Heresy

[Robin Landseadel]

On Sep 14, 2009, at 8:47 AM, Joseph Tracy wrote:

>  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.

I think if you pursue these sorts of drugs long enough, you eventually  
open up some of these doors. This looks like a near-constant theme in  
Pynchon's writing, these alternate routes of consciousness and the  
"accidental" ways folks end up on their spiritual paths.

> 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.

Seems to me to be a normal experience in cultures that are more  
comfortable with "Visions."

> Other experiences related to hallucinogens:

I think the biggest shared vision is the vision of the whole earth and  
the awareness that the planet constitutes a single being—the Gaian  
Hypothesis. This is becoming ever more important, but such tripster  
happenings as watching trees fuck or lawns breath, witnessing the  
extraordinary energy patterning of the plant kingdom for the first  
time, that is the most important shared vision of the sixties. LSD was  
an element in that global vision, but only one element.