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May 25, 2005
Armageddon and LSD
was raised as one of Jehovah's Witnesses, until about the age of 15.
That's right. I was a fundamentalist door knocker, ready to offer you copies of the Watchtower and Awake! magazines to give you the good news that the world was crap, Armageddon is coming (circa 1975 back in those days...they have to keep pushing back the date), and only 144,000 go to heaven while the rest lay dead until resurrection and a second chance at living eternally on earth.
I read enough of science and critical thought to be asking the wrong questions when I turned 15. Questions that got me into trouble, like "So if Cain and Able had children, then they must have married their sisters, right?" and "2 Corinthians 12:1-5 talks about a man out of the body and lifted to the third heaven. Third heaven? What's the difference between the three heavens? And what's this stuff about a live man being out of the body?" and "So Adam's body was created first and then God breathed into him the breath of life. So doesn't this mean abortion is okay because life begins with the first breath?"
I wasn't popular with the elders in my church. I suffered through that crisis of faith at 15 and by the time I turned 16 I was a full-blown existentialist. Life is what you make of it. There were simply too many religions in the world and the only way to find out if any of them are true, I'd have to tkae the time to investigate every one. And there wasn't enough time in a single lifetime to properly check out all of them.
(BTW, if you want to stop JWs in their tracks, just tell them, "Oh, I've been DISFELLOWSHIPPED." And smile as they nod and quickly leave. They are forbidden to talk spiritual matters with someone who has been officially disfellowshipped. Like me.)
So I stopped believing in Satan. And I found sex, drugs, and rock n' roll.
Between my 16th and 21st year, this A student got in deep, not on the speed/downer/needle side, but deep into pot and about, oh, 100 full-blown LSD trips.
I'm amazed sometimes that I still seem to have all my faculties. Some of my so-called friends from those years, including my brother, lost many of theirs.
The first time I took LSD, it was a small orange tablet. Orange Sunshine. It must have been very weak and cut with speed (which I never liked...I was already hyper enough. Speed made me itch. And by the way, you high school teachers, I was in Honors English and Honors History and almost all of us "intelligent" kids were so damned bored with all of your "creative" assignments and failure to teach real history, just social studies like how to get along with the Bantus in South Africa and I never met a Bantu, so what the fuck...anyway we were so bored that we all did drugs, speed, pot, mescaline, peyote, LSD...for God's sake teach us real grammar and real political history...it was profoundly embarassing to be a former honor's student in college and not understand the purpose of a preposition.)
So where was I before the rant? Oh yeah. Orange Sunshine. I barely saw trails and didn't really understand what LSD was. I think it was the fourth time I took it, in the form of a little piece of plastic about 1/8-inch square, Windowpane, which had smeared on it the real thing, LSD 25, full uncut dose, no speed or strychnine or whatever else the smarmy middle men do to it, from some chemist in UC Davis, and within 15 minutes my hands were melting before my eyes, and I was on an intergalactic journey that last literally centuries.
Here's some of the experiences that I remember that might give those who have never experienced real LSD what it COULD BE like. It has it's dangers, which I will descibe, but I never regretted doing any of it:
- i'm looking out of my right eyeball at the vast multi-mile distance to the table below that holds two giant sticks of incense and the smoke is hanging eternally in the air in thick, deep tapestries of color, exuding a meaning and significance that cannot be verbalized.
- The progressive rock group YES is coming out of the speakers, literally. i see the music, connected to my eyeballs, moving and dancing with the tonal rhythms, lasting more than a lifetime, and as a note is played, it glitters and pulsates through a range of colors and meanings and i orbit around that note for a hundred years, and then the second note is played, glitterring and interacting in counterpoint to the first note, and i orbit around both notes for another hundred years, noting all the harmonies and discords and reflecting on the history of music. (Some text stolen from Timothy Leary.)
- There's a galaxy in my head. Literally. A Milky Way type spiral galaxy splitting my head somewhere between my eyebrows and the top of my head. i can see it slowly rotating there. My head is a huge oval with this galaxy rotating in a relaxing manner.
- i'm smelling colors. Every color i see has a smell to it. Flower-like. The uglier ones have uglier smells, but that's just a projection, because I can turn any ugly color into a bright and happy and good-smelling color with a thought. All those psychadelic posters we have set up to look at before taking this trip are suddenly laughingly irrelevant. We can look at a blank white wall and create with our minds and our feelings any image, any movement, literally anything we want. On a blank white wall.
- i walk into the kitchen and a fork attacks me. i laugh uncontrollably. A FORK JUST ATTACKED ME! That doesn't happen every century, no sirree. i look at my hand and it's melting and i begin to ponder death and question whether or not i'm alive. i'm perfectly aware that i am not the same "I" before taking this trip. Mark is not the same Mark. i am a philosopher and it suddenly occurs to me that i am thinking the same profound thoughts that i was thinking the last time i took LSD those many centuries ago, and maybe i should write these thoughts down so that Mark can read them and be impressed. But something else catches my attention and i forget.
- i'm the perfect driver. Seriously. When i get behind the wheel, for real, i can make all of my senses calm down and tune into a Clear Light perception of everything around me, perfectly focused, perfectly attentive, a perfect driver. i can even read the thoughts of everyone driving around me and tell my companions what they are going to do before they do it. My companions are impressed, but that's nothing. i tell them they can do it to if they only believe and try. Contrary to popular belief, you can tell the difference between what is in this world and that world.
- i'm out of my body looking at the group of acidheads sitting around the room listening to the Beatles' Sgt. Peppers album. i am psychically connected and can dip into their experiences at will. i can fall into the music, watching it play out visually in the air around me, inside me, in my very cells. In fact, my body is alive and moving and I cannot only create any visial image i want i can create any auralsmelltastefeel sensation, have them crossover at will so that I feel smells and hear taste and see feelings and...It's all one grand glorious orgasm in every cell of my body, continuous and non-stop with the Beatles personally delivering the best possible concert in the history of the universe.
Needless to say, after returning from this heavenly land where clocks stop, where journeys last centuries, where one can control every sense and be the supreme architectonic artist, I would want to do it again and again and again...as I say, about 100 times over the space of three years.
But all good things must come to an end. More later.
*** My advice to people today is as follows: If you take the game of life seriously, if you take your nervous system seriously, if you take your sense organs seriously, if you take the energy process seriously, you must turn on, tune in, and drop out. Timothy Leary
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Posted by witnit at May 25, 2005 5:00 PM
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