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| Huxley,
of course, knew what it's all about because this experience really is
about the Good, the True and the Beautiful and an experience of immense
significance and importance and worth having at a very great price. It's
too bad we know nothing about it. The Western world is advanced in technology,
but sadly lacks in wisdom if the visionary experience is associated with
insanity and if someone is in danger of going to jail for having such
an experience or even encouraging others to do it. That is the mentality
of this country and of course, it's a fascist mentality. If someone is
totally closed and has no interest in the LSD experience, that's their
business. If a person has to go to jail because they disagree, then there
is a problem, a fascist problem and that is where this country is at.
We aren't any different today than the people who thought that Galileo
was dangerous because of his telescope and in turn, refused to look into
the telescope. Galileo was arrested. We are just as backward today. We
have cars, TV's and computers, but the wisdom level is still near zero
and will stay there until people on a widespread scale become aware of
the LSD visionary experience and what it means. R. Gordon Wasson traveled the world studying mushrooms, the "magic mushrooms". Timothy Leary's first psychedelic experience was in Mexico with the mushrooms. John Cashman wrote a book, The LSD Story. Cashman knew nothing about LSD, but there is a quote from Wasson on page 24 worth mentioning: "The visions were not blurred or uncertain. They were sharply focused, the lines and colors being so sharp that they seemed more real to me than anything I had seen with my own eyes. I felt that I was now seeing clearly, whereas ordinary vision gives us an imperfect view. I was seeing the archetypes, the Platonic ideas, that underlie the imperfect images of everyday life. The thought crossed my mind: could the divine mushrooms be the secret of the ancient Mysteries?...These reflections passed through my mind at the very time that I was seeing the visions, for the effect of the mushrooms is to bring about a fission of the spirit, a split in the person, a kind of schizophrenia, with the rational side continuing to reason and to observe the sensations that the other side is enjoying." That last sentence was just another way of saying that the person has their usual rational mind the whole time, no matter what is happening. There was a reference to the ancient Mysteries. We'll get to what that is. What follows is another quote from R. Gordon Wasson. It's from pages 35-37 of The Psychedelic Reader, a selection of writings that appeared in the Psychedelic Review. The book is edited by Timothy Leary, Ralph Metzner and Gunther Weil, all Harvard men. Here it is: "It permits you to see, more clearly than our perishing mortal eye can see, vistas beyond the horizons of this life, to travel backwards and forwards in time, to enter other planes of existence, even (as the Indians say) to know God. It is hardly surprising that your emotions are profoundly affected and you feel that an indissolvable bond unites you with the others who have shared with you in the sacred agape. All that you see during this night has a pristine quality: the landscape, the edifices, the carvings, the animals-they look as though they have come straight from the Maker's workshop. This newness of everything-it is as though the world had just dawned-overwhelms you and melts you with its beauty. Not unnaturally, what is happening to you seems to you freighted with significance, beside which the humdum events of everyday are trivial. All these things you see with an immediacy of vision that leads you to say to yourself, 'Now I am seeing for the first time, seeing direct, without the intervention of mortal eyes'. (Plato tells us that beyond this ephemeral and imperfect existence here below, there is another Ideal world of Archetypes, where the original, the true, the beautiful Pattern of things exists for evermore. Poets and philosophers for millennia have pondered and discussed his conception. It is clear to me where Plato found his Ideas; it was clear to his contemporaries too. Plato had drunk of the potion in the Temple of Eleusis and had spent the night seeing the great Vision.)" |