Advertisement
This is an interesting mailing discussion from MAPS.org mailing list, i thought it was worht sharing it (email addresses have been removed for author's privacy). I storngly advise you to have a look at maps website and the interesting archive of discussions www.maps.org/.
Start reading from the end......
Peace
PS : i hope the authors will not mind that i put this here, but i feel it's interesting talks for humanity and freedom of all beings...
LAST MESSAGE COMES FIRST !
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
From "shortfatsteve"
This discussion reminds of something Terence McKenna once said,
speaking on the paradigm-shattering power of psychedelics, about
how:
"...people who yearn for legal psychedelics have not thought...
deeply enough about what is really at stake here. Imagine a
culture so certain of it's primary values, so sure that it
represented
the right way to live, that it would encourage people to take
psychedelic substances and examine it's premises. There ain't
such a one--at least not in the high-tech/industrial democracies,
or the facist states either. Some aboriginal cultures have this
courage, but it has kept them very close to the breast of Nature
and her processes. Cultures that have habitually broken down the
cultural illusion and examined the terrifying reality beyond it
have
not marched off then to pontificate with religions of absolutism or
scientific absolutism or all the rest of it. Why is that? It's
because
cultures are "virtual realities" made of language, and if there is
one
thing psychedelics do--whether you hate 'em or you love 'em,
whether you don't give a hoot--what they do is they dissolve
boundaries.... That is the ultimately subversive behaviour
[because] cultures are boundary-defining engines."
Of course, he's talking about a whole lot more than LSD here. But if
you include it in this bigger picture of psychedelics, as you
inevitably
have to, you can see that it was only a matter of time before the
authorities would have made it illegal, as they to all psychedelic, or
"subversive", drugs. I guess from this perspective you could say that
blaming Leary for making LSD illegal is like blaming the crowing
rooster for making the sun rise. It was inevitable, and pointing
fingers isn't going to do anything better than soothe bruised egos.
That said, I think Hofmann was right to criticize Leary for being too
cavalier in his approach to spreading the message. When the acid
craze got so big that even uninformed teenagers, who are already
generally of a mind-state worst-suited to psychedelics, were
dropping left and right and doing it right in everybody's face, as
teenagers will.. well that cetainly didn't help things.
Best,
Steve
PS-> The excerpt is from a talk McKenna gave in April, 1999 (just a
few months before he passed away), called "Culture and Ideology Are
Not Your Friends." I got it from Lorenzo's wonderful podcast show,
The Psychedelic Salon (available free from the iTunes store).
Leary was naively optimistic, reckless, and self centered, and
sparked a lot of hysteria that identified psychedelics with
revolution, and that has made the current task of integrating
psychedelics into society that much harder. but as Kurt Vonnegut
quipped in his last book: "A war on drugs is better than no drugs at
all." he and frank compared his exploits to the Boston Tea Party,
only in that example of causing a ruckus to ignite a revolution, the
revolution actually happened. Tim just caused a ruckus and the
revolution didn't quite catch on... almost... or did it? maybe i
expect too much, or am impatient.
i think it is important to point out that Tim and Frank Barron were
among many social scientists in the 50's who devoted themselves to
understanding and treating the psychopathology of Nazism,
authoritarianism, etc... They saw it on the rise in this country
after the war in the manufactured anti communist hysteria, rampant
conformity, unquestioning obedience, cruelty... Remember these were
the days of Solomon Asch's Yale studies of conformity: a majority of
students would disagree with their own senses just to conform, or
Stanley Milgram (also Yale, i think ) who found that a majority would
administer severe electric shocks to fellow students if a man in a
uniform told them to, or Phil Zimbardo at Stanford who found if you
put people in an authoritarian environment they will become
authoritarians themselves and subject their fellow students to
degrading acts of cruelty. Give that mentality the atomic bomb and
you've got trouble, and that trouble is what frank and tim wanted to
ward off, even before they got hold of the mushroom. Tim didn't
think the institutions of our country were going to heal this kind of
madness in our youth. in fact he thought the institutions
perpetuated it. I think he was right. He had already shown in the
fifties that psychotherapy worked better if you took the
psychotherapist out of it. Education might well be the same, as in
Elliot Aronson's Jig Saw classroom. Surely religion. take the
authorities out of it and the people do better on their own... ...
this sort of blind obedience unquestioning "authority" is rampant
again and look what we've got. i believe this pertains to Aarons
last sentence below: why do republicans who are getting fucked by
the Neocons still vote for them and against own interests?
many interesting parallels between then and now. at the beginning of
the 60s we had JFK's murder in broad day light which brought the
right wing into power. Even though in the Zapruder film we all can
see he was shot from the front, just like the numbskulls in Solomon
Aschs experiment our culture accepted the "official story," which
makes no sense at all. today we have 9/11 and the blind acceptance by
a majority of the "official story" which upon even the most
elementary scrutiny doesn't hold up...
Tim took a big risk that his popularization would overwhelm the
resistance that was already embedded in the culture.
I wonder if having psychedelic experience correlates highly with
tendency to deconstruct "official stories."
would be interesting to redo Asch's work and see if there were such
common experiences in the non-conformers.....
On Jan 27, 2006, at 5:21 PM, Aaron Long wrote:
> If someone gave you an electric lightbulb and you'd never seen one
> before, you'd probably be pretty excited to share it with all the
> other members of your tribe. This is the kind of enthusiasm Leary
> had. He thought LSD was great and wanted to share it. (Remember
> the first time you tripped? Didn't you want all your friends to
> try it?) Leary probably had a little tunnel vision about LSD, but
> if he was guilty of anything it was just excessive optimism about
> the public's receptiveness to things that might help them live
> better lives. As a person who is continually mystified as to why
> financially impoverished moral conservatives keep voting for the
> Republicans who take away their jobs and healthcare, I am
> sympathetic to Leary's blindness to this facet of human nature.
>
> --Aaron
>
>
> From: "**" <
> To: "John Beresford", "ER/RTA"
>
> CC: MAPS Forum
> Subject: Re: MAPS: article on Hofmann's 100th birthday
> Date: Thu, 26 Jan 2006 17:14:47 -0800
>
> I'm not at all into Leary bashing but there is some family
> history. I take strong exception to the implication that were it
> not for Leary none of us would be here. Leary was a late arrival
> on the LSD scene I became connected with...He brought a lot of
> attention to the stuff and that brought popularization and hysteria.
>
> ----- Original Message ----- From: "John Beresford"
<
> To: "ER/RTA"
> Cc: "MAPS Forum"
> Sent: Wednesday, January 18, 2006 6:01 PM
> Subject: Re: MAPS: article on Hofmann's 100th birthday
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>> One of the main events at the symposium was Robert Forte's powerful
>> vindication of Tim. Included was his discussion with ALbert, who
>> denied
>> ever having told the Times that what Leary did was *criminal.*
>> Typical
>> media twisting of the truth.
>>
>> ER/RTA wrote:
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>> I recently went to an event where one of the main speakers
>>> disparaged Leary 3 times in some 45 minutes. Revisionist.
>>> Without Leary, how many would be on this list? Would MAPS
>>> exist? In a perfect world....
>>>
>>> Thanks,
>>>
>>> Gwyllm
>>>
>>> > Inspirational and optimistic, until that last little detail
>>> that the > end.
>>> > Surely, LSD doesn't teach us to feed the head by cutting off
>>> the dick. > But
>>> > if that's what Dr. Hoffman has to say on his 100th birthday, I
>>> will
>>> > politely do my time behind bars with Dr. Leary.
>>> >
>>> > Psychedelicists criminalizing each other is "a crime."
>>> >
>>> > Jon Frederick, Ph.D.
Start reading from the end......
Peace
PS : i hope the authors will not mind that i put this here, but i feel it's interesting talks for humanity and freedom of all beings...
LAST MESSAGE COMES FIRST !
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
From "shortfatsteve"
This discussion reminds of something Terence McKenna once said,
speaking on the paradigm-shattering power of psychedelics, about
how:
"...people who yearn for legal psychedelics have not thought...
deeply enough about what is really at stake here. Imagine a
culture so certain of it's primary values, so sure that it
represented
the right way to live, that it would encourage people to take
psychedelic substances and examine it's premises. There ain't
such a one--at least not in the high-tech/industrial democracies,
or the facist states either. Some aboriginal cultures have this
courage, but it has kept them very close to the breast of Nature
and her processes. Cultures that have habitually broken down the
cultural illusion and examined the terrifying reality beyond it
have
not marched off then to pontificate with religions of absolutism or
scientific absolutism or all the rest of it. Why is that? It's
because
cultures are "virtual realities" made of language, and if there is
one
thing psychedelics do--whether you hate 'em or you love 'em,
whether you don't give a hoot--what they do is they dissolve
boundaries.... That is the ultimately subversive behaviour
[because] cultures are boundary-defining engines."
Of course, he's talking about a whole lot more than LSD here. But if
you include it in this bigger picture of psychedelics, as you
inevitably
have to, you can see that it was only a matter of time before the
authorities would have made it illegal, as they to all psychedelic, or
"subversive", drugs. I guess from this perspective you could say that
blaming Leary for making LSD illegal is like blaming the crowing
rooster for making the sun rise. It was inevitable, and pointing
fingers isn't going to do anything better than soothe bruised egos.
That said, I think Hofmann was right to criticize Leary for being too
cavalier in his approach to spreading the message. When the acid
craze got so big that even uninformed teenagers, who are already
generally of a mind-state worst-suited to psychedelics, were
dropping left and right and doing it right in everybody's face, as
teenagers will.. well that cetainly didn't help things.
Best,
Steve
PS-> The excerpt is from a talk McKenna gave in April, 1999 (just a
few months before he passed away), called "Culture and Ideology Are
Not Your Friends." I got it from Lorenzo's wonderful podcast show,
The Psychedelic Salon (available free from the iTunes store).
Leary was naively optimistic, reckless, and self centered, and
sparked a lot of hysteria that identified psychedelics with
revolution, and that has made the current task of integrating
psychedelics into society that much harder. but as Kurt Vonnegut
quipped in his last book: "A war on drugs is better than no drugs at
all." he and frank compared his exploits to the Boston Tea Party,
only in that example of causing a ruckus to ignite a revolution, the
revolution actually happened. Tim just caused a ruckus and the
revolution didn't quite catch on... almost... or did it? maybe i
expect too much, or am impatient.
i think it is important to point out that Tim and Frank Barron were
among many social scientists in the 50's who devoted themselves to
understanding and treating the psychopathology of Nazism,
authoritarianism, etc... They saw it on the rise in this country
after the war in the manufactured anti communist hysteria, rampant
conformity, unquestioning obedience, cruelty... Remember these were
the days of Solomon Asch's Yale studies of conformity: a majority of
students would disagree with their own senses just to conform, or
Stanley Milgram (also Yale, i think ) who found that a majority would
administer severe electric shocks to fellow students if a man in a
uniform told them to, or Phil Zimbardo at Stanford who found if you
put people in an authoritarian environment they will become
authoritarians themselves and subject their fellow students to
degrading acts of cruelty. Give that mentality the atomic bomb and
you've got trouble, and that trouble is what frank and tim wanted to
ward off, even before they got hold of the mushroom. Tim didn't
think the institutions of our country were going to heal this kind of
madness in our youth. in fact he thought the institutions
perpetuated it. I think he was right. He had already shown in the
fifties that psychotherapy worked better if you took the
psychotherapist out of it. Education might well be the same, as in
Elliot Aronson's Jig Saw classroom. Surely religion. take the
authorities out of it and the people do better on their own... ...
this sort of blind obedience unquestioning "authority" is rampant
again and look what we've got. i believe this pertains to Aarons
last sentence below: why do republicans who are getting fucked by
the Neocons still vote for them and against own interests?
many interesting parallels between then and now. at the beginning of
the 60s we had JFK's murder in broad day light which brought the
right wing into power. Even though in the Zapruder film we all can
see he was shot from the front, just like the numbskulls in Solomon
Aschs experiment our culture accepted the "official story," which
makes no sense at all. today we have 9/11 and the blind acceptance by
a majority of the "official story" which upon even the most
elementary scrutiny doesn't hold up...
Tim took a big risk that his popularization would overwhelm the
resistance that was already embedded in the culture.
I wonder if having psychedelic experience correlates highly with
tendency to deconstruct "official stories."
would be interesting to redo Asch's work and see if there were such
common experiences in the non-conformers.....
On Jan 27, 2006, at 5:21 PM, Aaron Long wrote:
> If someone gave you an electric lightbulb and you'd never seen one
> before, you'd probably be pretty excited to share it with all the
> other members of your tribe. This is the kind of enthusiasm Leary
> had. He thought LSD was great and wanted to share it. (Remember
> the first time you tripped? Didn't you want all your friends to
> try it?) Leary probably had a little tunnel vision about LSD, but
> if he was guilty of anything it was just excessive optimism about
> the public's receptiveness to things that might help them live
> better lives. As a person who is continually mystified as to why
> financially impoverished moral conservatives keep voting for the
> Republicans who take away their jobs and healthcare, I am
> sympathetic to Leary's blindness to this facet of human nature.
>
> --Aaron
>
>
> From: "**" <
> To: "John Beresford", "ER/RTA"
>
> CC: MAPS Forum
> Subject: Re: MAPS: article on Hofmann's 100th birthday
> Date: Thu, 26 Jan 2006 17:14:47 -0800
>
> I'm not at all into Leary bashing but there is some family
> history. I take strong exception to the implication that were it
> not for Leary none of us would be here. Leary was a late arrival
> on the LSD scene I became connected with...He brought a lot of
> attention to the stuff and that brought popularization and hysteria.
>
> ----- Original Message ----- From: "John Beresford"
<
> To: "ER/RTA"
> Cc: "MAPS Forum"
> Sent: Wednesday, January 18, 2006 6:01 PM
> Subject: Re: MAPS: article on Hofmann's 100th birthday
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>> One of the main events at the symposium was Robert Forte's powerful
>> vindication of Tim. Included was his discussion with ALbert, who
>> denied
>> ever having told the Times that what Leary did was *criminal.*
>> Typical
>> media twisting of the truth.
>>
>> ER/RTA wrote:
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>> I recently went to an event where one of the main speakers
>>> disparaged Leary 3 times in some 45 minutes. Revisionist.
>>> Without Leary, how many would be on this list? Would MAPS
>>> exist? In a perfect world....
>>>
>>> Thanks,
>>>
>>> Gwyllm
>>>
>>> > Inspirational and optimistic, until that last little detail
>>> that the > end.
>>> > Surely, LSD doesn't teach us to feed the head by cutting off
>>> the dick. > But
>>> > if that's what Dr. Hoffman has to say on his 100th birthday, I
>>> will
>>> > politely do my time behind bars with Dr. Leary.
>>> >
>>> > Psychedelicists criminalizing each other is "a crime."
>>> >
>>> > Jon Frederick, Ph.D.
posted by:
|
France
|
Advertisement
Advertisement
