Drug Abuse

 

 

Skinny Dipping in Reality: The Great Hippy LSD Enlightenment Search Party

By Joe Bageant, JoeBageant.com

Posted on March 25, 2009, Printed on March 25, 2009

http://www.alternet.org/story/133256/

 

There's nothing better that 250 mics of good acid to kick start the cosmic coonhunt

for Enlightenment. It takes juice. After all sonny boy, you don't knock down stars with

a bee bee gun.

-- Mad Dog Howard, Hippie Doper/Philosopher

 

First LSD trip, 1965: Tumbling, tumbling, tumbling inward with eyes closed, I could

hear the spider plant hanging in the basket overhead singing in its green subatomic

plant language, a hymn to the sunlight charging my bedroom atmosphere. On the

back of my eyelids spun a great wheel of existence, turning both ways simultaneously

generating an unearthly mournful chant that seemed to be composed of every

human voice on earth. It rose in some unknown universal tongue singing, "Wheel of

life, wheel of death, Bangladesh, Bangladesh. Wheel of life, wheel of death,

Bangaladesh, Bangaladesh." Millions of starving faces, young men, girls, old men,

babies, crones, materialized in uncountable swarms, each face transfigured by some

unnamable mutual understanding that I could not share. Then they atomized,

leaving the room filled with the scent of wood smoke, shit and citrus blossoms (an

odor I would instantly recognize decades later in poverty stricken Central

American villages.)

 

No words can describe an LSD trip, but let me say that at the end of this one, I sat

down and cried. For happiness. My deepest hope and suspicion, the one to which I

dared not cling, had been confirmed. Life could indeed be significant, piercing and

meaningful.

 

I first took LSD in Winchester, Virginia, thanks to my gay friend George, who was

being "treated" for his homosexuality with lysergic acid and enjoying every minute of

treatment. Ever since reading about LSD in a Life magazine article a year before,

both of us had wanted some of the stuff. Then one day George walked into my

basement apartment and threw a cellophane packet onto the kitchen table. "There it

is Bageant," he said. Next day, after creating a small meditative space with plants, a

Tibetan mandala, and classical music on the turntable, we took it. Five years later I

was still taking it at least once a week, and to this day I consider LSD the promethean

spark of whatever awakening I have managed to accomplish in the life.

 

Hard as it is to imagine today, LSD was perfectly legal at the time. Legal and

apparently not dangerous. In fact, it never even interfered with my job at a

microbiological laboratory in the local Shraft's frozen food plant, but seemed to

improve work. Often I arrived there still under the influence of the previous night's

psychotropics and still managed to impress the hell out of the lab boss, Ray Trotta,

for my ability to note extremely subtle differences in cultured bacterial colonies. Of

course, when we put our eye to the same lens of the dark field colony counter, we

were by no means looking at the same colony, as I skimmed across and through the

colorful landscapes and towers of teeming metropoli of bacterial civilizations.

 

For the first time in years, my life in that small town was very enjoyable. In fact

Winchester soon spawned its own small psychedelic scene, one among thousands in

heartland America at the time. We never hear about them today, the media having

since trivialized the entire Sixties (which actually ran into the Seventies) into a handful

of newsreel snippets of the Haight Ashbury, Kent State, long hair, Vietnam and the

Beatles.

 

In Winchester, an assortment of perhaps fifty artists, gays, hillbilly hipsters,

academics from a nearby college of music, passing beatniks, and psychedelic

enthusiasts had accumulated around town, hanging out at a marvelous old "dinner

and juke joint" in the poor section. Winchester's good Southern burghers couldn't

help but notice all this "suspicious happiness," as the mayor once called it. But

because the sons and daughters of local doctors, lawyers and authorities, including

the daughter of the town's prosecuting attorney, were in the mix, and because the

queer son of a state senator hung out there, a hands-off policy prevailed for the first

couple of years. Finally, the good fundamentalist Christians and Republican business

community just couldn't take it any more.

 

Meanwhile, I'd gained a profile for myself through openly espousing consciousness

expansion and by working to racially integrate the all white Shraft's frozen food plant,

which was later accomplished when the plant got a liberal New York manager named

Hank. It was hairy for a while, but together we got it done.

 

As an aside, last year, some forty years later, I again saw the first Negro we hired (I

use the non-PC word because it was the term of the day and feels right in this telling

of the times), Ted, a religious man with a spark in his eye and built like a small tank.

As we sat in his little house in Winchester's still-black section, Ted, now completely

white haired and with one of those post cancer bowel bags attached, recalled that

"Them was the days of Jim Crow, but they wasn't the worst thing to come along."

"How's that?" I asked. "Crack," he answered. "Crack be destroyin' this generation.

But if God took us through Jim Crow, he can take us through crack." We clasped our

hands and closed our eyes in a short prayer.

 

Given that I openly advocated LSD and psychedelics, my uh, notoriety, grew,

resulting in becoming the town's first pot bust. Titillating as it was for the readers of

the Winchester Star, the regular fare of which featured such things as potatoes that

looked like Bob Hope and large unidentified bugs brought into its offices by local

farmers, the trial itself was a dismal little thing, completely uninteresting in retrospect,

even to the arrestee, despite that I was facing 15 years.

 

Anyway, several months later I was acquitted, partly for the fact that it was one of

the few pot sales I didn't make around town, but mostly because of a hard boozing

old Southern attorney named Massey, who sported white linen suits and carried a

load of buckshot in his ass acquired while climbing out the window after screwing

some guy's wife years before. Ever savvy, he selected blacks for the jury, people who

for good reasons had no fondness for Winchester's lily white judicial system and law

enforcement. Massey personally did not have much use for "cullids," and believed, as

we were taught in schools then, that blacks were lazy and inferior because their

culture evolved in a warm climate where fruit fell out of the trees and in the absence

of the need for work, they just fucked all day. At the same time he understood that

"the sight of cullids in the jury box is unnerving as hell for any prosecutor, the way

they sit there blinkin' so inscrutable and all. You never know what they are thinking,

but you know it ain't good for the prosecution. And besides, the commonwealth's

prosecuting attorney is gonna have his hands full just keeping his daughter's name

from coming up in your marijuana adventures. Nachully, you are gonna mention it

very chance you get, and I'm gonna give you plenty. And we're lucky as hell, boy,

that he's incompetent to boot." This all turned out to be sheer prophecy.

 

The verdict was "not guilty." Still, there was no living in Winchester after being all

over the front pages of the paper. In fact, there was no living there during the long

wait for the trial anyway because waiting for anything is boring as hell in an already

boring place. So I moved to a tent in Resurrection City, the Poor People's Campaign

camp on Washington's national mall, to wait for the trial.

 

After acquittal of the charge, I was gassed up, greased and ready to hit the road. I

knew there was a big-time counter-culture out there somewhere, thanks to regular

trips to D.C. to get publications such as Paul Krassner's The Realist, and by damned

my wife and infant child and I were going to join them for good. Several months

later, after a stint in New Orleans' French Quarter at the invitation of a junkie jazz

man named Ed, who'd blown through Winchester earlier with his hooker wife, Kathy,

after being released from Leavenworth. N'awlins was a scene in itself, given that we

lived across the street from a hippie storefront church whose sole ritual was dropping

acid.

 

Later, while headed for San Francisco, I found myself and my little family in Boulder,

Colorado. Definitely this was a culture counter to the rest of America. Hell, they were

hawking LSD out loud and openly on the streets! At least a dozen of them looked at

us and asked, "Do you need a place to crash brother?" Or call out, "Brother and

sister, come share food with us." We wanted for very little as we worked toward

buying the old psychedelic school bus, a 1947 Dodge, that became our home. Not

that we lounged about in drugged out ecstasy (though there was some of that

involved too). I was working at a car wash from the first week there. Also beginning a

serious attempt at writing -- at first for the small alternative weeklies, dealing a little

dope now and then, but increasingly I got assignments from the larger slick

magazines as years went by.

 

------

 

 

By 1970, the great hippie wave had years before broken on the West Coast, and the

backwash had reached its high water mark, flooding the streets of Boulder and

surrounding mountain canyons. There, thousands of similar minded young people sat

up all night discussing metaphysics, the illusory nature of the "straight" world, and

the coming revolution in American consciousness and politics we all felt was coming.

Here in this self dubbed "Himalayas of the New World," midnight oil burned in

mountain cabins and attic apartments of the town below. From the ponderosa pine's

edge, mule deer pricked their ears and looked on at the noisy outdoor camps of

America's new culture gypsies -- restless strange young nomads with psychotropically

morphed street names and identities such as Cloud, Spaco Mike, Berkeley Betty, John

The Baptist, Deputy Dawg, Chrisie the Shrimp Girl, STP John, Wabbit, Goldfinger,

The Glass Man. They smoked homemades, screwed and read a lot, and

diced up reality beyond recognition under the influence of bootleg insight. A weird

electricity arched over everything, as blown away rap sessions drove into the starry

night while sanity cowered in the back seat. Yup, this was paradise all right.

 

------

It's a mortal sin for writers to paraphrase their betters in the craft, but I'd have to

echo the late Hunter S. Thompson in his sentiment that, I wouldn't recommend

drugs and mayhem to anyone, but it's always worked for me. For starters, LSD

resolved, dissolved might be a better word, my bleak black/white, right/wrong

judgmentalism forged in a fundamentalist childhood. But not the way one might

think. As anyone who has used much of the stuff knows, acid can melt away painful

lifelong imprints with a single blast of insight. But not usually. And it's potential is

never quite the same for any two people, and definitely different for a redneck kid

who'd been raised on Christian fundamentalism. You start discovering from the space

and life experience you already know. For me, LSD began to power deep meditations

upon the meaning of Christian symbols, especially of the holy cross. Not motionless

sitting meditations, but physically active ones, in this case

woodcarving. As the product of generations who worked with their hands, to this day

my hands must always be in motion, either playing guitar, tapping the keyboard --

"talking with my hands." So for hours, days and weeks I carved every sort of cross

imaginable -- plain ones, Coptic ones, Celtic ones, coarse ones and gold leafed ones,

just sitting in our school bus home by dim lantern light carving, sometimes on peyote

or acid.

 

And often the soft presence of a gentle and loving Christ would fill the air with a

sense of transcendent peace. Despite my many personal conflicts with the Police

Court Jehova of Christian fundamentalism, it was becoming clear that Christ was a

guy whose actions were worth deep consideration, even if you considered yourself an

atheist. Police Court Jehova be damned. Other times would come zappy symbolic

glimpses of quasi cosmic order: Aha! The upright bar of the cross represents the

onrushing spirit and mind of man through eternity, and the horizontal crossbar

stands for undifferentiated matter. And where they meet one another all we know is

made manifest -- all pain, all ecstasy and everything in between. Pure existence.

Years later I related this to one of the numerous Asian Buddhist masters who passed

through Boulder. He crinkled up his face and laughed in recognition. This mysticism,

if that's what it is, was clearly not new.

 

LSD, by way of a discussion with Tim Leary, also delivered the question within a

question: What is the question to which my life is the answer? Right away I knew I'd

rather peel that metaphysical onion the rest of my life than grovel before a hollow

religious institution which flails its cowering followers with the question WHY? Why

does the world exist? Why does god take little children, or allow natural disasters?

Why did god put so much fucking hair on my back?

 

So finally, I figured out that "Why?" was never the question. "Why?" was a bullshit

ontological query Christianity forced upon its followers, so its priests could pretend

they had the answer, and thus control the longing masses by withholding the

answer. It's sure as hell worked. People raised in Christian cultures are still asking it.

And still not getting an answer because there is no answer to a non question. I was

very lucky in that I never completely inherited the quest for that question, despite

coming from a fundamentalist family loaded with preachers. But be damned if I

wasn't forced to go out and find some other unanswerable question anyway, because

I did inherit their essential grim religiosity in approach to life -- the dirty

cultural/spiritual genetics of misery the loving Protestant European peasantry.

 

Of hundreds, I only had one bad LSD trip, one in which I felt I could not get my

breath and was being smothered to death. It turned out that I actually couldn't

breathe, I'd always had bad lungs and I was experiencing the onset of COPD lung

disease, which would later limit my life severely. If you've never experienced

suffocation under the influence of a powerful mind altering substance, I'm telling you

dear hearts, you can well grasp the horror of things like waterboarding and the kind

of people who'd sanction such a thing. But even that experience taught me

something, showed me once again the face of mortality. Eternity. Eternity without

Joe Bageant in it. We may dance, make love and argue passionately, eat, shit and

extrude children onto the floor of spinning speck of cosmic dust. But the universe

yawns at the whole affair.

 

Nevertheless, once you've seen the face of eternity, you are left with the question of

what to do about it. How to respond. "How will I live my life, in light of what I have

seen?" I'm still wrestling with that question -- but then that's what I had wanted,

wasn't it? That Great Question which would lead to the Great Answer? LSD doesn't

give answers, just questions. But used with directed and sincere effort -- to the

degree that is even possible -- it can make you ask the Great Questions, the only

important ones. Such as "What are you going to do to eliminate human suffering?

What are you going to do, Joe Bageant, now that you have seen the faces in the

Great Wheel that turns both ways simultaneously? What will be your direct action?" If

you really give a shit about the world, LSD will "serious your ass up real fast," as we

used to say.

 

Grave as such propositions appear, one must, to my mind at least, be both serious

AND silly about exploring consciousness to get results, do it in the spirit of

enlightened philosophical levity. Even after all these years, that spirit ­ when and if it

happens to be available at the moment --- still gets me through the day. It enables

me to face the increasing sorrows that come with age. One of the nasty little truths

about life is that it gets harder with age, not easier, and that there is no prize at the

bottom of the box of crackerjacks. But the good news, as I see it, is that we are

inherently capable of becoming stronger and more deeply resonant with the world in

a way that swamps personal misery into insignificance. Denial ceases to be the first

reaction to uncomfortable truths. There are billion dollar industries in this country

based upon denial and our refusal to acknowledge mortal entropy. Even death is

supposed to be more or less negotiable

through fitness, medical science -- and we are lied to that we are as young as well

feel and act. There is no inherent virtue in being either young or old. We are young

when we are young and old when we are old, and any attending virtue comes with

whether or not we actualize truth.

 

Enter Buddhism. It is damned near impossible for any literate person to launch off on

a teleological trajectory without being sucked into the gravitational force of

Buddhism. Especially if the launch is powered by LSD, which is the difference

between a journey on foot and a ride in a rocket sled. By the way, there is no

Buddhist commandment that says, "Do not take drugs," though most Buddhists do

not. Nor is there one that says, "Do not drink," though it's not the most

recommendable thing to do. Buddhist leader Trungpa Rinpoche, founder of Boulder's

Naropa Institute, got drunk often, got laid too, and was very controversial for it. Our

American Calvinism makes us equate morality and rightness with prohibition,

especially of pleasure. The Christian church has always been about controlling its

followers. Buddhism is not so much about prohibition, except for harming life. It's not

even about religion, but more about the ultimate order of the world and

liberation.

 

There are many, many forms of Buddhism, but they all fall roughly into two types. If

I may vastly over simplify -- Mahayana and Theravada, "big boat" and little boat"

Buddhism. Big boat aims at the enlightenment, over many incarnations, of all

sentient beings through, among other things, selfless love. Little boat holds that you

are alone responsible for your own enlightenment through your actions, and may

possibly achieve liberation in a single lifetime -- enlightenment being the liberation

from the desires that create unhappiness and pain in mankind. As I said, I am vastly

oversimplifying here, which is sure to put American trust fund babies in ashrams

around the country and elderly Theravadan gurus into a snit, generating an

onslaught of disputative email, but the essence is correct as far as I'm concerned.

 

There is a lineage of Buddhism which translates as "crazy wisdom." It is the antithesis

of what westerners usually think of in conjunction with religion, and it's purposefully

full of irreverence, goofiness, shifting perspectives and absurdity. Crazy Wisdom has

been described as the unifying metaphysical force field of "poets, philosophers,

artists and gurus and other crazy fools gushing with wisdom." In one variant, the

great Japanese poet monk Ikkyu found antidote to Zen formality in whorehouses and

bars, i.e., "Her mouth played with my cock the way a cloud plays with the sky." For

whatever reasons, the "People of the Book," Judaism, Christianity and Islam, opted

out of the wine and blowjobs, which may partly explain the general crabbiness and

vindictiveness that inspires them to enthusiastically kill other people who disagree

with them, not to mention each other during such things as The Crusades, or more

recently in Gaza.

 

By no means am I an adept at crazy wisdom, thus I am sure thousands of folks

sitting zazen in Boulder and San Francisco are livid at my sloppy explanation and less

than deeply dedicated application of its principles. "Using crazy wisdom as an excuse

to escape the discipline of Buddhism," is the usual charge. Which is much the same

discipline ridden thinking as that of my Baptist-Pentecostal boyhood. Lawdy Miss

Claudy, the American system instills a psycho-sexual love of discipline in all of us. No

sex in the park bushes, no marijuana for Americans, but rather debt slavery and

airport cavity searches by direct orders from the Christian police court Yaweh, whose

face is now the Department of Homeland Security. It all comes down to just how

much discipline is the right amount for an individual. A thirsty man needs but one

drink of water to continue his journey, not the whole tank. Drinking the tank not only

halts the journey, but in all likelihood kills the

traveler. At any rate, as the years go by, what I take or mistake to be crazy wisdom

continuously opens inner doors, even given my poor discipline (and small intermittent

doses of it at that).

 

Crazy Wisdom was brought to Boulder in early 1971 by Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche,

a remarkable Chinese/Tibetan guru whose confrontational, unpredictable teaching

style was smart, and controversial. Rinpoche ("The Rinp") put away quarts of Johnnie

Walker scotch, possessed an overwhelming charisma and humor, and turned your

mind inside out, emptying it of its conditioned defenses. Rinpoche was both an

enlightened teacher and an intentional charlatan, which if you think about it, is

exactly in the spirit of crazy wisdom. He never doubted for a moment that all who

came within his presence benefited from the experience. I remember an occasion

when he arrived in town dead broke, though already with a couple of followers. "The

Rinp" was invited to dinner at the Pygmy Farm, an early commune in Boulder. Upon

leaving, Rinpoche gave the commune members a bill for his attendance. Which

makes perfect sense when you consider that Crazy Wisdom forces change through

confronting convention at every turn and by any means available. Another one of

those things you either get or don't get. Although it's about the purest wordless kind

of awareness, being literate does help you start to get it, which is why it attracts so

many highly intelligent people.

 

------

By no means am I stretching things to say ours was a more literate generation. Most

of the hippies I hung with in Boulder followed the contemporary literary scene, had

read Hesse, Joyce and Mann, Hobbes, Faulkner, Freud, Jung, Huxley, and had a

passing knowledge of such things as Zen and Sufism. Not to mention an expanded

consciousness. So when Rinpoche explained how the "mind is emptiness, the true

world is empty" and that "the emptiness is permanent and all else is merely passing

mental display" they could get their heads around it. And have room to spare.

 

At the time however, I too often judged Rinpoche from my born-and-bred American

perspective and background, so I missed a great learning opportunity, many in fact,

regarding Rinpoche Trungpa. If nothing else, I owe Trungpa, for several things,

some of them minor, such as coming to understand that the Tibetan Book of the

Dead is a manual for living. And some of them major, such as that I'd lived most of

my life in my head in an effort to avoid suffering.

 

All these years later I am beginning to understand the effect living for a decade or so

in a genuinely free time and place had on my life. Thanks to an ongoing a ttempt to

understanding human consciousness, everything has changed over time. Yet nothing

has changed at all, except my attitude toward everything. And yes, LSD had

everything to do with it. When it comes to rewiring one's own neuro-circuitry toward

ecstatic understanding and perception and playful wisdom, and real compassion, LSD

and Buddhism can certainly jump start the awakening. Paradoxically, that awakening

is to a dream. You come to see very clearly that the "It is the dream that is dreaming

the dreamer." Such liberating insights are big as stars. And like Mad Dog says, "You

don't knock down stars with a bee bee gun."

 

------

"But if I never get another look at the face of God on acid or pick up another splinter

of insight for the rest of my life, it'll be too goddamned soon for me! Life may be a

shit sandwich all right, but brain damage ain't ketchup either!"

-- The Mad Dog in retrospection

 

Then that arc of electricity in the Himalayas of the New World snapped, and thus

began what I call Enlightenment Fire Sale. For almost a decade change had come

down like rain through the ozone (we still had some ozone left in those days) and

Boulder found itself morphing into a metaphysical beachhead, a seething

marketplace of salvation salesmen and exotic snake oil peddlers -- hawkers of truth

and burning skyfulls of revelation. The Ten Commandments played in the park,

consciousness tramps did Sufi slapstick in the alleys, while more introverted souls

curdled their brains as they saw fit, for about a buck a dose. In the throes of the new

consumerism Boulder consumed every cosmic thing imaginable, short of a giant

asteroid, even though it was surely contemplated during the comet Kahotek. But still

no avatars. No ship of deliverance. No change in the price of bananas or sidewinder

missiles.

 

Desire turned to demand, then exhaustion, disillusionment or plain boredom. Having

lifted veil upon veil, mortality still grinned across the void, offering no new deals. The

Cold War was thriving as much as ever. The murdering bastards in charge still had

the upper hand.

 

The hippie generation represented a massive threat to Cold War America, already hell

bent on Global Empire, but not acknowledging such. The harder you looked around

at America, the more terrible the shock. Slow leaks in the bucket of our national

destiny. Within that advanced core of the most optimistic, best educated and most

visionary generation America ever produced, belief seeped away. Yet it nevertheless

launched the ecological movement, the health food movement, and attempted to

open up the closed darkness of American power politics, which made it avant-garde.

 

Avant-gardes are, by definition, small. Despite the claims of graybeard stock brokers

and aging realtors at cocktail parties, the majority of the generation never took part

in the movement. They were the same as they are today, concerned more with

sports, pussy and bling. Oh, they smoked pot, talked the talk, but that's about all.

Thomas Frank documented this very well in The Marketing of Cool. Still, they were

more open than the previous generation, and certainly more open than they are

now.

 

Meanwhile, many, if not most, of those dedicated to the movement did not grow so

fat and well-heeled as they aged. I can name many dozens who've remained true to

their beliefs at great personal cost to their lives and families. A few still live on their

humble organic back-to-the-land plots, or spent their lives teaching in school systems

that keep on rotting despite their own best efforts, because the schools are

themselves part of a degraded Empire of the type against which they fought. Or

working in social services or the ecology and earth movement. (Speaking of which, I

still hold the Rainbow Family and its gatherers to be among the highest order of men

and women in America.) Many, if not most of the true blue hippies now suffer the

gloom and depression of any intelligent and soulful person in this age. But they

endure. Few of them as there are compared to the 300 million American other-

minded souls around them, they endure.

 

Often at my speaking engagements or readings, I see one or more of them in the

audience -- long gray hair, loose fitting sensible well worn clothing, soft eyes, and

perhaps an herbal amulet around the neck or in the hair. I look very directly at them

from the podium, until that old electric flash of mutual recognition pops. Immediately

after the reading or talk or whatever, I seek them out if at all possible (press agents

sometimes screw this up). Always there is the big smile and the hug.

 

And we are again brothers and sisters," as we used to sincerely address each other

on the street. And again I have been granted the gift, that brief spark of

unquestioned mutual love and goodwill in a darkening time.

 

 

Joe Bageant is author of the book, Deer Hunting With Jesus: Dispatches from

America's Class War. (Random House Crown), about working class America. A

complete archive of his on-line work, along with the thoughts of many working

Americans on the subject of class may be found on his website.

 

© 2009 JoeBageant.com Drug Abuse & Addiction, Detoxification, Treatment, Opiate Withdrawal. Substance Abuse: Heroin, Cocaine, Marijuana, Crystal meth, Vicodin, OxyContin, Amphetamines, Percocet and others.
All Rights Reserved.

View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/133256/

 

 

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