Acid Dreams: The Complete Social History of LSD (22 page)

There was a great deal of disagreement among seasoned acid veterans as to the real meaning of the vision of the Clear Light. Hollingshead experienced something akin to it but did not consider it the final nirvana: “Let’s face it—LSD is not the key to a new metaphysics of being or a politics of ecstasy. The ‘pure light’ of an acid session is not this—it may even be the apotheosis of distractions, the ultimate and most dangerous temptation. But it does allow one to live at least for a time in the light of the knowledge that every moment of time is a window into eternity, that the absolute is manifest in every appearance and relationship.”

The experience in which eternity takes root in the waking state is brief, yet its significance is profound. It may take months, years, even a lifetime to come to terms with this fleeting moment of vision. Any experience so overwhelming, so incomprehensible to normal waking consciousness, carries with it a tendency to rationalize it as quickly as possible. Art Kleps felt that the peak of a major deathrebirth experience was no time for making formulations,- on the contrary, he insisted that one should fight this urge: “If you can’t let go and instead grab the first lifesaver or bit of wreckage that floats near your thrashing form, you will come down firmly believing that the lifesaver you grabbed was the meaning of the trip rather than the exit from it. Your new personality will be defined, not in terms of the truth, but in terms of the particular lie you happened to grab at the crucial moment.”

It would appear that Leary succumbed to this “LSD temptation” when he developed the notion that a person could tune in to his
genetic code while high on acid. “Is it entirely inconceivable,” he mused, “that our cortical cells, or the machinery inside the cellular nucleus, ‘remembers’ back along the unbroken chain of electrical transformations that connects every one of us back to that original thunderbolt in the pre-Cambrian mud?” Leary suggested that by taking LSD he could commune with the “evolutionary program” and actually make contact with the ultimate source of intelligence: DNA. He turned his cellular visions into a kind of psychedelic Darwinism, positing the reading of the individual genetic code as a universal truth: “God does exist and is to me this energy process; the language of God is the DNA code.”

Kleps took issue with Leary’s conception of a good trip. He insisted that people who never had mystical experiences on acid could learn just as much as those who did. He thought Leary placed too much emphasis on pleasurable visions. “Nine times out of ten, talk about bad trips resolves itself into a naive identification of pleasurable visionary scenes and sensory appreciation of the present (during the trip) with ‘goodness.’ When such people find themselves in a few Hell-worlds here and there, they think that something is seriously amiss.” For Kleps LSD was never supposed to be
easier
than traditional methods of self-realization; it was only “faster and sneakier.” According to the Chief Boohoo, you could be devoured by demons during a psychedelic experience and it still might be a good trip if you came out of it feeling that it was worthwhile. Kleps maintained that striving for a preconceived visionary end in the acid high only complicated things and led to bummers.

It is as if [Leary] deliberately and with malice aforethought polluted the stream at its source and gave half the kids in psychedelic society a bad set to start out with. Almost every acidhead I talked to for years afterwards told me he had, as a novice, used
The Tibetan Book of the Dead
as a “guide”—and every one of them reported unnecessary anxiety, colossal bummers, disillusionment, and eventual frustration and exasperation, for which, in most cases, they blamed themselves, not Tim or the book. They were not “pure” enough, or perhaps the “Lord of Death” did not deign to transform them because they were not worthy of His attentions, etc., etc.

The psychedelic biography of Allen Ginsberg illustrates the futility of the programmed trip, be it self-initiated or imposed from without. Ginsberg found that even self-programming could create formidable psychic tensions often resulting in awful bummers. His
desire for a heavenly illumination, which he sought through LSD, was a carry-over from a powerful non-drug experience he had in 1948. Ginsberg was then living in a sublet apartment in Harlem. While reading William Blake’s “Ah, Sunflower!” he heard a deep resounding voice. He immediately recognized it as Blake’s own voice emerging from the dead. Ginsberg felt his body afloat, suffused with brilliance. Everything he looked at appeared in a new light. He was struck by an overpowering conviction that he had been born to experience this universal spirit.

When Ginsberg began using psychedelic drugs, his Blake vision was his reference point. As he put it, LSD gave access to “what I, as a poet, have called previously aesthetic, poetic, transcendental, or mystical awareness.” But he ran into trouble when he attempted to recapture the cosmic heights of his Blakeian episode via drugs. He wanted to write a poem under the influence of LSD that would evoke a sense of divinity, but he found that the act of writing interrupted the multitudinous details inundating his nervous system. The tension between the romantic vision of illumination and the simultaneous urge to communicate it turned his divine quests into bum trips. Ginsberg described his frustration in numerous poems he composed while high on acid and other psychedelics: “The Reply,” “Magic Psalm,” “Mescaline,” and “Lysergic Acid.”

Ginsberg had been painting himself into a corner with drugs, thinking that he should take acid to cleanse his soul and trying too hard to attain some sort of satori. He felt a compulsive obligation to use LSD again and again to break down his identity and conquer his obsession with mortality. His growing paranoia with regard to psychedelics came to a climax when he ingested yagé in Peru in i960. Again he was primed for divine revelation, but instead “the whole fucking cosmos broke loose around me, I think the strongest and worst I’ve ever had it. . . . I felt faced by Death. . . got nauseous, rushed out and began vomiting, all covered with snakes, like a Snake Seraph, colored serpents in aureole all around my body, I felt like a snake vomiting out the universe—or a Jivaro in head-dress with fangs vomiting up in realization of the murder of the Universe—my death to come—everyone’s death to come—all unready—I unready.”

Toward the end of 1961 Ginsberg undertook a spiritual pilgrimage to India to come to terms with his unsettling drug visions. On the way he stopped in Israel to talk with Martin Buber, the eminent
Jewish philosopher, who emphasized human relationships and advised him not to get caught up in confrontation with a nonhuman universe. Ginsberg received a similar message in India from Swami Sivananda, who told him, “Your own heart is your guru.” These encounters set the stage for a sudden realization that came to him a few months later, during the final days of his long journey. While riding a train in Japan in mid-1963, he had an ecstatic conversion experience, an inexplicable but deeply felt resolution of his trials with psychedelics. The relief was so great that he wept on the train. Inspired by this breakthrough, he pulled out a pencil and wrote a poem called “The Change: Kyoto-Tokyo Express,” which signaled a turning point in his spiritual search.

Ginsberg had been seeking divinity through out-of-the-body trips on psychedelics. In trying to superimpose the acid high on his old memory of a cosmic vision, he was not living in the present; he was blocking himself. Now he saw the futility of attempting to conjure visions of a blissful imaginary universe when the secret lay within his own mortal flesh. In this moment of profound insight he understood that truth could only be experienced within the framework of the body; therefore, the overarching mystical imperative was to become one with his own skin. He was not so much renouncing drugs as refusing to be dominated by them or by the obligation to take psychological risks with chemicals to enlarge his consciousness. “I spent about fifteen, twenty years,” Ginsberg reflected, “trying to recreate the Blake experience in my head, and so wasted my time. It’s just like somebody taking acid and wanting to have a God trip and straining to see God, and instead, naturally, seeing all sorts of diabolical machines coming up around him, seeing hells instead of heavens. So I did finally conclude that the bum trip on acid as well as the bum trip on normal consciousness came from attempting to grasp, desiring a preconceived end, a preconceived universe, rather than entering a universe not conceivable, not even born, not describable.”

Secure in his sense of self, his mind calmed, Ginsberg had a different personal set for his subsequent LSD trips, which took on a whole new character for him. He began to enjoy himself while he was high. After all he had been through, Ginsberg finally realized that the experience of peaking on LSD is above all one of an open horizon, a field of presence in the widest sense. Any clutching at the Eternal or the Clear Light or the hidden message of the DNA
code necessarily became a fixation, an objectification, and therefore an inauthentic relationship to the infinite openness of psychedelic consciousness. Once Ginsberg was able to direct his attention outside himself, there were no heavy judgments required by acid, just an appreciation of the world that lay before him.

The Hard Sell

Despite criticisms of trip programming, Leary still saw advantages in working with a manual: if a particular spiritual state could be consistently reproduced, there was a good chance the psychedelic movement would really take off. Hence the adoption of the
The Tibetan Book of the Dead
as the first LSD guidebook. Since the movement’s only “activism” was the psychedelic session, the first step was to persuade people to take the drug. Leary aimed his message at those whose hearts and minds were still up for grabs: the younger generation. He saw himself as the orchestrator of a mass cultural phenomenon. His goal was to encourage large numbers of American youth to decondition themselves away from the workduty ethic by means of psychedelic drugs. Leary insisted that the insane rat race was the real “narcotic escape” and that people could find a new kind of harmony by dropping out and “sanitizing” themselves with large helpings of LSD. He advised taking the drug repeatedly in order to transcend the mind’s habitual fixations: “Find the wisdom in yourself. Unhook the ambitions and the symbolic drives and the mental connections which keep you addicted and tied to the immediate tribal game.”

To those in the inner circle it quickly became apparent that the psychedelic movement “would be sold like beer, not champagne,” as Kleps put it. Whether or not the liberation was bogus, the style was strictly Madison Avenue. Leary not only hyped LSD as a shortcut to mystical enlightenment but also fused it with something that had proven mass appeal: sex. In his 1966
Playboy
interview he discussed psychedelics in the broad social context of “erotic politics” and “hedonic engineering.” Acid was portrayed as a “cure” for homosexuality and a means of inhabiting a supremely sensual reality. “In a carefully prepared, loving LSD session,” Leary stated, “a woman will inevitably have several hundred orgasms. The three inevitable goals of the LSD session are to discover and make love with God, to discover and make love with yourself, and to discover and
make love with a woman. . . . That is what the LSD experience is all about. Merging, yielding, flowing, union, communion. It’s all love-making. . . . The sexual impact is, of course, the open but private secret about LSD.”

Leary had a knack for telling his audiences exactly what they wanted to hear. He could be all things to all people; whatever guise he chose, the gist of the message was essentially the same. “It’s all God’s flesh,” he insisted. “LSD is always a sacrament: whether you are a silly thirteen-year-old popping a sugar cube on your boy-friend’s motorcycle, or a theatrical agent giving pot to a girl to get her horny. . . or even a psychiatrist giving LSD to an unsuspecting patient to do a scientific study.”

Leary’s public pronouncements were calculated to seduce and frighten. He taunted his critics and prospective followers with brazen epigrams: “You have to go out of your mind to use your head.” As he saw it, Western culture had reached such a critical impasse that one couldn’t afford
not
to experiment with LSD. Regardless of how dangerous such a venture might seem to the uninitiated, the potential benefits were simply too great to pass up: “I would say that at present our society is so insane, that even if the risks were fifty-fifty that if you took LSD you would be permanently insane, I still think that the risk is worth taking, as long as the person knows that that’s the risk.”

Leary was a kind of carnival barker for the psychedelic movement. He had no compunctions about using the media to promote LSD. “Tim had what we needed,” said Kleps. “He had the ’dreams’ of the true salesman.” Leary was quite candid about his role as a media mogul. “Of course I’m a charlatan,” he often joked in public. “Aren’t we all?” To Leary the PR was all pretense, a cosmic put-on. That was what he had learned from LSD—all social roles were a game, and he could change personalities like so many different sets of clothing as the occasion warranted. His close friends never took him seriously as a guru or prophet or high priest. As Hollingshead commented, “It was easier to see him as an inspired impresario, an Apollinaire or Cocteau.”

During the mid-1960s, Millbrook attracted considerable publicity. TV crews filmed regularly at the estate, bringing even more notoriety to Leary, who quickly became one of the most famous and controversial figures in America. Leary knew he could get more coverage by making provocative statements, and he played upon the public’s
infatuation with the sensational. He realized that the press was not an organ for disseminating truth; no matter what one said, it would always be distorted by straight journalists. Thus, even when the media castigated him as everything from an “irresponsible egotist” to a “madman” hooked on acid, he was not in the least flustered. On the contrary, such outbursts seemed to be grist for his mill. Any publicity was a walking stick, as far as Leary was concerned, and if it came down to choosing between no publicity and bad publicity, he would opt for the latter. Leary was confident that the subliminal message—LSD could take you to extraordinary places—would come through between the lines and young people would turn on in greater and greater numbers.