A "normal" woman — tests have verified that she's psychologically normal — submits to a scientific study of LSD, in 1956:
I'm fascinated by how completely stereotypically hippie her expression becomes and by the odd situation of talking to a scientist while having a transcendent experience.
February 11, 2011
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98 comments:
Mr. Crack Emcee; please use the nearest white courtesy phone.
Mr. Crack Emcee; to the white courtesy phone.
We might come to the astonishing conclusion that perhaps there was some relationship between the use of LSD and hippies.
I saw this as a part of a double feature in my grade school auditorium. It was followed by a movie called "Duck and Cover".
Lots of good late 60's memories there. Strawberry Fields, gold microdot, purple barrel, peace tabs, orange sunshine, etc. Oh yeah, Miami Pop Festival ('69), Atlanta Pop Festival ('70) et al. Now I'm a professional in my very late 50's and getting ready to retire. "What a long strange trip it's been"...
It's a shame that hallucinogens are so outlawed and vilified in our society...when with republicans realize that drug laws are as restrictive to our freedom as taxes & health care bills?
LSD expands a mind until it is open to whatever wants to occupy it next.
It's that state where one can finally fully comprehend the core truth of reality and that it has a lot to do with Emmerson Lake and Palmer's Tarkus album.
(Um, I mean, from what I hear.)
"We might come to the astonishing conclusion that perhaps there was some relationship between the use of LSD and hippies."
Well, yeah. That's my point. This video seems to demonstrate how little personal or cultural expression there was in the hippie movement. The drug was instant hippiedom. It was: "oh, wow."
The shit didn't agree with me. After a couple of fun trips, I had a severe paranoid trip. For months afterward I thought I was becoming psychotic. I finally realized that what I was experiencing was a fear of the fear coming back--phobophobia. Years later I did it one more time, just get back on the horse. It was interesting, I managed it, and I have never wanted to do it again. I do not recommend its use. The risks outweigh the benefits.
Point of order--
I knew a lot of hippies who never did acid. I knew some hippies who never did drugs. Ann, you paint with too broad a brush.
If there was a unifying drug experience in the hippie movement, it is more likely to have been pot. It made you feel calm, happy, and ready for fun. It made you feel like part of a brotherhood.
wv: bedull-- another effect of pot was to bedull your intellect. Acid went too far in unbedulling it.
So I entered LSD into the Amazon search box to see if I could get me some and it showed me a bunch of books. Books! Tons of them, getting less and less relevant until finally you get to Dragnet episodes for $1.99 and batteries.
A guy I knew older than myself but in my peer group worked in a hospital. He told me a man came into emergency who perished. They opened his head and it was mostly just mush. My friend said, "It's called acid for a reason. I saw myself what a lot of it does. An excess of it eats right through your brain." True or not that put me off the idea right from the start.
Well, Doc may not have given her enough.
Besides she has her clothes on, and hasn't painted PIG on her tummy
Fascinating. One can see why they had to make LSD illegal...it's as powerful a means of transforming consciousness as television, but it cannot be controlled, and it cannot be used to induce people to keep shopping as their primary duty to the nation.
"A guy I knew older than myself but in my peer group worked in a hospital. He told me a man came into emergency who perished. They opened his head and it was mostly just mush. My friend said, 'It's called acid for a reason. I saw myself what a lot of it does. An excess of it eats right through your brain.' True or not that put me off the idea right from the start."
True or not?
It's total bullshit.
I think that psychedelics were the drugs that did define the hippie movement, even though pot was much more ubiquitous.
And, without the psychedelics, pot has become the drug of losers, when used heavily. Ok, not like hard drugs like meth and heroin, but the stoners on campus these days seem to be looked down on by most everyone else.
I do think that the psychedelics are what made the drug culture of the 1960s into the 1970s cool, and what really defined the era.
Robert Cook said...
It's total bullshit.
Agree. To the best of my knowledge, it is physically impossible to overdose on acid. Chip's story sounds like the kind of urban myth that convinced Gen X that all the warnings about drug use were bullshit.
What about the dweeb who invented you, Tyrone Slothrop?
Legend has it Capn TP was rather fond of .... ergotic madness whilst penning the Rainbow.
But you are mostly correct. In the wrong setting, Bad Joss can and does arrive via El Es Dee, sort of like a napalm strike
Brings back memories, and they are all good ones. The only problem I ever found with acid was that it just lasted too long. We are not made to be that turned on for 12 hours. Which is why I never understood the value of Tantric sex. Moderation is a great tool if you can master it.
Besides she has her clothes on, and hasn't painted PIG on her tummy.
Well, at least in public, that wasn't what you usually saw with people tripping on psychedelics. I saw a lot of tripping people during my stint in college, and none of them took off their clothes in public. And, most often, not in private.
It is an acuteness of sight that allows the viewing of the veins beneath the skin, which looks blue, and wet. You can almost grasp the basic tension and electricity that composes life, but not quite. Later, you can remember figuring out why we're here, but not what the answer was. Everything breaths, and your heart almost seems to jump from your chest, and the trees are speaking.
Are you experienced?
Robert Cook said: "One can see why they had to make LSD illegal..."
So we do -- because it turns otherwise normal people into Democrats.
They see us all as part of one big collective, rather than separate individuals; and they think that they have some special vision, some insight, that allows only them to see truth. If others disagree with them about the indescribable colors of the molecules in the air, it can't possibly be because the colors aren't there. That possibility never enters into their thinking.
Like Democrats with anthropogenic global warming.
10:32 Jeez, thanx Bosco. Not everyone attended the same fratboy party as you Brucey.
Richie Cunningham? The Fonz?? POTSIE!
You could get a bad batch, which would just about destroy your mind. Hence, the expression, "bad trip" or "bummer".
Chip's story may have less to do with quantity that quality.
PS Cook forgets, if they ever told him down at the Daily Worker, that LSD was an experimental substance, mostly confined to the lab. It had to be outlawed when it got into the general populace and kids started talking strolls in rush hour traffic.
Imagine Cary Grant on LSD (he was an aficionado of the stuff in his later years).
Chip's full of Chit. Back to Phyliss Schafly.com, Jr!
"They see us all as part of one big collective, rather than separate individuals; and they think that they have some special vision, some insight, that allows only them to see truth. If others disagree with them about the indescribable colors of the molecules in the air, it can't possibly be because the colors aren't there. That possibility never enters into their thinking."
Spoken like someone who has never experienced psychedelics.
That aside, on a basic level, we are one big collective. While we all cherish our individual liberties, as individuals we are insignicant in the scheme of things, and even as a collective, our existence and presence in the universe, while marvelous, is accidental, and is without purpose or meaning.
J said: "Chip's full of Chit."
I agree, J. I think LSD is actually good for you -- it's a vitamin. You should run out and score yourself a big old batch.
And when the band you're in starts playing different tunes, I'll see you on the dark side of the moon.
Robert Cook said: "Spoken like someone who has never experienced psychedelics."
You are correct, sir. Unless you consider The Macallan to be a psychedelic.
I've also never hit myself in the head with a hammer; or used a pneumatic gun to drive 10-penny nails through my brain. Oh, the colors I've missed.
But I've also avoided the hippy commune delusions that particular type of brain damage. Take heed, libertarians who argue for drug legalization: You're creating the next generation of hippies.
"as individuals we are insignicant in the scheme of things, and even as a collective, our existence and presence in the universe, while marvelous, is accidental, and is without purpose or meaning."
Where did you find this information. I need to learn more about that.
Non sequitur, Pastaman.
I disapprove of Chip's paranoia and alarmism (and really the video itself). Doesn't at all imply one approves of LSD for the Peoples. It's dangerous. Tim Leary was a quack. But LSD's probably not as damaging as like belonging to the mormon cult, or teabaggers.
PHYLLIS SCHLAFLY?????????
Frankly, I liked Hippies. As long as they had some means of support, they seemed to be less offensive than the average jerk.
Our society could use a little of their philosophy: "Do your own thing, man." I miss that today. Now everybody has an opinion on how you should live, vote, eat, drive, work, spend, think, etc.
The painfully sober are a dry lot, and pretty busy screwing things up. It's almost like they are on something.
Not everyone took acid in the 60's. Most tried it once or twice. Others experienced many trips. It was a big part of the Hippie culture and artwork from that period.
It is an experience that really can't be described. As they say, you have to have been there.
Like Tyrone, I too had several wonderful mind expanding colorful 'trips' and a few that were frightening.
I think that everyone should be able to experience LSD at least once in their lifetime.
"(LSD) had to be outlawed when it got into the general populace and kids started talking strolls in rush hour traffic."
Mmmm, while I can't say that never happened, most of the horror stories told about LSD users jumping off roofs thinking they could fly, or wandering into traffic, or having their chromosomes scrambled and mutated, were pure bullshit, scare stories like the no less horrific lies told decades earlier about marijuana to compel it being made illegal.
If such anecdotes are true in enough numbers to require the prohibiton of the catalyzing agent, then, uh, we should say bye bye to that most destructive of drugs: alcohol.
One can see why they had to make LSD illegal...it cannot be used to induce people to keep shopping as their primary duty to the nation.
If for no other reason, I'd take LSD just to get away from Cooky's extreme reductionism.
"Where did you find this information."
God told me.
Cook, of course, considers Uncle Vlad to be God.
Robert Cook said...
"(LSD) had to be outlawed when it got into the general populace and kids started talking strolls in rush hour traffic."
Mmmm, while I can't say that never happened, most of the horror stories told about LSD users jumping off roofs thinking they could fly, or wandering into traffic, or having their chromosomes scrambled and mutated, were pure bullshit, scare stories like the no less horrific lies told decades earlier about marijuana to compel it being made illegal.
The morgue of the Daily Worker is a bad place to go for material. Like marijuana, LSD does weird things to the chromosomes and this is pretty well documented. It was one of the reasons acid fell out of favor with the slacker class, believe it or not.
If for some reason I decided to have a transcendent experience, I can't think of anyone I'd rather talk to during it than a scientist. But I'd want one who studies things that interest me, not one who's studying me.
PHYLLIS SCHLAFLY?????????
I never had enough confidence in my mental equilibrium to fool around with LSD. Life was psychotic enough in those days without amping up the volume to eleven. I had a friend who complained of flashbacks. He said that sometimes when he was driving the road turned upside down. He confided that interesting bit of information while driving. Forewarned is forearmed.....I did try amphetamines. I cracked a molar grinding my teeth while sleeping. That was a transformative experience that opened my mind to the portals of a dentist's office.
10:32 Jeez, thanx Bosco. Not everyone attended the same fratboy party as you Brucey.
Well, yes, I did belong to a fraternity. 40 years ago. But there was about as much drug use in the fraternities at that time as anywhere else. Including psychedelics.
My comment though was the result of numerous comments by undergraduates, most often women, about their impressions of those who smoke too much pot.
Back when I was in college, it was cool to smoke dope, and, for many, to do psychedelics. Throw in coke, since it was a novelty drug then, and was most often pharmaceutical grade. Heroin and speed were iffy, but, hey, it was the their choice. But now, their seems to be a lot of scorn for those who go through college stoned. Of course, by those who don't - but would have in my generation.
"(LSD) had to be outlawed when it got into the general populace and kids started talking strolls in rush hour traffic."
Maybe, and maybe it was because it was tied to the hippie generation.
As with a lot of manufactured drugs, the primary effect may have been to just provide those who used acid to imbibe much more corrupted versions of the drugs. Something like what we are seeing today with meth, with many of the most notable side effects being because it is being formulated in apartment sinks instead of in pharmacies.
When I started college, real LSD, while scarce, was still available. By the time I had graduated (1972), what was being sold as acid tended to be highly cut with speed. Maybe good, maybe bad. May be why we didn't see as many people jumping out of windows as supposedly happened in the early to mid 1960s.
I don't completely disagree Brucey. Even 20 years ago or soo when attending college...that izz, IIRC...dope of all sorts was abundant (well, except for decent china white). The Nancy Reagan approach to the "drug war" was as ridiculous as her senile hubby. IM for ....legalization of pot (in theory at least).
But boomers don't cop to the excesses of the 60s--like, the Manson family. Lots of loud ugly music. 'Nam (Demo-started at least) Occultic crap. Drug casualties.... The Dust Bunny Queen! Scary.
I've seen this video before and it's really an interesting and sometimes funny look at normal folks see in tripped out folk. She was calm, reserved, and yet she was experiencing something she never has before and it overwhelmed her and she tried to express it in the only way she knew how. However, when she started talking about seeing air molecules, my bologna meter pegged. It's not that she could see them or what she thought was them, but it was her usage of 'air molecules' that struck me. Either she is a scientist herself posing as a normal 'housewife' volunteering for this experiment or she was coached, or frankly, maybe the whole thing is an act. But she was really cute.
She seemed perfectly believable as someone who was tripping for the first time, or she could be acting too. If you have no experience with this stuff you tend to expect weirdness and lack of control that is just not the norm for it. People who did this back in the day often did it while at work, play, or in class. I never saw anyone get outed for bizarre behavior. I often sat down to dinner with my family in my late teens while tripping. Strange and funny, but not impossible to handle. Of course, Ive seen people who took entirely too muck acting like crazed animals. Dosage is very touchy, but if you kept it to what was considered one dose, it was manageable, although it never feels like it. You assume you are obviously wasted at the time, but afterward people will often say they had no idea, but you have to keep your mouth shut to pull that off.
Those who have never tried drugs and specifically hallucinogens, don't really have a frame of reference to relate. It's unique in human experience, which is why the intellectually curious should try it, at least once. Trust me, your brain will not turn to mush, but it won't unmush it either.
""Is it all one?" "It would be all one if you weren't here.""
The dude was harshing her mellow by asking questions while she was becoming one with the universe.
Random memories of the 1960s: Timothy Leary at Harvard gave LSD a reputation as if it had been scientifically tested. The only tests had been done by the CIA and Military trying to weaponize personality destruction by drugs before the Russians got ahead of us. But the peyote mushroom hallucinogen had always been in use by indigenous Americans as a religious initiation into the spirit world. In 1964 there was no drug culture, but by 1966 it was popularised everywhere.
"Is it all one?" "It would be all one if you weren't here."
I've made that point so many times it's silly - with no acid required - though there was that time I did 30 hits,...long story.
"I never saw anyone get outed for bizarre behavior. I often sat down to dinner with my family in my late teens while tripping. Strange and funny, but not impossible to handle. Of course, Ive seen people who took entirely too muck acting like crazed animals. Dosage is very touchy, but if you kept it to what was considered one dose, it was manageable, although it never feels like it. You assume you are obviously wasted at the time, but afterward people will often say they had no idea, but you have to keep your mouth shut to pull that off."
Did you wear sunglasses? It seems to me you'd want to take LSD in a situation where you don't have to pretend you aren't on it and you don't have any kind of task at all that needs to be accomplished or any kinds of obstacles to deal with... including a scientist asking you to describe things.
"wasted"
What decade was that? The 70s?
A guy I knew older than myself but in my peer group worked in a hospital. He told me a man came into emergency who perished. They opened his head and it was mostly just mush. My friend said, "It's called acid for a reason. I saw myself what a lot of it does. An excess of it eats right through your brain." True or not that put me off the idea right from the start.
Total nonsense. LSD has mild physical effects and essentially no long term effects or damage. Lots of temporary mental effects, though!
http://reason.com/blog/2010/11/01/the-most-dangerous-drug
from here
http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736%2810%2961462-6/fulltext
I find it funny that DBQ and bagoh are advocating use of an illegal drug.
"The Harvard Psychedelic Club: How Timothy Leary, Ram Dass, Huston Smith, and Andrew Weil Killed the Fifties and Ushered in a New Age for America"
I highly recommend this book for a glimpse into the formation and intersection of the drug culture, new ageism, and good intentions gone bad.
There was a guy in the 1980s in Menlo Park that I called "good value." I heard that he had taken one trip that never stopped, thus the good value of that hit. He stood at the light on Sand Hill Road and laughed and laughed.
In a way, the sixties ended that day, December thirty-first, nineteen sixty-nine.. no, that's a Simpson's quote.
To me it seemed like the the hippies were all over with when LSD became just another recreational drug, something high-school kids took to get high and no lip service paid to mind expansion. From there it was just a short hop to the realization that pretty much the whole hippie canon was based either on naivete or the machinations of the KGB.
@traditionalguy
Psillocybin is a mushroom, peyote is a cactus.
Peyote makes you barf your guts out due to strychnine, then an electric high that I thought was mellower than acid.
Psillocybin is the easiest to handle, I thought, but I never did take a lot.
Apropos my last comment,
Kid Charlemagne
Peyote makes you barf your guts out due to strychnine, then an electric high that I thought was mellower than acid
Yeah. I never did that because the idea of barfing in order to 'trip out' was just not appealing. No thanks.
marilize legajuana!
@Tyrone
According to the Internet there is no strychnine in peyote or LSD for that matter.
According to the Internet there is no strychnine in peyote or LSD for that matter.
I'm taking Carlos Castaneda's word for the strychnine part, or maybe it was just druggie lore.
You can take my word for the barfing part. Everyone. Copiously.
Owsley Stanley, the famous LSD producer from Berkley, is alive and well in Australia a believer in the Neanderthal diet and a maker of expensive belt buckles and other hippie accouterments. He was the sound guy for the Grateful Dead.
Anything that plays a role in encouraging us to question how we perceive the world is BAD FOR THE SOCIAL ORDER and don't you forget it!
Except for a wine box and a webcam.
Legajuana? That's actually a cool word. Of course, I'm not sure it's seen that way in the land of Lake Woe Be Gone.
Same thing. Just a different hallucinatory pathway.
These guys don't think that someone's interest in recreational drugs shouldn't be so stigmatizing as to disqualify them for public office. What say Der Commentariat?
Who's with The Long Island Iced Tea Party?
Ritmo - why am I not surprised that you are for illegal drug use?
Why am I not surprised that you are not only illiterate but incapable of understanding who decides which laws should be enacted in a democracy?
For someone who pretends to be a libertarian, you're a pretty socially authoritarian guy.
Also, this just in: You can satirize or criticize one view without endorsing some supposed "opposite" view. It's called thinking, Alex. You should try it sometime.
No one has commented that the woman is movie-star attractive -- somewhere between Jeanne Crain and Susan Hayward. And we are to believe she is a simple helpmeet to a VA employee?
I remember vaguely in the early 60s that a Tribune journalist -- of the variety known as a "sob sister" -- took LSD in order to be able to write about it for the paper. This was before the hippie psychedelic era.
I'm 37, so I've no personal experience with 60s drug and hippie culture except my parents were young people during that time.
May I ask a question of those who have experimented with drugs?
Why did you do it? Or why do you do it?
The woman is clearly out of touch with reality while on her trip. Do people out of touch with reality make better decisions (before, after or during the trip)?
I only need have a convo with my ex-drug addict bro-in-law to understand how harmful drugs can be to the individual and the collective.
Little Towhee - it's clearly evidence that all great art from the 1960s to 1970s was done on acid. Not only that but some of the great computer graphics breakthroughs were done by acid-popping computer scientists. They really are BETTER then us.
Why did you do it? Or why do you do it?
1. Zeitgeist
2. Peer pressure
"No one has commented that the woman is movie-star attractive -- somewhere between Jeanne Crain and Susan Hayward. And we are to believe she is a simple helpmeet to a VA employee?..."
Yep, a ringer for Susan Hayward. That's the first thing I noticed and her very nice legs....
FLS: I believe the woman in the film is an actress. A number of actors and actresses went to a psychiatrist in Hollywood who used LSD as it was originally intended: as a drug to help in psychiatry. I believe there was a recent article in Vanity Fair on the group who used this doctor.
I believe the woman to be Betsy Drake, Cary Grant's wife. http://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/features/2010/08/drugs-in-hollywood-201008
"It seems to me you'd want to take LSD in a situation where you don't have to pretend you aren't on it".
Absolutely, but nightly dinner with the family was required attendance, no matter what else you had planned or started. You often needed to start your experiment early enough to be "ready" when your friends picked you up. That's right, to go driving around tripping on acid, which always included an assortment of other drugs and alcohol.
The dealing with people who had no idea you were high was one of the fun challenges of it all. My parents had no idea what their pride and joy was up to. About 1/3 of the kids in my small PA town acted this way often. We never got hurt, we never got busted,and we none became drug addicts. There were many addicts among those who tried intravenous drugs. That's a different clique with vastly different outcomes.
Yes Ann, we got "wasted", because it was the mid 70's.
Nothing but fond memories of it, no regrets. The narrative about such things was never accurate, and it hasn't changed.
My ISP's been acting horribly ever since the storm, impeding download speeds to a dial-up pace and extending the amount of time it's taken to watch the YouTube video to hours. (Very trippy, I know).
But I like that at the end there's a transition to this ad for a very interesting book I'd picked up a few months ago. Apparently the vid advertises a newly published book that links Timothy Leary, Andrew Weil and a few prominent others into a once-tighter group that represented the nexus of LSD's eventual impact on American culture.
Obviously, not everyone involved in understanding LSD's impact took the role that Leary did. Andrew Weil is a somewhat respected physician and purveyor of alternative therapies. But the way this book explains how such disparate, though somewhat prominent personalities came together and eventually developed their roles in society around their shared experiences related to LSD is very, very interesting.
If you like reading about how the different, diverse personalities of the founding fathers shaped the nation, you'll like this one too - assuming you accept that the 60s and the counterculture were not some kind of un-American evil and a blot on our history but rather just a phase of our cultural and historical evolution during a turbulent century. As long as you're not fixated with passing judgment on a phase of our history I think you'll find it interesting.
Ritmo - if LSD is so wonderful why aren't you taking a hit a day? What are you scared of?
The reason I tried LSD, peyote and mushrooms is the same reason I tried cigarettes and marijuana and alcohol. I was young, I wanted to see how it felt.
Later in life, I tried Ayahuasca while I was visiting peru. I wasn't that young, but it was a remarkable experience. Somewhat like LSD, with a lot more barfing...and yet, somehow, a lot more controlled than LSD. While I didn't have any lasting revelations (lasting is the key word here), there were times I felt I was in total bliss. That was the closest I have felt to a superior being/god/brahma/vishnu/etc in my life.
Yes, you do seem to see connections between unexpected things. But after you come out of your trip, those connections seem to be artefacts of the mind rather than anything else. And yet, the whole Ayahuasca experience enabled me to be more compassionate. At the same time, it helped me crystallize my individuality even more.
Before it, my individuality and my compassion were always pulling me in opposite directions. After that experience, they seemed to coexist better.
I'm afraid of melting my brain and becoming the intellectual equivalent of Alex.
Ankur - how does being more compassionate help in a world filled with head cutters and suicide bombers? We have to be MORE ruthless then they are.
Once a suicide bomber, always a suicide bomber. That's what I always say. There's no other impulse that could be appealed to in such a human being. Why, even if Osama bin Laden didn't exist, I'm sure there'd be lotsa suicide bombers. They're just born that way.
You can always count on Ritmo to find the humanity lurking in homicide bombers. yes I will call them that since Fox News created the term. I worship at the Haus of Faux. Eat is shit-eating Gaga RETARDS!!!!!
Does God implant the Muslim-ness in the suicide bomber's soul and the Christian-ness in Ted Haggard's soul at conception or is it determined beforehand?
Ya gotta love how Alex thinks LSD was "bad" for U.S. society because of the influence it created but individual suicide bombers are soul-less monsters who aren't influenced in any way by the society around them.
It's his imperialism speaking. Humanity for me, not for thee.
Alex, it helps me give more in charity every year. It helps me choose different projects that I accept in different parts of the world (mostly south america and India). It helps me be nice to Jehovah's Witnesses who knock on my door. It helps me not react (and do something more dangerous) when someone cuts me off on the freeway.
In other words, it works for me personally.
As for ruthlessness - sometimes ruthlessness is the other side of the same coin as compassion. In the Mahabharata (an Indian legend), when Arjuna (good guy) is hesitating to destroy his cousins (bad guys), the lord Krishna gives him a series of lessons on the nature of compassion and ruthlessness, essentially saying that when you eliminate evil, even with the use of violence, you are ultimately expressing compassion for the souls of the evildoers, and compassion for the world that would have suffered at their hands.
This series of lessons ultimately became the "Bhagwad Gita" which is a rather important religious/philosophical text in hinduism. Of course, there is a lot more to it, and I am grossly oversimplifying , but essentially,to summarize that part of the Gita - sometimes it might be hard to differentiate compassion and ruthlessness, and that it may not even matter. But what DOES matter is the ability to tell good from evil.
"You can always count on Ritmo to find the humanity lurking in homicide bombers"
Well, they are human beings. But just because they are human beings, one shouldn't hesitate to kill them.
What does one's humanity or lack thereof have to do with whether they should be killed for the greater good?
Why do you have to dehumanize them to kill them? You can recognize their humanity, their foibles, their societal influences, their riches, their poverties, their freedoms, their lack of freedoms...and still kill them.
Nice gams!
Pogo,
Mr. Crack Emcee; please use the nearest white courtesy phone.
Woman: "I wish I could speak in technicolor."
I just got home where I could watch the video and, wow, that ending's such bullshit. If we're "all one" then why did Andrew Weil betray Timothy Leary "like a spurned lover" (as one historian put it) not long after this time - but after both had taken LSD?
The lies and hypocrisy, as usual, are overwhelming. Is there no room for truth and honesty, at all, in the hippie cosmology? I'd really like to get to the bottom of it (actually, I think I have gotten to the bottom of it, with, say, that woman in the video being the top) but with so many being the self-serving pricks they are, few will ever tell the truth, taking their lies with them to the grave. Weil's still alive. Think he'll talk? Or will he just keep stringing the world along on bullshit? "We're all one."
In your dreams.
That poor woman! She is obviously an amateur and should not be forced to trip on her own, it would have been much better to have a friend or two to trip with her. Otherwise, you boomers have always been amateurs when it comes to truly "transcendent experience" and, and, AND... whut Crack said.
"Yes, you do seem to see connections between unexpected things. But after you come out of your trip, those connections seem to be artefacts of the mind rather than anything else."
But this is where lies the value in taking pschyedelics...not is "getting wasted," but in seeing that how we experience the world around us, and how much "the connections we make" regarding "reality" and social norms are "artifacts of the mind," so to speak.
That is not to say "nothing is real," but that we see what we expect or want or have been taught to see. We experience and interpret events according to our innate temperaments, our external conditioning by parents and society, by what our personal experiences have shaped us to see, and by our received or developed ideas about what things signify or mean.
When one realizes that the world is not necessarily as one has learned to believe it is, that there are other ways of seeing and experiencing and interpreting the world, one is more apt to question the dogma of one's own culture or political system or religious system, or peer group beliefs, etc.
This is why totalitarian nations object to and often ban art forms that extend outside the parameters of accepted style or taste, as art can similarly provide vivid and novel emotional and cognitive experiences, which are dangerous to regimes that wish to order their societies through the management of what can be thought or felt or expressed.
Tricky,
This is why totalitarian nations object to and often ban art forms that extend outside the parameters of accepted style or taste, as art can similarly provide vivid and novel emotional and cognitive experiences, which are dangerous to regimes that wish to order their societies through the management of what can be thought or felt or expressed.
Have you seen my blog?
Just sayin'.
"It's called acid for a reason."
Well, yes. That reason would be that "LSD" stands for the German version of "Lysergic Acid Diethylamide," the joker in the deck being that the German word for "acid" is "Serge." The fact that something is chemically an acid means nothing as far as harming you goes. Your stomach (assuming you're healthy) contains hydrochloric acid powerful enough to melt solid metal (see Hydrochloric Acid in Stomach").
Stomach acid: it's not just for the Alien anymore.
Michael said...
Andrew Weil
Is a piece of shit that is one of the architects for the bullshit 'wellness' movement we are seeing today. He is largely responsible for a lot of the crap we have to wade through because of morons like him. I'd love to punch that sack of shit in the face for the culture rot he has introduced into my country.
Little Towhee said...
I'm 37, so I've no personal experience with 60s drug and hippie culture except my parents were young people during that time.
You may not think so, but the pervasiveness of that culture is still infesting the culture today. You are not immune to it whether you think so or not.
Ankur said...
Alex, it helps me give more in charity every year. It helps me choose different projects that I accept in different parts of the world (mostly south america and India). It helps me be nice to Jehovah's Witnesses who knock on my door. It helps me not react (and do something more dangerous) when someone cuts me off on the freeway.
In other words, it works for me personally.
In other words you are saying that hallucinogenics made you a better person? Is that what you are saying? Really? You couldn't have come to these determinations towards people without them? Ankur, I'm not sure whether you are a fraud, a liar, or just downright stupid and gullible.
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