| PAGE
06 |
| When
you are tripping and the ego has to confront LSD, it's it's like the marines
have arrived to rescue you. It's all over for the ego and now your life
can finally begin in ernest. The ego has as much of a chance against LSD
as an infant has in the ring against Evander Holyfield. The baby has a
better chance because Evander wouldn't hit an innocent infant. The ego,
however, is not innocent. It's like the devil. LSD knows that and when
it sees the ego, the ego better run for the hills like any other crook
that has met its match, but the ego thinks that it's so high and mighty
that it will take on LSD. What a mistake because the ego will get mauled,
destroyed and buried, just what it deserves for trying to steal your life. Timothy Leary puts it this way on page 104 of David Solomon's LSD: The Consciousness Expanding Drug: "How can we Westerners come to see that our own consciousness is infinitely greater than our little egos and the ego games into which we are so blindly caught up? That the universe within our skulls is infinitely more than the flimsy game world which our words and minds create? "Put in a sentence, the task is to see that the mind is a tiny fragment of the brain-body complex. It is the game-playing fragment. The process of getting beyond the game structure, beyond the subject-object commitments, the dualities, this process is called the mystic experience. The visionary experience is the nongame, metagame experience. Change in behavior can occur with dramatic spontaneity once the game structure of behavior is seen. The visionary experience is the key to behavior change." From the same book as the example above, Alan Watts said on page 118: "Theologians said to Galileo, 'We will not look through your telescope because we already know how the universe is ordered. If your telescope were to show us anything different, it would be an instrument of the devil'". "Similarly, so many practitioners of the inexact sciences (e.g., psychology, anthropology, sociology) let it be known most clearly that they already know what reality is and therefore what sanity is. For these poor drudges reality is the world of nonpoetry: it is the reduction of the physical universe to the most banal and dissected terms conceivable, in accordance with the great Western myth that all nature outside the human skin is a stupid and unfeeling mechanism." Continuing on this point of how narrow and close-minded people are to new ideas, we return to Robert Anton Wilson and his book Sex and Drugs. On page 117-118 he gives examples of the absurd reasoning used by blind critics: "The best that such people can do to rebut the obvious facts is to make a highly artificial distinction between experience and impression. If the hashish user says that he saw brighter colors, they correct this to 'he imagined brighter colors'; should he say that his sense of touch was more acute, they will write that 'he imagined his sense of touch was more acute'; if he experiences a cosmic vision, they become especially arch and tell us 'he imagined he was having all sorts of mystical insights'". "Is there any sense in saying that if red looks brighter to me, then I am only imagining that it looks brighter to me? Or that if my orgasm seems more intense to me, then I am only imagining that it is more intense? Or that I have a delusion that I'm happy or am hallucinating that I feel great?" |