I grew up a 70s baby, early 80s child in suburban middle-America, raised by European hipsters who had partied with the Yardbirds and Jimi Hendrix in 60s London. My nursery rhymes were things like, "I Am the Walrus, goo-goo gachoo" and "The Answer is Blowing in the Wind".
While my parents' marriage exploded, my early teenage years were spent with my chuck taylors and doc martins firmly glued to the deck of a skateboard, flying as fast as I could through the concrete jungle. I was a punk, a misfit, a rebel giving the middle finger to my vapid surroundings. I searched for meaning in a broken world, remaining completely drug-free for most of my HS years, including eschewing both alcohol and cigarettes.
I was disenchanted with the normalness of suburban American High School. The stupid conformity. The apparent willingness to jump through all the right hoops that I observed in my peers. I was a GT student who refused to do my homework, because it bored the shit out of me to regurgitate a bunch of answers that I had learned by heart the very first week the textbook was put in my knowledge-hungry hands. I had no interest in the drudgery of imposed knowledge. An intrepid explorer since the first time I stepped into the woods, I wanted to learn of other worlds, other thoughts, other paths than the well-trodden, safe and reliable roads that my 'elders and betters' forced me to walk down.
I became depressed, and watched a lot of TV. I had always fought against the machine - now I was sucked into it. I stopped thinking, I stopped exploring, I became a reclusive spectator. I had been turned on to the machine.
Then one day someone turned me on to something new...
The first time I smoked a J, it was like all the bad years, the resentful years, the angry years, had been wiped clean. I was transported back to the state of innocence I felt as a child, the same music I heard as a kid replacing the anger and runaway-breakneck speed of punk and hardcore.
I turned on to the 60s 100%. I grew my hair long and walked barefoot everywhere. I spent most of my days and nights outdoors. Even if it was raining. My boomer parents' friends told me that I was born too late. I began to read again - voraciously. I learned about psychedelics. I never saw what I did as hedonistic pleasure seeking, but rather a path to enlightenment and transcendence.
If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear as it is - infinite - William Blake
Turn on, tune in, drop out. - Timothy Leary
There is a tendency, however, to push the envelope. Too much knowledge too fast can veritably kill a person. I began to see myself as a sort of sorcerer, playing with dark forces for the power of knowledge. I was playing with fire. Things were getting dangerous. The psychedelic colors and playful animals were becoming dark shadows and hungering monsters.
I, while the gods laugh, the world's vortex am;
Maelstrom of passions in that hidden sea
Whose waves of all-time lap the coasts of me;
And in small compass the dark waters cram. - Mervyn Peak
My environment was pretty dark at this point in my life: working a crap job in a print shop and making deliveries. The potions and herbs that I once used to explore reality had become an escape, a relief from the cog-existence of industrial life. I extricated myself from this existence by moving half way around the world to a beautiful island in the Mediterranean. I learned to live among nature again. I became a creature of the water, of buoyancy, no longer constrained by gravity.
Living in the 90s in that part of the world had a lot of similarities to Hunter S. Thompson's description of San Francisco in the 60s. Fueled by Ecstasy, the beach, the sun, and dusk till dawn waves of electronica, it was the Filmore made lush and sexy. A paradise of love and warmth. It was here that I finally realized the near-fatal error that I and many others had made.
This was the fatal flaw in Tim Leary's Trip. He crashed around American selling "consciousness expansion" without ever giving a thought to the grim meat-hook realities that were lying in wait for all the people who took him too seriously...
...Not that they didn't deserve it: No doubt they all Got What Was Coming To Them.
All those pathetically eager acid freaks who thought they could buy Peace and Understanding for three bucks a hit. But their loss and failure is ours, too.
What Leary took down with him was the central illusion of a whole lifestyle that he helped create... a generation of permanent cripples, failed seekers, who never understood the essential old-mythic fallacy of the Acid Culture: the desperate assumption that somebody - or at least some force - is tending the Light at the end of the tunnel. - Hunter S. Thompson
I now believe that the terrible mistake made by Leary is not, as an acid-wearied Thompson professed in "Fear and Loathing Las Vegas", that he told a generation of seekers to "Turn on, tune in, drop out", but rather that he omitted the first crucial step: TURN OFF.
Smash the control images. Smash the control machines. - William S.
Burroughs
Whatever is done out of love occurs beyond good and evil. - Friedrich Wilhelm Nietsche
Turning on is all well and good. Enlightenment is a goal we should all strive for. But we are currently shackled to a great machine, a machine that uses us up. The amount of energy in every human being is finite.
Before we can turn on to a higher state of consciousness, we have to turn off, as much as possible, the world in which we find ourselves: a world that encourages greed, shallowness, and the banality of evil.
My generation had the power to change the world. Instead, it opted for the Home Shopping Network. - Stephen King
But it wasn't entirely their fault. When the wave of the sixties broke, the establishment
welcomed back its prodigal children with shiny toys and gadgets to replace their tarnished imaginations. Cynicism was a ready balm that helped ease the transition from transcendence back to materialism.
Welcome, my friend. Welcome to the Machine. - Pink Floyd
How can we attain transcendence when our minds are cluttered by answers that other people have put in our heads, turning us into robots?
Gone are the days of fairy tales. All sacrificed for the caress of steel. - Cartoon Messiah
The DFHs were right. But the powerful forces of the 'serious people' had them right where they wanted them all along: consumerism was a far more powerful drug, and its effects are far more insidious than heroin: it dulls the mind and body, making us plaint and subservient.
So the solution is to amend Leary's maxim: TURN OFF, turn on, tune in, drop out.
Only once we have eschewed the bells and whistles of the commercial world, can we begin to work with clear minds at achieving a state of higher consciousness necessary to progressing past the brutal necessities of the survival trip we are all forced to take every day, which blunts us to the web of mutuality in which we all live.
The mediated world we live in is Maya - illusion, Babylon - corruption. But as long as we, too, love the poison, who can we blame for this but ourselves?
We must do everything in our power to eschew this world of artifice for a more natural world, wrought with our own hands as constituents of nature, and not as its foes or masters. The belief that we can master the natural world is being shown to be folly and hubris in the havoc such a doctrine is wreaking on our environment. There is no other alternative than to decouple ourselves as much as possible from a failing civilization if we wish to cleanse the doors of perception.
I can see clearly now the rain is gone. I can see all obstacles in my way. - Johnny Nash