http://psypressuk.com/2010/08/19/literary-review-the-acid-diaries-by-christopher-gray/


Literary Review: ‘The Acid Diaries’ by Christopher Gray
August 19, 2010
tags: drugs, LSD, reviews, books, psychedelics
by psypressuk

‘The Acid Diaries – A Psychonaut’s Guide to the History and Use of LSD’ by
Christopher Gray was originally published in the UK by Vision under the title ‘The
Acid: On sustained experiment with lysergic acid diethylamide, or LSD’ in 2009. The
author sadly passed away last year but fortunately this extraordinarily insightful book
is being republished by Park Street Press, in November 2010.

Christopher Gray (1942-2009) first came to prominence in the 1960s for his
involvement with, and text translations of, the Situationist International. During his
formative lifetime he saw himself, politically, as being part of the New Left – a
movement, in many ways, entwined with the counterculture. Having travelled
extensively, he eventually settled back down in the UK with his wife and child. The
book picks up with Gray post-divorce and pushing retirement age, in a time of
personal crisis. He finds himself drawn into the psychonautic world of LSD, something
he’d not considered since its 1960s heyday, but through which he saw a possible
salvation for himself.

The Acid Diaries is a potent mixture of psychedelic threads. Broadly speaking, it is a
genuinely engaging attempt at synthesizing psychological, political and spiritual
discourse within psychedelia. The basic framework is centred around his own trip
journal, which he quotes Terence McKenna as saying is an important method for the
psychonaut. However, in using the backdrop of his own life, and reports from other
notable sources (like Charles Hayes’ Tripping,) Gray produces a succinct argument
for the repoliticization of psychedelics; along the lines of their spiritual and
psychologically demonstrated attributes.

As Gray notes: “The concept of deconditioning was at the heart of the New Left” and
“if any single feature set ‘60s and ‘70s radicalism apart from any previous
insurrectionary politics, it was the insistence that individual subjectivity had to be
transformed”. During the course of the book Gray begins to see LSD at being at the
heart of this process. The slow passing of the counterculture, its last coffin nails
seemingly hammered in by 1980s neo-Conservativism, and the recent, so-called,
“psychedelic renaissance” is a potent metaphor that resonates along all the three
threads of the book; not least along his own life.

The exploration begins with Gray’s re-reading of Stanislav Grof’s Realms of the
Human Unconscious, which has since been republished as LSD: Doorway to the
Luminous. Grof’s model of the psychedelic experience is a central study within text.
In coming to various new understandings of himself, he corresponds the experience
of his LSD trips alongside the descriptions given by Grof, which in effect gives the
novel its theoretical grounding. Gray also discusses Masters and Houston’s Varieties of
the Psychedelic Experience, published in 1966. The outcome of examining these
models biographically is a startling personalization of theory that creates a very clear
and sympathetic relationship with the reader.

The locations and setting of many of his trips are in London and there are some very
picturesque passages, as he roams the parks and woods of the capital. Yet, the
insights of the world were always tinged with a political edginess – a touch of Marxist
alienation perhaps. Walking through London, during rush hour, tripping with the
content focused on death: “They were all young men and woman, in what should
have been the pride of youth – falling in love, wanting to hitch around South
America, afire with new ideas – and here they were shuffling along like tired old
people, with the last bit of fight long kicked out of them”. Though LSD began to put
his own psychological problems into focus, it simultaneously did so on society as well.

Yet whilst Gray could more readily assimilate his insights into society, through his own
understanding and political position, he struggled more to comprehend the
transpersonal nature of the psychedelic experience: “For I was being taught from the
inside, as it were; as though I had looked something up in an encyclopaedia, but
instead of reading the entry, I was actually experiencing it. The text was lived
existential states”. The idea that language/information is the very stuff of nature and
experience is an increasingly popular line of exploration in psychedelic studies.
Literarily speaking, however, Gray does an extraordinary job at elucidating the
problems of his “lived existential state”. This is at the heart of his deconditioning
argument.

In the end, the argument follows that the New Left, rather than being an inherently
atheistic stance – inherited from some Marxist conception of history – is better off
becoming a “sacramental vision of reality”. And that “it is here that the much-aligned
“recreational” quality of psychedelics suddenly takes on a surprising spiritual
originality. Because psychedelics are basically an adventure – an adventure in a world
without any. Because, despite the hair-raising moments, they are fun. They are
celebratory. They reveal their own incandescent spirituality, and their anarchism is
something that cannot be defended against. They get in under the atheist radar…”.
So, in Gray’s argument, whilst multiculturalism openly contrasts religions and
consequentially allows them to undermine one another, the psychedelic sacrament
pervades all.

In his quest, Gray utilized many important works of psychedelic literature, which
being read through his own narrative sequence of trips, has enabled a fresh look at
old material. Whilst, on the one hand, he uses the literature to inform his passage
through LSD, he simultaneously challenges it within his own experiential field. His
conclusion, as with any good conclusion, is the synthesise of his research into a single
new question: “Essentially three factors – God, the world, and the self – confront us.
What we have to do is discover the true relation between them. Can the three
coincide?”. Truly The Acid Diaries is a return to form for psychedelic literature, not
only is it a beautifully written narrative but it’s full for engaging ideas that Gray uses
to weave a web of possibility and, ultimately, hope for the future of psychedelics. For
more information and to pre-order a copy this book please visit here.

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