A Democracy of Visions

Edgar Broughton and Sidney Cohen: two sides of the same tab.....

I passed the 1960s in the pleasant but generally unremarkable Home Counties market town of Aylesbury, England. An unexpected gift was bestowed on the place in 1969, however, when it began to play host to a rock music club named Friars. The club quickly gained a reputation for its discerning eye in spotting good quality bands in their infancy. Some, such as Mott the Hoople, went on to commercial success; others found fame elusive, yet were equally good.

One fairly regular fixture at Friars was the Edgar Broughton Band, and I saw them several times. They put on a solid set, but two songs always stood out. One was 'Out, Demons, Out', a kind of public exorcism of the evil that surrounded us all. The other was 'Dropout Boogie/Apache'. Edgar Broughton was, to one impressionable sixteen-year old at least, hairy, scary, and very hip, the very epitome of everything that my parents' generation had so lamentably failed to be. We would all watch, wide-eyed and slack-jawed, as His Royal Hairiness scowled, growled, and magically intoned those fateful words: 'What do you want, what do you want/ They think they know what it's all about/ Turn on, tune in, drop out, drop out/ I told you once, I told you twice'. From that moment on, the die was cast, my fate sealed: I didn't stand a chance.

Turn on, tune in, drop out: Timothy Leary's clarion call to the mass of disenchanted visionary youth that terrorised a generation. For those with any sympathies for psychedelic culture in its many guises, the third in the triad of exhortations always proved the most problematic. Ray Manzarek, keyboard player in the Doors, says that, instead of urging people to turn on, tune in, and drop out, Leary should have been urging them to turn on, tune in, take over. Elsewhere, Paradigm Shift TV exhorts us to turn on, tune in, and transcend. Sidney Cohen, an early LSD researcher and therapist, bemoaned the effect of Leary's ravings: 'Cohen had warned that Tim was skimming the cream of a generation and leading them down a blind alley. While the Best and the Brightest were grooving on the cosmic, the second-rate and the venal were appropriating the traditional slots of power' ('Storming Heaven' by Jay Stevens, Epilogue). As an Oxford graduate who went on to help form a cosmically-grooving commune then teach Buddhist meditation, I take Dr Cohen's charges very personally.....

Once the 1960s were out of the way, it was difficult to find anybody (with any social credibility at least) who would give much support to Tim Leary's apparent crusade for social revolution spearheaded by psychedelics. Terence McKenna, a leading light for the next generation, was at pains to criticise the excesses of the '60s, pointing to the use of psychedelic substances by a pioneering dedicated few, rather than widespread ingestion by the psychedelicised masses. And more recently still, Rick Doblin of MAPS (Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies) has bemoaned what he calls the backlash that took place against psychedelics as a result of their reckless use in the 1960s. This backlash has meant that research into their value in psychotherapy (as psychological aids for the terminally ill, for example, or for those suffering from post-traumatic stress) has been curtailed or, in most cases, brought to a grinding halt.

These pronouncements echo a debate amongst protagonists of psychedelics in the early years: whether they should be available to all, or whether access should be reserved for those who mystic-cum-author Aldous Huxley referred to as 'the Brightest and Best'. This was Huxley's more cautious approach: provide LSD for the philosophers, politicians, artists and academics - those mainly responsible for shaping and influencing society at large.

For the record, it is worth noting that the advocacy of indiscriminate distribution of LSD sometimes accredited to Leary is a caricature and/or distortion pumped up by the popular media. Leary was in equal measure visionary genius and unashamed opportunist/personal publicist, and he said many different, often contradictory, things at different times. In his more sober moments, however, he called for careful and responsible use of psychedelics, as sacred substances, to be taken in a conducive environment by those who were psychologically prepared. He claimed that, had the US authorities listened to him and established clinics/temples where people could use psychedelics in the company of experienced guides, much of the negative fallout could have been avoided. If it is to be associated with any one figure of the era, the more casual use of LSD could possibly be linked with Ken Kesey and his busload of tripping Merry Pranksters.

The idea of restricting access to psychedelics to 'the Brightest and Best' is all very well. Except that it is unworkable and terribly naive. Who decides? Cui bono? What's the basis on which 'the Brightest and Best' are selected? The critique peppered liberally throughout the posts on Pale Green Vortex - of Control System dynamics, dominator culture values, and the insight that all this is a construct of consciousness - makes it abundantly clear that there is no benign Ubermensch who is likely to look favourably upon drawing up a list of the deserving few on whom the privilege of psychedelic experience is to be bestowed. There is something that rankles about Rick Doblin's continued lament about the backlash against psychedelics as if, had Timothy Leary not been around, the research and the therapy could have quietly continued unabated. Despite the stupid and ill-judged things that Leary said over the years, the disturbing truth remains that enormous numbers of people found their lives enriched by following something of the course he outlined. More fundamentally, there is the very nature of the vistas opened up by LSD and other psychedelics. While sometimes described as 'non-specific amplifiers', they have tended to turn people away from a life dedicated to 9-to-5 and a blind belief in the diktats of dominator culture. The potential that they embody is inherently threatening to the status quo. This is the unspoken agenda in the 'War on Psychedelic Drugs' that sees Casey Hardison serving twenty years for producing psychedelic drugs (for comparison, Albert Speer, Minister of Armaments and War Production to the Third Reich 1942 - 45 received the same length of sentence at the Nuremberg Trials). So I think Rick Doblin is mistaken in pointing the finger solely at the 1960s for the collapse of official research into psychedelics. Point one finger, yes; but look at the effects of the substances as well. Access to the multidimensional nature of our being is the greatest danger of all to the continued reign of dominator culture. If Rick thinks that the Control System will eventually smile upon research, provided it conforms to the standards of modern science and is conducted by folk with PhDs, I hope he is correct. I rather doubt it will come to pass, however.

By the same token, Sidney Cohen's (and Ray Manzarek's) objections are fatally flawed. It is not a case of slotting envisioned beings into the places of power, thereby producing a benign government. The ego-softened consciousness does not want to - is not able to - function within an apparatus constructed by dominator cultures over millennia. It needs to find other ways of working, to create different forms of social organisation that reflect its own experience of reality.

I suspect that, at root, the collapse of the psychedelic-fuelled counterculture of the '60s and early '70s was tied in with the lack of a mythology connecting it to a sacred past. It imagined itself as something new, unprecedented, an evolutionary leap. Better to envisage the rejection of dominator culture as part of a greater tradition extending into deepest prehistory. It is not a case of creating something new, out of thin air, but one of reconnecting with humanity's true, but almost lost, heritage. It is here that Terence McKenna made one of his greatest contributions, through his work on what he terms the 'Archaic Revival'. The modern western counterculture - to the extent that we can talk of such a thing - senses its heritage stretching back to pre-Christian times: to the Minoans, the Gnostics as expounded so elegantly by John Lash, the partnership cultures of Catal Huyuk and beyond. Now the tree does not simply show off flowers of great beauty: it boasts a sturdy trunk and hardy roots that penetrate to the deepest strata of an enriching subsoil.

It is not a question of limiting use of psychedelic substances to therapists, medical researchers, or any other 'Brightest and Best'. Indigenous cultures regard their psychedelic, or entheogenic, plants as sacred, and their sacredness is not normally reserved for an elite. It is a matter of ensuring the substances are accorded the respect and seriousness they warrant; handing out acid like sweeties at free festivals in the '60s and '70s wasn't a very clever idea. Timothy Leary had likened tripping to being an aeroplane pilot, where training and a licence are required. For more sense on the subject than anything Control System emissaries such as politicians have ever said, take a peek at the section on psychedelics in Transform's document 'After the War on Drugs: Blueprint for Regulation' (available online). Introduce an element of rationality to the subject and it's not so hard to get your head round at all......

Place of Power, Part Two

Photos: same place as in Part One, different season......

Neil Kramer encourages us to seek regular contact with nature, which should be in as pristine a state as possible (interview on Hundredth Monkey Radio, July 17th 2011). This immersion in a world that is not created by the ideas of human beings allows certain processes to take place that cannot in an environment that is synthetic, he suggests. He might also include the perceived effects of climbing upwards: how, as one enters the realm of the mountains, the skin containing us within one particular type of experience becomes more permeable, and the realisation that we are multidimensional beings in a multidimensional universe becomes more apparent (this is the theme of my first ever post on Pale Green Vortex). On the mountains, what is first interpreted as an encounter with 'Other' slowly morphs into an experience of 'Self' in its truer, broader form, free of the artificial constructs of human ideas. Paradoxically, it is when we are away from the world of human inventions that we can feel our humanity most deeply. Factor in the personal coefficient - of a place in the mountains that had first issued an invitation to me over thirty years ago - and it is no surprise that I was back on the hillpaths at the first available opportunity, en route to the mountain of power.

As twilight descended, I clattered into a bothy (a small hut), waking up two other mountain people already curled up in sleeping bags in the process, and managed to grab a few hours' sleep. Then, with the other residents still in the land of dreams, I headed into a fresh but overcast early spring morning, intent on following the route I had stumbled on the previous year. The decomposed remains of a once-magnificent stag deer straddled the sides of the gorge I followed up to the col, the gap between the two mountain peaks. I turned right, into cloud and utter silence, and began scaling stony slopes towards the summit - of the mountain named Lurg Mhor, incidentally. Strange shapes emerged from the mist; the divide between form and formlessness became indistinct, irrelevant. I passed a tiny upland loch on my right, cradled in the arms of low crags, then hauled myself up more steep rocks. At last, I made out the summit cairn through the gloom. Circumspectly I approached, before finally standing on the very top of the mountain. Nothing. Not a sound. Nothing to see, apart from a few undistinguished grey rocks. No animals or plants. Not a movement. I did not care. I had done what I needed to do.

The following spring found me in the grip of a personal crisis. Giving up my day job, I voluntarily entered what Tibetan Buddhists call a bardo, a kind of gap or interval between one state or stage and the next. It can feel like suspended animation, as if the ground has been pulled from beneath ones feet. In this state of extreme mental discomfort, I knew there was only one thing to do: go to Lurg Mhor. By the time I reached the foot of the mountain I was already exhausted, but I was nevertheless certain that this was the right place to be. The peculiar quality of the area began to impress itself on me more strongly than ever as I began the slow climb. Finally reaching the col, I looked out over neighbouring peaks from a truly magical spot and allowed new, strange influences to impinge upon my consciousness. Once on the mountain summit I lingered long, then ventured out along its rarely-visited eastern ridge. At last I managed to pull myself away from the mountain top environment. Beginning my descent, something inside me gave, and tears started to roll down my face. By the grace of the mountain gods, a crack was opening up in my psyche, allowing me to shed whatever I needed to relinquish from the past, and catch a glimpse of a new life ahead.

This year I returned to the mountain once more, in less turbulent circumstances (coming off a mountain with your eyes swimming in tears is no easy matter!). Having put my tent up on a remote and lonely lochside the evening before, I emerged into the total silence of the place soon after first light. A smattering of rain greeted me rudely as I packed up my belongings before starting up the steep slopes that lead onto the west ridge. This was a new route, a tough one, and for a short time I considered abandoning the climb altogether. What is a man doing, at 7 o'clock on a Sunday morning, struggling up slopes of deep heather, slippery peat, and thick wet grasses? Then a reflection of the early morning sun streaked fiercely over the top of the ridge far above, where a group of deer appeared silhouetted on the golden skyline. Motionless, they peered at me, and motionless I returned their gaze. At that moment, I knew why I was there. In a curious way, I had come home........

Earthship Notes for Lammas

Highland Scotland in twenty years' time?

In the beginning (well, fairly near the beginning) was the Club of Rome:

'Men and women need a common motivation, namely a common adversary against whom they can organise themselves and act together...... Bring the divided nation together to face an outside enemy, either a real one, or else invented for the purpose...... In searching for a common enemy against whom we can unite, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine, and the like would fit the bill...... The real enemy then is humanity itself.' (italics mine). This is an extract from 'The First Global Revolution' 1992 report by the Club of Rome, self-appointed group of VIPs which, along with the sister organisations the Clubs of Budapest and Madrid, apparently numbers among its members Henry Kissinger, David Rockefeller, Mikhail Gorbachev, Al Gore, Desmond Tutu, Bill Clinton, and the Dalai Lama.

Even NASA, some of whose folk have been at the forefront of the Human Global Warming scare, has conceded that the situation is not quite the way they thought it should be. A new study in the science journal 'Remote Sensing' (peer-reviewed, so it must be true - ha ha!) reports that NASA satellite data from the years 2000 to 2011 show the Earth's atmosphere is allowing far more heat to be released into space than alarmist computer models have predicted. The study further indicates that far less future global warming will occur than UN computer models have forecast. This real-world data contradicts multiple assumptions fed into alarmist computer models. 'There is a huge discrepancy between the data and the forecasts that is especially big over the oceans.' (Dr Roy Spencer, report co-author).

You might think that such findings, impacting deeply on the future of humanity on Planet Earth, not to mention the way that billions of pounds are scheduled to be extracted from our pockets in the form of planet-saving carbon taxes, and the further huge amounts of our money that are going to subsidise painfully expensive and inefficient forms of energy production (planet-saving, of course) that litter our beautiful landscapes with trash, would warrant a mention in the mainstream news. Not so. The BBC (now officially an abbreviation for British Brainwashing Conspiracy) failed to report it. Strange, that.

Just in case anybody hasn't got it yet: the whole Anthropogenic Global Warming scare is a fraud, a total fraud. I could spend half my free time cataloguing the evidence on Pale Green Vortex, but it's all out there for everyone to find; it just needs a bit of personal homework. Plus, the prime purpose of this blog is solution-oriented, rather than intended to dig up more and more dirt on the Control System and its tactics, a depressing and never-ending task. To paraphrase the alarmist twisters-of-truth, the science seems pretty settled, for the time being at least. Which is not to say that humans have no effect on the climate - I don't think anyone makes that claim - but our impact is relatively small.

Sadly, our modern 'environmental movement' is an archontic construct. It bases itself on computer modelling and other artefacts of one-eyed science, and is a deception away from real environmentalism, which has as its root what John Lash calls 'rapturous bonding with the Earth'. The real thing is an empathetic emanation from direct experience, not a product of database and pathological fear, paranoia, and hatred of humanity. It embraces and celebrates the multidimensional magnificence of Gaia, instead of reducing her to single-dimension points on a computer graph. Believe in the Great Fraud, and you have been well and truly suckered. It's as simple as that, I conclude.