Heresy

[Joseph Tracy]

I kinda started this discussion though the thread has filled in a lot  
of the negatives and positives of LSD along with some scientific info.

My original proposition is that at a time when the culture I grew up  
in (new California, and second or 3rd generation east coast suburbia)  
was saturated in materialism and ideological warfare LSD jolted many  
people into what I can only call an intense variety of spiritual  
experience.

I had grown up in an Irish catholic family with mostly Jewish and  
Wasp friends and had fought very hard to liberate myself from  
religious beliefs, though I remained deeply respectful of Judaism  
which I pursued as a reading interest and talking with friends. Not  
angry, just didn't buy it and methodically distanced myself from it.   
Saw myself as an atheist humanist.

In 1969 I took my graduation money gift and got on a plane from  
Fresno back  to a suburb of Philadelphia. I wanted to get away from  
my parents and go to the Philadelphia folk festival for the 3rd year.  
I ended up going to Woodstock with 2 of my best friends, Benjy fom a  
Jewish family and Roger from an Orthodox Armenian family.  we picked  
up a hitchiker and all but Roger ,who was driving, dropped acid, my  
first time. It  was the only one of many times using so-called  
hallucinogens that I had unambiguous hallucinations. Saw people  
working in a creek at night that no-one else saw, saw purple haze  
coming out of Benjy's eyes, thought the van had headed down the  
freeway in reverse when  we stopped,  other stuff.  The next morning  
the crazy stuff was over and that night I had my 2nd remembered  
mystical experience. I was sitting with a young woman I had met. We  
were keeping warm by snuggling up, not sexual,  just friendly. A kind  
of peace came to me that I had never felt and an understanding that  
love was not something that you found or that happened to you, that  
it was something you did that it was related to kindness. Simple  
enough and sentimental in words, but this was direct and saturating  
beyond anything I had even imagined as possible. I wasn't looking for  
God, I was looking for psychedelic adventure.

I was determined not to let this moment phase me and my pursuit of  
fun, sex and good music.   I kept playing with the hallucinogenic  
fire and scored in the fun sex and good music areas. Other stuff  
started happening, I started to read other peoples minds. I would  
encounter people I had never met and start to tell them the ideas  
from the books they were reading the music that they had just been  
listening to, their career aspirations. I wasn't trying to do this,  
it scared me. Was I just a cross section of the interior human babble  
that surrounded me? The phase petered out in this extreme form but  
continued in a subtler sense of a more accurate intuition and  
discernment about people, an openness to extra-logical sources of  
information. I don't think Pynchon's description of this phenomena in  
Doc's life is just literary gamesmanship.

It seems to me   that all this is  normal experience in tribal or  
religious cultures that incorporates mysticism and that we have so  
narrowly proscribed "normal" or socially acceptable parameters for  
experience as to guarantee a challenge from an  invasive species into  
our monoculture.

The love energy kept appearing, bringing a calm center to the  
weirdness of the last days of the Vietnam War. I involved myself   
more in the Peace movement.  I began to read my way through Non  
Christian Spiritual literature: Taoism, Hopi  Plains and Navajo.  
Buddhism, Theosophy, Gospel of Thomas, Judaic Mysticism, Paramahansa  
etc. This stuff was pouring into the culture. Why?

Other experiences related to hallucinogens:

the world revealed as constant transubtantiation, a burning bush that  
burns and is not consumed..

a  visceral sense that petro based technology was poisoning the earth
and  a similar sense of the of the toxicity of TV culture

a perception that we are living n a world made by flowering plants  
and that we should respect that world

a delightful sense of the abstract  and malleable nature of the tools  
and principles of aesthetic pleasure and a release of visual,  
musical, and literary exploration and output leading finally to a  
living earned by art and craft, and enriched by playing music.

a definite sense that there was only so much to learn from the drugs  
themselves, that feelings of love and feelings of spiritual  
revelation were not the same as life lived well and a discovery that  
there were other routes to these experiences

Some bad drugs that led to  severe physical and mental discomfort

a significant diminishment of the fear of death.

a discovery  and the beginning of  incorporation of the feminine  
aspects of my self.

A sense that consciousness pervades everything and that humans are  
not the only spirit beings.

many forms of synesthesia

   A sense of the dark powers resident in institutional and personal  
power trips  and the human psyche which led to a hallucinatory  
fascination with manichean divisions, (This fucked me up big time,  
and later led me into an overlong immersion in fundamentalist pietist  
pacifist Christianity, the Bible,  and the whole passive yearning for  
external salvation)


Obviously,  there is nothing here that cannot be experienced by other  
means or  simply as  ecstatically heightened  aspects of human  
development.  LSD can exaggerate imbalances or balance exaggerations,  
and that makes it dangerous and useful. A lot of things are  
dangerous. But my feeling is that it stimulates a multivalent  
rerouting of internal and external connections, and we have taken  
something with real healing potential, and possibly ritual usefulness  
and associated it with criminality and escapism, neither of which it  
is particularly related to.

I stopped taking LSD many years ago but I want to describe one other  
experience, because I think it relates to Pynchon's ability to evoke  
karmic truths in adroit literary forms.

I was at a party where someone had given some LSD to a cat. I felt  
nauseated by this violation.  There was a guy at the party telling  
stories of how he ran drugs for the CIA, probably a liar but  
definitely a good one and fluent in several languages. I  abandoned   
my ride  who I was upset with for laughing about the cat. I started  
to walk the few miles home and saw the lights of televisions in  
houses I passed. I started to think about the war still in progress  
and the bombing in Cambodia and Vietnam.  The intensity of these  
thoughts kept growing till they were overwhelming, as though the war  
scenes from the nightly news were all around me.  I did not see this   
as an externalized hallucination but I felt in a way  that was  
terrifying and heart wrenching  missiles and gases and bombs falling  
in the suburban streets. This felt different from any drug experience  
I had had , not hallucinatory but visionary like a huge event  
happening behind the scrim of the calm California streets, the little  
wheel and the big one. I knew that what we were doing was blowing our  
lives to pieces, that what we had done in Vietnam we had done to our  
souls. That karmically we were poisoned and bloody and homeless and  
that we did not know it.

Many years later the missiles have started to fall here and the civil  
wars we started in other lands have come home.

Overall my sense of it is that LSD gave birth to fresh modes of  
consciousness that were fundamentally expansive and integrative.   
This consciousness played an important role in challenging inherited  
cultural neuroses and obsessions and the conformity required for a  
smooth running empire.  Among other things Pynchon's fiction has  
similar effects.