AMST 3100 The 1960s

1
AMST 3100 The 1960s

• The Psychedelic Movement
• Primary source is Jay Stevens, Storming Heaven
  LSD and the American Dream, 1998

2
Spiritual Lag?

• Jay Stevens argues that, in a sense, the hippies
  were an attempt to push evolution to raise
  consciousness to new levels.
• The psychedelic movement, of which hippies were a
  central element, was an attempt to restore
  spirituality and humanity to Western cultures
  that had become uprooted by the force of
  modernity.
• Modernity Social patterns resulting from
  industrialization, urbanization, rationalization,
  and other changes that have occurred over the
  last few centuries.
• The argument is that the rapid shift toward
  modernity came at the expense of the environment
  and human spirituality - or humanity itself.

3
The Problem

• Rapid industrialization and mass society have
  transformed and uprooted our spiritual roots.
• The emphasis on materialism and consumerism
  detract us from our spiritual health.
• The rise of weapons of mass destruction
  (particularly The Bomb), brought by modernity,
  suggest that the human race may be headed toward
  apocalypse unless we develop our spiritual health
  and connect with our humanity.
• Einstein felt that in the dangerous nuclear age,
  we were like children playing with loaded
  weapons. We needed to grow - very quickly - if
  we were to avoid disaster.

4
Aldous HuxleyJuly 26, 1894 November 22, 1963

• Writer of Brave New World (1932), a fictional
  novel featuring a dystopian culture where the
  masses were given happy pills to keep them
  content and passive while elites ran the world.
  This drug (soma) was used for escapism rather
  than growth.
• Huxley wondered if in real life there might be a
  drug that could be used to create utopia, not
  dystopia. Such a drug would not be an escapist
  drug it would be an engaging drug that
  facilitated our connections to humanity and life.
• Huxley felt a sense of urgency in the need for
  social change and growth, given the events of
  World War II, the emergence of the Cold War, and
  the nuclear arms race that was so frightening.

5
The Crisis of Modernity

• This sense of crisis led many thinkers to argue
  that we are doomed unless we find a way to speed
  up evolution, or to raise consciousness to a
  higher level.
• This raised the question of whether we can
  consciously evolve ourselves. Hence, the
  interest in finding a key to unlock the doors of
  perception.
• They asked is there a door in the mind we can
  pass thru, and if so, does a key exist to unlock
  it?
• These thinkers thought that perhaps LSD and other
  psychedelic drugs were the key to raising
  consciousness.

6
LSD

• LSD was viewed as a mind detergent capable of
  washing away years of social programming. It was
  a tool to help push us up the evolutionary
  ladder.
• By 1967, during the peak of the psychedelic
  movement, a countercultural momentum had
  developed in which the hippies began to see
  themselves as the true revolutionaries of the
  mind and spirit.
• LSD was one of the sacred sacraments of this
  movement.

7
LSD

• By 1967, LSD had been one of the most extensively
  studied chemicals in our society.
• Yet despite this, there was no consensus about
  LSD.
• It was linked to madness, yet also to curing
  madness.
• It was linked to mystical experiences and
  profound insights, yet it merely chemically
  scrambled neurons.
• Was it a source of enlightenment? Or was it just
  a way to get the neurons to malfunction?

8
LSD

• From a spiritual perspective, the question was
  whether the psychedelic state of consciousness
  was an affirmation of the mystics argument that
  the kingdom of Nirvana is inside all of us,
  waiting to be discovered.
• The history of LSD has a religious component, a
  scientific component, and a cultural component.

9
The Scientific Aspect of LSD

• LSD is the product of scientific research.
• In 1943 Albert Hofmann was searching for a new
  headache powder and revisited a drug he had
  synthesized in 1938 - LSD. This time he
  discovered (accidentally) that LSD was capable of
  producing fantastic hallucinations.
• However, it was unclear what it could be used
  for.
• Sandoz, the drug firm Hofmann worked for, then
  sent the LSD to psychiatrists seeking to get
  their feedback.
• Could LSD help patients release repressed
  material?
• The psychiatric testing of LSD had begun. It it
  arrived in the U.S. in 1949.

10
Post WWII Rise in Psychology

• The post-war rise in psychology contributed to an
  interest in LSD.
• Given what the Nazis had done during the war,
  researchers were greatly interested in the mind
  and human behavior.
• Freudians especially were interested in the
  unconscious in releasing the inner mind. They
  were attracted to mind drugs for this purpose.
• Freudians treated the wealthy more than any other
  demographic. Consequently wealthy people would be
  among the first to take LSD.

11
Timothy Leary

• By the mid-1950s scientists became interested in
  scientifically testing the effectiveness of
  traditional therapy psychotherapy.
• Timothy Leary was one of the first scientists
  involved.
• Leary found that those receiving traditional
  therapy were no more likely to improve than the
  control group.
• However, he found that where successful therapy
  had occurred, something else had occurred these
  patients had experienced a vitalizing
  transaction a moment of epiphany type of
  realization.
• The key to these vitalizing transactions lay
  somewhere in the unconscious mind, according to
  Leary.

12
1950s Research of LSD

• The 1950s research of LSD revealed that it made
  people extremely sensitive to nuance it
  heightened awareness of others moods as well as
  heightening the moods of the subjects.
• LSD was found to produce astonishing effects in
  both normal and crazy people.
• A catatonic on acid would sometimes come out of
  their shell, only to return after the effects
  wore off.
• LSD made some people become selfless, yet at
  other times they became egocentric. The selfless
  state was similar to the spiritual state called
  Nirvana.

13
Historical Backdrop

• Historically, the use of mind drugs is associated
  with
• 1. Pleasure, and/or
• 2. Healing and spiritual enlightenment.
• Psychedelic drugs are less associated with a
  third motivating factor for drug use escapism.
• The drugs that work best for escapism tend to
  dull rather than awaken or sharpen the mind.
  Drugs like alcohol, heroin, cocaine,
  barbiturates, etc., are typically used for
• 1. Pleasure, and/or
• 2. Escapism.

14
Historical Backdrop

• The first scientific approach toward
  mind-altering drugs occurred in 1855, when these
  drugs began to be cataloged.
• By the late 1800s, artists and intellectuals had
  discovered the potentials of peyote and magic
  mushrooms.
• They used these psychedelic drugs for both
  pleasure and mind stimulation.
• In the 1800s Victorian culture, experiences of
  the body were viewed in a moralizing tone as
  immoral as a threat to civilization and decency.

15
Historical Backdrop

• The U.S. was particularly influenced by
  conservative mores, given its Christian and
  Victorian influences.
• There was even a Prohibition Era between
  1920-1933 that outlawed alcohol consumption (the
  18th Amendment, later repealed by the 21st
  Amendment).
• Consequently, the U.S. even today is unusually
  moralistic in its approach toward sex, drugs,
  rocknroll, and other pleasures of the body.

16
Historical Backdrop

• Yet nearly all societies use mind-altering drugs
  of some kind.
• One reason may be that the human mind is
  constantly dulled by the inflow of everyday data.
  Consequently the mind seeks out sensation in the
  way we use grit to sharpen a dull blade.
• In other words, mind-altering drugs may be
  intrinsically appealing because they function to
  simulate new sensations that sharpen the brain.

17
Historical Backdrop

• It took less than 30 years for peyote to pass
  from the hands of scientists to the hands of
  artists and intellectuals.
• For LSD the period was even shorter.
• Aldous Huxley was one of the artists/intellectuals
  who was an important catalyst for the spread of
  LSD.

18
Aldous Huxley

• Fascinated by mind drugs.
• Huxley was searching for an ideal drug which did
  not pollute the body the way alcohol does.
• Huxley became interested in the scientific
  reports on the effects of psychedelic drugs and
  he sent a note to two of the key researchers
  Humphrey Osmond and John Smythies.
• Huxley wanted to try mescaline, and Osmond
  agreed. So in 1953 Osmond turned Huxley on.

19
Aldous Huxley

• Huxleys philosophical interests
• 1. The gap between rational technology and
  wisdom.
• 2. Evolution (or the misapplication of
  evolution).
• Particularly the dangers of engineering human
  nature with new technologies. See also the novel
  Frankenstein for this indictment.
• 3. The failure of education to create the whole
  man.
• 4. The increasing concentration of power in the
  form of Big Government and Big Business.
• In Brave New World the all-powerful corporate
  state issued a mind-altering drug which induced
  euphoria. Here, the drug was used for diabolical
  purposes.

20
Aldous Huxley

• Huxley was interested in a drug which could be
  used for enlightenment rather than entrapment.
• He had dabbled in many forms of psychic awareness
  chanting, meditation, hypnosis, and Eastern
  philosophy. What he discovered is that widely
  divergent mystical experiences had some core
  similarities
• They blended a physiological experience into the
  very structure of the mind to produce a moment of
  deep mystical revelation.
• The physical sensation of dancing and chanting
  around a bonfire could serve as a catalyst toward
  achieving the mental state of selflessness where
  a person becomes at one with the universe. The
  physical and the mental are connected.

21
Aldous Huxley

• By the 1950s, Huxley was considering psychedelic
  drugs as a tool to raise consciousness.
• His first mescaline trip in 1953 excited him to
  the possibilities he thought he may have found
  the key to the doors of perception.
• Huxley wrote an essay titled after William
  Blakes poem, The Doors of Perception which
  became a classic among later psychedelic drug
  users.

22
The Psychedelic Experience

• The psychedelic experience transcends words.
• Huxley likened the psychedelic experience to a
  journey or a trip where the perceiver sailed
  beyond the horizon.
• Tripping is paradoxical. It is a social
  experience on the one hand, because of the
  heightened skill at nonverbal communication yet
  no two people found themselves in the same part
  of this other world. Sometimes one felt
  distinctly alone.
• Some people had powerful mystical experiences
  others didnt.

23
The Psychedelic Experience

• Some trippers began to distinguish between a mere
  visionary experience and the more powerful
  mystical experience.
• Both Huxley and Timothy Leary were interested in
  the mystical experience because of its
  transformational powers.
• By 1956 Huxley was at the center of an emerging
  movement, part scientific and part
  religious/aesthetic.
• This movement was spurred on by Al Hubbard
  (Captain Al), who turned Huxley on to acid in
  1955.

24
The Psychedelic Experience

• Al Hubbard was a flamboyant millionaire who had
  taken an interest in psychedelic drugs and had
  experienced a mystical vision.
• Thereafter, he devoted his time to spreading the
  good word. By 1959, he had turned on 1700 people.
• Hubbard was an excellent guide for acid trips. He
  emphasized the importance of set and setting on
  the trip.
• He attended to the set of preconceptions, moods,
  etc of the tripper, along with the proper setting
  in which to make the trip most rewarding. Hubbard
  got people in the right mood and provided the
  right setting for a rewarding trip.
• To Jay Stevens, he played the role of the ancient
  shaman who guides tribal members on their trips
  using techniques passed down thru time.

25
Which way to go?

• While scientists studied LSD in the laboratory
  under careful scientific conditions, Hubbard used
  a more informal mystical approach to the acid
  trip.
• Huxley opted for Hubbards approach. If the goal
  was to speed up human evolution and raise
  consciousness, Huxley concluded it was important
  to select the right mix of brilliant and
  influential people and turn them on informally.
• This technique would hopefully cause a snowball
  throughout the culture.
• After all, Huxley felt the human race didnt have
  much time.

26
Emergence of an LSD Subculture

• By 1956 LSD researchers had become an informal
  fraternity of trippers who got together and
  shared their stories.
• They even began to have LSD parties among
  themselves.
• LSD was beginning to take off, especially in
  California.
• California provide the right cultural climate for
  acid because it was a hip place even in the
  1950s.
• Eventually the scientists shared acid with the
  artists and intellectuals, and by the early 1960s
  many famous people had tripped.
• LSD became the fashionable party drug among the
  Hollywood elite.

27
A Short Cut to Wisdom?

• Among the intellectuals, the debate over acid was
  whether it was indeed possible to mass produce
  the mystical experience.
• To writers like Anais Nin, you couldnt take a
  short cut to wisdom.
• But to Huxley, humans did not have the luxury to
  ignore short cuts.
• The world of the 1950s was already too close to
  the nightmarish dystopia of Brave New World.
• Huxley did not promote the wholesale distribution
  of LSD. He was selective about who should be
  turned on. LSD was too powerful to give to just
  anybody.
• Huxley was interested in turning on Beat artists
  particularly.

28
The CIA

• While Al Hubbard was celebrating the mystical
  properties of psychedelic drugs like LSD, the CIA
  was looking for a drug they could use for mind
  control.
• The Cold War drove both the Americans and Soviets
  toward diabolical methods of warfare, including
  chemical and psychological warfare.
• The CIA needed a domestic supplier of LSD so they
  contracted with Sandoz for huge local supplies of
  the drug, which eventually contributed to LSDs
  cheap and ready availability in the U.S. (LSD was
  not illegal until 1966).

29
The CIA Experiments

• The CIA experiments with LSD were so bizarre they
  seem like science fiction.
• Driving a car thru New York City and randomly
  dosing unsuspecting civilians.
• Dosing unsuspecting soldiers and, in one
  experiment, faking that their plane was about to
  crash to see how they reacted.
• These experiments on unsuspecting American
  citizens were not alarming to the U.S. Inspector
  General after all, we were at war!

30
The Importance of Set and Setting

• What the CIA, psychologists, and artists began to
  agree on was how crucial set and setting are in
  influencing the quality of the psychedelic
  experience.

31
What made LSD so attractive to the kids of the
1960s?

• The kids of the 60s grew up with messages of
  rigid conformity. Any deviation from cultural
  norms was viewed as a sign of mental instability.
• 1. This rigidity led kids to develop a
  fascination with the surreal superheroes found in
  comic books.
• Plasticman, the Human Torch, Captain Marvel
  they were all nonconformists. But they had
  started out as ordinary conformists until a
  chemical accident transformed them.
• They affirmed the idea of chemically-induced
  evolution or transformation. This made comic book
  superheroes subversive.

32
What made LSD so attractive to the kids of the
1960s?

• 2. Mad Magazine emerged during the 1950s and 60s
  to goof the adult world and encouraged an
  irreverent attitude toward authority.
• 3. Elvis Presley and rocknroll bypassed
  rational thinking and conformity in favor of
  kinetic, emotionalized body music.
• 4. Hollywoods new antiheroes, like James Dean
  and Marlon Brando, were role models of teen
  alienation and rebellion. They were
  nonconformists.
• 5. The Beatniks, bored with bland conformity,
  were gluttons for new and alternative
  experiences. The more intense the better. They
  were ripe for LSD and helped lead the way.

33
The Beats

• Many of the Beatniks tripped. Beats sought the
  same state of selflessness that Huxley sought.
• Beats like William Burroughs were concerned with
  shedding their social skin to explore their
  asocial self.
• They felt that the socially-constructed self of
  Western culture was a conformist straightjacket.
  It was trapped by repressive societal mores. They
  advocated shedding the repressed social self for
  something freer. LSD liberated people by
  de-constructing the socially constructed self.
• Beats viewed traveling as a means of not being
  held down by oppressive social structures.
  Tripping was a form of traveling.
• California was the promised land a place free
  from the stifling moralistic norms of the East
  Coast.

34
Neal Cassady

• Jack Kerouac was a chronicler of the Beat
  culture, and he portrayed Neal Cassady as the
  closest thing to a genuine beatnik.
• Cassady was different. He had charisma and spoke
  in long, flowing, intense rushes of words.
  Everyone liked him, he was full of life, and he
  lived in the moment.
• Most importantly, Neal Cassady seemed to have no
  ego. He was as close to selfless as Kerouac had
  ever seen.
• He was a role model for how to achieve Nirvana.
• He was existentially free.
• Kerouacs On the Road was a tone poem to Jack
  Cassady (Dean Moriarty).

35
Allen Ginsberg

• One of the leading Beats of the era was Allen
  Ginsberg.
• His poem Howl became a classic among the
  emerging underground.
• San Francisco was fast becoming the new Mecca.
• Ginsberg took acid and became an immediate
  advocate of LSD.
• He felt everyone should use it as a
  de-contamination tool.

36
The Emerging Counterculture

• The Beats were hip. They excelled at producing
  existential vaudeville theater experiences that
  were surreal.
• The Beats loved absurdity.
• In doing so, they were morphing into what would
  later be called hippies.
• A distinguishing feature of the hippies was the
  presentation of the absurd self.
• It was the emerging fashion to push things to
  their extreme, including all kinds of sexual and
  drug experimentation, and this became a hallmark
  of the 1960s counterculture.

37
Timothy Leary

• Leary was a product of the 1950s backlash
  movement called humanistic psychology.
• It was time to ask what made people healthy not
  just what made them sick.
• Learys humanism led him to have contempt for the
  Organization Man conformity of that era.
• When he discovered psychedelic drugs for himself
  in 1960 he felt that he had discovered a tool to
  unleash the intuitive mind and to experience
  profound transformations.
• And he couldnt wait to share his discovery.

38
Timothy Leary

• Leary experimented with psychedelic drugs at
  Harvard, using his students as assistants.
• Their first experiment was to give psilocybin to
  175 people in a naturalistic study.
• Over 50 of the participants claimed the
  experience taught them something about
  themselves, and 90 wanted to try it again.
• By 1961 it was less clear whether Leary was
  running a scientific experiment or whether he was
  trying to start a cultural revolution.
• By 1962 Leary was experimenting with LSD. If
  psilocybin was all about love, LSD was all about
  death and rebirth. It was much more powerful.

39
Timothy Leary

• Leary and Huxley exchanged enthusiastic
  correspondence over Learys research.
• They discussed the proper strategy to introduce
  mind expansion to a culture of Organization Men.
• Huxley argued that they should turn on artistic,
  intellectual and economic elites, and Leary
  initially agreed.
• However, after listening to Allen Ginsberg, Leary
  would later shift toward making LSD available to
  a wider array of people.
• Ginsberg stressed that it should be up to the
  individual and that everyone, not just elites,
  should have access to LSD. Ginsberg was an
  egalitarian.
• By turning everyone on, they would generate a
  snowball effect of mass change.

40
LSD Crosses Over

• Eventually psychedelic drug use spread across
  different groups, including the wealthy and the
  avant garde, who mingled at the same drug parties
  that Beats, artists, and intellectuals attended.
• Note the motivations for drug use varied by the
  group. Some took the drugs mainly for pleasure
  purposes while others took them for spiritual
  growth purposes.
• Gradually the West Coast parties began to
  emphasize the pleasure purposes.
• This was not a problem for Timothy Leary, who
  felt that American culture was too rigid and
  sexually hung-up. Leary believed pleasure and
  spirituality were linked.

41
Social Change

• At the core of the egalitarian philosophy was
  that true social change begins from the bottom
  among the masses - and moves up to the elite.
  This view opposes the more elitist view that
  change must stem from elites and their
  institutions, and the masses will follow.
• The problem with the egalitarian approach was
  that by giving everyone access to acid, there
  would be many casualties. This debate relates to
  a deeper debate.
• The most important debate among the
  counterculture involved whether to place the
  emphasis upon Nirvana or Utopia as the primary
  goal of The Movement.

42
Personal Politics versus Institutional Politics

• The 1960s protestors felt that both personal
  (psychological) and institutional (social
  structural) changes were needed, but which was
  more important making people at peace with
  themselves or making institutions more
  humanistic?
• Hippies and Radicals were split on this issue.
• Hippies favored a personal-change emphasis, with
  LSD as the tool for personal introspection. Their
  goal was Nirvana.
• Radicals favored an institutional-change
  emphasis, with organized social activism as the
  tool for change. The radicals goal was Utopia.

43
Personal Politics versus Institutional Politics

• Regardless of whether the emphasis was on Nirvana
  or Utopia, the two are interrelated.
• Under a Nirvana emphasis, we would expect that as
  minds became loving, institutions would
  eventually be reconstructed to be more
  humanistic.
• Under a Utopian emphasis, we would expect that as
  institutions became more humane, minds would
  eventually be reconstructed to be more loving and
  compassionate toward others.
• Both approaches are valid.

44
Timothy Leary

• By 1962, Leary was beginning to see himself as a
  spiritual prophet of sorts that he needed to
  lead society to a higher consciousness.
• Learys research had confirmed that psychedelic
  drugs produced forms of the mystical experience.
• His mission was assuming an increasingly
  religious or spiritual tone.
• According to his friends characterization, he
  saw himself as having evolved from his earlier
  - more scientific - self into a spiritual Guru
  self. He was losing interest in the scientific
  component of psychedelics. For this reason,
  Harvard would eventually boot him out.

45
The Politics of Consciousness

• Lysergic acid hits the spot. Forty billion
  neurons, thats a lot. Marshall McLuhan.
• By 1962, the mood began to change.
• Some psychiatrists began to feel that LSD was a
  dagger pointed at the heart of psychiatry. They
  were fearful that Leary would bring down the
  house.
• LSD had become easy to get, and it was now
  associated with an emerging hedonistic California
  subculture.
• Others in psychiatry advocated continued LSD
  experimentation.

46
Research into Safety of LSD

• By the mid-60s, qualms about the safety of LSD
  were being put to rest.
• Researcher Sidney Cohen surveyed a sample of 5000
  LSD users and learned that an average of 1.8
  psychotic episodes occurred per 1000 ingestions
  far less than the anti-drug forces had argued.
  LSD was fairly safe.

47
LSD as a therapy tool

• With the question of safety out of the way,
  interest now focused on the best way to use LSD.
• There were 2 schools of thought in psychiatry
• 1. LSD could be used as a facilitator of
  traditional Freudian psychiatry, or
• 2. LSD could be used in huge doses to try to
  produce an integrative or mystical insight that
  would lead to a radical change in behavior. This
  was called psychedelic therapy.
• If successful, the effects could be dramatic.
  Humphrey Osmond claimed a success rate of 50-70
  for chronic alcoholics, while Dr. Al Hubbard (by
  now a PhD) reported a success rate of 80.

48
LSD therapy

• What some trippers discovered was that,
  underneath the fragile ego, there exists an
  imperishable self that is at one with nature,
  death, and the universe.
• Much therapy involved moving past the vain ego
  into this selfless state. If successful, neurotic
  patterns die away because much neurosis stems
  from an insecure ego. This is how the Freudians
  see it.

49
Different Interpretations of LSD

• However, LSDs effects were seen differently by
  different researchers.
• One researcher might see LSD dissolving the ego
  while another might see it as a form of
  depersonalization, while Timothy Leary saw the
  same effects as a mystical union or an
  integrative experience.
• A hallucination to one was a vision to another.
• These discrepant interpretations represented turf
  wars between various types of psychologists,
  spiritualists, artists and others.

50
1962 LSD Research is Curtailed

• To conservative representatives of the
  Establishment, LSD was harmful. Period. In 1962,
  Congress passed a law that gave the FDA approval
  over all new experimental drugs.
• This law was aimed mostly at speed, but it could
  be used against LSD too. LSD was no longer so
  readily available for research after 1962.
• The research machine was being turned off by the
  authorities.
• However, it was too late to turn off the
  publicity machine.

51
The Fifth Freedom

• If the psychedelic movement had a highpoint of
  nostalgia, it might be in mid-1962 when Timothy
  Leary gathered 35 LSD experimenters in Mexico for
  tripping.
• Leary was interested in internal freedom,
  involving the right to do what one wanted with
  ones own consciousness. This was the Fifth
  Freedom to Leary.
• By this point, Leary had rejected the idea of
  turning on only elites. What was needed as a
  group of well-trained acid guides, capable of
  training others in the art of psychedelics.
• So Leary founded the International Foundation for
  Internal Freedom (IFIF) to promote the movement.
• IFIF lasted only a year. Leary dissolved it in
  1963 as too rigid or too bureaucratic. Learys
  attention shifted toward founding a commune that
  would offer less formalized training.

52
Learys goal 4 million

• Leary estimate that 25,000 people had used LSD by
  1961. He forecasted that by 1967 one million
  people would try it.
• To Leary, the magic number was 4 million people,
  after which he felt the movement would snowball
  great change in American society.

53
1962 the good ole days

• Learys subculture blended Beat coolness with a
  zest for having fun while learning at the same
  time. The prevailing mood was serious cosmic
  fun.
• At this point (1962) the subculture was moving
  beyond Beat but had not yet morphed into the
  hippie scene.
• The official definition of LSD at that time was
  that it was potentially useful but had become
  dangerous in the irresponsible hands of
  scientists like Timothy Leary.
• By now, the psychedelic movement was generating
  much publicity. Of the many magazine articles
  written about LSD at that time, Playboy provided
  one of the only positive articles.

54
1963 Huxley dies

• It was soon after then (11-22-63) that Aldous
  Huxley would die of disease and expressed his
  wish to his wife that he die while tripping.
• Huxley believed in LSD but feared that the
  politics of LSD would bring the movement to an
  end.
• Given the socially conservative climate of
  America, he did not want anyone to promote LSD
  irresponsibly.

55
Learys Millbrook Commune

• During the early 1960s, Leary moved to Millbrook,
  NY, where he established a psychedelic commune on
  the wealthy estate of a benefactor.
• Millbrook became the center of the psychedelic
  movement, which was growing in popularity.
• Leary offered a merging of psychology with a dose
  of spiritualism and hedonism at Millbrook.
• The weekend drug parties at Millbrook quickly
  became famous.

56
The Boy Most Likely to Succeed

• In the early 1950s, Timothy Leary was a well
  respected psychologist. By 1963 he was a famous
  psychedelic guru.
• A similar change occurred for Ken Kesey.
• Kesey was a regular jock athlete with a likeable
  personality who got good grades in school. As a
  senior in high school he was voted most likely
  to succeed.

57
Kesey discovers LSD

• When Kesey attended the Stanford Writing Program
  in 1958 he discovered that he was a gifted writer
  and that he was attracted to the Beat subculture.
• He grew a beard, began playing folk songs on his
  guitar, and started to smoke pot.
• Later he volunteered as a drug tester at a
  hospital studying psychedelic drugs.
• Kesey found that LSD was great and became an
  instant convert to the cause.

58
Kesey becomes famous

• It was during this period that he got his
  material for his famous novel, One Flew Over the
  Cuckoos Nest.
• This novel was a metaphor of 1950s America, where
  there was no room for individuality in the
  combine.
• Meanwhile, Kesey began to have gatherings for
  mutual drug exploration in his California home.
• By 1962, an inner circle of fellow-adventurers
  had emerged to call themselves the Merry Band of
  Pranksters, with Kesey at the center of it all
  and with Neal Cassidy as their role model.

59
How does one sustain Nirvana?

• One of the issues that Kesey and Cassidy were
  familiar with involved how to sustain ones state
  of cosmic consciousness.
• As Leary and others in the movement had
  discovered, people would often drift back to old
  routines and regress.

60
So how do you sustain Nirvana?

• At Millbrook they were working on ways to break
  set. This involved brain research and other ways
  to sustain nirvana.
• For Kesey and the Pranksters, the trick was to
  live totally in the here and now, where one was
  not trapped by the socially conditioned self.

61
The Pranksters take a trip

• By 1964 Kesey had finished his second novel and
  purchased a bus to travel with his Merry
  Pranksters to New York for its publication party.
  They were going to go to the Worlds Fair - and
  also to look up Timothy Leary.
• The bus, named Further, was equipped with motion
  film cameras, a sound system, and drugs. They
  planned on making a film of their adventure to
  the East Coast and filmed almost anything and
  everything.

62
The Pranksters go to Millbrook

• When they reached Millbrook, they realized that
  the psychedelic movement had split in different
  directions.
• Timothy Learys group regarded the Pranksters as
  too garish, while the Pranksters regarded
  Millbrook as too stuffy and egghead like.
• In others words, Millbrook was too scientifically
  serious while the Pranksters were too hedonistic.
• The Millbrook meeting strengthened the
  Pranksters sense of their own psychedelic
  identity as a distinct and separate subculture
  from the Leary crowd.

63
The psychedelic movement splits

• The Pranksters avoided the heaviness or
  seriousness of Learys subculture.
• They also rejected the careful reliance on LSD
  guides that Leary believed was necessary for the
  revolution.
• Instead they adopted a go with the flow
  approach.
• But here were the seeds of disaster where Leary
  pulled away from Huxley, Kesey was pulling away
  from Leary. Kesey was developing a loose code
  where anyone and everyone could take LSD freely.
  This was exactly what Huxley feared would happen,
  and what would bring down the authorities to put
  a stop to LSD.

64
The West Coast scene

• When the Merry Pranksters returned to the West
  Coast in 1964 they believed the represented a
  legitimate heir to the psychedelic movement.
• In this hedonistic subculture, there were no
  rules. New recruits had to figure out for
  themselves what the informal norms were and prove
  themselves before being accepted into the group.
• At Millbrook, new recruits were given Learys
  writings. At Keseys home, new recruits were
  given comic books and science fiction novels like
  Stranger in a Strange Land about an alien on
  Earth who had no ego.

65
Pranksters and Hells Angels?

• As Keseys subculture grew it attracted the
  authorities. Narcotics raids were infrequent,
  however, and generally did not yield much.
• By 1965, the Pranksters decided to test their
  philosophy of love and drugs on the Hells Angels.
  
• Hunter Thompson was the midwife for this strange
  bedfellow meeting, which went surprisingly well,
  but which unfortunately increased the Angels
  sense of self-importance.
• The Hells Angels would go on to provide security
  at various pop festivals. The most notorious was
  Altamont in 1969, where they murdered a man and
  beat up members of the Jefferson Airplane.

66
Allen Ginsberg

• At the same time that Kesey was taming the Hells
  Angels, Kesey was also meeting with Allen
  Ginsberg.
• Ginsberg brought his radical egalitarian politics
  into the West Coast movement, which was already
  egalitarian under Kesey.

67
The Acid Test parties

• The Acid Test was Keseys experiment on the
  nature of group mind and a possible new art
  form.
• It was a total party experience, complete with
  lights, music, cameras, theater, incense, and
  LSD.
• The music at these public parties was provided by
  the Warlocks, soon to rename themselves The
  Grateful Dead.
• During these parties people would play weird
  sounds, do spontaneous theater, and make magic.
• The conditions were designed to manipulate the
  suggestibility of the psychedelic condition to
  push people further, and to push people together.
• Ultimately, thousands of people showed up at
  these parties, which were becoming famous.

68
Kesey is busted

• By the end of 1965 Keseys Acid Tests were the
  psychedelic equivalent of a Billy Graham crusade.
• The tests peaked out in 1966 at the Tripps
  Festival, where 10,000 people paid admission to
  come in and gawk or grok.
• Just before this event Kesey was arrested for pot
  and this time the authorities intended to put
  him away for good. Kesey decided to flee to
  Oregon while he appealed and when Kesey vanished,
  the movement temporarily lost one of its most
  charismatic leaders.
• And at just the moment that the movement was
  about to snowball.

69
Leary and Buddhism

• Meanwhile, Timothy Leary had become interested in
  Buddhist mysticism. He believed that he was a
  tool of the great transformation of our age.
• Occasionally Leary himself lapsed into his Holy
  Man performance to the irritation of some
  insiders who felt he had too big of an ego.
• To many in the counterculture, the evolution of
  the human race depended on the restoration of
  unity between outer science (Western philosophy)
  and inner yoga (Eastern philosophy).
• Many were experimenting with Eastern ideas by the
  mid-1960s.

70
Millbrook issues

• One problem at Millbrook was that when Leary left
  the estate to research Buddhism or other topics,
  Millbrook sometimes devolved into a hedonist
  playground for omnisexuals.
• Plus, petty personal conflicts emerged.
• Another problem was that some people wanted to
  push the envelope to higher and higher doses of
  acid. The problem was that they always came back
  down and little had really changed.
• Yet another problem was that Leary had problems
  with finances. Millbrook was expensive to
  operate.
• Consequently he began to devote weekends to
  paying customers who paid to have a drug-free
  experiential weekend workshops designed to
  stimulate psychedelic growth and enlightenment.

71
Leary is busted big in 1966

• The politics of LSD were getting repressive by
  the mid-60s. Leary had moved from research, to
  politics, to the idea that people should be free
  to feed their minds without government
  restrictions.
• But by now government and medical bureaucracies
  were portraying LSD as worse than heroin. A new
  era of Prohibition was on the horizon.
• In 1966, Leary was busted for pot in Texas (it
  had been found on his daughter) and received a
  30-year jail sentence plus a 30,000 fine.
• He appealed and set up a defense fund, but this
  was the beginning of the end.

72
Leary part shaman, part showman

• Media coverage of Timothy Leary tended to portray
  him as a colorful weirdo not to be taken too
  seriously. When he was taken seriously (by a
  liberal media outlet) he was often criticized for
  not being serious or responsible enough to the
  movement. He was caught between these two
  characterizations.
• Leary was becoming part showman, because this
  helped pay the bills, yet Leary saw himself as
  part shaman.
• Meanwhile the authorities had staked out
  Millbrook with the intention of shutting it down.
• It was none other than G. Gordon Liddy, the local
  DA and future Watergate bumbler-burgler (chief
  operative of the White House Plumbers), who sent
  24 deputies to raid Millbrook in 1966.

73
LSD outlawed in 1966

• The Psychedelic Movement had grown so large that
  by 1966 Americans began to react to it.
• The reaction was severe.
• The governors of California and Nevada competed
  for the prestige of being the first to sign
  anti-LSD legislation.
• Their eagerness was matched by Washington
  politicians.
• By October of 1966, the possession of LSD had
  been made illegal in every state in the country.

74
The LSD backlash

• The backlash against LSD was not simple politics.
  It wasnt until 1965 that concrete evidence of
  its danger first appeared. This evidence
  suggested that people with unstable personalities
  were prone to disintegration when exposed to LSD
  in uncontrolled settings. They tended to freak
  out in an anxious or panicked state.
• A second problem with LSD was that some people
  claimed to have flashbacks months after
  tripping.
• The mainstream media immediately exploited these
  fears and began to portray LSD as a social
  danger.
• In March of 1966, Time Magazine declared that
  America was in the midst of an LSD epidemic.

75
Is .7 temporary psychosis that bad?

• Unfortunately there was little hard data on this.
  Among researchers it was largely agreed that
  roughly 2 who took LSD in uncontrolled settings
  experienced anxiety or panic attacks.
• Of that 2, one-third became temporarily
  psychotic.
• In other words .7 of LSD users had a temporarily
  psychotic breakdown.
• However, the media and politicians tended to
  exaggerate these psychotic breakdowns, and LSD
  was labeled a drug that causes insanity.

76
The LSD Witch-Hunt

• This LSD witch-hunt occurred partly from
• 1. Ignorance.
• 2. Capitalistic journalistic styles that
  emphasize sensationalism.
• 3. The dominant value system that all drugs are
  bad.
• 4. Poor research. For example the FDA concluded
  that 3.6 million people had an LSD problem by
  counting known illegal cases (360) and
  multiplying them arbitrarily by 10,000.
• The Reefer Madness of the 1930s became LSD
  Madness in the 1960s.

77
LSD Research Conclusions

• The researchers generally did find one thing to
  agree about regarding LSD it did offer the
  potential to affect personality (for better or
  worse, depending on ones views).
• Regarding personality change, researchers had
  found only one significant effect on personality.
  
• In 1966, a Rand Corporation study concluded that
  LSD users tended to have second thoughts about
  settling into a routine corporate job after a
  single acid trip. Rather, the user stated they
  would prefer a more contemplative lifestyle.
• If a person became more sensitive to poetry and
  music but less concerned with competition and
  success, is this good or bad? People do not agree
  here.
• But even this effect wore off over time if users
  stopped tripping.

78
There really is a reason to be concerned.

• Perhaps the most threatening aspect of LSD is its
  unpredictability. It is difficult to tell what it
  will do beforehand.
• Therefore, it is not surprising that some
  authorities were so concerned.
• The fallout led to LSDs outlaw by 1966 and to
  Sandozs decision to stop making LSD even for
  research purposes - in 1966.
• This was at the very time that many researchers
  were saying that what was needed was more
  research.

79
LSD a 3-part story

• Some view the LSD story as a 3-part story
• 1. A scientific story about the potential of LSD
  to unlock consciousness.
• 2. A religious story about LSD as a means to
  human salvation.
• 3. A cultural story involving a cultural revolt
  against the over-socialized or over-disciplined
  self into a more hedonistic and re-creative self.

80
The Counterculture

• At the essence of the 1960s is a restless desire
  for change.
• The question was, in what direction?
• Corporations were a major blame during the 60s.
  They promoted rampant materialism as well as the
  imperialism that led to Vietnam. But most kids
  realized that corporations were only the tip of
  the iceberg. The real menace was The
  Establishment of which corporations were members.

81
The Counterculture

• Big Business, Big Government, Big Labor all
  were part of the Establishment and its promotion
  of
• Anticommunism.
• American hegemony abroad.
• An emphasis on managing people as cogs in a
  machine-like system.
• Americans were polarized about how to view
  themselves during the 60s. Was it better to
  dismantle the Establishment and redistribute
  wealth or to get a good job?
• One of the rising strains within the
  counterculture was hedonism. Students who
  advocated a disciplined and carefully structured
  campaign against the Establishment were running
  into others who advocated hedonism and personal
  politics as solutions to a repressive society.

82
Kesey and the Counterculture

• Ken Kesey was opposed to Vietnam and the
  Establishment, but he was equally opposed to the
  idea of youth as a political vanguard to seizing
  power in the name of equality.
• To Kesey, this was playing their game. Kesey
  felt that people should simply turn their backs
  on the combine.
• And many did just that - to the disappointment
  of the SDS and other political radicals who
  advocated a disciplined political solution.
• Those who dropped out called themselves freaks
  or heads. By 1965, the youth protest movement
  had 2 symbolic capitols Berkeley for the
  radicals and Haight Ashbury for the heads.

83
The Hippies

• The hippies emerged by the mid-60s, but unlike
  the nihilistic and dark Beats, the hippies were
  colorful and loving.
• The hippies were the locus of the personal
  political revolution, where individual diversity
  was championed in context of communal
  allegiances.
• To hippies, the revolution started with the ego
  and the self, and LSD was the tool of this
  personal revolution because it opened the self up
  for change. Taking acid was a very serious thing.

84
The Hippies

• At first, hippies used acid as a de-conditioning
  agent to remove elements of the overly
  socialized, conventional self.
• Haight Ashbury provided the geographic context
  for this re-making of the self.
• The catalyst in this was Ken Kesey and the Acid
  Tests, where the Merry Pranksters introduced
  thousands of people to acid way more than Leary
  had done.
• By the summer of 1966, 15,000 people were living
  and tripping in the Haight, and from this emerged
  countercultural shops of all kinds.

85
Hippies Are you experienced?

• The Psychedelic movement initiated new forms of
  slang LSD was acid, a user was an acid head, a
  dose was a hit, marijuana was pot, getting high
  was groovy, people were far out in cosmic or
  bummer ways, etc.
• People who moved to the Haight typically changed
  their names.
• Huxley predicted that acid would awaken the baby
  boomers appetite for spiritual meaning but he
  had not anticipated the sources of this food.
• Astrology, numerology, black magic, Eastern
  mysticism, various New Age philosophies, etc
  all of these tend to emphasize that knowledge and
  direct experience go hand in hand. They emphasize
  experiential knowledge over book knowledge.

86
Sex, Drugs, and Rock

• Doing acid was not conducive to having a full
  time job, so many hippies had part time jobs. For
  this reason they also pooled their resources and
  developed a sense of tribe or extended family.
• At the center of the lifestyle was sex, drugs and
  rocknroll. Rock music was a perfect complement
  to drugs, as was dancing. The outside world was
  temporarily exorcized.

87
The decline of the movement

• So this was the choice hippie or radical
  activist.
• Unfortunately, instead of coming together as one
  beautiful tribe, Haight Ashbury was getting
  zooier. A miscalculation had occurred by 1968
  kids were tripping wherever and whenever they
  could without the least interest in human
  spirituality.
• Hedonism, a feature of the dominant capitalist
  culture, was usurping the drive of the
  counterculture. LSD was becoming merely a source
  of mindless fun, or worse, a source of escapism
  for some.
• By the late 60s, many kids were using it for the
  wrong reasons and in the wrong settings and bad
  trips were becoming more common. (It didnt help
  that the acid was often of inferior quality and
  frequently had strychnine in it).

88
The decline of the movement

• In the end, the psychedelic movement withered due
  to
• 1. A new era of Prohibition and ignorance about
  the nature of LSD and countercultural drugs in
  general.
• 2. A split in the movement between hippies and
  radical activists.
• Hippies emphasize personal change, with LSD as
  the tool for transformation, along with hedonism,
  with nirvana as the ultimate goal.
• Radical activists emphasize institutional change
  with disciplined social activism as the tool for
  change toward utopia.
• 3. A collapse of idealism by the late 60s, along
  with rising cynicism and fatalism.

89
Legacy of the Psychedelic Movement

• What is left of the psychedelic movement is
• 1. Largely underground again due to Prohibition.
• 2. Taking new forms in various New Age movements
  involving spiritualism.
• 3. The legacy of new music, art and dance forms
  that involve wildly expressive or trance like
  behaviors (raves, electronic trance music, avant
  garde art forms, etc).
• 4. Found in the subcultural legacy of the Dead,
  Phish, Radiohead, and other post-hippie segments
  of society.

90
End