It's morning on a clear but chilly day in March 1974. I'm sitting in the bedroom of a friend in Redland, Bristol, south-west England. He opens a drawer by his bedside, takes out a piece of off-white blotting paper, then hands it to me. I glance at this unappetising offering, before turning to look into my friend's eyes. Part of me is terrified: like everyone else, I have read and heard the numerous media reports, and wonder if I will be thrown into complete and irreversible madness. At the same time, I trust my friend, and so many people I know of in the underground culture, who recommend it as a kind of rite of passage. I put the blotting paper into my mouth; it is dry to the tongue, but tasteless. I swallow it down. Then we head off to the Mendip Hills to burn a cat.
The cat is already dead. It is the recently-deceased companion of the man from the flat below. This fellow, who sports a remarkable long moustache, claims to be a Zen master; I do not believe him. I dutifully collect wood for the funeral pyre, then watch as the cat's elements are returned to the wider universe in what increasingly seems like a pointless ceremony.
We return to the flat, where more commune-type people arrive. At one point, my Bristolian friend unnervingly sprouts long donkey's ears. I blink hard, then turn away to watch Gandhi on a large wall poster as he dances vigourously to the music.
The following morning we climb to the top of Glasonbury Tor. The dark green melancholic countryside stretches quietly in all directions beneath a uniform grey sky, mirroring precisely my mood. This first LSD trip has been a shattering experience - quite literally. All my ideas, ideals, and ideologies - and believe me, I had plenty - have been shown to be just that: thoughts and viewpoints, nothing more. I have been living my life from ideas about it and, for the first time - since I was a child, at least - I have experienced everything directly, the veils of thought and idea ripped asunder. My view of self has been smashed, leaving a nihilistic-tinged, everything's-the-same, is-ness. I survey Arthur's magic lands from a standpoint of slightly depressive freedom.....
February 1975: Almost a year has passed since the cat's cremation. Enough of my old idea-defined self has been shed to allow the embryo of a new sense of reality to emerge. It is Saturday evening, and I am sitting near the fire in the commune living room in Oxford. Slowly the contents of the room and of my mind rearrange themselves, until I find myself participating in a web of total harmony. I have never known such peace and tranquility before. A hitherto unsuspected sense of 'at-homeness' manifests itself within my being.
At this moment, a dark cloud of realisation drifts across my mind. The means to this state of utter harmony is not officially approved. It is, indeed, frowned upon and highly illegal. This is a most bizarre state of affairs - that the means to bliss and wisdom can lead to a hefty prison sentence. There is only one unavoidable conclusion: bliss and wisdom can play no part in the official agenda. And from this point I know - as I had known for many a year, but less vividly - that one part of me will always be like a bandit, an outlaw, wandering on the peripheries of sanctioned existence.
April arrives: high spring in Oxford. I take matters very seriously. With an instinctive grasp of what Leary and co. refer to as 'set and setting', I read Tibetan Buddhist texts before chemistry-facilitated journeys into the unknown - to the amusement, concern and, in one case, barely-concealed ridicule, of my fellow communards. 'Secret Oral Teachings in Tibetan Buddhist Sects' by Alexandra David-Neal is a favourite. One Saturday afternoon I am sitting on my bed, when something miraculous seems to happen. In the Buddho/Hindu-tinged post-hippie speak of my diary entry for the day: 'I became one with the rest of the universe.......The 'I' dissolved totally into the rest of creation..... And the intuitive power, energy, of those few seconds was enormous, incredible..... it was all so simple, so obvious. Like it had always been like this.... And I don't know how long I'll remember, except that I'll probably never forget.....' And so it continues.
O.K. So it's all very well becoming one with the rest of the universe, and realising that's how things have always been anyway: but where do you go from there........?
Timothy Leary, self-proclaimed 1960s High Priest of acid, was by all accounts an extremely complex character. What is frequently overlooked, however, is the fact that he was initially - and arguably remained - first and foremost a psychologist. Years before he set eyes upon anything remotely psychedelic, he was working with friend and colleague Frank Barron at the Kaiser Clinic, California. Taking advantage of the backlog of patients awaiting psychotherapy, Leary and Barron devised a nifty little experiment aimed at demonstrating how useful therapy really was. They would compare the progress of those undergoing therapy with that of those waiting for it. The results of their research were surprising, to say the least: there was no difference between the two groups at all! In both, roughly one third of patients improved, one third remained the same, while a third deteriorated. The critical factor, Leary concluded, was not so much therapy, as what he referred to as the 'vitalizing transaction': that elusive 'click' which, as Barron described it, was 'as frail as love or blessedness, as passing as the moment of grace or the beginning of creation.' (quoted in 'Storming Heaven' by Jay Stevens, chapter 11). (As an aside, Leary and Barron's idea would help to explain why so many people spend years and a fortune in psychotherapy, without escaping from the web of family relationships in which they are trapped. Lots of understanding but no vitalizing transaction.). A few years down the road, Leary swallowed some psilocybin-containing mushrooms and proceeded to devolve to a single solitary cell, an experience so vitalising that it profoundly influenced the course of western youth culture for decades to come.
So where could you go from union with the godhead; from watching the universe create itself moment by moment in front of your own eyes; from experiencing time and space dissolve into irrelevance, or whatever other vitalizing transactions took place with a little help from the LSD blotter or tiny brown microdot? It is difficult to convey the impact of those few short periods, sometimes mere moments, when the world was seen with fresh eyes, as if for the first time, and in a profoundly new and different light. Nevertheless, this was the question that many people were forced to confront in the early 1970s in Britain. Nobody told you about this stuff at school. Television and radio were silent on the matter. The local priest would want you committed. Hinduism and Buddhism offered more hope, however, and groups based on their teachings were among the main beneficiaries of all the acid-facilitated visions of the time. Rajneeshis, sanyassins, Hare Krishna people, Divine Light premies were everywhere if you frequented the alternative scene. I worked for a while in a Black and Decker tools warehouse in Didcot, Oxfordshire, making money for the commune project I was part of. Half the temps there seemed to be premies, mainly good-looking girls in long flowing dresses. 'She deserves better than that,' quipped one of my co-workers about a particularly beautiful girl on the warehouse floor, referring to her premie status as well as her rather passive Divine Light boyfriend. I was not inclined to disagree.
The overall ambience of these groups was one of 'going beyond acid', and before long I too joined the ranks of the post-LSD set. Barely fifteen months after realising my irreconcilable unity with the rest of the universe, I was giving away my last few blue microdots to an astonished friend named French Paul. Each successive trip now seemed to land me in a slightly different corner of the landscape of the cosmos, and I needed a map to help find a way around. The search was on for my own 'next step'.
I went to a Sri Chinmoy meeting. The guru came with impeccable credentials: one of his devotees was John McLaughlin of the Mahavishnu Orchestra. The evening consisted largely of a film about athletics, however, resulting in my leaving non-plussed. And while some of the phenomenology of my LSD-assisted ventures was mirrored in various Hindu texts, I eventually opted for a Buddhist path. I felt that Buddhism presented a clearer road map through the murky swamps of samsara towards the lands of nirvanic bliss.
In retrospect, all this 'going beyond acid' mentality was infected with hubris. The Beatles had already done it in 1967: 'LSD can only get you so far' was the subtext for John, Paul, and George at least, when they went off to meditate with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, a guru I viewed with deep suspicion even at the tender age of fourteen. Instead of 'going beyond' - especially in the idealistically renunciate spirit that I adopted -, it might have been better to create situations where a more regular spiritual life was adopted, but one which included the chance to investigate more directly what precisely was going on at the height of the acid trip. Put it this way: 'going beyond' a substance that, even in the most miniscule of quantities, could open the doorway to the Absolute. What's that about?
In fairness, most of us had no precedents to help us on our way. For the majority, little had changed since, fifteen years beforehand, Timothy Leary had written of his initial intensive experiments with psilocybin: 'We were on our own..... Western literature had almost no guides, no maps, no texts that even recognised the existence of altered states.' The western traditions that might have accommodated psychedelic experience - shamanic, alchemical, pagan - had been thoroughly destroyed by the monotheists, through inquisitions, witch-burnings, and the rest. What felt radically new in the 1960s and 1970s was, in fact, more like a fumbling attempt to reconnect with our own natural sacred traditions, our suppressed and persecuted birthright. Traditions within which, as in modern-day shamanic societies in Central and South America, and in West Africa, psychedelic, or entheogenic, experience is firmly embedded within a wider psycho-spiritual context and tradition. It is testament to the success of the Christians that I, along with many others, had to look far afield for traditions that said anything about altered states of reality that may be entered courtesy of psychedelics, or indeed other practices. And the ensuing love affair with organised religions born in the East brought with it, in turn, its own catalogue of problems and pitfalls.......
The cat is already dead. It is the recently-deceased companion of the man from the flat below. This fellow, who sports a remarkable long moustache, claims to be a Zen master; I do not believe him. I dutifully collect wood for the funeral pyre, then watch as the cat's elements are returned to the wider universe in what increasingly seems like a pointless ceremony.
We return to the flat, where more commune-type people arrive. At one point, my Bristolian friend unnervingly sprouts long donkey's ears. I blink hard, then turn away to watch Gandhi on a large wall poster as he dances vigourously to the music.
The following morning we climb to the top of Glasonbury Tor. The dark green melancholic countryside stretches quietly in all directions beneath a uniform grey sky, mirroring precisely my mood. This first LSD trip has been a shattering experience - quite literally. All my ideas, ideals, and ideologies - and believe me, I had plenty - have been shown to be just that: thoughts and viewpoints, nothing more. I have been living my life from ideas about it and, for the first time - since I was a child, at least - I have experienced everything directly, the veils of thought and idea ripped asunder. My view of self has been smashed, leaving a nihilistic-tinged, everything's-the-same, is-ness. I survey Arthur's magic lands from a standpoint of slightly depressive freedom.....
February 1975: Almost a year has passed since the cat's cremation. Enough of my old idea-defined self has been shed to allow the embryo of a new sense of reality to emerge. It is Saturday evening, and I am sitting near the fire in the commune living room in Oxford. Slowly the contents of the room and of my mind rearrange themselves, until I find myself participating in a web of total harmony. I have never known such peace and tranquility before. A hitherto unsuspected sense of 'at-homeness' manifests itself within my being.
At this moment, a dark cloud of realisation drifts across my mind. The means to this state of utter harmony is not officially approved. It is, indeed, frowned upon and highly illegal. This is a most bizarre state of affairs - that the means to bliss and wisdom can lead to a hefty prison sentence. There is only one unavoidable conclusion: bliss and wisdom can play no part in the official agenda. And from this point I know - as I had known for many a year, but less vividly - that one part of me will always be like a bandit, an outlaw, wandering on the peripheries of sanctioned existence.
April arrives: high spring in Oxford. I take matters very seriously. With an instinctive grasp of what Leary and co. refer to as 'set and setting', I read Tibetan Buddhist texts before chemistry-facilitated journeys into the unknown - to the amusement, concern and, in one case, barely-concealed ridicule, of my fellow communards. 'Secret Oral Teachings in Tibetan Buddhist Sects' by Alexandra David-Neal is a favourite. One Saturday afternoon I am sitting on my bed, when something miraculous seems to happen. In the Buddho/Hindu-tinged post-hippie speak of my diary entry for the day: 'I became one with the rest of the universe.......The 'I' dissolved totally into the rest of creation..... And the intuitive power, energy, of those few seconds was enormous, incredible..... it was all so simple, so obvious. Like it had always been like this.... And I don't know how long I'll remember, except that I'll probably never forget.....' And so it continues.
O.K. So it's all very well becoming one with the rest of the universe, and realising that's how things have always been anyway: but where do you go from there........?
Timothy Leary, self-proclaimed 1960s High Priest of acid, was by all accounts an extremely complex character. What is frequently overlooked, however, is the fact that he was initially - and arguably remained - first and foremost a psychologist. Years before he set eyes upon anything remotely psychedelic, he was working with friend and colleague Frank Barron at the Kaiser Clinic, California. Taking advantage of the backlog of patients awaiting psychotherapy, Leary and Barron devised a nifty little experiment aimed at demonstrating how useful therapy really was. They would compare the progress of those undergoing therapy with that of those waiting for it. The results of their research were surprising, to say the least: there was no difference between the two groups at all! In both, roughly one third of patients improved, one third remained the same, while a third deteriorated. The critical factor, Leary concluded, was not so much therapy, as what he referred to as the 'vitalizing transaction': that elusive 'click' which, as Barron described it, was 'as frail as love or blessedness, as passing as the moment of grace or the beginning of creation.' (quoted in 'Storming Heaven' by Jay Stevens, chapter 11). (As an aside, Leary and Barron's idea would help to explain why so many people spend years and a fortune in psychotherapy, without escaping from the web of family relationships in which they are trapped. Lots of understanding but no vitalizing transaction.). A few years down the road, Leary swallowed some psilocybin-containing mushrooms and proceeded to devolve to a single solitary cell, an experience so vitalising that it profoundly influenced the course of western youth culture for decades to come.
So where could you go from union with the godhead; from watching the universe create itself moment by moment in front of your own eyes; from experiencing time and space dissolve into irrelevance, or whatever other vitalizing transactions took place with a little help from the LSD blotter or tiny brown microdot? It is difficult to convey the impact of those few short periods, sometimes mere moments, when the world was seen with fresh eyes, as if for the first time, and in a profoundly new and different light. Nevertheless, this was the question that many people were forced to confront in the early 1970s in Britain. Nobody told you about this stuff at school. Television and radio were silent on the matter. The local priest would want you committed. Hinduism and Buddhism offered more hope, however, and groups based on their teachings were among the main beneficiaries of all the acid-facilitated visions of the time. Rajneeshis, sanyassins, Hare Krishna people, Divine Light premies were everywhere if you frequented the alternative scene. I worked for a while in a Black and Decker tools warehouse in Didcot, Oxfordshire, making money for the commune project I was part of. Half the temps there seemed to be premies, mainly good-looking girls in long flowing dresses. 'She deserves better than that,' quipped one of my co-workers about a particularly beautiful girl on the warehouse floor, referring to her premie status as well as her rather passive Divine Light boyfriend. I was not inclined to disagree.
The overall ambience of these groups was one of 'going beyond acid', and before long I too joined the ranks of the post-LSD set. Barely fifteen months after realising my irreconcilable unity with the rest of the universe, I was giving away my last few blue microdots to an astonished friend named French Paul. Each successive trip now seemed to land me in a slightly different corner of the landscape of the cosmos, and I needed a map to help find a way around. The search was on for my own 'next step'.
I went to a Sri Chinmoy meeting. The guru came with impeccable credentials: one of his devotees was John McLaughlin of the Mahavishnu Orchestra. The evening consisted largely of a film about athletics, however, resulting in my leaving non-plussed. And while some of the phenomenology of my LSD-assisted ventures was mirrored in various Hindu texts, I eventually opted for a Buddhist path. I felt that Buddhism presented a clearer road map through the murky swamps of samsara towards the lands of nirvanic bliss.
In retrospect, all this 'going beyond acid' mentality was infected with hubris. The Beatles had already done it in 1967: 'LSD can only get you so far' was the subtext for John, Paul, and George at least, when they went off to meditate with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, a guru I viewed with deep suspicion even at the tender age of fourteen. Instead of 'going beyond' - especially in the idealistically renunciate spirit that I adopted -, it might have been better to create situations where a more regular spiritual life was adopted, but one which included the chance to investigate more directly what precisely was going on at the height of the acid trip. Put it this way: 'going beyond' a substance that, even in the most miniscule of quantities, could open the doorway to the Absolute. What's that about?
In fairness, most of us had no precedents to help us on our way. For the majority, little had changed since, fifteen years beforehand, Timothy Leary had written of his initial intensive experiments with psilocybin: 'We were on our own..... Western literature had almost no guides, no maps, no texts that even recognised the existence of altered states.' The western traditions that might have accommodated psychedelic experience - shamanic, alchemical, pagan - had been thoroughly destroyed by the monotheists, through inquisitions, witch-burnings, and the rest. What felt radically new in the 1960s and 1970s was, in fact, more like a fumbling attempt to reconnect with our own natural sacred traditions, our suppressed and persecuted birthright. Traditions within which, as in modern-day shamanic societies in Central and South America, and in West Africa, psychedelic, or entheogenic, experience is firmly embedded within a wider psycho-spiritual context and tradition. It is testament to the success of the Christians that I, along with many others, had to look far afield for traditions that said anything about altered states of reality that may be entered courtesy of psychedelics, or indeed other practices. And the ensuing love affair with organised religions born in the East brought with it, in turn, its own catalogue of problems and pitfalls.......
