The Psychedelic Movement
Source: Jay Stevens Storming Heaven (for private reading only)
I. Spiritual lag?
Rapid industrialization and mass society have transformed us and uprooted our spiritual roots. The industrial emphasis on materialism and consumerism detract from our spiritual health - and given the power of industrial technology (ie The Bomb), we may be headed toward apocolapyse unless we develop our spiritual health. According to Einstein, we are like children playing with guns in this nuclear age. We need to grow more, spiritually.
Alduous Huxley: is there a way to develop the spiritual? To speed up spiritual evolution? Is there a door in the mind we can pass thru, and if so does a key exist to unlock it?
In Huxleys Brave New World, society was a dystopia held together by a drug (soma). In his dystopia, people took drugs to escape rather than grow. In real life, Huxley wondered if a mind drug might be used to help create utopia rather than dystopia.
Huxley felt a sense of urgency in the need for social change. Huxley argued that the modern world was increasingly dystopian. He feared the increasing concentration of power in the hands of government and private bureaucracies - and felt their technologies were alienating, or unable to produce the whole man.
II. Psychedelics as a possible key to unlock the doors of perception.
Might psychedelics be used to enhance spiritual growth? The psychedelic state of consciousness is an affirmation of the mystic's argument that the kingdom of heaven or nirvana is INSIDE all of us. We merely need to find it.
Huxley asked whether there is a mechanism that could be tripped in the mind which would awaken the mind to a higher spiritual state. His research into mystical experiences throughout the world revealled that they all had one thing in common: They blended a physiological experience into the mind itself to produce a moment of deep mystical insight.
These physiological experiences included chanting, meditation, prayer, hypnosis, dancing, fasting, singing, or drug taking. Each of these forms of physicality is associated with dropping the ego boundaries and achieving a sense of egolessness, or cosmic oneness: the body becomes a tuning fork vibrating at the cosmic or spiritual level.
The psychedelic experience is primal - it transcends words - and it is like taking a trip or journey where the perceiver travels beyond the horizon. This trip is paradoxical: on the one hand it may heighten nonverbal communication, yet on the other hand no two people found themselves in the same part of this other world.
III. Historical backdrop
LSD was first synthesized by Albert Hofman in 1938. However, its potential was not realized until Hofman accidentally ingested it in1943 after he revisited the compound. The use of psychedelic drugs to enhance spiritual growth goes back thousands of years in some cultures. However, they are controversial in western Christian societies, which have insisted that the kingdom of heaven should be found only through their strict churchgoing procedures.
The first scientific study of psychedelic drugs occurred in 1855, during the Victorian Era. During this era, experiences of the body were viewed in a moralizing tone as immoral or indecent. (The post Victorian era of Prohibition would retain this mindset.)
Nevertheless, by the late 19th century, artists and intellectuals had discovered the potentials of peyote and magic mushrooms for (1) pleasure and (2) spiritual enlightenment.
NOTE: There is also a third reason to take certain types of drugs: escapism. Escapism is associated with the desire to escape (or avoid) the pressures of life in context of alienation in a conflict-ridden society. This is less relevant to the psychedelic movement because psychedelic drugs are not generally used for escapist purposes. Alcohol, on the other hand, offers both pleasure and escapism in our society.
IV. Timothy Leary
Leary agreed with Huxley that our society was spiritually bankrupt and that it needed spiritual growth as soon as possible to avoid destruction. As a psychologist he was interested in personal transformations which lead to a healthier spiritual self.
In the 1950s, Leary researched the effectiveness of traditional psychology models and found that traditional therapy was no more effective than nontherapy. Something else was needed. Leary concluded that where therapy had been successful it had promoted a vitalizing transaction - a moment of epiphonic insight in the patient. He concluded that the key to these moments lay somewhere in the unconscious mind. This made him interested in psilocybin during the 1950s, and in LSD by 1962.
What Leary and others in the emerging psychedelic movement realized was that psychedelic drugs were capable of transforming people. They key difference was that people who took them - even if for one time - did not see the world the same way the next day. They tended to be more spiritual, and to want to lead a more contemplative life. The problem is that this effect may wear off to some extent. Consequently, one of the areas of interest involved using psychedelic drugs as a catalyst toward permanent change, which required a restructuring of societys values and institutions.
[Leary would become the single person most associated with the psychedelic movement during the 1960s, and his phrase tune in, turn on, and drop out would become a cliche phrase of the era. Yet he was controversial even within the movement. Some questionned his showmanship tactics. Some questionned his desire to make himself so visible a proponent of acid. They viewed him as an irresponsible, egoistic and elitist Pied Piper who did not represent the grass roots and essentially democratic nature of the psychedelic movement. In a personal correspondence with Rutledge regarding this, Owsley wrote that Leary was an unabashed seeker of celebrity. He did inestimable damage to the psychedelic movement. The draconian laws dating from 1966 are almost entirely of his doing.]
Meanwhile, Humphrey Osmond had been doing his own research on LSD during the 1950s. He found that it made people extremely sensitive to nuance - it heightened awareness of others moods, as well as the moods of the subjects.
LSD was producing amazing effects in both normal and crazy people: in some cases it produced a spiritual or epiphonic moment of selflessness, or nirvana. This finding excited Timothy Leary, as well as Alduous Huxley.
Spiritually, LSD was linked to the mystical experience - the epiphonic moment of insight into spiritual wholeness - yet it was also merely a way of scrambling the thought process.
V. LSD and the 1950s
A. Al Hubbard
During the 1950s, one of the masters of the mystical drug experience was Al Hubbard. He was a flamboyant millionaire who had taken a psychedelic drug and had a mystical experience on it. After that, he devoted his wealth to spreading the good word.
Hubbards special skill was as an acid guide. He was a good guide for people taking acid, because he was capable of moving people toward the mystical experience (as opposed to a mere visionary experience).
Hubbards approach was to emphasize the set and setting of the trip. By playing music that the tripper liked, showing safe images, and providing an overall favorable atmosphere for tripping, Hubbard was able to produce powerfully positive experiences in people.
This technique of paying attention to the set and setting of the trip is ancient, and shaman have long known about its importance.
Meanwhile, Huxley and Hubbard met each other in the mid-1950s and began to compare notes. Huxley concluded that if the goal was to speed up human spiritual evolution - or raise consciousness - then they needed to (1) select the right mix of brilliant and powerful people and (2) turn them on.
B. An emerging subculture
However, by 1956, LSD was more than a drug for spiritual growth. By this time, it had become an experimental pleasure drug among researchers, intellectuals and Hollywood actors. In other words, it had become hip to take acid by the mid-1950s among those in certain subcultures - especially when Cary Grant revealed he liked it.
But they were not taking it for the same reasons that Huxley had advocated. They were using it more as a social/pleasure drug than a drug for spiritual growth.
Huxley did not advocate the wholesale use of LSD by everyone. It was too potent, and therefore too dangerous. He was very selective in who he thought should take the drug.
One special group he targeted were the group of bohemians known as Beats. He specifically targeted the leaders of the beat movement to take acid, and this included Alan Watts and the poet Allen Ginsberg. And they did. And it changed them. Ginsberg became an LSD enthusiast and realized that you could change the world with it - but you had to be willing to take the drug.
By the early 1960s, Kerouac, Dizzy Gillespie, William Burroughs, and others in the bohemian subculture had taken acid. But the results were mixed: Kerouac had a bad trip and Burroughs was not interested in love drugs. He was more into hedonism.
Within the subculture of LSD a split had emerged: some were taking it as a spiritual drug while others took it mainly for hedonistic reasons. Even Timothy Leary had begun to shift by the early 1960s, defining it as both a spiritual drug and a pleasure drug.
C. LSD & CIA
The CIA also investigated LSD during the 1950s and early 60s. They were looking for a potential weapon in the Cold War. They wanted to know if LSD could be used as a mind control drug. Their infamous experiments with LSD proved what Hubbard already knew: if you put people in a scary setting and give them LSD they will freak out. The CIA eventually gave up on LSD because it was too unpredictable. Nevertheless, their research into LSD helped make the drug more widely available during the 1950s and early 60s.
VI. What made LSD so attractive to the kids of the 1960s?
The 1950s and early 60s generation grew up with messages of rigid conformity, where any deviation from cultural norms was seen as a sign of mental instability. This rigidity produced a fascination among kids with the surreal:
1. 1950s comic books were surreal. These superheroes (Captain Marvel, The Human Torch, Plasticman, etc) were cultural outsiders. They were nonconformists who had typically been transformed in some way - perhaps deformed by an industrial accident. In effect, they were latently subversive.
2. The emergence of black humor (ie Lenny Bruce) and irreverent magazines like Mad Magazine, which goofed the status quo.
3. The rise of rocknroll which was irreverent and which openly challenged the rigid conformity of the period;
4. Hollywoods promotion of the anti-hero by the late-1950s. James Dean and Brando were alienated teenagers who saw society as corrupt or bankrupt. They were united by feelings of alienation, boredom, anger - but their rebellion was not political. It was more introspective, and did not have a clear answer to the problems.
5. The beats were fascinated with the surreal - they were gluttons for new experiences because they too felt that society was hollow.
VII. Leary, revisited
Meanwhile, Timothy Leary had begun to emerge as the 1960s guru for the psychedelic movement - a largely spiritual movement seeking world harmony and peace by changing the inner state of the individual to make them more whole. But his attitudes about LSD were changing, too. Leary had taken LSD by 1962, and he found it even more powerful than psilocybin. If psilocybin was all about love and peace, then LSD was all about death and rebirth.
While Leary was initially more cautious in who should take acid, he began to change his mind after hanging out with the beats more. Leary was particularly influenced by Allen Ginsberg. Ginsberg advocated that not just anyone - but everyone - should have the choice about whether they wanted to experiment with LSD. Ginsberg was a radical idealist.
By turning everyone on, they would generate a massive wave of public opinion to support more research and training centers on the intelligent use of drugs.
Consequently, Leary eventually rejected Huxleys more cautious model of giving acid only to the best & brightest in favor of an open to the public approach. Of course, he strongly advocated training before taking the drug - and that is what he did during the 60s: he held drug seminars where he would lecture and assign readings to people and then they would all trip as their graduation ceremony.
At the same time, he loved the emphasis on hedonism that was emerging - because he saw it as a tool toward the spiritual and he blended the physical and the metaphysical together in his belief system.
In Learys view, our society had become too rigid in all ways, including sexuality. He saw acid as a tool to release these rigid inhibitions and to ultimately free us to live more wholesome lives. People had a right to pleasure. Pleasure and spiritual growth were linked together in his mind: the body and the mind were not separate; both deserved stimulation.
VIII. Models for change
At the core of Learys philosophy about change was that true social change begins from the inside and moves to the outside. This is the core belief of the psychedelic movement. Introspection produces spiritual insights, which leads to personal growth, which has a contagious effect on others. Eventually society will change in this way.
But there were other activists who advocated that social change comes from institutional changes more than personal changes. The civil rights movement advocated that change comes from challenging institutional policies and reforming them - more than from personal journeys in the center of the mind. (However, they were a church-oriented movement - it was a spiritual movement - but the source of spirituality was not the same here).
Similarly, the emerging white political radicals tended to embrace the institutional model for change over the personal model advocated by Leary.
A split began to emerge during the 1960s among those who sought to change the world:
Hippies and the psychedelic advocates viewed change as a personal journey into ones own mind. They were largely apolitical. They were less interested in institutions and more interested in personal revelations. They were more interested in personal nirvana. In their view, a healthy heart produces a healthy landscape, with healthy institutions.
On the other hand there were radicals who advocated institutional change through politics. These people tended to reject LSD as the solution in favor of organized political protests against the establishment, or the Pentagon, or whatever. They were more interested in social utopia. In their view, a healthy landscape produces a healthy heart.
Both groups were right. The changes demanded during the 60s were both internal (Psychological) and external (Social/Political). It was a matter of which angle to prioritize.
IX. The response by officials to the psychedelic movement
Lysergic acid hits the spot. Forty billion neurons, thats a lot. - Marshall McLuhan.
A. Doubts within the field of psychology
During the 50s and early 60s, acid was not viewed as a particularly dangerous drug, mainly because it was contained within the subcultures of the beats, Hollywood, and intellectuals. However, by 1962, the mood began to change.
One of the sources of discontent was within the field of psychology. To some, LSD was a dagger pointed at the heart of traditional psychology and some psychologists were fearful that Leary would steal their thunder. But there were other reasons as well:
LSD had become too easy to get and was increasingly associated with a hedonistic culture of rif-raf; the psychedelic experience was too difficult to predict or control; sometimes taking acid did not lead to any great truths.
One of the reasons why LSD therapy was a threat to the traditional therapy model was that doubts about the safety of LSD were put to rest by the mid 60s. Researcher Sidney Cohen surveyed a sample of 5000 acid users. He found an average of 1.8 psychotic episodes per 1000 ingestions, 1.2 attempted suicides, and 0.4 successful suicides. He concluded that LSD was fairly safe.
With the question of safety out of the way, interest focused on the best way to use psychedelics. Should it be used in small doses as a facilitator in Freudian therapy, or in huge doses to produce mystical insight? The psychedelic therapist advocated huge doses to shatter the social self and thereby produce a more selfless person.
This isnt to say that acid was not controversial anymore. Because of its powerful effects and because of who used it, acid posed a major threat to advocates of the status quo.
The psychedelic movement probably peaked in 1962 - before the authorities came down hard on drugs. By 1961, Leary estimated that 25,000 people had taken acid and he forecasted that by 1967 it would be 1 million. Leary calculated that 4 million people was the critical number for blowing the mind of American society.
The official and popular culture definition of LSD during the early 60s was that it was a potentially useful drug but that it had become dangerous in the hands of irresponsible scientists like Timothy Leary.
B. Ken Kesey
Meanwhile, Ken Kesey had published his famous novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest in 1962. In this book, society had become an insane asylum, and we were the victims of a repressive combine which punished people for being original. Kesey, like Huxley, felt society had become a dystopia (a dystopia is the opposite of a utopia, basically).
Kesey was becoming famous for his book, and he had a following. Together, Kesey and his group formed a community of psychedelic adventurers who took acid at their famous acid parties. Keseys group was known as the Merry Pranksters.
The Merry Pranksters believed in living life to the fullest, and to live totally in the moment. They rejected the socially conditioned ego in favor of the ego-less self (as modeled after Neal Cassidy). In their view, anyone should have the right to take acid. Acid was seen as a cleansing drug - it rids us of our uptight social conditioning and makes us more real.
Unlike Leary, who was pretty heavy, the Pranksters adopted a light approach to acid. The Pranksters did not believe people needed Gurus like Leary to tell them how to trip. Just go with the flow was their loose approach to acid trips.
And Kesey was developing a loose code where anyone and everyone could take LSD freely. In Keseys subculture, there were no rules. New recruits had to figure this out for themselves. It was a subculture of creative anarchy, where structure was spontaneous and sometimes elusive - just like the style of music that was emerging in their house band, the Grateful Dead. What held people together was the spirit of love and acceptance.
In1965, the Pranksters decided to test their philosophy of love on the Hells Angels. According to some (perhaps overly romanticized) reports, by controlling the set and setting of the Angels as they tripped on acid, they were able to make the Angels become peaceful and loving. These same Angels were violent and crude when they left Keseys house - and they would go off and beat up more hippies. [However, in a personal correspondence with Rutledge, Owsley strongly disagrees with this characterization:
Hells Angels NEVER, EVER became 'peaceful and loving' on acid. I had Terry the Tramp tell me once he LOVED to get into fights while high-he said 'the other guy is like, in slow motion, I can't lose'. Acid does not change anyone's basic nature, in fact it turns all your 'knobs' up to max. It is an amplifier of your nature.]
Keseys acid tests were becoming a new art form: a total experience complete with lights, music, cameras, and theater. It was a hedonistic celebration of the moment - and the magical. The Pranksters carefully manipulated the set and setting of the acid tests to make people suggestible to alternative realities - to push people to go further. But not alone - people tripped together and looked after each other. Ultimately, thousands of people attended the acid tests, which peaked out in 1966 a the Trips Festival, where 10,000 people paid admission to come in and either stare or participate.
Just before this, Kesey was arrested for pot. This was not the first time, and this time the authorities wanted to put him away in jail. Kesey decided to flee to Oregon - but in doing so he abandoned his symbolic leadership role and the Pranksters lost their center.
In 1966, Timothy Leary was also busted for pot - in Texas - and he received a 30 year sentence and a $30,000 fine. Leary appealed, but it was clear that the authorities were coming down hard on the leaders of the psychedelic movement. On another occasion, Leary was busted in 1966 in New York - this time by none other than G. Gordon Liddy (of Watergate notoriety).
The psychedelic movement had grown so large by 1966 that the authorities had decided to put a stop to it by force if necessary. By October, 1966, the possession of LSD was a crime in every state in the country.
The backlash was severe, and it included the spreading of lies about the effects of LSD. One lie was that it causes chromosome damage. Another was that it caused psychotic breakdown, and still another was that it led to violence.
Still another issue was whether LSD caused flashbacks. The authorities insisted it did - but there is little hard data supporting this. Among LSD researchers, it was agreed that roughly 2% who took acid in uncontrolled settings experienced anxiety attacks or panic attacks, and of that 2%, roughly 1/3rd became temporarily psychotic.
But this is not the version that was told by authorities to the press and the public, and which was printed by the commercial press. Both politicians and the media exaggerated the threat of psychotic breakdowns and labeled LSD as a drug which CAUSES insanity. The mainstream media believed these lies partly because they trusted the authorities and partly because it sold newspapers. What followed was a witchhunt. It was Reefer Madness all over again.
By 1966, most Americans had been told that taking LSD causes people to freak out and go insane - and they believed it. What is true is that people with UNSTABLE personalities were prone to disintegration from LSD. LSD was very potent - and should never be taken by people in the wrong emotional state. Secondly, the most threatening aspect of acid is its unpredictability - one did not know what it would do.
X. Conclusion
At the essence of the 1960s is a restlessness - a desire to change both self and society. During the 60s, much of youth culture was rejecting the sanitized suburb as supported by sanitized jobs in search of something new.
Most parents could not understand why their own children, who seemingly had it so good, would reject the affluence of the suburb.
To many in the youth culture, the problem was bigger than the suburbs - it was the establishment and its promotion of a way of life oriented around managing people as cogs in a machine-like system. Some these kids wanted to make a clean break from society. For every kid who wanted to make a clean break, there was another who was happy with the system, who kept his hair short, who drank beer rather than smoke pot, who joined the local football team, and who measured his worth by the car he drove.
Society had become polarized by the 1960s between very different ways of life. And even among the protestors, there was a split emerging over hedonism versus responsible radicalism.
Ken Kesey opposed the war in Vietnam - but he was apolitical in his opposition. He did not want a youth vanguard seizing power in the name of equality. To Kesey, that was playing their game. So instead, Kesey simply turned his back on the establishment. This disappointed the SDS and other political radicals.
Those who dropped out and turned on called themselves freaks or heads out of pride (the same way that blacks call themselves niggers today). By 1965, the youth protest movement had two symbolic capitols:
1. Berkeley and its political radicals (the SDS)
2. Haight-Ashbury and its hippies. While only 20 miles apart, they were a world apart in their philosophy for social change. The hippies were direct descendents of the beats, who were mainly apolitical and interested in personal transformation. A key difference is that while the beats were dark and cynical, the hippies were loving and idealistic. The psychedelic movement is fundamentally an idealistic movement based on the philosophy that personal transformation leads to social transformation. The revolution starts from within, and LSD was the tool of this personal revolution. Taking LSD was a sacrament - it was a ritual of transformation.
LSD was used by the hippies as a deconditioning agent to remove elements of an overly repressed, socially-constructed self. The subculture that emerged from this included people who changed their names to symbolically affirm their new liberated identities.
At the core of this movement is a spiritual yearning for meaning. The demise of the psychedelic movement did not bring an end to this search. The ball was picked up by the New Age movement with its emphasis on Eastern mysticism, astrology, numerology, and other new philosophies. What all of these New Age movements have in common is the insight that direct experience and knowledge go hand in hand - and this may require people to go outside the boundaries of their society.
Haight-Ashbury peaked in 1967. People came from all over the world to live as one beautiful tribe united by love and tolerance. After 67, the Haight became zooier. Kids by the late 60s and early 70s were often taking drugs for the wrong reasons and the psychedelic movement was giving way to an escapist and hedonistic youth drug culture that centered not on LSD but rather on pot, cocaine, alcohol, and other hedonistic and escapist drugs.
By the mid to late 60s, a new era of Prohibitionism set in. The psychedelic movement was essentially outlawed. At this same time, the youth movement had split between personal change tactics versus political change. Finally, by 1968, idealism began to wane, and cynicism and anger become more common.
What is left of the psychedelic movement is
1. Largely underground (ie the raves) due to Prohibition;
2. Taking new forms in various New Age philosophies;
3. The legacy of new forms of music, art and dance - especially found in bands like the Grateful Dead, Phish, and other post-hippie segments of society.
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