#10 - JERRY GARCIA [1942-95]
“Nobody stopped thinking about those psychedelic experiences. Once you’ve been to some of those places, you think, ‘How can I get back there again but make it a little easier on myself?’”
—Quoted in Rolling Stone, November 30, 1989
#09 - TERENCE MCKENNA []
"LSD burst over the dreary domain of the constipated bourgeoisie like the angelic herald of a new psychedelic millennium. We have never been the same since, nor will we ever be, for LSD demonstrated, even to skeptics, that the mansions of heaven and gardens of paradise lie within each and all of us."
#08 - STEVEN WRIGHT [1955- ]
"If God dropped acid, would He see people?"
#07 - BILL HICKS [1961-94]
"Always that same LSD story, you've all seen it. 'Young man on acid, thought he could fly, jumped out of a building. What a tragedy.' What a dick! Fuck him, he’s an idiot. If he thought he could fly, why didn’t he take off on the ground first? Check it out. You don’t see ducks lined up to catch elevators to fly south—they fly from the ground, ya moron, quit ruining it for everybody. He’s a moron, he’s dead—good, we lost a moron, fuckin’ celebrate. Wow, I just felt the world get lighter. We lost a moron! I don’t mean to sound cold, or cruel, or vicious, but I am, so that’s the way it comes out. Professional help is being sought. How about a positive LSD story? Wouldn't that be news-worthy, just the once? To base your decision on information rather than scare tactics and superstition and lies? I think it would be news-worthy. 'Today, a young man on acid realized that all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration. That we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively. There is no such thing as death, life is only a dream and we're the imagination of ourselves' . . . 'Here's Tom with the weather.'"
JIM MORRISON [1943-71]
"In the beginning we were creating our music, ourselves, every night . . . starting with a few outlines, maybe a few words for a song. Sometimes we worked out in Venice, looking at the surf. We were together a lot and it was good times for all of us. Acid, sun, friends, the ocean, and poetry and music."
#05 - KEN KESEY []
"I believe that with the advent of acid, we discovered a new way to think, and it has to do with piecing together new thoughts in your mind. Why is it that people think it's so evil? What is it about it that scares people so deeply, even the guy that invented it, what is it? Because they're afraid that there's more to reality than they have confronted. That there are doors that they're afraid to go in, and they don't want us to go in there either, because if we go in we might learn something that they don't know. And that makes us a little out of their control."
—Quoted in the BBC documentary, "The Beyond Within: The Rise and Fall of LSD," 1987
#04 - TOM WOLFE [1931- ]
“The Pranksters had what looked like about a million doses of the Angels’ favorite drug—beer—and LSD for all who wanted to try it. The beer made the Angels very happy and the LSD made them strangely peaceful and sometimes catatonic, in contrast to the Pranksters and other intellectuals around, who soared on the stuff . . . The Angels were adding LSD to the already elaborate list of highs and lows they liked, beer, wine, marijuana, Benzedrine, Seconal, Amytal, Nembutal, Tuinal. Some of them had terrible bummers—bummer was the Angels’ term for a bad trip on a motorcycle and very quickly it became the hip world’s term for a bad trip on LSD. The only bad moment at Kesey’s came one day when an Angel went berserk during the first rush of the drug and tried to strangle his old lady on Kesey’s front steps. But he was too wasted at that point to really do much.”
—The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, 1968
#03 - TIMOTHY LEARY [1920-96]
"'Turn on' meant go within to activate your neural and genetic equipment. Become sensitive to the many and various levels of consciousness and the specific triggers that engage them. Drugs were one way to accomplish this end. 'Tune in' meant interact harmoniously with the world around you—externalize, materialize, express your new internal perspectives. Drop out suggested an elective, selective, graceful process of detachment from involuntary or unconscious commitments. 'Drop Out' meant self-reliance, a discovery of one's singularity, a commitment to mobility, choice, and change. Unhappily my explanations of this sequence of personal development were often misinterpreted to mean 'Get stoned and abandon all constructive activity.'"
—Flashbacks, 1983
#02 - HUNTER S. THOMPSON []
“That was the fatal flaw in Tim Leary’s trip. He crashed around America selling ‘consicousness expansion’ without ever giving a thought to the grim meat-hook realities that were lying in wait for all the people who took him too seriously . . . All those pathetically eager acid freaks who thought they could buy Peace and Understanding for three bucks a hit. But their loss and failure is ours, too. What Leary took down with him was the central illusion of a whole life-style that he helped to create . . . a generation of permanent cripples, failed seekers, who never understood the essential old 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.”
#01 - ALBERT HOFMANN []
"Of greatest significance to me has been the insight that I attained as a fundamental understanding from all of my LSD experiments: what one commonly takes as 'the reality,' including the reality of one's own individual person, by no means signifies something fixed, but rather something that is ambiguous—that there is not only one, but that there are many realities, each comprising also a different consciousness of the ego. One can also arrive at this insight through scientific reflections. The problem of reality is and has been from time immemorial a central concern of philosophy. It is, however, a fundamental distinction, whether one approaches the problem of reality rationally, with the logical methods of philosophy, or if one obtrudes upon this problem emotionally, through an existential experience. The first planned LSD experiment was therefore so deeply moving and alarming, because everyday reality and the ego experiencing it, which I had until then considered to be the only reality, dissolved, and an unfamiliar ego experienced another, unfamiliar reality. The problem concerning the innermost self also appeared, which, itself unmoved, was able to record these external and internal transformations. Reality is inconceivable without an experiencing subject, without an ego. It is the product of the exterior world, of the sender and of a receiver, an ego in whose deepest self the emanations of the exterior world, registered by the antennae of the sense organs, become conscious. If one of the two is lacking, no reality happens, no radio music plays, the picture screen remains blank."
—LSD: My Problem Child, 1980Subscribe:&&&&&&|&&&&&&
by Jonathan DeJong
There has always been a sense in the back of my mind that nothing really matters. How could it be that all of this “existence” really has some kind of end purpose? If you sit and think logically about it, if there is some endgame, some divine plan that is supposed to end up somewhere, then the end, it would seem, would be something to avoid. After all, the end result would be that nothing beyond that end goal matters. Once the goal is achieved, life is meaningless. So if that is the case, then the idea of an infinite ebb and flow of energy and consciousness makes a lot more sense. Life is still meaningless, but now it is an infinite field. It is not linear. It is an eternal playground. Nothing is important unless you give meaning and purpose to it. Being awakened from the role playing in the dream state, should free us. It should allow us all to simply spread our wings and throw off the shackles of this nightmare. And then, of course, I use the term “we”.
There is only the dream. There is no me or we. There is simply infinity. Logically I know this. Logically I know that nothing we do ultimately matters. Logically I know that I am simply living one thread of awareness to the exclusion of all others. There will be others. There have always been others. It is simply a never ending ride dow experiencing only what is the next adventure around the next bend in an ever winding, never ending stream of consciousness.
I find that con freeing. I yearn for the letting go. Holding on creates anger. This bend in the river – the western industrial capitalist complex – has created some amazingly difficult habits from which to break. The most formidable being the continual neurosis that one needs to “get” somewhere. The delusion that striving and building and achieving somehow are important in and of themselves. The duality I feel is that the conscious awake me knows it is all a hologram. I know that this “person” is an imaginary construct. I know this is the dream state playing itself out and I am simply riding in the canoe. But, the Calvinist mental illness that has been brow beaten into all western beings, is the default behavior that rises when the defenses are down. We fall back into the dream and go back to acting like striving matters. The anxiety ramps up, the inability to relax causes stress, personal interactions with those close to us in the dream become strained, and we hypnotically fall back into the unconscious world of striving and attachment. Fear rears its ugly head, and peace is lost.
My spiritual autolysis has nothing to do with waking up. I am awake. My spiritual autolysis has to do with breaking 50
50 years of reacting habitually because the outside world, and those children deemed to be in positions of authority said I was supposed to have because that is the way of “reality”. The ultimate hoax is having to be taught by those who have not awakened themselves. Habits get formed, neural pathways become strongly wired together, and then when awakening happens, those pathways create doubt, anxiety, uncertainty, and a wish to get back to what has always been considered “normal”. Normal is a lie. It is the paradigm created by fear, by children, by a ruse. This plane of existence is severely, and by every definition of the term, mentally ill.
I have lived an entirely schizophrenic existence. It is the source of all of my pain. It is a mental split. There are two people involved. The first is the inner me. The awakened me. That being is awareness. It is the being that has always “known” reality. It is the wounded child that has never been able to live fully out in the open – The being who had never been allowed to truly and without resistance become completely me. Parents, society, financial issues, needing to “be” someone, always took precedence. After all, when the majority of the humanoid energy blips keep telling you that, and sometimes forcefully, a kid is going to repress him/herself. You come into this physical world utterly dependent upon others to raise you and educate you. Lost in the translation is that they don’t teach you to think for yourself. Because of this we internalize our sense of worthlessness, integrate into society, and the awakened being sits in a prison box in the recesses of one’s mind,an ever present murmur, but ignored, driven back, demonized, guilted into submission.
The second person in this schizophrenia is the ego. It is that being that the wider society in the dream state has become expert in cultivating. It is the source of all striving, all wars and corruption, all oppressive religions based on reward and punishment, and it is a brutal, fear amplifying, task master. It is intensely real, and for those asleep in the dream state, they are playing out their role in this delusion, with no questioning that there might be a very easy way to quell this cataclysmic existence. It is the face I put on when I meet with clients. It is the authoritative father figure I wear when dealing with my son. It is the dutiful, patriarchal husband armor donned when protecting one’s family. It is the constant and exhausting striving to make the farm work better than all of the other homesteads because “someone” is watching and that means failure isn’t an option. It is the worry what others think, or even the denial that one thinks that is important. If you are the animate ego with no connection to the imprisoned awareness within, your only motivation can be a striving after the physical and avoiding the negative scrutiny of others. Salvation is beyond you because you are of original sin and filth. Awakening and heaven must be given to you… because you are deemed worthless.
The ultimate war within is the ego relentlessly bludgeoning the awakened child so completely as to render the ego dominant. Thus, the external world we experience. The dream state is made manifest by the dreamer. Those who have ful learned to live in the dream state yet fully aware, often flame out. Suicide, substance abuse, mental illness, or fleeing to anywhere so as to create an escape can all be a means to that end. The most profound struggle a human can go through is to dethrone the ego and put the inner aware being in control.
The more evolved have learned that meditation is a way to help break the habits. Some lose themselves in the life of altruism. But for so many, they still cannot let go. Awakening means to realize that the suffering poor and the greedy rich are all constructs. There is nothing. Habit breaking means choosing what game you want to play in this stream while never losing sight of the fact that it is a game. To break the habits and replace the DVD that has programmed your mind, the awakened being needs to create triggers to help snap you back into lucidity when you find yourself acting unconsciously again.
True awakening cannot happen without anger. When the torment becomes a true mental illness, because the reality of meaninglessness can no longer be suppressed, a lifetime of repression to succeed in a dream becomes a rage, a rejection of the dream itself, a mental breakdown, and one’s previous life flames out like a strip of birchbark struck by a flint. You look back on all that you did in your life unconsciously, and shake your head in disbelief. You simply cannot believe what you did with yourself and to yourself over all of that time because you let a wider society… that doesn’t even exist… torture you for so long. Aggravating as it is, ther not even yourself. Because ultimately, it was a dream. It still is a dream but you now accept it without keeping the knowing being encased in that lead mental casing preventing you from accessing it and using it fully. The challenge, now that the inner person has slain the outer egoic and asleep being, is to quit falling back into the trap. Funny how Christians also call a falling away – backsliding. But in the awakened state, backsliding is simply falling back to sleep and allowing the lifetime of habits to retake the helm and once again begin trying to paddle up stream.
The trick is to do nothing unconsciously. The way to break habits is to act as though you have never really lived before. Deliberately slow down, watch what you are doing and be aware of what you are thinking. Are you rushing through a task to get somewhere else? Are you thinking that what you are doing isn’t important and that you wish you were doing something else? Why? If it is important and the task you are doing is boring… does it need to be done at all? If the other seems more important should you really stop what you are doing and go do that? Why?
Buddhists do something called walking meditation. They deliberately put their awareness on each step they take, not allowing their mind to wander. One step, the next step, the next step, etc. Being present in the activity to try to quell the monkey mind. My habit to break is the thinking that I am needing to get somewhere. There is no where to get TO! There is only what I want to do to play in the field while I am able to. After that, its simply conversation.
Do I want to garden? Yes. Then garden and quit thinking you need to go paint. Do you want to observe with your telescope? Yes. Then don’t do shit during the day that will make you too tired to observe. Do you want to resume archery for fun instead of competition? Yes. Then use the space you have on the farm to do that! Use it again as your zen sport! Do you want to be in shape and live the mostly-terian or Flexitarian life? Yes? Then quit sabotaging yourself and do it… quit worrying about what others may think… they don’t EXIST! And more to the point – don’t matter!
The issue of social acceptance is another layer that Maya uses to keep us imprisoned and is very powerful. The only way to quell the fear is to grab the thought, look at your intention, then consciously decide if that is in your best interest given the game you have decided to play. I suppose you can play the “I want to worry about what others think” game, but in most cases, considering the deep slumber and pre-programmed responses these movie-extras have memorized, it is certainly not helpful. Do you love to be a modern homesteader, using your physical ability to grow your food, increase your level of self-reliance, and detach yourself from a corrupt, polluted, and destructive wider paradigm? Yes? Then do it. Do it regardless of whether the golfers, mall crawlers, and general citiot population think it valuable or not. They are IRRELEVANT!
So my spiritual autolysis is no longer about extricating the demons in my head. It is the process of habit breaking. The anger of meaninglessness comes from the stark understanding that everything you were taught to believe and everything you have done up to this point was wrong. I think that had we been a product of the indigenous who had rights of passage around the age of puberty, that there would be far more awakened beings. Our child like society killed off the people who really were enlightened, who had a success rate of waking people up of probably 90 percent because it was built into their culture. From that point, we have run around for centuries wondering how to
thinking we needed some Babahooha or Swami-Salami from the east to wake us up. We invaded the North American holy land and killed off the priestesses because “we knew not what we do”. So now, instead of a vision quest at 13, we go psychotic for 50 years wondering why the pain of the imprisoned child of awareness inside of us needs drugs, or worse, the pain of ending it all.
Be deliberate in your actions. Be in control of your thoughts. Remove yourself from environments that pollute you and force you back into old unconscious habits, and dare to act differently than your programming when you are in familiar settings that you know don’t serve you. In order to live the knowing, to align yourself with that which you know logically to be true, you have to learn how to live- not all over again- but for the first time. Awareness is not enough. Habit breaking is the autolysis that will align you with the real. Question every thought you have ever had. Question why you do any physical action. Throw away that which hinders but ultimately be mindful of everything, until being mindful becomes the habit.
So what game do I choose to play consciously? Runaway Climate Change is a fact. It is unavoidable in this existence. It is the pinnacle achievement of the ego-driven mindset. Everything about it, including extinction, is the result of a world that is completely asleep. It is the crowning achievement of the industrial civilization stage upon which this self-proclaimed intelligent species has created. I choose to play in this existence by rejecting that civilization. I have rejected it ever since I woke up in High School. I looked upon our species with disgust, but because I was beholden to the role models and people “in charge” it was repressed and it ended me up in the church. I reject the intelligence of our species. I value how humans change for the better pretty dramatically when they are in small social tribes. I choose to work toward local food, local community, and people lending help to people. If I can find that or if I can play a part in creating it, I will. If not. I’ll do it some other way.
No one will escape the pain of climate change. Memento Mori, remember your death. Knowing that you are going to die and keeping that awareness about you, should, in itself, change the way you behave and act on this stage. I choose to embrace the miracle of growing things. It stands in stark contrast to the wider slumbering egoic culture that strives to kill and mine everything in its path. If this world implodes and the universe folds up on this little pebble in the great void, my energy will reverberate into the eternal fabric that at least one person in this blip of an existence valued life and the natural world. I choose to use my physical abilities to work with the field. I choose to reject what ego has wrought. In the end, it doesn’ but the universe planted this seed of revulsion in me back in the years that the native americans would have sent me out on a vision quest. I went on one and didn’t know it. I found myself and I hear its message. Detach from that which pollutes you, embrace that which feels right, do nothing as though it has ultimate significance. Float down your river of homesteading, don’t attempt to fight. Do it until it is indicated that you should do something else, and let that raft take you there.
I also choose to let go of controlling my world. Everything is what it is. Its all going to happen anyway… or maybe it won’t. Nothing I do is going to change that. I choose to watch world events as though they are a comedy, not something of ultimate significance. Everything is a giant comedy and my sense of humor is perfectly suited for it.
I reject the religion and sciences that revolve around ego. I choose to work to join myself with the field of energy and consciousness. My alter is my telescope, my zen is my bow, my sacrament is my farm. My tribe are those who choose to orbit those fields. But they too, will be free to find themselves and either continue to orbit or move to another plane.
There are certain realities to these choices if you don’t want to increase pain. Physical needs need to be met. At some point, the pain of work – my only forced habit of attachment to the egoic industrial civilization construct – at some level needs to be endured. The only result that can happen from eliminating that is to become a street person. It doesn’t seem to be indicated, but it does seem to be indicated that it needs to not be taken so seriously. If the ego driven world is going to wreck the lives of millions again, there is nothing on earth that I can do to stop it. In the end, it is not my fault. It is the result of children acting as if they are adults. There is nothing so blatantly obvious than the fact that we live in a world of children. They have had no right of passage, no help in awakening, and every construct of that civilization is designed to keep them trapped.
So I have anger associated with the awakening to meaninglessness. Should I have had a choice I would have avoided this existence altogether. The fascinating piece in all of this is how much bigger my understanding of infinity has become. This isn’t the only me. There are infinite versions. All of them are dreams, none of them mean anything, and that, ultimately, is the most freeing thing I can imagine. Freedom to play, freedom to choose, no matter what the slumbering play actors do.
(Throughout this I have referred to a word “Autolysis” It is a word coined in a trilogy by Jed McKenna which means to “devour one’s self”. It is a process by which he asserts can free the mind to reality. I highly recommend the books, as I know several others in this community would)
and Guy McPherson. Tune in every Tuesday at 8:00 p.m. Eastern time, or catch up in the archives . If you prefer the iTunes version, including the option to subscribe, you can click .
McPherson’s forthcoming book is co-authored by Carolyn Baker.
has been submitted to the publisher and is scheduled for release before 1 October 2014.
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BV in VT Says:
Thank you again, Jonathan for a very insightful and thoughtful essay.
I picked up on the term “Autolysis” right away, and I think its a keeper.
I will return to re-read you essay and reflect on it — I think it speaks to the very heart of the matter of giving up our trappings and living a more conscious and aware life.
There are so many forces pulling us back into this dream state that this struggle to free ourselves and really live is a daily chore.
We still have mortgages and taxes and all the trappings of this artificial culture in which we have been embedded since birth.
You and I are on very similar journeys — probably everything but the bow — though I have an appreciation of Osage Orange or Bois d’Arc for other reasons!
I also find my sanity and perspective through astronomy (no “L”!), which I find very humbling and connecting.
If there is a way for me to write to you directly, I would like to do so — please advise.
I tried the link to your farmstead from back in April, and it didn’t work for me.
I’m at green works vt at g mail dot com (just remove the spaces)
July 8, 2014
If you are contemplating suicide, please re-consider. And then click here for awareness, prevention, and support on the topic of suicide. I'm not advocating for or against suicide.
The latest guest essay at NBL ... i think doomers generally have a compulsion to try to understand certain things which simply can’t be understood. a good example asks why are sheeple in general so irrational and badly misinformed/misopinionated re. crucial scientific matters like agw (i prefer the old nomenclature, global warming,…
Ms. Ladybug and Mr. Honeybee: A Love Story at the End of Time
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