San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run . . . but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world.
...
So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.”
... a generation of permanent cripples, failed seekers, who never understood the essential mystic fallacy of the Acid Culture: the desperate assumption that somebody - or at least some force - is tending the light at the end of the tunnel.
This culture is still pervasive - probably accounting for the majority of people who actively argue for decriminalization and research - and a bad spokesman. It reminds me a lot of the people who think Cannabis can’t be addictive, cures cancer, and has no negative effects. In some ways, it fetishizes and ascribes magical properties to drugs just as much as the “drugs are bad with zero exceptions” crowd does. Except, in many aspects it’s worse, because it downplays risks and pressures people to partake. Normal people notice it even if they can’t articulate it, and it does a lot to discredit reasonable people.
For me, and most people I was doing this with, it was just an affordable, long lasting drug. Sure, I had read various books about opening the doors of perception but at some point you realize it's just more "you" that you are finding.
I do think psycadelics can be used therapeutically in the right conditions but I'm not convinced ad hoc trips will get you there unless you are already skilled at introspective techniques.
The one thing I'll say I agree with is it does change your perspective and can give you a break from your ego. Seeing how nice it is to not be a slave to all the negativity, dwelling in the past, and obsessing over the future is very freeing and taught me that pursuit of meditation was worth doing.
Ultimately, I'd say meditation can give you the benefits that people associate with psychedelics if you are consistent in the practice.
surely "just" more you still offers "deep spiritual truths", and surely finding them makes you more enlightened.
> I'd say meditation can give you the benefits that people associate with psychedelics if you are consistent in the practice.
I don't see how this in anyway devalues the psychedelics
If you have experienced what people often refer to as enlightenment, you'll know the feeling fades. It's like trying to hold onto water. Knowing it is there can change the way you think about the world, sure, but chasing it is the ultimate ego trip. It's probably better to be open to it than to run around looking for it.
And I have to tell you, listening to Slayer on the second day of an acid binge in some dingy basement apartment while you try to figure out who you know that has some weed is not the same as hanging around in an alpine meadow with the cast of Hair. It's just not.
I never meant to devalue psychedelics, I was agreeing with the removal of that magical cache they seem to enjoy. For a lot of people they are simply affordable party drugs that let you drink your face off and have a good time for 8 hours or whatever. Their clinical use is very different and I love that it is being explored in a rigorous manner.
The psychedelic drugs themselves do not operate in a vacuum. They are neither good nor bad. I don't mean to devalue their therapeutic use but if anything they are a shortcut to give you a taste of what is possible with your existing hardware.
For an adult trying to lead a responsible life, regular meditation (or walking, playing an instrument, etc) is probably better than self-dosing after work on a Friday. For someone struggling with PTSD, I would imagine a dose in the right environment alleviates that burden in a way most other things cannot. Seeing that it is possible to not feel like you have been feeling could give you the motivation to try to hold on to that and find other ways to experience it. That's incredibly valuable.
Or maybe it just makes "you" more crawled up "your" own esoterical butt?
But that's what opening the doors of perception means. Of course you're "only" discovering things about yourself, but that is still valuable and I think that is what a lot of people find 'mystical' about these drugs.
I agree that shamanistic woo-woo doesn't do any good though.
If there's one thing that's clear beyond all else involved in the topic of popular culture, it's that the media chooses what culture to push and what to ignore.
For those not in the know, Mondo films (that's usually the start of the title, like Mondo Freudo) gathered together very disparate samples of different slices of life, with a heavy emphasis on the titillating, the criminal, the bizarre, not to mention almost anything that might be numbered among the counterculture, and presented them in a vaguely documentary-like format. How much was staged, how much wasn't? Still, aside from the almost obligatory nudity, you got a very strong feeling of "look at the strange stuff these people get up to!"
My guess is that they had kind of an outsized impact for what seemed like half "nudie cuties" of the 50s married to a casual National Geographic feel of different cities in Europe, the United States, and associated territories.
The media does manufacture narratives. Youth in New York and San Francisco had a subculture in the 1950s which was framed as beatnik, and soon sitcoms were mocking beatnik. Small basement performance places would have patrons not clap to avoid noise complaints, so patrons would snap their fingers as applause. This was then presented as something unusual and pretentious, minus its original context. The same thing with San Francisco hippies - they arose organically, the mainstream culture took notice of them and presented them a certain way, and the cycle goes on.
Every social movement that arises is met with an attempt to coopt and to commodity by the corporate media and corporate America, this has happened for a long time.
https://www.amazon.com/Conquest-Cool-Business-Counterculture...
This sounds like something you'd read in a pop psychology book, not an actual piece of historical analysis.
Given the visible cultural impact that the "ideology" (to use your word) had, and the sheer number of artifacts we have to attest to that, it's almost impossible to imagine how this claim could be substantiated.
Ironically, the only thing in that that's close to a correct statement is the line about communes and acid, which were actually a very small part of the "ideology" that you're referring to, and relatively rare, but which were amplified in public perception due to media portrayals.
If you follow the long-wave (Kondratiev wave) theory of economics, the 70s was the beginning of the real "drop" while the 60s were still (relatively) boom times.
At the beginning of the downturn, there were large strike waves and dissent ... which were then, yes, broken, leading to the collapse of the socialist left wing in western countries (those parties calling themselves [or being called] socialist or social democratic now generally aren't and haven't been for a long while), and a brutal weakening of the organized labour movement.
One remarkable thing is how the hippie stuff often induced by chemical manipulation of serotonin receptors mirrors a lot of religious messages. You can take slogans like "peace on earth, love your neighbor, love is all you need" and say, is that hippie stuff? Or is it, say... The message attributed to Jesus? In that sense, you don't really need the drugs or counterculture to come up with that. It's been an authentic part of history before. Nor can it totally be dismissed as only coming from drug culture, or a brief source for a small moment in time. We've had similar movements and ideas become popular before. I'd go one step further and call it objectively a good thing.
A shaman brewing a mystical drink that gives you visions of supernatural forces is pretty convincing evidence of a god(s) to your any 2000 B.C. person. How else could you explain such a trip while having no concept of chemicals much less neurochemistry.
My point is you don't necessarily need chemical inducement to start or sustain the idea. Centuries of religious people believed in transcendent consciousness at times in history where they demonstrably had no access to drugs. You don't need to partake to be moved by John Lennon's all you need is love either; a lot of the people listening did not. And part of our cultural norms have these ideas baked in, with or without drugs.
It is totally believable that a true religious zealot would be able to achieve much, much more with decades of practice.
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/baba-ram-da...
Probably BS, but matches with what you say.
And in the three main monotheist religions formation stories there is a good amount of time spent/lost in the desert.
I think of the brain as a "rationalization machine". It observes environmental inputs, and reflexively seeks to ascribe a cause for those inputs. In so doing, a causal model of the world is constructed (whether accurate or not), allowing the agent to make intelligent decisions about what actions to take in order to produce desired outcomes.
What hallucinogenic drugs tend to do is overwhelm the brain with sensory inputs that are sui generis and cannot be folded neatly into a pre-existing causal model of reality, but that are so numerous that they cannot simply be ignored.
So the "protective mechanism" of the brain, rather than abandoning or risking damage to this highly valuable causal model of reality, is to shunt these experiences over into an "other" category of mystical and religious significance. The fact that these experiences are inexplicable, rather than being an indication of any "malfunction" in the brain which might prompt us to doubt our perception in general, is instead proof of their cause: the incomprehensible divine.
This isn't academic, just my 2c.
It's important to not become too confident in this either. Our perception of that is as you say useful but also subjective and flawed, and I think if you get down to pure materialism, it's harder to pin down than you may think.
Even something basic which seemingly we all agree on at a basic level and require to function, trying to answer questions like "what is time?", you quickly can end up with mind bendy examples from physics where the intuitive understanding falls apart.
I don't think whichever one you see is a choice either, more like the yanny vs laurel thing
At one point I made the same argument you make. Now I don't see it that way. And I feel much better honestly
I think you're right that it's a personality thing, maybe connected to how strong the "rationalization drive" is? I don't know.
I guess I'd rather tickle the rationalizing side of my brain with a rationalizination of the tendency to stop rationalizing rather than just stop rationalizing :)
There is no religion, outside of what we imagine. We made it up. It isn’t like the water cycle, it’s not something just waited to be discovered by humans who know how to look for it. Religion is fantasy.
You're making a metaphysical claim here, good luck proving it
Someone mentions religion and you come along and decide to attack it with the same cliche. Why?
Really in all cases, religious and secular, we make the best guesses available to us. I think we need to be humble about all of this.
My opinion is also that it is more amplified then justified part of the 60s. The more important part was the social revolution and not the sexual revolution. The sexual revolution was more the pill. People did fuck before.
While anybody who has been paying attention to reality for very long will recall that the preference for peace & love over war & hate was so overwhelming that it was the war that was over within just a year or two after critical mass was reached among young people. Yes it was only a small portion who took the LSD, but the entire generation was influenced in some way or another too numerous to mention. For one thing it was just too stupid to continue being drafted into the army to go and fight for somebody else's country. There were not major anti-corporate attitudes, that was the least of considerations and really just a little bit of collateral fallout against military contractors. Nothing compared to the number of people today who are truly anti-corporate.
The entire nation grew to a point where a US President known to be dishonest by millions of citizens, was embarassingly ushered out by the combined attitude of the rest of the country (including those who had voted to re-elect him), way more respectably than deserved.
Think how much more widespread a collective attitude among young people against dishonesty would have to be before it could spread further enough for anything comparable like that to be accomplished today. Someone born in the 21st century would be the easiest to be taken advantage of by current disinformation since they simply have no frame of reference, there's nothing modern that compares. When someone born as early as 1968 can come up without a clue.
What's really hilarious is whoever is swallowing this propaganda is spending so much time so misinformed it's like (not even) trying to grasp reality while never venturing outside of Disneyland, and having nothing but imaginary characters as a source of guidance. This wouldn't be the first century where some people's perceptions can become far more distorted without any drugs compared to others who are under the influence.
I guess you can't trust everybody's description, especially when it comes to ideology.
Plus I would think it makes sense to do whatever one can do to discourage the spreading of propaganda.
I feel like something similar happens with various woke/cultural issues
Weird to think about how media can amplify a set of ideas, that itself didnt last very long. We keep having this renewed consciousness of ideas, like a microphone blowing it into everyones ears. Even funnier is to think that an ideology that hates mass media (anti corporate 60s culture) may actually just be a product of mass media, much like mickey mouse.