Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
Both the Ginsberg interviews (Playboy and Gay Sunshine) are included
in Allen Ginsberg: Spontaneous Mind, Selected Interviews 1958-1996.
It's a well-edited book, not a lot of overlap in topics, so gives a
solid sense of his ideas developing over time.

I was re-reading the Leary Playboy interview last night and came
across this intriguing quote: 

"Within one generation, through the use of these chemical keys to the
nervous system as regular tools of learning, you will be asking your
children, when they come home from school, not 'What book are you
reading?' but 'Which molecules are you using to open up new Libraries
of Congress inside your nervous system?'

While the letter of Leary's comment may have been off, the spirit
strikes me as prescient. All over the country, when Little Johnny comes
in the door from school, the first question is, "Did you take your
meds today?" In the case of ADHD et. al. the meds are indeed seen as
tools of learning (to help with sitting still, concentrating, etc.).
Since there is likely a psychiatrist involved in the prescription
somewhere along the line, there's the overlap with mental
health-drugs-learning that was Leary's intellectual sweet spot.

In the drugs-consciousness-spirituality area, I wonder what/if mood
stabilizers, attention drugs, etc. will open or close for coming
generations. Don, have you heard any religious/spiritual leaders
discussing this issue? Any thoughts on how these widely used (and
socially acceptable) drugs could impact religion and spirituality in
the 21st century?       
 
  

    
#118   Well played, sir.
  

    
I agree about #118.  It was a non-enlightened koan I pitched Don, and he 
passed beautifully.

Peter, the last interview in Ginsberg's Spontaneous Mind is with me. An 
earlier draft of the book also contained this interview, in which I asked 
Allen if he had changed his opinion of LSD since the famous sermon in 
Boston when he advised "everyone who hears my voice" to try it.

SS: You have spent the last decade and a half publicly identified as 
"Buddhist student Allen Ginsberg," but you were once regarded as one of 
the most articulate exponents of psychedelics as a means of personal, if 
not global, transformation. How do you view the Reagan administration's 
attempts to police consciousness via urine tests and sobriety checkpoints?

AG: All scientific research on LSD has been stopped, except for very few 
projects done under the military, and that's a major catastrophe for human 
mind engineering and scientific advancement and psychology. The heroin 
problem stands as it always was: a conspiracy by heroin police, narcotics 
bureaus, their bureaucracies and budgets -- with their working relation 
with Cosa Nostra and organized crime in maintaining a black market and 
high prices and sales under the desk -- as well as regular organized crime 
dope laundry money, and that whole network extends from the White House to 
the Vatican. Contras -- White House -- Vatican. So the whole public 
approach by Reagan is just complete hypocrisy.

I've changed my mind about the relationship between acid and neurosis -- 
it seems to me that acid can lead to some kind of breakdowns maybe. So 
that people should be prepared with meditation, before they take acid. 
There should be an educational program to cultivate meditative practice 
and techniques, so that when people get high on acid and get into bum 
trips they can switch their minds, easily -- and there are ways of doing 
it, very simple. But nobody is doing mass training in that, and it might 
be interesting for high school kids. It's like -- give junkies needles, 
give kids condoms if they're gonna screw so they don't get AIDS. If 
they're gonna try acid -- which is probably good for an intelligent kid -- 
they should also be prepared with some techniques in meditation, so that 
they can switch their attention from bum trips back to their breath, and 
to the current space around them.

So I think in the sixties I wasn't prepared to deal with acid casualties 
from the point of view of a reliable technique for avoiding those 
casualties. 

http://www.stevesilberman.com/ginsberg/wer/index.html
  

    
Excellent, Steve!
  

    
I think one of the big problems not only with acid but with pretty
much every commonly abused drug (including alcohol) is that it's not a
good idea to take it if you're crazy or about to go crazy - and yet
those people are very attracted to psychoactive drugs.

There's a whole body of research (and a big public controversy) in the
UK re: pot "causing" schizophrenia.  I don't buy it for a minute.  But
I've certainly met people with schizophrenia who smoked a lot of weed.
  

    
Don, you covered Bay Area Buddhism quite a bit for the Chronicle. Was it
you who wrote about Baker-roshi's scandal at SF Zen Center?  This is off
the subject of your book, but I'm curious about your outlook on how
Buddhism is evolving in America as it becomes less and less an exotic
import from Japan or Tibet, and more and more an organic, locally-grown
fruit from Spirit Rock or the gazillion Zen Centers (often staffed by
Jewish teachers, one can't help but note) that have sprung up everywhere
since the '70s.
  

    
I agree with you, mcdee.  That pot/schizophrenia study made eager 
headlines everywhere, but the first thing that struck me was the fact that 
they couldn't control for pre-schizophrenic people self-medicating, which 
is indeed common in my experience.
  

    
My informant informs me that after he began doing aikido (and even
after he stopped), the meditation/concentration skills he picked up
from that practice made it much easier to deal with any crises that
came up during trips, many of them were nothing more than getting stuck
in an endless loop regarding something, exiting the loop ended usually
ended the crisis. 
  

    
The American Buddhist mantra "You don't have to believe everything you 
think" might be quite useful in such situations.
  

    
That is indeed useful.  I'll remember that one.
  

    
Now if we can just deal with the problem of all these informants who
seem to have taken an incredible amount of drugs!!
  

    
Just read this & it feels relevant (to this group & its informants).
Jerry Garcia from a 1989 interview in Buffalo, NY. Originally printed
in August 2008 issue of Relix:

"There was one time that was really memorable, actually it scared me
silly but it was also wonderful. One time when I had taken LSD and I
think artificial mescaline, and the LSD was “White Lightening” which
was incredibly strong and very, very pure. I remember I was lying down
on the grass and we were living at the time in a large sort of ranch
place in northern California, the band was, and we were all tripping
that day, us and a lot of friends. I was lying on the grass and I
closed my eyes and I had this sensation of perceiving with my eyes
closed—it was as though they were open. I still have this field of
vision and the field of vision had a partly visible pattern in it and
then I had this thing that outside the field that little thing that you
spin around and it takes the little strip of metal off? It was like
that and it began stripping around the outside of the field of vision
until I had a 360 degree view, and it revealed this pattern
and the pattern said “All” in incredible neon. It was, (laughing) it
was one of those kinds of experiences. But the fact that these things
are happening to you in your own personal language means that they have
something to do with whatever it is that’s in your own personal
programming. Now a lot of this stuff that I experienced and saw and
felt and so forth are things that I don’t think I picked up in this
existence. They aren’t directly memories. They aren’t some kind of
fusion. They aren’t things I’ve read in books. I don’t know what they
were or where they come from. So, there are a lot of questions that
would be nice if somebody would address them in a serious way. It’s one
of the reasons it’s unfortunate that psychedelics have become confused
with drugs."
  

    
Don - I'm curious if you had access to the Leary archives in writing
your book? And, if so, what sort of state are they in physically? Have
you heard of any plans for their future? 
  

    
Garcia described that trip in at least one other interview that I've
read (I don't remember where -- Rolling Stone in the early '70s
maybe?), pinpointing the "sort of ranch place" as Olompali. He went
into more detail in that interview about his feelings about seeing the
word "ALL," and I remember he concluded his description by saying,
"I've never forgotten that day" (or words very similar). 
  

    
I'd paste a link to the interview, but I don't see one anywhere. I got
it from the Deadshows yahoo group. It does say, "Information for
getting an audio recording of the complete Garcia interview may be
obtained by writing to garciainterview@yahoo.com

Steve - he never says in this interview, but, yes, it sounds like
Olompali. There's also another trip he describes that sounds closer to
the conclusion you mention. 

In response to the question: Is there any experience that stands out
as the highest?


"The experience of the dying many deaths. It started to get more and
more in kind of a feedback loop, this thing where I was suddenly in the
last frames of my life, and then it was like, “Here’s that moment
where I die.” I run up the stairs and there’s this demon with a spear
who gets me right between the eyes. I run up the stairs there’s a woman
with a knife who stabs me in the back. I run up the stairs and there’s
this business partner who shoots me. Boom. And it was like playing the
last frame of a movie over and over with subtle variations and that
branched out into a million deaths of all sorts and descriptions. I
don’t think I ever really recovered from it."

Reminds me of Leary saying he experienced hundreds of "death-rebirth
trips." The first was a non-drug related breakdown following his first
wife's suicide. 
  

    
#138 -- I did not get into the Leary archives. I made several attempts
to get the archivist, Michael Horowitz,to talk to me about that, but
it never went anywhere. Some Leary loyalists felt burned by Robert
Greenfield's unflattering tome, which might have been a factor. Plus,
they were working with Ralph Metzner and Ram Dass, who were putting
their book together at the same time and there might have been some
competitive concerns. Leary wrote so much himself (some of it is even
true!) that there's lots of stuff there. Plus there's some great source
material in Robert Forte's collection, "Timothy Leary: OUtside Looking
In." Plus massive media coverage. My problem was having too much
source material on Leary, who threatened to dominate the other three
characters in my narrative. I struggle to keep an even balance. 
  

    
What would of Huxley thought of Leary, and what kind of friendship
would they of had (if at all) if Huxley had lived into the 60s and 70s?
  

    
As these informants have grown older, some have raised children who have
never gotten on the bus.  They must wonder whether any of the insights would
travel in the DNA.

Toward the end of the book, David Goleman's name comes up.  He wrote the
book _Emotional Intelligence_.  I was unaware of any connection between his
work and the Harvard research, but there it is.

Other books, _Prometheus Rising_, _Listening to Prozac_, _the Power of Now_
for example, challenge the notion that the mind's reality is fatalistic and
replace that with the idea that we're each making our own trip, something my
informant suggested to me back when we used to ride our bikes along the
beach while the stars and planets put on a show in the sky.

Carlos Castenada's stories, whether true or not, link this back to coming of
age rituals that have been replaced in our culture by BA's, MA's and PhD's.
T.S. Eliot posed the question: "Where is the wisdom we have lost in
knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?"

Have you got any plans to follow the road forward in another book?
  

    
#126. Peter raises an interesting question regarding the ethics and/or
wisdom of using attention drugs like Adderal or mood/empathy drugs
like MDMA. I don't have the answer, but this is going to be an
interesting discussion in the coming years as new designer drugs come
out to give us a psychological performance edge for very specific brain
activities.  When is it OK/not OK for "healthy" people to use these
drugs? I was just listening to an interesting discussion about this on
a Dr. Kiki's Science Hour interview with Matthew Baggott, a young
scientist from Cal who is doing some basic research on the safety and
effects of MDA and MDMA. It's toward the end of this hour-long video:  

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XxMZg1oEWd4
  

    
#121. I used that Hunter Thompson quote about crippled seekers and the
acid culture fallacy in my conclusion, followed by my observation that
"There's some hard truth in Hunter's words, but they come from a
tortured soul who blew his mind out with drugs before blowing his
brains out with a handgun." 
  

    
#142. Huxley met Leary over dinner with Humphrey Osmond on night of
the Kennedy election. Their first impression was that Tim was "stuffy."
So much for the accuracy of first impressions. Huxley's famous quote
about Leary: "I'm very fond of Timothy, but why, oh why, does he have
to be such an ass!" Eerie ending to their relationship. As some of you
know, Huxley died the same day as the Kennedy assassination (that's why
no one ever saw the obit) and went out on a 100 mic dose of LSD 
injected by Laura Huxley. Leary flew to LA two days before he died to
deliver the acid. Huxley probably would have gotten fed up (as many
did) watching the Leary story play out in the 1960s and 1970s.
  

    
Sad to say about Hunter, but true… more hard truth. Still, for all the
"crippled seekers", I surmise that quite a few of us took a little bit
of insight and gratuitous grace into building our futures after
psychedelic experiences. We are certainly not more than human for our
experiences, but likely a bit more human than we might have been
otherwise.
  

    
Yeah, I basically agreed with you.  HST also seems to have been a
truly spectacular alcoholic, judging by semi-candid film of him I've
seen over the years (nothing like drinking straight whiskey from an ice
tea glass!).  Something on the order of 10 to 15% of alcoholics commit
suicide.
  

    
Worst drug ever.

        Signed,
        The son of a recovering alcoholic
  

    
Worst drug ever.

    Signed,
    Got about 3/4ths of the way to alcoholism about 25 years ago.

I enjoy a beer or three now and then, but man... you're basically
drinking an industrial solvent.