Photo: Hofmann LSD blotter (Erowid library)I recently finished rereading 'Acid Dreams' by Martin A. Lee and Bruce Shlain. Along with 'Storming Heaven' by Jay Stevens, and Andy Roberts's 'Albion Dreaming', this forms part of a trio of books relating tales of consciousness, counterculture, and larger-than-life characters, all connected in one way or another with the history of that classic psychedelic LSD. Fact may or may not be stranger than fiction, but in this case it is certainly every bit as compelling - if you're into that kind of thing, at least.
'Acid Dreams' sheds light on the CIA's involvement with LSD in the 1950s, both in their search for a wonder 'truth drug' and as an agent of incapacitation. The book's particular strength, though, lies in its exploration of the counterculture of 1960s U.S.A., and the relationship psychedelic experience had to its birth, growth, and eventual disintegration.
Media and consumerism have successfully reduced the more significant aspects of this side of 1960s American life (which spilled over into the early 1970s in the U.K.) into a predictable set of cliches, caricatures, and fashion features. 'If you remember the '60s you weren't there' is a typically dumb and trite soundbyte, a translation from alcohol-based assumptions on the effects of drugs into foreign territory. It you were really there, you might just as likely recall it as if it were only last week. Then there are those television rockumentaries of the period, making occasional reference to 'drugs', and daring to show a couple of clips of long-haired dopers taking a toke at a music festival; yet with LSD, the bete noire, getting no more than a passing reference, as if it were an incidental add-on to the main story. All this amounts to a massaging of history, removing its more problematic and threatening aspects: typical Control System tactics.
Most critically, 'Acid Dreams' resurrects the genuine psychic ambience of the mid- and late 1960s in the U.S.A. 'Nearly everything was being questioned and most things tried in an orgy of experimentation that shook the nation at its roots.' (chapter 5, 'Acid and the New Left' section). And central to this upheaval was the growing popularity of LSD, which opened doorways in the mind that the initiate had hitherto not suspected even existed. Even those counterculture affiliates who did not directly partake of the new sacrament, viewing it with fear, suspicion, or distaste - I knew plenty of people like this in the mid-1970s - were nevertheless caught up in a maelstrom that had acid at its centre.
LSD was capable of facilitating many things, among them personal and social change. On mid-60s Dylan: 'The vastly accelerated personal changes Dylan underwent as he moved from protest to transcendence were archetypical of a rite of passage experienced by thousands of turned-on youth.' Carl Oglesby, former president of Students for a Democratic Society: ' It (acid) draws a line right across your life - before and after LSD - in the same way you felt that your step into radical politics drew a sharp division.' (all quotes from chapter 5).
While the precise phenomenology of different psychedelics at reasonably high doses tends to differ, it is not exceptional for the subject - certainly with the help of the classic psychedelics LSD and mescaline - to enter a dimension of complete existential open-ness; infinite potential, unbounded possibility reveal themselves within and without. All the games, as Timothy Leary termed them, which go to make up our repeated patterns of behaviour, our unconsciously acted roles - in short, who we think we are - temporarily vanish. For the moment, all conditioning seems in abeyance, all habit unravelled, and the human being bathes in fullness, a transpersonal luminosity that is strange yet familiar. This moment correlates roughly with the aim of Castaneda's Don Juan, when he speaks of 'erasing personal history'. It also resounds with Buddhist scholar Herbert Guenther's translation of 'sunyata' as 'the open dimension of being'. There is additionally an echo of the esoteric meaning of the 'drop out' section of Timothy Leary's frequently ridiculed clarion call to 'turn on, tune in, drop out'. It is not the literal leaving of society so much as the dropping out of the games and habits which bind us to a blind and limited existence.
This is all very bad news for the Control System, to use Neil Kramer's most apt term. For its functioning, the Control System relies on its subjects following games and habits seriously and unthinkingly. Intimations of infinite possibilities in our life are definitely not part of the game plan. They pose a dire threat to the entire set up; when Richard Nixon declared Timothy Leary to be the most dangerous man in America, he wasn't joking.
How close the whole shithouse came to collapsing in the late 1960s will never be known for sure; not very close, I suspect. All the same, the Control System was given a severe jolt, and realised the potential threat to its own game of total domination that psychedelics posed. Enough people get hold of this stuff, and who knows what will happen? The Control System was determined that no such situation should be permitted to arise again. Once the CIA and other agencies of domination decided that LSD was no good as a truth drug for interrogation purposes, Operation Psychedelic Crackdown was instigated. Spearheaded by the U.S.A., and ushered into the global arena by the U.N., it classified psychedelics alongside heroin and cocaine as the most dangerous of drugs (in truth, the Control System prefers heroin to LSD: it enslaves people to the system, reducing their autonomy, and offers up huge profits, a proportion of which can be seamlessly sequestered). All nations must follow the line: step outside, and there will be serious trouble, chiefly in the form of bullying and threats from the U.S.A. and U.N. Control System emissaries. And so the story continues until today. With few exceptions, politicians and the media play the 'psychedelics mean death' game, either without a clue as to what they are talking about, or as a cynical publicity ploy. Practical examples can be found littered throughout the posts in Pale Green Vortex and across the web.
Looked at from one perspective, the history of western 'civilisation' over the past 45 years can be read simply as the slow but inexorable clampdown on the hearts, minds, and bodies of the populace by a system intent on extending its influence and preventing a repeat performance of the goings-on of the past. To spend any amount of time in a shopping mall today, and compare what goes on with the dreams of hope and infinite possibility illuminated by the acid-fuelled visions of the 1960s and early 1970s is a salutary experience. Most people's horizons are very narrow. The Control System's strategies have been extremely successful. A new pair of trousers (the right cut and colour, of course), a McDonalds, and sweeties for the kids. That'll do nicely (speaking of children, it is noticeable how many of them are out there in the shops. 'Get them early' has been another successful Control System ploy: kids who can't spell their own name, but can shout 'Buy one, get one free' with gusto. That's the kind of citizen we want....).
Fear and a perverted sense of normality created by media saturation characterise our Brave New World. Yet any extreme position inevitably throws up its opposite. And a system based upon the suppression of the many by the few is built upon inherently shaky foundations. Personal observation suggests that humans are an extremely flexible species ( I use 'flexible' deliberately rather than 'adaptable', with its Darwinian connotations). Just as so many have been duped and suckered into a life that falls far short of its amazing potential, so they could equally rise into fullness and an awareness of the possibilities latent in every breath they take. We dream mad dreams regardless, and live from the innate purity that resides deep within our hearts, minds, and bodies.....
