Psychedelia, page 65
- Where is the angel that led me down?
Conscious but apparently in great pain, Father Yod was brought back to the house in Lanikai by the Family. It was assumed that the kite had simply been too light and not properly adjusted for Yod's massive body. He remained awake through the day, and even managed to deliver some final teachings to his disciples, before entering a meditative state and quietly passing away. In line with the Family's beliefs, Father Yod's body was maintained in their care for 3.5 days, before being released for burial proceedings. The Family soldiered on in the Hawaiian islands, appeared on a TV show and took menial jobs, but without Yod's magnetic center, the congregation (which included former pop star Sky Saxon of the Seeds) drifted apart. Three years after Father's death, the Source Family was no more.2
This is not a tragic story, however. While the benign and often humorous personality of Father Yod stands in stark contrast to the sinister nihilism of Mel Lyman, the two communal leaders are alike in that they never sold their disciples out. There were no scandals of defrauded income or sexual misconduct of the kind that destroyed many other modern spiritual congregations; nor did the Family suffer from the internal power strife that deflated the once powerful Hare Krishna movement. Instead, the Source Family members survived best they could, remaining faithful to Father's teachings and memory, and in the 2000s were rewarded with a series of joyful reunions, alongside a public interest in the Family, Father's teachings and their music recordings that surpassed all attention they had received in the 1970s.
2
Repeated exposure to the psychedelic experience will often bring about a state of spiritual freedom whose leading expressions are collective hedonism and pantheistic mysticism. To maintain a lifestyle in accordance with this state, the most obvious development would be the clustering together of seasoned acidheads in collectively shared households close to nature. This, of course, is precisely what happened as the urban, intense, flashy 1960s gave way for the rural, leisurely, low - key 1970s. The development is often described as a kind of retreat or even defeat for the spiritual counterculture, but that perspective is accurate only in the superficial world of Madison Avenue and Fleet Street. As Psychedelia becomes a way of life, its demands on one's living conditions changes, and a quest for a suitable terrain for the hedonistic celebration and pantheistic rapture begins. For some, this was a hidden commune in the archaic landscape of the Mojave Desert. For others, their spiritual homestead was found in a makeshift jungle hut on Maui, or a farm in the bluegreen hills of Tennessee, or an artist colony in a river valley in New Mexico.
What all of them had in common was the setting out on a new adventure, after a spiritual (usually psychedelic) initiation had been passed and a feel for one's new direction of life had begun to form. The migration away from the metropolitan anthill was not an escape as much as a turning of the page, an attempt to harmonize the outer environment with one's new-found inner freedom and its holistic yearnings. This is a radical step for any young individual, and the frequency with which it occurred and still occurs today is significant of the revelatory power of The Psychedelic Experience as it strips away layers of indoctrinated consumerism and mechanical achievement/reward patterns. In a time marked by economic surplus such as the sixties, a reversal of the Depression-era migration took place as young counterculturists streamed out of the cities and went on the road to find new, all-inclusive living quarters better suited to their way of life, deepening their removal from mainstream society, and leaving weekend hippies and political activists behind.
When Stephen Gaskin led a caravan of 60 buses loaded with hippies on a massive exodus from the increasingly grim streets of San Francisco, he became a lineage holder in a tradition with deep historical roots. Wavy Gravy did much the same, except on a smaller scale, by transforming Ken Kesey's old Acid Tests into a travelling light-show circus that crisscrossed America before settling down at the Hog Farm. The idea to create rural communities of like minds following an egalitarian lifestyle goes back to the Transcendentalists at least. In the 1840s, Henry Thoreau's famous experiment in individual self-subsistence at Walden Pond was paralleled by a less famous communal project, just a few miles away. Known as Brook Farm, this may have been the first secular community to be established anywhere, its agnostic nature distinguishing it from earlier communes formed by orthodox religious groups seeking an undisturbed way of life. Brook Farm was based partly on the philosophy of Emerson and Thoreau, both who ironically declined to take part or even visit the commune, founded by one George Ripley. With its emphasis on shared labor, progressive education, and individual creativity Brook Farm appears ahead of its time, but it would prove a short-lived success. Its credo of religious freedom let to unavoidable internal strife, but more than that Broook Farm suffered from the harsh economic realities that are the stumbling block of ma ny idealistic communes. Lasting five years, it still survived longer than most corresponding projects that flourished briefly in the mid-1800s.
While there is no lack of theoretical literature on how to construct Utopian enclaves, ranging from socialist work cooperatives to austere Christian fundamentalism, one has to look beyond traditional academia to find the roots of the pantheistic-escapist spirit that nourished the hippie era communes. The drive to 'go rural' appears to be more instinctual than a formal consequence of the counterculture's problematic interactions with mainstream society. At the same time, it was a development predicted by many, and the Diggers had begun outlining alternate implementations of a Haight-Ashbury type lifestyle via their 1968 'Free City' broadsheets, which undoubtedly influenced the on-going trend (not least in Europe). This transitional vision remained located to the urban- suburban geography and dealt with issues such as public ownership of parks and the rescuing of decaying buildings, and despite a similarity in ideological basis the actual overlap with the migration towards rural collectives was modest. In a little while, however, the Diggers would develop concepts that aligned with the trend towards rural migration, gathered under the banner of 'Free Family'. Less immediate in their presence than during the Haight-Ashbury days, the Diggers were instrumental in setting up a number of free-standing Free Family collectives in the early 1970s.
Notions of a psychedelic utopia had been generally lacking in the 1950s, where the socio- cultural climate of paranoia followed by exotic and romantic fantasies may have been sufficiently escapist by itself. The Beats of the 1950s would undoubtedly have applauded something like Gaskin's Farm, but their basic thrust was unmistakably urban, seeking an authentic realness in the inner city world as an escape from a conformist Suburbia. It's significant that Kerouac's Dharma Bums, the Beat work closest in sentiment to the naturist thrust of the 1970s, places its protagonist alone in his Sierra Nevada hideaway, rather than in the company of likeminded friends. Aldous Huxley didn't fully address the communal aspects of hallucinogen use until the publication of his final novel The Island (1962), a vision of an isolated, peaceful society based on shared spiritual awareness where a synthetic drug called moksha provided valuable experiences, from recreation to visionary initiation depending on the dosage. Those who have actually read Huxley's novel would scarcely call it utopian in view of its ending, which sinister pessimism parallels the classic dystopia of Brave New World. In The Island, it is not futuristic society itself that disrupts the vision, but the military aggression of its neighbor, a dictatorship featuring elements of capitalism, socialism, media propaganda and other 20th century phenomena that darkened Huxley's horizon.3
The Island appeared just at the point where modern Psychedelia entered its counterculture phase, and while the book may have been more mentioned than actually read, its concern with the relation between psychedelic drugs and communal splinter groups would soon prove prophetic. Even before the major LSD wave hit the streets, small spiritual-psychedelic communes had begun to appear on both US coasts. These were almost exclusively cases where either housing or financing was provided by fortunate circumstances, such as donations from a thankful spiritual seeker. For this reason, the emphasis lay more on spiritual quests than the maintenance of a collective household. As early as 1962, a skeptical colleague to the Harvard Psych mavericks remarked that their Psilocybin research project resembled the formation of a 'cult'. Years later, Richard Alpert agreed to the accuracy of this statement, in the sense that a cult was a group of individuals gathered around a shared set of beliefs. As academic psychology fell by the wayside, the spiritual-communal element in the IFIF 'cult' grew stronger. Despite an ambitious program declaration, the psychedelic training center that Alpert and Leary established at a hotel in Zihuatanejo in the Summer '63 is perhaps best understood as a temporary acid commune in a paradisiacal setting, rather than a formal research facility.4
After having been ousted from Mexico for misappropriate use of a tourist visa, the ex-Harvard hallucinogen enthusiasts found a permanent home in the Millbrook estate in upstate New York. Part psychedelic lifestyle commune, part artistic workshop, and part consciousness research center, the story of the charmed Millbrook years have been thoroughly retold over the years, and here one can mainly reflect on how fortunate Leary and his friends were in gaining access to this compound, even if the substantial wealth of the Hitchcock-Mellon family could not prevent the occasional police raid. As the emphasis within the group shifted from psychology and analysis to spirituality and creativity, the old IFIF initiative from the Harvard days was discarded in favor of the 'Castalia Foundation' and ultimately the 'League for Spiritual Discovery', reflecting the profound influence that the works of Hermann Hesse had upon Leary's commune at the time.
As Leary himself observed in his and Ralph Metzner's essay on Hesse, 'Poet Of The Interior Journey' (Psychedelic Review #2, 1963), the correspondence between Hesse's later prose works and the evolvement of modern psychedelic culture is remarkable. The novels form a thematic arc that begins with the sufferings of the modern, isolated cynic and his first initiation into the 'Magic Theater' of higher states of mind in Steppenwolf. Siddharta details the continued inner work and ultimate illumination, after which Journey To The East has the protagonist join a small, tightly-knit group of fellow esoteric seekers who together travel across space and time. Their League, it is said, has secretly existed for centuries, much like the alternative Platonic-Eleusinian culture of the West. The concluding Glass Bead Game is the utopian vision of a peaceful, refined Renaissance society whose gifted members preserve and extend their culture via a complex intellectual game in which all forms of art and knowledge can be represented.
It is often assumed that Hesse had been part of a mescaline group in the early 1920s, where artist Paul Klee may have been another member. Steppenwolf and Journey To The East in particular seem unambiguous in their descriptions of an encounter with psychedelic drugs and the close communal bonds that frequently develop among those involved. Hesse's works predict not only the surging post-WWII interest in Eastern thought and the formation of psychedelic artist communes like Millbrook, but also touch upon more radical acidhead concepts like Alan Watts' purposeless play and Terence McKenna's visual language, the two of which in combination might resemble the enigmatic glass bead game. As discussed in Chapter XIV, there is also an interesting congruence between the thematic trajectory in Hesse's novels and the psychedelic growth shown in the key works of the 13th Floor Elevators. The development which Hesse describes, and millions have discovered and re-discovered after him, is the fundamental process of psychedelization.
Individual and collective phases of psychedelization
3
When the Millbrook group became the League for Spiritual Discovery in late '66, the change of name signified more than just a tribute to Hermann Hesse. Interviewed by the Chicago Seed in 1967, Ralph Metzner describes the League as a 'church' and outlines a scenario that had begun to emerge in the mid-'60s:
The reasons for starting the church are several. One has to do with attempting to structure the experience in some way to give it some kind of form and boundaries' the need for a ritual. Now everybody is aware that ritual has a tendency to become dead; that is, empty of its original content. Of course, the use of the actual chemical [LSD] does in a sense guarantee the constant renewal of the actual experience. When the ritual becomes a substitute for the experience then obviously it becomes meaningless.
(Metzner, The Seed, op.cit)
Metzner's reasoning is partly in line with the notions that inform the present work, where the priority should always be given to immediate experience in general, and the direct revelation inside the psychedelic states in particular. However, this paradigm does not conform to the creation of a church in as readily a sense as Metzner seems to suggest. The word 'church' implies the existence of an organized underlying religious framework, including ecclesiastic structures, doctrine, liturgy, ethical codes, community interaction, and so forth. Indeed, depending on one's precise interpretation of the word 'church', it may imply the existence of a priestly class which moves the core experience – the direct revelation of the otherworldly – away from the members of the congregation to a special representative of the divine in the form a priest, imam, geshe, or such. In that sense, a 'church' goes directly against the intent of psychedelic culture as described in the present work.
The other reason for starting a religion is a social one. Religion is a form of social self- protection' That's why the Peyote Indians started a church, in order to protect their use of Peyote they needed to incorporate a legal church. I think that the tendency will be to have as many churches as possible. Every tribe should incorporate its own church.
(Metzner, ibid)
This comment goes some way to explain the somewhat confusing talk of 'religion' and 'church' that was frequent in the pioneering psychedelic communes of the '60s. Behind the talk of a need for ritual and shared experience one can detect a political agenda, clearly inspired by the success of the Native American Church to legalize their peyote use. In order for a group of white East Coast Ph D's to successfully exploit this precedent, it was necessary for them to refer to the LSD sessions as a 'ritual' involving a 'sacrament', the group of acidheads as a 'church', and the total sum of their acid - related activity as a 'religion'.
It is easy to see Timothy Leary's hand behind this plan, which if successful would not only grant immunity to all LSD users, but also deliver another blow to the establishment and its cops and priests. To facilitate the incorporation of 'every tribe' into a religious organization, Leary put into circulation one of his most notorious essays, "How To Start Your Own Religion" (1967). Presumably composed for an oral lecture format, the text is a somewhat bewildering mix of slogans, exhortations, and bureaucratic instruction. The fact that the square defenders of traditional society (what Leary calls 'the TV studio world') were forced to write formal rejoinders to spaced -out texts like this is amusing in retrospect. As to the actual agenda, Leary doesn't mince words; 'For both psychedelic and legal reasons you must form your own cult'. The words 'religion', 'cult' and even 'clan' are used interchangedly, and the hidden political agenda behind this document is not hard to detect, even if Leary urges the reader to 'Avoid all politics… Political choices are meaningless.' It is possible or even likely that both Leary and Metzner knew that the words 'religion' and 'church' did not fit particularly well with the type of psychedelic enclaves they had in mind. The word 'cult' or 'mystery cult' is much more appropriate, and the topical debates during the early counterculture phase make more sense with such terms applied instead.
Yet the fact remains that the earliest known hallucinogen community, preceding Leary's League by several years, also referred to itself as a 'church'. The Church Of Awakening was formed in New Mexico in 1962 by the married couple John and Louise Aiken, two MD's who had lived through the double tragedy of seeing both their sons die in tragic accidents. Coming upon psychedelic drugs at an early point, the experience seemed to them a powerful adjunct to the spiritual search they were already conducting. John Aiken, who summarized his ideas in a humble little volume titled Explorations In Awareness (1966), may have chosen the word 'church' as a deliberate reminder of what a church really should be, in his opinion:
I used to think that churches were interested in religion. And they are, if you define religion as following a moral code, of accepting a belief. Which is not the same thing as achieving Self-realization. There is a spiritual nature--a divinity--within each one of us. And the purpose of life is for us to realize, to unfold, to actualize this potential divine nature.
(John Aiken, interviewed in Explorations magazine #2, 1966)
This was to be achieved via a psychedelic session, for which the Aikens' organization offered monitoring service to those whose applications had been granted. The somewhat vague creed of the Church Of Awakening is 'based on that which is universal in all religions', and that 'Consciousness is another name for God'. However, as Aiken makes clear, once the subject has achieved the mystical experience, the Church Of Awakening organization offers no further assistance of weight. In other words, the Aikens' 'church' was not a religion or even a cult, but rather a spiritual guidance center.5
This holds true for the other pioneering endeavors in the field of psychedelic communities, such as the early Harvard/IFIF enterprises, or Art Kleps' notorious Neo-American Church. Basically a support organization for newly fangled acidheads, Kleps' initiative displayed some unusual traits that makes it worth a closer look. Having encountered mescaline in 1960, Kleps established an early contact with the Harvard trio before registering his unorthodox 'Church' in 1965, preceding Leary's League by more than a year. Kleps charmingly describes his makeshift psychedelic training center the 'Morning Glory Lodge' in upstate New York during the mid-'60s, before settling more or less permanently at Millbrook.6 The autobiographical account he offers in Millbrook (1974, 1998) details the bizarre menagerie and intrigues at the Leary-led compound circa 1966-68, along with the psychedelic-solipsist philosophy of the 'Chief Boo-Hoo', Kleps himself. Due partly to a drinking problem that he was unable to lose even after dozens of LSD trips, some of his recollections are lamentable, but on the whole the psychology-trained Kleps appears as an inspired observer of people and their games. The notion that petty social games and status-seeking will disappear just because everyone takes acid is not substantiated by the saga told in Millbrook.
