Phase 7
Like many of my contemporaries, I was psychedelitized by the youth music and culture of the late 60’s. That must mean that I smoked pot daily and gobbled down hundreds of hits of acid, right? Well, no, nothing of the sort. First of all, I was a mere 13 years old when I began to experience psychedelia. Much of the movement that spawned the counter-culture had begun to wane before it got to Madisonville. Even though we had television, things moved more slowly in those days. So, when I say I was psychedelitized, I mean that the psychedelic sensibility was a perfect match with my own. It was the thing I’d waited for my entire life, as though all my experiences had prepared me for expanding my mind through the perception of new music, art, fashion, and media. I didn’t need drugs to understand. The great misconception is that anybody did need them. I’m not discounting the drug experiences of anyone, and I’m not discounting drugs’ powers to influence perception, but there’s more than one way to skin a cat.
The psychedelic experience is really nothing more than breaking the surface of the conscious mind to get at the vast store of everything that floats around in the unconscious mind. I made that sound somewhat flippant, but it’s actually quite serious business because the essence of each person, both the known and unknown, the seen and unseen, the public and the secret, and all desires, loves, hates, frustrations, and fears are all there. Some of it is beautiful and some is scary as hell. Why dredge all that up, then? one might ask. Why not? It’s there regardless of its examination. Ever wonder: Why did I do that? Believe me, the answer’s in there somewhere.
What I’m laying out here is not the easiest path. For one thing, getting toward the core of the mind’s essence isn’t so simple. The big block is the chemical barrier between the two poles of mind. That barrier thins during sleep and allows that unordered, uncensored, illogical mess of dreams to invade perception. It’s pretty difficult to examine all that while sleeping, and I think that’s where drugs like LSD became so important to psychic explorers in that those drugs, too, thin the chemicals between the the conscious and unconscious mind, and thus allow it conscious interplay. As in dreams, crazy things sometimes become paramount to the experience. Then again, sometimes every perception just seems funny (or sad, or whatever).
How then does music, or art, or anything else open that door between the mind’s rooms? When experience jostles or jolts or pitches the mind’s perception out of its narrow confines of conscious self, the psychedelic mind is near. It’s not just for hippies, or heads, or psychotics, but for anyone. It could land anywhere: in church, at a concert, during a test at school, while making love. There’s no end to where it could happen.
Actually, I feel that drugs in general, and what I call the mind drugs, LSD, mescaline, MDMA, marijuana, psilocybin, and others, in particular, have gotten a bad rap. I’m not saying there isn’t danger in using these drugs, but I am saying that not a single one of them will, by ingestion, kill a person. That’s true. I’ve heard of people ingesting doses of LSD a hundred times greater than necessary to achieve its effects who have lived to tell the tale (I’m sure these people spent unpleasant hours coming down, but did not die). The reason is that none of these drugs have a toxicity level great enough to induce death. Period. Not one of the mind drugs is addictive, either. Don’t take my word for it. Something else to remember is that it isn’t the drug that causes hallucinations, but is the mind which produces all those. The drugs just open the door.
A proposition that I reject is the idea that such drugs destroy human will or restrict the mind. That is, frankly, bullshit. The image of a stoner lounging around the couch with a bag of potato chips in one hand and a bong in the other while watching television might at times be true, but it isn’t the entire story. I’ll quote a reggae song I once heard while showering: “I like marijuana because it puts me into a deep meditative state.” That pretty much nails it.
But that’s enough of that. I’ll mention more about drugs later. Back to where I was going in the first place, concerning the psychedelitization of my mind via various influences of the late 60’s, I’m sure the process took some time. It’s not like I woke one day and I was a flower child, but gradually new insights accumulated until I began to look at and even experience things in a different way, and all without a trace of drug or alcohol. When my mind became ripe for a jolt, it came. For instance, I might be listening to the radio and a song would somehow go directly to the core of my brain. That led me to reevaluate another song or image or piece of writing or personal interaction in the vein of what I’d learned from the previous (psychedelic) experience. I guess that made me a kind of weird little puppy (that was confirmed by the way I was occasionally treated at school, at football practice, in church, or in my neighborhood, though I’m the first to admit that other factors played into the equation as well), even if no one really thought of me as a puppy.
I began, quite accidentally, to listen to bands whose music had within it the possibility of transformation. Like many another, one of the first for me was The Beatles. Paperback Writer hit me like a brick. Hello Goodbye, I Am the Walrus, Strawberry Fields—god almighty! All of them blew my mind. What about The Doors? That music took me closer to the meaning of life and death much more dramatically than anything I had experienced in church. Even The Beach Boys got into the act. Listen to Smiley Smile and it will all be obvious. And The Animals’ San Franciscan Nights said it all: “Strobe light’s beam/creates a dream. Walls move/minds do too.…”
Excellent! Well written. Leary couldn't have said it better.
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