"And this guy - who I really didn't know, he hadn't made
Easy Rider or anything - kept coming over, wearing shades, saying 'I know what it's like to be dead,' and we kept leaving him because he was so boring."
It was scary, when you're flying high: "Don't tell me about it. I don't want to know what it's like to be dead!"
"...[H]e was showing us his bullet wound. He was very uncool..."
From
the Wikipedia article on the Beatles song "She Said She Said," which I looked up after reading the she-said-she-said bad editing in TPM (quoted in
the previous post).
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23 comments:
Very uncool to be so serious about being dead. Especially if you've really even dead. When you're tripping you don't want to be confronted with reality. it harshes your mellow.
So what deep life insights did they glean from their acid trip?
So what deep life insights did they glean from their acid trip?
Hard to say. I know that I will never be able to look at a forested area or a field of grasses...with the wind blowing through the trees or field in the same way as I did before taking acid. Instead of seeing just a tree or two moving and swaying in the breeze, there is a bigger picture and you can (if you look at it in just the right focus) see all of the trees and bushes participating in an intricate and inter-connected dance of movement and colors rippling and changing as the leaves turn one direction and the other. It is quite beautiful, emotionally moving and makes you feel the connectedness of yourself to nature.
....too much information???
:-)
With one exception, I always had nice acid trip experiences.
So you experienced a sensation that otherwise might not have been available to you, DBQ. Okay, that's legit.
What bugs me is that one of the Beatles, I think it was George, insisted that drug taking was the path to wisdom. I don't buy it.
This was the final track recorded during the Revolver sessions, and was hastily added when the album line-up was found to be a song short. It took nine hours to rehearse and record the entire song, complete with overdubs.
Boy, in those days the Beatles were one, lean, mean song-making machine.
Monsoon, an Indian band did a wonderful cover in 1983.
ricpic,
What bugs me is that one of the Beatles, I think it was George, insisted that drug taking was the path to wisdom. I don't buy it.
And you shouldn't:
A doorknob will always be a doorknob and, yeah, George was a doorknob,...
Many Westerners said intemperate things about psychedelics in the sixties. George Harrison would never have taken an Eastern spiritual path without acid. I would be very surprised if Harrison didn't moderate that position, if it was his, later.
This was why the Beatles never grabbed me when they got "heavy".
Or thick, as you prefer.
What an amazing Wiki entry.
Conservatives and libertarians fight with the biased editors for the right to tone down liberal points-of-view all through Wikipedia - and now we get a no-holds-barred celebration of recreational drug use, printed in all its glory, without conformation or proof that the incident ever happened.
Characterizing Ringo as "acid-fired" because he was playing pool using the wrong end of the cue was totally unnecessary, but adding his quote was over-the-top. "Wrong end?" he’d say. "So what fuckin’ difference does it make?" Indeed!
George, insisted that drug taking was the path to wisdom. I don't buy it.
I've also seen other people take the path to stupid. I guess you just go where you were going to in the first place. Wisdom and creativity or stupid and destructive.
Seriously, though, (and this is hard to express) the experience did give some people the ability to perhaps think or see things that were always there, but you just didn't go down that path before for whatever reason. Either biological or just ingrained comfortable thought patterns/paths that prevent you from going on new paths.
So you experienced a sensation that otherwise might not have been available to you, DBQ. Okay, that's legit.
I think the sensation(s) was(are) always available, I just wasn't aware of it or able to access it.
If George Harrison wanted to think that it was the 'acid' gave him wisdom, I guess he could think that. I prefer to think that the 'wisdom' or thoughts or the ability to connect previously unconnected thoughts to create something new...is already there. Not created by the acid itself, but by the experience. It could be any other experience, possibly even a near death experience in a car crash or something, but whatever it is, it somehow opened the ability to get at what is already there.
Some forms of insanity, (Van Gogh for example) or some types of autism also open up the creativity and sensations that are somehow available. I don't recommend either of those methods. Merely point them out as examples of the mystery of the brain.
"Instead of seeing just a tree or two moving and swaying in the breeze, there is a bigger picture and you can (if you look at it in just the right focus) see all of the trees and bushes participating in an intricate and inter-connected dance of movement and colors rippling and changing as the leaves turn one direction and the other. It is quite beautiful, emotionally moving and makes you feel the connectedness of yourself to nature."
I've had that experience. No acid. No drugs.
A few times in my life, probably why I ended up pursuing theology/etc. instead of law. One of the more vivid came after I spent a weekend reading Paradise Lost on a large midwestern lawn in October.
Theophanies, like my mind was awakened to this huge reality.
Very spiritual.
Years ago there was a young guy who stood every day at the corner of Sand Hill road and Santa Cruz in Menlo Park. Big smile on his face, dreamy look. Found out he had been a star tennis player at Stanford but had taken some very bad LSD and was on a more or less permanent trip. I named him "good value." I hope he is alright after all these years. I hope he still stands on the corner of Sand Hill and Santa Cruz and smiles at the cars, the joke running in his mind.
I used acid and mushrooms (Separately) playing basketball.
The acid didn't work. I just laughed and walked off the court.
I saw 5 steps ahead on mushrooms. It was unbelievable. I felt like
Bob Cousy. I woulda said Pistol Pete, but I just saw ahead, no flair.
One of the more vivid came after I spent a weekend reading Paradise Lost on a large midwestern lawn in October.
Yes. It doesn't require acid or drugs to... using a trite phrase....expand your mind or to see connections that you never noticed before.
I had a similar experience while deer hunting in the high desert area. I was actually hunting for photographs this time so carried camera equipment (before the digital age) along with my rifle. Sitting for hours on top of a volcanic formation in crystal clear crispy air, able to see for miles, in the absolute silence of the high desert and realizing that it was not at all silent or empty and was teeming with life. Again the inter-connectedness and at peace with everything feeling.
I think one thing that taking lsd can do is to let you know that your senses are not reality. That is a big change, as prior to using a hallucinagen, most of us equate our sensory input with real life. What else can we do?
Once you experience your sensory data as, well, negotiable, it does change things. And spending brief periods of time as basically insane made me know I never wanted to be insane for real.
So I stopped.
Trey
Owsley Stanley, who died last year, ran the most prestigious LSD lab in the world. Ultra high quality. Ended up living in Australia on an all meat diet and making a living making trippy belt buckles. I communicated with him about one but decided I didn't want to pay a grand or so for a hippy buckle I would probably never wear. After he died I realized I should have done.
I believe DBQ rightly points out that the compound opens doors that are present but otherwise locked, or which cannot be unlocked without a lot of training and effort and desire.
Doing acid is one thing...doing acid and being stuck with some weirdo is something else. Looks like Fonda was on a "different trip" or something and came off as macabre or threatening.
I hate it when that happens.
I was too chicken to indulge in LSD. I did, however, go on a three day drunk with amphetamine boosters. The down side was that when I finally went to sleep, I ground my teeth so hard that I cracked a molar. The path of excess leads to the palace of wisdom or, in my case, to the dentist's office.....William James wrote of the dental patient who, while under the influence of laughing gas, knew the great secret of the universe. Unfortunately when he came out of it, he forgot what that secret was. Finally, he was able to muster all his will power and write down that secret while still under the influence. The secret, as he perceived it, was this: "Laughing gas make me laugh."
OK, I'll bite.
One particular Peter Gabriel concert, 1982/the 'Shock the Monkey' tour, found us a magnum of Mateus and a little square of paper deep.
There were 3 or 4 of us that nite, the show was stunning. I can confirm an 'other-reality', but like Trey, I didn't need to do it again, and haven't. Envigorating and terrifying at the same time, a chemical thrill ride.
I also can relate to Paddy's experiences. I consider myself very fortunate for my life, my family and my God. It is my humble opinion that the latter has the former by 'mercy' rule...
I believe humanity has another appointment with psychedelics farther in the future after the current drug wars settle down.
Psychedelics are not the solution to everything. Frequent use tends to break people down and destroy some completely, e.g. Syd Barrett. Still psychedelics have the power to open one to new ways of looking at the world, especially the realms of art, and that's valuable.
There's a fine documentary about LSD, Hoffman's Potion, that provides a good middle-of-the-road look back at LSD research before it exploded into headlines and hippies.
DBQ, I strongly suspect that your ability to have such an experience without drugs was why you had an experience with drugs.
I suspect I would have an similar experience with drugs as well, though I'm not tempted to try it. It's also why I see my experience as formative but not conclusive or definitive. It pointed to something more, awakened me to a new reality, but certainly didn't fill in all the details, or answer all the pressing problems of life lived in the normally experienced world.
there seems to be some LSD-influenced connection between getting high and being dead
The connection is the Tibetan Book of the Dead.
In attempting to understand the LSD experience the Leary group at Harvard decided that the Book of the Dead provided a good map to the death/rebirth experience of LSD as well as to the real after-death experience according to Tibetan Buddhism. Leary's group did a psychedelic translation of The Book of the Dead.
For a time John Lennon ascribed to this theory as well. He took large quantities of LSD while reading the Book of the Dead or the Leary version. The lyrics to "Tomorrow Never Knows" come from the Book of the Dead.
DBQ, I strongly suspect that your ability to have such an experience without drugs was why you had an experience with drugs.
Paddy O: With respect you don't know what you are talking about. It's a common conceit among those who have not explored psychedelics to assume that people who have breakthroughs with them could have had them otherwise. The research on psychedelics with alcoholics and ordinary people with terminal conditions, who broke through to very deep mystical experiences, strongly suggests otherwise.
Those who have not done psychedelics have no idea how powerful they are. I don't say this as a boast and certainly not as a recommendation. Most of the damage wrought by psychedelics was the result of this power. It was only natural to overvalue psychedelic experiences because of their power.
Once you have seen reality disintegrate and then reintegrate before your eyes, you are a different person. Not a better person or a wiser person, and definitely not a more functional person, but you are a different person and it's hard to accept the world as you did before, which is a very checkered blessing.
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