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Learyfan
It's the psychedelic movement!



Registered: 04/20/01
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Today in psychedelic history (05/04) 6
#14398418 - 05/04/11 05:41 AM (12 years, 8 months ago) |
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- 1953: Aldous Huxley first takes mescaline
Quote:
Huxley accompanied Osmond to several APA sessions, which he found deadly dull, and amused himself by genuflecting whenever Freud's name was mentioned. The subject of mescaline didn't arise until two days before Osmond was to leave, and then it was Maria who broached the subject, having decided that the famous British reticence was going to prevent the two men from discussing what was certainly uppermost in Aldous's mind. Osmond admitted that he had brought some mescaline with him; while Huxley conceded that he had borrowed a tape recorder to preserve a record of the experiment. The next day, May 4, 1953, Osmond dissolved some mescaline crystals in a glass of water and nervously handed it to Huxley. Outside it was one of those perfect LA mornings, blue and warm, with just a trace of smog hanging over the San Bernardino valley. What if the drug worked too well, Osmond thought to himself. Although Smythies and he had begun to appreciate that there was more to the mescaline experience than simple psychosis, that didn't diminish the possibility that the next six hours might be absolutely hellish. And Osmond didn't relish the possibility that he might become infamous as the man who drove Aldous Huxley crazy. On the other hand, what if nothing happened? It was beginning to dawn on Humphrey that Huxley had some rather idiosyncratic notions about what he hoped to achieve in the mescaline state. Nowhere was this more explicit than in the letter Osmond had received confirming his invitation to stay with the Huxleys while at the APA. After the usual pleasantries, Aldous had launched into a critique of what he called the Sears & Roebuck culture: Under the current dispensation the vast majority of individuals lose, in the course of education, all the openness to inspiration, all the capacity to be aware of other things than those enumerated in the Sears-Roebuck catalogue; is it too much to hope that a system of education may someday be devised which shall give results, in terms of human development, commensurate with the time, money, energy and action expended? In such a system of education it may be that mescaline or some other chemical substance may play a part by making it possible for young people to "taste and see" what they have learned at second hand, or directly but at a lower level of intensity, in the writings of the religious, or the works of poets, painters and musicians.4 Osmond was using mescaline as a mimicker of madness; Huxley wanted to incorporate it into the curriculum. The minutes passed slowly—too slowly for Huxley, who told Osmond he expected to enter what he called the Blakeian world of heroic perception. What actually happened was much more mundane. The lights danced. The insides of his eyelids dissolved into a complex of gray squares that occasionally gave birth to a blue sphere. Then, ninety minutes into the experience, Huxley felt himself pass through a screen, at least that's what it seemed like, and suddenly he was seeing "what Adam had seen on the morning of creation."5 It was as though, born myopic, he had just put on his first pair of glasses. The colors, the shapes, the sensuous mysteriousness of his flannel trousers. Later Aldous would pun that he had seen "eternity in a flower, infinity in four chair legs, and the Absolute in the folds of a pair of flannel trousers." He kept murmuring, "This is how one ought to see." 40 Mescaline, Huxley decided, intensified the visual at the expense of the temporal and spatial. There was a pronounced loss of will, which gradually expanded into a loss of ego. And as the ego relinquished its grip, all sorts of useless data, biologically speaking, began to seep into the mind. From the house, with its suddenly cubist furniture, they wandered into the garden. For the first time Huxley felt the presence of paranoia, and beyond that, madness. "If you started the wrong way," he told Osmond, "everything that happened would be proof of the conspiracy against you. It would all be self-validating. You couldn't draw a breath without knowing it was part of the plot."6 "So you think you know where madness lies?" Osmond asked. "Yes." "And you couldn't control it?" "No, I couldn't control it," Huxley said. "If one began with fear and hate as the major premise, one would have to go on to the conclusion." But then the shadow passed. From the garden they moved to the street, where a large blue automobile touched off gales of laughter. Fat and self-satisfied, it seemed to Huxley that the car was a self-portrait of twentieth-century man; for the rest of the day he giggled whenever he saw one. Aldous was having a wonderful time. After years of theorizing that each of us carries a reservoir of untapped vision and inspiration, he had suddenly stumbled across it at the advanced age of fifty-eight. It was a little like that classic moment in children's literature when the hero walks outside one morning and discovers a door, where yesterday there was only blank wall. And beyond that door, a garden of infinite dimension, infinite adventure.
Huxley was jubilant. Mescaline was "the most extraordinary and significant experience available to human beings this side of the Beatific Vision," he cabled his New York editor, Harold Raymond, adding that he was working on a long essay that would raise "all manner of questions in the fields of aesthetics, religion, theory of knowledge."1 He planned to call this essay The Doors of Perception, after Blake's observation that If the doors of perception were cleansed everything will appear to man as it is, infinite.
Destined to become the most famous volume on the psychedelic bookshelf, Doors took Huxley a month to write, and when he was done he had a blow-by-blow account of that afternoon with Osmond—events like the Dharma body of the Buddha manifesting itself in the garden hedge—tempered by liberal speculation as to what it all might possibly mean in terms of human psychology. What it all meant, Huxley thought, was that Bergson and the English philosopher C. D. Broad had been correct when they suggested that the brain operated as a vast reducing valve, "shutting out most of what we should otherwise perceive or remember at any moment, and leaving only that very small and special selection which is likely to be practically useful."2 Like the Freudian ego, this reducing valve was constantly beset by the raging tides of Mind-At-Large, which was what Huxley called Jung's archetypal unconscious plus Freud's pathological unconscious plus Myer's treasure house plus all the other unconsciousnesses yet to be named. And like Freud's ego, this reducing valve was not watertight: its seal was susceptible to pressure. "As Mind at Large seeps past the no longer watertight valve," he wrote, "all kinds of biologically useless things start to happen. In some cases there may be extrasensory perceptions. Other persons discover a world of visionary beauty. To others again is revealed the glory, the infinite value and meaningfulness of naked existence … . In the final stage of egolessness there is an 'obscure knowledge' that All is in all—that All is actually each." Which was why bookjackets gleamed with godliness and an innocuous canvas chair in the garden "looked like the Last Judgment."3 There was nothing unique about Mind at Large: the smart monkey had been vacationing there for millennia—the number of hit or miss techniques could've filled a small booklet. But suddenly, with mescaline, mankind had lucked upon a technology. For the first time a science of the Other World was possible. Perhaps. In his excitement over all the possibilities, educational and mystical and philosophical, Huxley skated past a few rather large problems with a nod and a wink. For example, one of the things he particularly liked about mescaline was the way it undercut verbal concepts. Words became superfluous. You didn't need to intellectualize about love or sadness or death, because you felt those emotions with every cell of your body. And that was a very useful condition in a culture that was increasingly dominated by its verbal constructs. "We can easily become the victims as well as the beneficiaries of these systems," Huxley wrote in Doors. "We must learn how to handle words effectively; but at the same time we must preserve, and, if necessary, intensify our ability to look at the world directly and not through that half opaque medium of concepts, which distorts every given fact into the all too familiar likeness of some generic label or explanatory abstraction."4 But if mescaline's ability to transport the user to an area of experience that was preverbal or antiverbal was a major plus, it was also a major drawback. You tried to pour language over it, but the words just slid away, like water off a duck's back. It was almost as if the highest tools of self-consciousness were inadequate when it came to capturing Bucke's cosmic realm. Of course part of the problem was that Huxley was pouring English, which lacked any kind of appreciation for these matters: Sanskrit, as Gerald loved to point out, was a far superior language, with over forty different words for alterations in consciousness.
(Storming Heaven: LSD And The American Dream)[.pdf file]
-------------------- -------------------------------- Mp3 of the month: The Apple-Glass Cyndrome - Someday
Edited by Learyfan (05/04/22 06:48 AM)
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SummerDaisies
Out of Retirement



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Re: Today in psychedelic history (05/04) [Re: Learyfan] 3
#14398464 - 05/04/11 06:04 AM (12 years, 8 months ago) |
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maybe i should find some cacti today
-------------------- [quote]Abuse said: summerfaggot is one of the biggest cunts on this site.[/quote]
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nglsnv
Becoming



Registered: 08/31/10
Posts: 782
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Re: Today in psychedelic history (05/04) [Re: SummerDaisies] 2
#14399565 - 05/04/11 11:48 AM (12 years, 8 months ago) |
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huxley is the man, i would love to have been able to trip with him, or just have a conversation with him for that matter
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gauge
Guns & LSD



Registered: 04/28/11
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Re: Today in psychedelic history (05/04) [Re: nglsnv] 2
#14400111 - 05/04/11 01:58 PM (12 years, 8 months ago) |
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Mescaline made the night sky flash for me after I threw up.
Good read, love the facts.
-------------------- I Lucy.
Edited by gauge (05/04/11 01:58 PM)
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Austrip
P. Sub


Registered: 08/05/10
Posts: 1,247
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Re: Today in psychedelic history (05/04) [Re: gauge] 2
#14400206 - 05/04/11 02:21 PM (12 years, 8 months ago) |
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huxley is the man, RIP!
Have to make a note of this day and dose up in the coming years to pay respect to a pioneer.
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Learyfan
It's the psychedelic movement!



Registered: 04/20/01
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Re: Today in psychedelic history (05/04) [Re: Austrip] 1
#14400681 - 05/04/11 03:53 PM (12 years, 8 months ago) |
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I wanna know if the audio tape of this trip has ever surfaced! I have to hear it!

-------------------- -------------------------------- Mp3 of the month: The Apple-Glass Cyndrome - Someday
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Learyfan
It's the psychedelic movement!



Registered: 04/20/01
Posts: 34,089
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Re: Today in psychedelic history (05/04) [Re: Austrip] 1
#16179676 - 05/03/12 11:39 PM (11 years, 8 months ago) |
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-------------------- -------------------------------- Mp3 of the month: The Apple-Glass Cyndrome - Someday
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Learyfan
It's the psychedelic movement!



Registered: 04/20/01
Posts: 34,089
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Re: Today in psychedelic history (05/04) [Re: Learyfan] 1
#18212287 - 05/04/13 08:46 AM (10 years, 8 months ago) |
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60th anniversary of Huxley's first mescaline trip today!
-------------------- -------------------------------- Mp3 of the month: The Apple-Glass Cyndrome - Someday
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allseeingike



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Re: Today in psychedelic history (05/04) [Re: Learyfan] 2
#18212422 - 05/04/13 09:41 AM (10 years, 8 months ago) |
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Awese
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Nature Boy
Stranger than most



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Re: Today in psychedelic history (05/04) [Re: Learyfan] 2
#18212532 - 05/04/13 10:20 AM (10 years, 8 months ago) |
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What a coincidence. Was just searching my bookshelf so I could re-read Doors of Perception for the umpteenth time.
N.B.
-------------------- All submitted posts under this user name are works of pure fiction or outright lies. Any information, statement, or assertion contained therein should be considered pure unadulterated bullshit. Note well: Sorry, but I do not answer PM's unless you are a long-time trusted friend. If you have a question, ask it in the appropriate thread.
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Rhizoid
carbon unit


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Re: Today in psychedelic history (05/04) [Re: Nature Boy] 2
#18213506 - 05/04/13 02:07 PM (10 years, 8 months ago) |
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What a coincidence indeed. I started celebrating this evening without having any particular reason, and now I find there is a great anniversary today that I almost missed.
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Learyfan
It's the psychedelic movement!



Registered: 04/20/01
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Re: Today in psychedelic history (05/04) [Re: Rhizoid] 1
#19939305 - 05/04/14 08:43 AM (9 years, 8 months ago) |
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Well I hope you guys had fun reading and celebrating on this day last year.
-------------------- -------------------------------- Mp3 of the month: The Apple-Glass Cyndrome - Someday
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Learyfan
It's the psychedelic movement!



Registered: 04/20/01
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Re: Today in psychedelic history (05/04) [Re: Learyfan] 1
#21633404 - 05/04/15 05:35 AM (8 years, 8 months ago) |
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Hopefully you dissolved some mescaline crystals in water for your trip.
-------------------- -------------------------------- Mp3 of the month: The Apple-Glass Cyndrome - Someday
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Learyfan
It's the psychedelic movement!



Registered: 04/20/01
Posts: 34,089
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Re: Today in psychedelic history (05/04) [Re: Learyfan] 1
#23187570 - 05/04/16 05:46 AM (7 years, 8 months ago) |
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Annual bump.
-------------------- -------------------------------- Mp3 of the month: The Apple-Glass Cyndrome - Someday
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Learyfan
It's the psychedelic movement!



Registered: 04/20/01
Posts: 34,089
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Re: Today in psychedelic history (05/04) [Re: Learyfan] 1
#24294229 - 05/04/17 06:30 AM (6 years, 8 months ago) |
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Annual bump.
-------------------- -------------------------------- Mp3 of the month: The Apple-Glass Cyndrome - Someday
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Learyfan
It's the psychedelic movement!



Registered: 04/20/01
Posts: 34,089
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Re: Today in psychedelic history (05/04) [Re: Learyfan] 1
#25183434 - 05/04/18 07:05 AM (5 years, 8 months ago) |
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65th anniversary of Huxley taking mescaline for the first time.
-------------------- -------------------------------- Mp3 of the month: The Apple-Glass Cyndrome - Someday
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Learyfan
It's the psychedelic movement!



Registered: 04/20/01
Posts: 34,089
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Re: Today in psychedelic history (05/04) [Re: Learyfan] 1
#25971745 - 05/04/19 09:03 AM (4 years, 8 months ago) |
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Annual bump.
-------------------- -------------------------------- Mp3 of the month: The Apple-Glass Cyndrome - Someday
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Learyfan
It's the psychedelic movement!



Registered: 04/20/01
Posts: 34,089
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Re: Today in psychedelic history (05/04) [Re: Learyfan] 1
#26647922 - 05/04/20 09:54 AM (3 years, 8 months ago) |
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Annual bump.
-------------------- -------------------------------- Mp3 of the month: The Apple-Glass Cyndrome - Someday
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Learyfan
It's the psychedelic movement!



Registered: 04/20/01
Posts: 34,089
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Re: Today in psychedelic history (05/04) [Re: Learyfan] 2
#27293327 - 05/04/21 04:11 AM (2 years, 8 months ago) |
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Annual bump.
-------------------- -------------------------------- Mp3 of the month: The Apple-Glass Cyndrome - Someday
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redgreenvines
irregular verb


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Re: Today in psychedelic history (05/04) [Re: Learyfan] 3
#27293979 - 05/04/21 01:10 PM (2 years, 8 months ago) |
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May the fourth be with you all!
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_ 🧠 _
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Learyfan
It's the psychedelic movement!



Registered: 04/20/01
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Re: Today in psychedelic history (05/04) [Re: redgreenvines] 1
#27762422 - 05/04/22 07:04 AM (1 year, 8 months ago) |
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Annual bump.
-------------------- -------------------------------- Mp3 of the month: The Apple-Glass Cyndrome - Someday
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Learyfan
It's the psychedelic movement!



Registered: 04/20/01
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Re: Today in psychedelic history (05/04) [Re: Learyfan]
#28305896 - 05/04/23 04:35 AM (8 months, 23 days ago) |
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70th anniversary of Aldous Huxley first taking mescaline.
-------------------- -------------------------------- Mp3 of the month: The Apple-Glass Cyndrome - Someday
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