. The image helped define the earth as a stranded blue island, vulnerable and floating in the void. It helped to spark Earth day, the ecology/enviornment movements and global awareness. Brand later went on to create the Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link or WELL, one of the first successful online communities and forerunner of the network of blogs we find today. Buckminster "Buckey" Fuller (1895-1983), was a philosopher, inventor, architect, mathematician, visionary, futurist, poet and cosmologist. As designer of the geodesic dome, and globalist, he was an inspiration to the communalism network and spirit of the 1960s. Fuller's great aunt was Margaret Fuller, who along with Ralph Waldo Emerson, published the literary journal The Dial, which first published Henry David Thoreau, author of Walden, a touchstone of do-it-yourself culture. Buckminster adopted the spiritual and connectivity idea of American Transcendentalism, something he felt a direct link with through his great Aunt Margaret. Fuller was able to work within science and industry to promote solutions and efficiencies he found within technology that also recognized and worked with the universal patterns he saw inherent within nature. He invented the phrases, "Doing More with Less," "Dare to be naïve," and "Spaceship Earth." Fuller's mind embodied the psychedelic spirit, his books on synergy and his manifesto, A Manual for Spaceship Earth,(29) continue to inspire and intrigue generations of eco-friendly earth walkers. The issue of psychedelics will forever be mired in controversy. Demonized by most fronts of the media, LSD still invokes the crazed image of serial killer Charles Manson, or suicide jumpers "flying high" off of tall buildings. On the flipside, the psychedelic aesthetic has produced a diversity of visual and musical art forms, a variety of new delights anyone can enjoy. Those who've had the experience of expand awareness, already know the mind to be a deep and 'spiritualized' private sea, capable of almost anything. Its unnecessary to imbibe psychedelics to enjoy and benefit from the experience. As Jean Baudrillard has noted, "We live everywhere already in an 'esthetic' hallucination of reality."(30) The digital age mimics the psychedelic as its co-opted and simulated in almost all forms of art and design. The psychedelic is a commodity that surrounds us. Our present day is an inheritance from the 60s and earlier tribal shamanic cultures. Ecstatic culture surrounds us and has been fashioned into an easily accessable and accepted aesthetic. The culture of the present has been stripped of its freedom and distinctiveness. What remains, has been redesigned and packaged as a commercial filled part of an endless snaking mass-media. We've arrived at a point where all creative possibilities are there for our use, yet we are enchained and consumed by a social economy based on marketing to the detriment of all else. We are living in a kind of waking dreamland, tuned into a dulling drone of marketing and consumer delirium, that is re-enforced with every image and consumer product we come into contact with. Our somnambulistic consumer habits are derived from marketing studies, past buying habits and “reality” programming. There’s no short-circuitting antidote, yet the psychedelic journey and the Eastern path stand together as a route of non-participation. Twin-trees that shade and embrace the cosmic person over the consumer. Survival in this new electronic flatland depends on how well we can adapt to global servitude, surrounded by the neon-dusted, 'Blade Runner', tattooed, manga shaped “Matrix” universe that has become our own desert of the real.(31) -- Cary Loren, 2007 |
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------------------------------------------------ 1 Aldus Huxley, Moksha: Classic Writings on Psychedelics and the Visionary Experience (Park Street Press, Rochester, VT, 1999), p.107 2 www.wikipedia.com definition; psychedelic 3 Wasson, R. Gordon; Hoffman, Albert; Ruck, Carl A.P. The Road to Eleusis: Unveiling the Secret of the Mysteries (Hermes Press, 1998, second revised edition) The mysteries of Eleusis and the origin of Soma are two of the great-unexplained secrets of history. Road to Eleusis is the first to propose an answer. We could speak of entheogens or, in adjectival form, of entheogenic plants or substances. In a strict sense, only those vision-producing drugs that can be shown to have figured in shamanic or religious rites would be designated entheogens, but in a looser sense, the term could also be applied to other drugs, both natural and artificial, that induce alterations of consciousness similar to those documented for ritual ingestion of traditional entheogens. ('Entheogens,' Chapter 7, page 139. Carl A P Ruck, Jeremy Bigwood, Danny Staples, Jonathan Ott, & R. Gordon Wasson) 4 Wasson, R. Gordon; Hoffman, Albert; Ruck, Carl A.P. The Road to Eleusis: Unveiling the Secret of the Mysteries (Hermes Press, 1998, revised edition) p. 148 It was also in this book that the idea of replacing the words psychedelic/hallucinogenic with entheogen was first proposed; (p.139). 5 Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Works of Emerson, Representative Men www.rwe.org 6 Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Works of Emerson, Representative Men www.rwe.org 7 see www.thesophy.org for online texts by Blavatsky, and a history of the organization. 8 J. Krishnamurti. http://www.kfa.org/biography.php biography and home of the Krishnamurti Foundation of America 9 "It is true that some people say they do not seek happiness but knowledge. Others say that they seek not happiness; they seek action. That is all very good; but examine the hearts and minds of average men, or of ordinary mortals. You will find that the ultimate goal which they all set before them, the ultimate goal they all seek directly or indirectly, consciously or unconsciously, is happiness, nothing but happiness.... Heaven is within you, seek Happiness not in the objects of sense; realize that Happiness is within yourself." The complete lecture of "Happiness Within" is located online at: http://www.ramatirtha.org/vol1/happiness.htm 10 The Self Realization Fellowship has a California based retreat and online presence at http://www.yogananda-srf.org/ 11 The Psychedelic Review published 1963-1971 and was an important circulator of information about the psychedelic experience and mind expansion. The entire archives of the Psychedelic Review are available online at: http://www.maps.org/psychedelicreview/ 12 Timothy Leary 'The Last Message of Aldous Huxley' Psychedelic Review, Vol.1 No.3, 1964, p. 271. Available at: http://www.maps.org/psychedelicreview/ 13 Arthur Klep quote from his book Millbrook, from major principles of the Neo-American church, online at: http://okneoac.com/m/chs/ch10.html aslo see The Boo Hoo Bible. (Ne-American Church). Kleps was an iconoclast who wanted to discard the eastern trappings that surrounded psychedelic usage, his psychedelic Neo-American religion was part anarchy, humor and Dadaism and had charismatic appeal among 60s youth. 14 See other historic letters and declassified CIA documents at the Acid Dream website: http://www.levity.com/aciddreams/dox.html 15 This pattern of Sinclair documenting his life and times would continue through his entire life. This documentation would take the form of letters, newspaper columns, books, recordings, radio programs, podcasts, etc.. 16 John Sinclair, Realizations of Peyotemind and After, (Book Beat Gallery, Oak Park, 2002) p.3. the original manuscript is in a 1963 student notebook at the Bentley Historical Library, Ann Arbor, MI. 17 Realizations of Peyotemind, p. 3,7 , 11. 18 Conversation with John Sinclair and the author 12/05 19 Interview with John Sinclair by the author, 12/05 20 John Sinclair, prison Interview with Peter Steinberger for Big Fat Magazine, 1970, reprinted in Guitar Army, p.182 21 John Sinclair. Guitar Army, p.306. 22 This interview was transcribed and provided by James Semark. It appears in an abridged format. 23 William Braden, The Private Sea LSD & The Search For God (Quadrangle Books, Chicago, 1967) p. 78. 24 Robert Masters and Jean Huston, The Varieties of Psychedelic Experience (Park Street Press, (Park Street Press, Vermont, 2000) p. 260. 25 Alan Watts, 'Psychedelics and Religious Experience' http://www.psychedelic-library.org/watts.htm 26Tomas King Forçade, quoted in Paul Krassner's introduction to The High Times Reader (Nation Books, New York, 2004) np. 27 Albert Einstein. Quote is from the original source as an article that appeared in the New York Times Magazine on November 9, 1930 pp 1-4. It has been reprinted in Ideas and Opinions, Crown Publishers, Inc. 1954, pp 36 - 40. It also appears in Einstein's book The World as I See It, Philosophical Library, New York, 1949, pp. 24 - 28. 28 John Markoff, What the Doormouse Said: How the 60s Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry (Viking, NY, 2005) Markoff goes into great detail about the various subcultures, hackers and outsider scientists who made contributions to the communal thinking that contributed to the computer revolution. 29 Buckminster Fuller. Manual For Spaceship Earth available online at: http://www.bfi.org/operating_manual.htm 30 Jean Baudrillard, Simulations (New York: Semiotext(e) and Jean Baudrillard, 1983), p.148 31 “desert of the real” is a quotation by the resistance leader Morpheous from the 1999 film The Matrix, "Welcome to the desert of the real," he says, as an ironic greeting amid the ruins of a burned out world. Graphics are from vintage Notes From the Underground magazine and Goose Lake Gags comics. |
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