|
|
The Man Who Turned on the WorldMichael Hollingshead9. 'A Gram is Worth More Than a Damn'1968
(Anonymous—Found in a book in cell-block beneath Bristol Central Prison)
Returning to America after an absence of nearly four years was much more than a sentimental journey, much more than just filling in time; I was a man trying to maintain his soul alive. Keep the candle flame ablaze.... When all was growing dark. It was the wriggling to avoid death, essentially a poetic thing, undertaken without either rationality or reason. I wanted to probe something solid to live by. And travel was an available means to see, look, find—'la vraie vie'. My internal space had changed since Millbrook and our first brief experiment in 'transpersonative living', when acid was the lance with which to ride after the Grail. There was now (1968) little good acid around, and what there was—the so-called 'street acid'—came mainly from California. There was something wrong with the synthesis; it was not pure. And you were never sure what it was exactly that you were taking, so I only dropped it on those rare occasions when someone gave me either 'Sandoz acid' or 'crystal acid'. I think the problem for the underground chemists manufacturing clandestine acid was shortage of ergot, without which the synthesis of d-LSD-25 is impossible. Until 1965, supplies of ergot could be bought with little or no difficulty from three or four European chemical companies; but pressure from Washington put a stop to this, doubtlessly hopeful that this would lead to an end of clandestine LSD. In one sense the Federal authorities were right. The underground ceased turning out d-LSD-25; instead, they discovered a wholly synthetic substance, akin to d-LSD-25 in so far as it produced marked change in consciousness. But the new synthetic acid lacked, in my opinion, that invisible non-pharmacological factor—the magical, spiritual component that was really what acid was all about. Sure, the new stuff 'worked' in the sense that any mind-altering chemical 'works' to produce subjective effects within the body, but it didn't seem to produce in those who used it any particularly noticeable elevation of either head or heart; at least, that was the conclusion I had reached in London. But it was—and probably still is—an unpopular view amongst the 'cognoscenti', who claim that some of the street acid is capable of producing positive subjective effects of a 'long-lasting nature', though they readily admit that a lot of the stuff sold as 'pure acid' is actually methylamphetamine (a concentrated form of amphetamine, first developed by the U.S. Army) or a stripped-down ergotamine compound by modern molecular chemistry. My evaluation had nothing to do with the notion that a wholly synthetic drug produced a wholly synthetic experience—the intellectual response—but was based on direct, first hand experience (about thirty trips with street acid in all). And in each session I felt there was something it lacked—it was too 'electric', too 'speedy' and too 'mind-shattering'. The earlier clarity of 'insight' which I had obtained via the Sandoz acid was replaced by confusion, brokenness, words and worlds thrown into absolute dismemberment or even, absolute chaos, though, I must add, often coupled with a feeling that I can only describe as 'sublime inflation', a superabundance of emotive energy; but it could not signify; more a passionate flame and less the life-giving sun, as it were. I have read that d-LSD-25 is a semi-synthetic substance, of which ergot is the organic, i.e. 'living' part. And to say that the 'spiritual' component is contained within the ergot molecules must sound like a superstition to some, but what I intend here is to suggest that 'pure' acid has 'metapolitical' implications—there is a hidden truth or statement in each acid session which is unaccountably missing in most of my experiences using the clandestine stuff, Owsley and 'white-lightning' notwithstanding. There is, it seems to me, a qualitative decline in the subjective acid experience which is something that does not admit of scientific analysis; it is an intuitive thing I'd say. At any rate, I personally observed a voluntary moratorium during this period and would take nothing until I knew the exact chemical synthesis and where it was made and by whom. Besides, there was little or no shortage of good marijuana or hashish, our so-called 'mild psychedelics'. A psychedelic is the solvent which dissolves the vigorous stereotypes of egocentric behaviour—it transforms the familiar self without changing a thing; it expands the moment: yet there isn't anything we can count on or accumulate; its value is poetic—it helps ferry us across the abyss and we may thus gain a new amplitude; it is not a 'psychological' experience but a poetic one. It is best of course to undergo such metamorphosis by means of tuning in to nature, though it is only the very rarest of Westerners who can do this; we seem unable to develop our own power of concentration sufficiently to live consciously and continuously in our deepest self. We cannot become more than we are. It may be that we cannot even become what we are—'there is only becoming' e.e. cummings says; for us, then, Being is becoming; yet it remains possibility only, never achievement. It is all a matter of recognition; we must become capable of visualising ideas in order to live at the very heart of our being. It is all so simple that any child could do it (if only we don't try to explain). Or: only a child can do it.
Cambridge, Mass., is the home of both Harvard College and M.I.T.
and stands across from the city of Boston, separated by the River
Charles, about thirty minutes by taxi from Logan airport. It was
snowing when I reached Gunther's house in Mount Auburn Street;
the town was as if deserted by man. The gigantic apartment block
on the opposite side of the street towered up from a snowy wasteland,
surrounded by a few straggling trees. Every now and again one
saw the lights of a car slowly moving along the driveway flanking
the river; visibility was soon almost reduced to nil. The lady
taxi-driver swore as I paid the fare, wishing she'd stayed in
Boston. Then she propositioned me. 'We could get to know each
other in the parking lot,' she added, waving to the back seat.
'There's not much else to do on a night like this.' I said I was
bushed after the long flight from London but this only seemed
to add spice to her game. 'I've only made it with one English
guy before, and he was the best ball I've ever had, though a fucking
bastard otherwise,' she added. Why not? She was pretty, in her
late twenties. 'Okay. Let's get to the parking lot,' I said. 'Crazy!
But in case you're kinky or something, you know, want to cut
off my tits or anything, Jack-the-Ripper style, I'll blow your
brains out with this.' And reaching inside the glove compartment
she suddenly produced an enormous revolver. 'Protection, you understand.
If you want to live in Boston, baby, you've gotta have a piece.
Bam! Get it?' 'Are those things legal here?' I asked, seemingly
dumb. 'Legal, regal; the fuzz ain't gonna bust ya for a piece,
though they get pretty rough if you kill someone. No, it's protection.'
'But what if everyone carried a gun, then what...?' 'Then you'd
be stupid not to, right? Anyway, I was only kidding. It ain't
got no bullets in the chamber, maybe just two or three. I use
it to scare drunks who get fresh.'
'Aphorism is instant dialectic Like the historical Oxford Movement the Psychedelic Movement is a Western response to the pathogenic signs of our inner disruption, and is recognised as such by the New Radicals and by a tiny circle of metaphysicians in both the West and the East, just as the revolutionary anarchist movement was a century ago. For LSD is anarchistic, it shatters our complacency, explodes our stereotypes of ideology and dogmas, wakes, shakes, and makes the inner sleeping man from the somnambulist gravity of rectitude or righteousness. It is the madness that revels in the categories of being in which not one member is sober. Madness need not necessarily be a cause for gloom—our greatest blessing, says Socrates in the Phaedrus, come to us by way of madness—provided; and the madness comes from God, he adds, someone like the God Dionysus or the spirit Mercurius or Siva, a condition which cannot be programmed, something whose truth lies beyond all power of words. Yet smile at our sad impasse. We cannot simply let ourselves go. 'I am fully aware of this,' Ionesco says, 'teach me how to untie the knots. I know I ought to undo them on my own and that this is a task everyone must carry out for himself, but at least give me a little guidance, so that I can see how the bonds I cannot loosen are tied.' But no help is forthcoming. The only reality is the truth of our own contradictory nature; truth is simply a more efficient form of fiction, Maya like everything else. Can anyone teach Ionesco to untie the knots? 'The principal instrument of monopoly and control that prevents expansion of consciousness is the word lines controlling thought, feeling and apparent sensory impressions of the human host,' says Burroughs, but he makes a common error for he fails to distinguish the word from the experience. Another answer: according to Joey Mellen and Bart Huges, is that it is man's rigid cranium that prevents him from expanding his consciousness, not his words... 'When the skull seals the tide of brainbloodvolume is Ionesco, the new message is: 'If you want to get ahead get a hole in your head.' Perhaps the advantage is with Tibet where prayer wheels are another way of arriving at the same result—an egoless involvement with the abyss inside the self—any fool can do it: the mechanism is external while the mind if left vacant; and vacancy is not the worst condition of the mind; the go, being non-existent, does not have to store, retrieve, catalogue, analyse or identify. But perhaps the last word can be left to Norman O. Brown, speaking of the place (and need) for the 'transforming spirit of play' and of that great revolutionary intellectual of the twentieth century, James Joyce: 'who reduced all that solemn nonsense to nonsense leading us in the path to which Wittgenstein directed us from disguised nonsense to patent nonsense a transition that is accomplished not by linguistic analysis but by poetry.' Leafless trees, the cold, clear air of winter; wide, snow-covered streets on which students wander about, whose physical appearance is different from when I was last here. Odd, really, how quickly the young respond to change. Whilst only seven or eight years ago the style was teeth-and-tweeds, button-down shirts and college ties, the mode of dress now veered on the far side of informality—jeans, denim shirts, cowboy boots and Afghan coats; and beards and long hair were everywhere prevalent. It was as if one psychic atmosphere had spread from California to Italy. Millions of similar people everywhere in the West. And their lifestyle was loose, unstructured; they seemed to roll on like the waves, whose movement is regulated by invisible forces emanating from the moon. They were beings who were in possession of a secret which provided the impetus to their lives; their aims were more inward; they had a feeling for values; they had achieved a certain level of consciousness. Were they not somehow more open than in any age previously, which gave them this new amplitude and a sense of purpose? And if you were to ask them, 'What for the future?' it is to themselves they would point. What folly to believe in a Providence which guides life from the outside! This is the change in itself. Where growth is guided by conscious volition, development of the personality takes place; everyone progresses, marches onward, further and further, and no end is in sight. Here was a new generation for whom time is real before eternity. How good for the mental health of modern youth to imbibe a little Eastern wisdom. Everybody who believes in himself, no matter who he is, stands on a higher level than the timorous—yes, the formative power of the Brahmanic and Buddhistic, but also the Islamic East, can help us achieve the ideal of universal brotherhood, whereas the received teachings of the West fail in spite of their ideals. For whatever power the spiritual message has exerted over the minds of men has surely come from the unique degree of involvement which it posits between the divine and the here and now. As I wandered the Cambridge streets, I thought of my earlier days of largely harum-scarum activity and what had happened to us all across these random and haphazard years of pilgrimage. And sometimes, when I am in a reflective mood, I wonder if there is a secret connection between spiritual necessity and empirical accident? How is it that this strange drug LSD had such immense consequences, and was discovered seemingly by accident alone? For the revolution in sensibility produced results which the LSD-users did not—and perhaps could not—foresee. But this is true for all revolutionaries—revolutions have to be considered as very complex series of actions initiated in highly particular circumstances and at particular points in time. 'Each age gets the revolution it deserves', is perhaps a truism, yet it is in fact that a small change of empirical circumstances, and the psychedelic revolution would not be the widespread manifestation which it is. It was now possible to see that an acceleration in our brief new renaissance had turned the Leary-Alpert streams into a river and that the whole movement, first of Harvard 1960-61, then of the International Federation for Internal Freedom in 1963-64 and the Castalia Foundation of 1964-67 and the League for Spiritual Discovery of 1966-68, etc., etc., was the result of a series of accidental circumstances in which groups of LSD-users discovered a peculiar disposition in their thought which allowed them to transform a triviality into a profound spiritual belief and allowed them to appreciate individual human existence as the living expression of metaphysical reality, because the psychedelic experience signified the reality and the beauty of the flower of the spirit. And thus the Age of the Flower Children was born out of the individual experience of transcendence, just as, in an earlier age, the Vedic Soma brought the light of consciousness into the world. What is the significance of the psychedelic movement? I do not know myself. I have struggled with the problem for years. But the facts are beyond question: the psychedelic renaissance, like all great periods of culture, cannot be explained altogether out of a demonstrable series of causes. If anything, they seem to owe their existence ultimately to a spiritual influx which bears the unmistakeable stamp of divine grace, something given rather than made. And once the source of inspiration has dried up, no effort and no talent is of any avail. Further, since the height of the psychedelic impetus, the insights have declined, in spite of all the psychedelic sessions which have occurred through these years, and today the LSD-user probably possesses less creative taste than any educated non-user, although they are still spiritually the most developed. What does this signify?—I know only that LSD has decorated the world of ideas. In what then lies LSD's unique quality, its appeal for the person who takes it? Perhaps it is the discovery of the existence of shades of inner meaning one would not normally credit with the capacity for signifying so much. Let us transpose ever so slightly the elements of visionary knowledge, or change the varieties of the spiritual, or use a different method for gaining deeper insights; or place the individual, as he is, into another setting which is subject to different environmental conditions, such as, for instance, a damp, ill-lit and unheated cave somewhere high in the Himalayas: it would be the revelatory 'mystical' experience no longer. I have seen such non-drug revelatory methods for getting westerners 'high' not fifty miles from Kathmandu: they lack the crystal-like clarity or immediacy of the psychedelic experience. The psychedelic experience makes particularly clear what the nature of individuality really is. It must seem a pity to some that anything could be metaphysically real which is manifestly so dependent upon empirical circumstances, in this instance, upon a psychedelic drug. It illustrates, on the other hand, that the spiritual component in man can only become visible subject to special empiric conditions. It doesn't solve the riddle of man's spiritual nature, nor is it a key to a metaphysics of ecstasy (as some thinkers have claimed); no matter how many causes and relations we establish: the essential escapes us. This says little in favour of those who incline to the belief that the LSD-user may thus far participate of metaphysical reality. But the visionary experience is essentially brief; once achieved and expressed, it becomes subject, like everything else, to the merciless downward pull of gravity and the world of three dimensions, that non-miraculous world of appearances we call either prison or home, which is manifest everywhere around me even now as I type these lines. But reality must still count for something, and this is perhaps more true in America (than in any other country I've ever lived in), where prosperity is regarded as normal; he who simply contents himself, i.e. turns himself on, is regarded as feeble. The idea that divine blessedness and prosperity are connected is still effective today: the man who discovers Christ within him will become rich, healthy, an accomplished individual in this lifetime; it is a religious belief that teaches the possibility of uniting one's struggle for the goods of this world with ideal aspirations. The man who is pleasing to God must become rich; the fruits, which hitherto have fallen only to the lot of him who renounces the world, can now be shared by him who affirms it. This is the teaching of 'a religion of democracy'; the materialism of our era is Hallowed in Thy name...
I am constantly relapsing into didactics, though no teacher I;
on the contrary, I discourage any kind of followership, since
my capacity for head-work is limited. I am also without the necessary
information. So I drift; I am that aimless drifting man who, setting
out in the first light of dawn like a ship to sea, never knows
when or with what cargo he will return to port; and to invite
anyone to follow me on such a reckless enterprise would be akin
to negligence, if not actually actionable. One has a few friends,
and of course they help sustain one through periods of change
or difficulty, but in the final analysis, one must chart one's
own drift course through the peculiarities of our modern kind
of existence. It is a situation I once discussed with Tim Leary—who
confided in me his own strategies as a mentor of modern youth,
which again confirmed my belief that he is one of the wisest,
most illuminatory beings that the world has ever known.... The
main theme of his philosophy, which he has dealt with in his book,
The Politics of Ecstasy is the 'seven levels of consciousness—solar,
cellular, somatic, sensual, symbolic, stupor (emotions) and
sleep', what he calls 'the seven tongues of God'; 'seven
dialects of energy, each triggered by the appropriate chemical—LSD,
mescaline, hashish, grass, stimulants, booze, narcotics'.
'The yoga of drugs is of course a key method. The sexual yoga is also key—access to and control of sexual energy. Nothing can be renounced. All is God. Every energy is divine. All must be understood and controlled for spiritual purposes, including the yoga of power. All energy is available to him who accepts the basic energy formula; all energy is available to him who knows that it must not be grabbed, held, possessed or used for any other purpose except spiritual.' (Private correspondence.) It is a beautiful message and one that could become a proper matter of concern for a generation raised on Marx, Dulles, Thieuing gum and Coca-Cola. It is thus not without precedent that Leary, like Socrates before him, should be convicted by his peers of corrupting a nation's youth, for history, like the big wheel in a cosmic funfair, spins slowly towards the final revolution... and mankind has not progressed even one iota. And, most tragic of all, the protoplasm seems happy.
Seeing how many of the original Harvard Psychedelic Project were
working for the Corporation, it was not too difficult to persuade
the university to have me back, this time, however, not as a four-hours-a-week
instructor to third-year graduate students in psychology but as
a trainee librarian at the Harvard University Library. The plan
was that I should work as an assistant curator of Scandinavian
Aquisitions, attend a two-year course in Library Science at Boston's
Sammer's college, and then stay on as a full librarian, with faculty
privileges; and perhaps teach one course after this probationary
period. The authorities were nervous, perhaps understandably,
but in their own way showed a remarkably liberal, open-minded
attitude about having me back.
On the way to Berkeley mention of the raid was made on the FM
news. It seemed that The Messiah had told the desk sergeant that
unless he was released that afternoon he'd have to take 'drastic
action'. He was reported as saying that he'd use his telepathic
powers to cause a two-hour traffic jam on the Bay Bridge during
the evening traffic rush. He was released on a nominal bail, a
few hours later.
'I think we're beginning to develop new capacities just in order to be able to save the world from our trips—you know, pollution, etc.—if for nothing else. Just for survival. The biological news is that in 100 years from now life on earth is finished, so what has to happen is this organism has to adapt real quick and develop new capacities to stem this flow, to maybe head it off somehow. In this scheme of things, politics and all those things belong to the past. They're meaningless, going down the drain.' After a couple of months in Berkeley, we moved to Southern California, to a ranch in Idyllwild near the San Bernardino Forest and the headquarters of the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, a former Los Angeles motor-cycle gang who had taken acid and dropped out of crime and into dope-dealing. And Tim it was who had become their leader/guru/teacher. The ranch was sited a couple of miles along a dirt road off the Palms-to-Pines Highway; the hills at the back overlooked Palm Springs and the desert. It was a beautiful place, and there were some thirty of us living there. Tim lived in a small bungalow with his wife, Rosemary, while I had a room in a smaller building adjacent. The Brothers either lived in the ranch house or in small outbuildings. The ranch hadn't been lived in for over a year, so there was a lot of work to be done. For my part, I built a sauna hut, utilising a couple of old stoves for the purpose and insulating the walls with sand. There was room inside for perhaps half a dozen people, and we'd often retire there in the evenings with a couple of cherry pipes filled with hashish, and sweat and smoke until we'd either pass out or freak out in the heat. I also worked the huge caterpillar bulldozer in an attempt to smooth out some of the bumps in the earth road leading to the ranch, but it kept breaking down or, perhaps due to my inexperience with heavy-duty machinery, it would sometimes swivel off the road and into the ditch and it could take all of us a whole day to get it back on the road again. The summer passed gloriously, and apart from the occasional police helicopter hovering overhead, we were not troubled much by contact with the outside world. There was also a lot of good acid available, and we would celebrate each Full Moon in the mountains, when the sessions would be run along the lines of the Indian Peyote ceremonies—that is, we'd all be seated in a circle around a blazing fire chanting or shaking an Indian rattle to ward off evil spirits. There would also be drums and guitars, and sometimes one of the Brothers would dance around the fire shouting incoherently as though touched with the 'gift of tongues', though you'd hardly call us Pentecostal. We also tried to communicate with flying-saucers of which many had been reported in the skies above the ranch.
However, by the Fall, I was again restless, this time for a more
solitary refuge, somewhere where I could simply be, and preferably
alone. I had met too many people in California, heard too many
things, maybe even taken too much acid. Now I wanted out. And
it was thus to Tonga in the South Pacific that I went...
'Here, let me read you some of what this cat said—"Our women who used to wear a dress, the traditional tupenu and ta'ovala are now clothing themselves in one yard of cloth. Even the huge women use up only one yard, making it so tight that their sharp-shinned legs show and it makes them look thick on the right side and thin on the left." Crazy! Now dig this, "When they are walking in the streets, you can't tell if they are coming or going! This has come from the examples set by the voluntary workers. All the spiritual feelings I experience when I am in the church vanish when these voluntary workers enter the church building with the clothes they wear. Very often I feel like getting up and throwing them out. Therefore I ask the Premier that if a copra boat should come, let us pack them all in it and send them back to America. Soon they will be wearing only underwear to church." But he got no steam from the Premier, who also happens to be the king's brother, Prince Tu'ipelehake. He really took the wind out of the sails, telling this uptight cat, Tu'akoi' that instead of being critical he should be grateful.... "God made their visit possible. It is often a mystery that, without knowing or being acquainted with anyone, they are willing to sacrifice t o give such help. The sacrifice and usefulness have been proved today not only to the Government, but also to the people, the country and the church. Love is repaid with love, and the understanding and the willingness to help is the most important of all. We should consider such gratitude and sacrifice. I believe that if they have sacrificed for Tonga, not one of us here in this house could do more for Tonga. We should be grateful and we have given an oath to be rightful and loving in our work for His Majesty King Tupou IV and the country".' After a few days I had got to know the seven local Peace Corps quite well. We'd spend a lot of time rapping. And there was plenty of grass from their gardens. We also discussed having a 'sunshine' session together, on one of the small uninhabited islands close by. We settled on one weekend, and taking supplies of food and water for two days, we took the motor-boat to a small island of palm trees and golden beaches about three miles from port. I had previously explained at some length what sort of reaction to expect and how to overcome any paranoia by fixing the mind on a natural object like a stone or a coconut, or by chanting the 'Vajra Guru Mantra'—OM AH HUM VAJRA GURU PADMA SIDDHI HUM—which represents the vital essence of the 84,000 sections of the Dharma, 'and in this way attain the siddhis of the wrathful deities'. The session began shortly after we landed. It was a morning of bright golden sunlight and a clear blue sky and sea, no sound from anywhere; a perfect setting. Soon the 'sunshine' began to take effect, and again I was transported into the heart of my intra-atomic self, that place of reconciliation and bliss in which all life lives in the unity of the One. But I was unable to stay there for long; one of the group had begun to declare himself as Jesus Christ and insisted that we were his disciples. And the force of his conviction, coupled with an increased rapidity and volume of his speech, began to take over our heads so that soon we were lost in a maze of contradictory thoughts and feelings, expressed variously in anger, laughter, dismay and fear. In vain I tried to get him to keep quiet, but he continued to expatiate on the evil he saw in life and insisted that we follow him on a crusade to save the world. Very soon the harmony of the session was lost, and people either wandered off by themselves or sat as if transfixed by this Christ figure, submerged under the non-stop repetitious flow of words. As there was nothing now I could do to silence him, I too ambled off along the beach, just hopeful that our new Christ would talk himself into silence by the time I got back. OM AH HUM VAJRA GURU PADMA SIDDHI HUM I intoned as I slowly walked along the shoreline stopping every now and again to pick up a shell or observe the miracle of the sand turtle or the vigorous motion of tiny crabs.... When I got back several hours later, everyone was there and seated around a small fire. Jesus was curiously observing each face one after the other, as if seeking an answer to some private question, a sort of vacant look on his face, an expression of disbelief; but he was mercifully silent. We slept on the beach that night, gazing at the million sparkling stars, thinking, wondering, seeking answers to man's age-old question 'What is the secret of this universe in which we live?' until, exhausted, we finally fell asleep. We returned to Vava'u the next day. The boy Jesus seemed a little embarrassed by what he had said and done, but soon we had him laughing at his own stupidity. He later told me he had been a divinity school student for two years before switching to social science, but after this 'trip' he wondered that perhaps he ought to have stayed on and become a minister. I told him that he could be anything he wanted, this time around. Besides, he was probably serving God better by helping teach Tongans how to run their social services than preaching his word each Sunday in church. I gave him my copy of the New Jerusalem Bible. But it was all too good to last. Already there was gossip on the main island about the Peace Corps growing pot on Vava'u, and now rumour had it that they were taking LSD. This was confirmed when I received a note from the British Consul saying that some questions were being asked about me and the purpose of my stay in Tonga. He was also in possession of a file from the Foreign Office, and the local CIA had filled in a few more details. Would I care to visit him to discuss the matter? It was exactly one month since I first arrived in Tonga when the Minister of Police and about a dozen detectives arrived on Vava'u and started searching for the marijuana beds. The Peace Corps were clearly implicated, and a cable was sent to Washington to this effect. By return came a cable from the Peace Corps Director asking that they return to Washington immediately, when there would be a hearing before the committee. As for myself, I decided to leave before I was kicked out, and soon I was on the jet, this time for New York, where at least it was still possible to smoke pot without getting paranoid, as now even office girls were smoking the stuff, which meant nearly everyone in the city was. And the fellows from the Peace Corps? It seemed that they had not returned to Washington as instructed but had decided to live in Fiji instead, turning on the local Peace Corps, as well as their former colleagues on holiday from Tonga. Again and again I am surprised at the effect that LSD has on people's lives, how it seems to change their directions or goals, making it somehow impossible for them to exist in the formal, structured world so favoured by the Establishment. In this case what a few micrograms of LSD had done was to transform a bunch of ordinary, middle-class Americans with clear-cut expectations and achievement-motivations into missionaries of a new order, for they were now possessed of a self, or of a self-conscious similar to that of the mystics, rishis, and saints. How was such a change accomplished? Only by the realisation of the God within, and by the willingness to accept the validity of this vision, and moreover by the ability to re-create this insight as immediately in terms of a living manifestation: they have made of themselves whatever art it is in the life of each one of them, unconcerned with the trappings of outer forms or appearances: they live according to an inner rhythm, not that of the metronome but of music. They had recognised the Atman within themselves, and now wanted to realise him in the world; they wanted to assist Brahma, whose partial expression they believed themselves to be. Chapter 10 |
Contents | Feedback | Search | DRCNet Library | Schaffer Library