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  New York, Farrar, Straus, 1963.

  Huxley’s explorations with psychedelic drugs are an example of his engagement. His willingness to get involved. Remember, every person who can read without moving his lips has heard about what the Saturday Evening Post4 calls “the dangerous magic of LSD.” And despite the controversy, almost everyone knows what is involved—the mind loss and the vision. Everyone has had to come to terms with the new development in his own fashion.

  November 2, 1963.

  There are as many rational reasons for not taking LSD as there are facets to the human mind—moral, practical, medical, psychiatric, mental. The real reason—however it is expressed—is fear. Fear of losing what we have. Fear of going beyond where we are.

  Aldous Huxley had spent years preparing himself for the fearful psychedelic voyage, and he made it without question when it presented itself. Why? Duty? Curiosity? Conviction? Courage? Faith in the process? Trust in his companions—divine or human?

  He did it, and the world will never forget it.

  But the gamble of the mind was not the last act of faith and courage. Aldous Huxley went on to face death as he had faced the whirling enigma of the life process. He tells us about it with poetic sensitivity and concrete specificity in the fourteenth chapter of Island,* his book of the living and the dying.

  Harper & Row, New York, 1962.

  Rounding a screen, he [Dr. Robert] caught a glimpse . . . of a high bed, of a dark emaciated face on the pillow, of arms that were no more than parchment-covered bones, of claw-like hands. . . . He looked at the face on the pillow . . . still, still with a serenity that might almost have been the frozen calm of death. . . .

  “Lakshmi.” Susila laid a hand on the old woman’s wasted arm. “Lakshmi,” she said again more loudly. The death-calm face remained impassive. “You mustn’t go to sleep.”

  . . . “Lakshmi!”

  The face came to life.

  “I wasn’t really asleep,” the old woman whispered. “It’s just my being so weak. I seem to float away.”

  “But you’ve got to be here,” said Susila. “You’ve got to know you’re here. All the time.” She slipped an additional pillow under the sick woman’s shoulders and reached for a bottle of smelling salts that stood on the bed table. . . . Then after another pause, “Oh, how wonderful,” she whispered at last, “how wonderful!” Suddenly she winced and bit her lip.

  Susila took the old woman’s hand in both of hers. “Is the pain bad?” she asked.

  “It would be bad,” Lakshmi explained, “if it were really my pain. But somehow it isn’t. The pain’s here; but I’m somewhere else. It’s like what you discover with the moksha-medicine. Nothing really belongs to you. Not even your pain.”

  . . . “And now,” Susila was saying, “think of that view from the Shiva temple. Think of those lights and shadows on the sea, those blue spaces between the clouds. Think of them, and then let go of your thinking. Let go of it, so that the not-Thought can come through. Things into Emptiness, Emptiness into Suchness. Suchness into things again, into your own mind. Remember what it says in the Sutra. ‘Your own consciousness shining, void, inseparable from the great Body of Radiance, is subject neither to birth or death, but is the same as the immutable Light, Buddha Amitabha.’ ”

  “The same as the light,” Lakshmi repeated. “And yet it’s all dark again.”

  “It’s dark because you’re trying too hard,” said Susila. “Dark because you want it to be light. Remember what you used to tell me when I was a little girl. ‘Lightly, child, lightly. You’ve got to learn to do everything lightly. Think lightly, act lightly, feel lightly. Yes, feel lightly, even though you’re feeling deeply.’ . . . Lightly, lightly—it was the best advice ever given me. Well, now I’m going to say the same thing to you, Lakshmi . . . Lightly, my darling, lightly. Even when it comes to dying. Nothing ponderous, or portentous, or emphatic. No rhetoric, no tremolos, no self-conscious persona putting on its celebrated imitation of Christ or Goethe or Little Nell. And, of course, no theology, no metaphysics. Just the fact of dying and the fact of the Clear Light. So throw away all your baggage and go forward. There are quicksands all about you, sucking at your feet, trying to suck you down into fear and self-pity and despair. That’s why you must walk so lightly. Lightly, my darling . . . Completely unencumbered.”

  . . . He looked again at the fleshless face on the pillow and saw that it was smiling.

  “The Light,” came the hoarse whisper, “the Clear Light. It’s here—along with the pain, in spite of the pain.”

  “And where are you?” Susila asked.

  “Over there, in the corner.” Lakshmi tried to point, but the raised hand faltered and fell back, inert, on the coverlet. “I can see myself there. And she can see my body on the bed.”

  “Can she see the Light?”

  “No. The Light’s here, where my body is. . . .”

  “She’s drifted away again,” said Susila. “Try to bring her back.”

  Dr. Robert slipped an arm under the emaciated body and lifted it into a sitting posture. The head drooped sideways onto his shoulder.

  “My little love,” he kept whispering. “My little love . . .”

  Her eyelids fluttered open for a moment. “Brighter,” came the barely audible whisper, “brighter.” And a smile of happiness intense almost to the point of elation transfigured her face.

  Through his tears Dr. Robert smiled back at her. “So now you can let go, my darling.” He stroked her gray hair. “Now you can let go. Let go,” he insisted. “Let go of this poor old body. You don’t need it any more. Let it fall away from you. Leave it lying here like a pile of worn-out clothes.”

  In the fleshless face the mouth had fallen cavernously open, and suddenly the breathing became stertorous.

  “My love, my little love . . .” Dr. Robert held her more closely. “Let go now, let go. Leave it here, your old worn-out body, and go on. Go on, my darling, go on into the Light, into the peace, into the living peace of the Clear Light . . .”

  Susila picked up one of the limp hands and kissed it, then turned. . . .

  “Time to go,” she whispered. . . .

  SEAL OF THE LEAGUE

  8

  The Mad Virgin of Psychedelia

  The psychedelic revolution has (with miraculous swiftness) won the hearts and copped the minds of the American people because (like any religious up-heave-all) it uses the ultimate weep-on, humor.

  Psychedelic guerrillas, disorganized bands of wise goof-offs, creative fuck-ups, and comedian chaplains have in 6 quip years effortlessly taken over the most powerful empire in world history.

  With music, clowning, laughter, the psychedelic revolution has passed through the classic sociopolitical stages of every great human renaissance:

  1. The philosophic preparation (Alan Watts writes the Zen introduction)

  2. The underground swell of the masses hungry for freedom (Allen Ginsberg howls)

  3. Accidental flareups of trigger incidents (Laredo, Texas: by this rude bridge that arched the flood, their flag to custom’s seize unfurled, here the embattled . . .)

  4. Widespread guerrilla tactics (Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters)

  5. The turning-point victory (the publishers of Time-Life get turned on)

  6. The mopping-up operations (in charge of Sergeant Pepper)

  7. The writing of war memoirs, prayer books, manuals, catechisms, new testaments, grandiose biblical versions in which the accidental-inevitable is made to seem planned blueprint

  The evangelists and social historians of the psychedelic revolution have a delightful roster of hero-comedian-clowns available for legendary canonization.

  Alan Watts is the smiling scholar of the acid age. For 30 years he has been converting the most complex theories of oriental philosophies into jewellike up-levels, wry epigrams. Cool, gracious, never ruffled, chuckling to share with us his amused wonder at God’s plans for the planet and, with quizzical eye, glancing to see if we will catc
h on.

  Allen Ginsberg. The celestial clown. Giggling, posturing with complete insight, histrionic, shamelessly direct. No one, not even J. Edgar Hoover, can be with this nearsighted, rumpled, worried, hysterical, lyrical, furry bear for 10 minutes and not giggle back because he tickles and hugs you when no one else dares.

  The Leary-Alpert-Metzner-Harvard-Hitchcock-Mellon-Mexico-Millbrook Circus backed and lurched into history, continuously making every mistake except taking itself too seriously for very long. (Someone was always high enough to laugh.) The name of our prisoner-rehabilitation project was “Break-Out.” The Good Friday religious experiment became the Miracle of March Chapel—to the dismay of Boston University. And it worked. The initials of our research organization, the International Federation for Internal Freedom, spelled out the conditional paradox of the atomic age. Institutional titles, creeds, were invented and outgrown monthly. Conversion, excommunications, schisms, could never keep up with the changes at Millbrook. You couldn’t resign from the Castalia Foundation and denounce its methods because it had already evolved into the League for Social Disorder, which in turn couldn’t be sued for its theatrical proceeds because the money and the slide projectors had been given away and everyone was dropped out, camping in the woods, and how could the police get a search warrant to raid a sacred pine grove or a promontory known as Lunacy Hill?

  The psychedelic yoga is the longest and toughest yoga of all, and the only way to keep it going is with a sense of humor. This has been known to seers and visionaries for thousands of years.

  For me, the model of the turned-on, tuned-in, dropped-out man is James Joyce, the great psychedelic writer of this century. Pouring out a river-run of pun, jest, put-on, up-level, comic word acrobatics. The impact of Joyce via McLuhan on the psychedelic age cannot be overestimated.

  Bill Burroughs is the Buster Keaton of the movement. He was Mr. Acid before LSD was invented. The soft-bodied answer to IBM. Unsmiling comedian genius.

  Twenty years ago today Sergeant Pepper taught the band to play. The classic ontological vaudeville routine.

  The Buddha smile.

  The laughing fat Chinese sage.

  The flute of Krishna tickling the cowgirls.

  The dance of Shiva.

  Om, the cosmic chuckle.

  The sweaty belly guffaw of a Hasidic Jew.

  Where are the laughing Christians? Something twisted grabbed the Christian mind around the third century. Is there any tender mirth left in the cult of the cross?

  Mystics, prophets, holy men, are all laughers because the religious revelation is a rib-tickling amazement-insight that all human purposes, including your own, are solemn self-deceptions. You see through the game and laugh with God at the cosmic joke.

  The holy man is the one who can pass on a part of the secret, express the joke, act out a fragment of the riddle.

  To be a holy man, you have to be a funny man.

  Take for example Lisa Lieberman, founder and chief boo-hoo of the Neo-Marxian Church. Authentic American anarchist, nonconformist, itinerant preacher. A pure-essence eccentric paranoid in the grand tradition of bullheaded, nutty women who stubbornly insist on being themselves and who are ready to fight at the drop of a cliché for the right of others to be themselves.

  For five years this Lisa Lieberman has been a wandering guerrilla nun in the psychedelic underground.

  When she first showed up at Millbrook in 1963, Lisa was a school psychologist, a big, blond, loud-voiced barroom intellectual. She roved around Castalia one weekend, grandiose, blustering, reverent, intelligent and too drunk to take LSD.

  Then this oldest daughter of a Lutheran minister wrote a 1,000-page pilgrim’s progress epic about her 3-day nontrip to Millbrook, running off 15 typed pages a day and coming back to Castalia weekends as Christian H. Christian, crawling painfully up the kitchen floor, splashing in the toilet bowls filled with whiskey, throwing out an endless monologue of corny psychological-psychedelic paranoia, and making feeble but mesmeric passes at Castalia’s soft-eyed marijuana goddesses whom she hallucinated to be thirteen-year-old virgins. Like Dylan Thomas, so high, so juiced on her own cerebrospinal fluid, she accused us of slipping LSD into her food.

  Then she got fired by her school board for some series of honest, rebellious, adolescent antics and, naturally, started her own religion.

  WE MAINTAIN THE PSYCHEDELIC SUBSTANCES ARE COMMUNIST, THAT IS, DIVINE SUBSTANCES, NO MATTER WHO USES THEM, IN WHATEVER SPIRIT, WITH WHATEVER INTENTIONS. . . . WE DO NOT EMPLOY SET RITUALS, MAKE CONDITIONS FOR MEMBERSHIP OTHER THAN AGREEMENT WITH OUR PRINCIPLES, OR REGULATE THE FREQUENCY OR INTENSITY OF THE SACRAMENTAL EXPERIENCE. MANY OF OUR MEMBERS ARE DAMNED FOOLS AND MISERABLE SINNERS. MEMBERSHIP IN THE CHURCH IS NO GUARANTEE OF INTELLECTUALITY OR OF SPIRITUAL WISDOM; IT MAY EVEN BE POSSIBLE THAT ONE OR TWO OF OUR BOO-HOOS ARE OPPORTUNISTIC CHARLATANS, BUT WE ARE NOT DISMAYED BY THESE CONDITIONS; IT HAS NEVER BEEN OUR OBJECTIVE TO ADD ONE MORE SWOLLEN INSTITUTIONAL SUBSTITUTE FOR INDIVIDUAL VIRTUE TO THE ALREADY CROWDED LISTS.

  Lisa Lieberman, the Martin Luther of the psychedelic movement, even when drunk, spraying blindly from her inkpot, the most courageous theologian of our time.

  While the academics play word games about God’s medical condition, Lisa, staggering insane in her study at three in the morning, tackles the real gut issues like: are marijuana and LSD really God’s sacraments? Then, if yes they are, and Lisa says they are, then anyone who uses them, gives them, is involved in a divine transaction no matter how gamey, how nutty, how sordid his motives, so it doesn’t matter who or when or how or why you turn on, it’s still a holy cosmic process whether you are a silly thirteen-year-old popping a sugar cube on your boyfriend’s motorcycle, or a theatrical agent giving pot to a girl to get her horny, or an alcoholic Catholic priest carrying the viaticum to a hypocritical sinner or even a psychiatrist giving LSD to an unsuspecting patient to do a scientific study. “It’s all God’s flesh,” shouted Lisa, “no matter what your motives may be.”

  Oh, yes, let Lisa be given the credit. While the rest of us were still involved in research foundations and poetry conferences and trying to demonstrate that LSD was a nice, healthy, productive medicine for virtuous, docile Americans, Lisa was roaring around in a turquoise convertible with a suspended driver’s license, drinking bad wine from a bottle and shouting DON’T BOTHER TRYING TO CURRY FAVOR WITH THE ESTABLISHMENT—IT’S A LOSING GAME. WE AREN’T AMERICAN INDIANS WHO CAN BE PATRONIZED AND ISOLATED. CONGRATULATED ON OUR SOBRIETY, AND ALL THAT. WE HAVE THE RIGHT TO PRACTICE OUR RELIGION, EVEN IF WE ARE A BUNCH OF FILTHY, DRUNKEN BUMS. TRY NOT TO DEGRADE RIGHTS INTO MERE CLAIMS BASED ON EVIDENCE OF VIRTUE AND LACK OF VICE. WE DO NOT STAND BEFORE THE GOVERNMENT AS CHILDREN BEFORE A PARENT. THE GOVERNMENT STANDS BEFORE US AS THE CORRUPTOR OF OUR GOD-GIVEN HUMAN RIGHTS, AND UNTIL THE GOVERNMENT GETS ITS BLOODY, REEKING PAWS OFF OUR SACRED PSYCHEDELICS AND CEASES TO HARASS AND PERSECUTE OUR MEMBERS, UNTIL, INDEED, EVERY POOR WRETCH NOW SUFFERING IN PRISON BECAUSE HE PREFERRED THE MYSTICAL UPLIFT OF POT TO THE SLOBBERING ALCOHOLISM OF THE POLITICIANS IS SET FREE, OUR ATTITUDE MUST BE ONE OF UNCOMPROMISING HOSTILITY.

  Pageant magazine reporter: You call your local ministers boo-hoos. Why do you use such a ridiculous title?

  Mona Lisa: We realize this title does have its absurd connotations, but we have intentionally chosen something with absurd qualities to remind ourselves not to take ourselves too seriously.

  Pageant: You claim to be a church, but you don’t take your own religion seriously. What do you take seriously?

  Lisa: A lot of things. But one of the things we take least seriously is institutional life, the thing most people take more seriously than anything else. We think this is one of the faults of modern man: elevating institutional forms and structures to the level of eternal verities.

  The wit and wisdom of this great psychedelic bovine is collected in a softcover book, The Neo-Marxian Church Catechism and Handbook. The Table of Contents reflects the flavor of this mad, disorganized masterpiece:
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  Pronouncements of the chief boo-hoo on:

  LSD

  MARIJUANA

  SEX

  REVOLUTIONARY POLITICS

  Articles:

  SYNCHRONICITY AND THE PLOT/PLOT

  WITH LSD I SAW GOD

  THE BOMBARDMENT AND ANNIHILATION OF THE PLANET

  SATURN

  DIVINE TOAD SWEAT

  THE REFORMATION OF THE NEW JERUSALEM

  MORNING GLORY LODGE AND MILLBROOK

  NEO-AMERICAN CHURCH GIVES ‘EM HELL

  THE 95 ITEM TEST OF NEO-PSYCHOPATHIC CHARACTER

  FREE ADVERTISING AT GOVERNMENT EXPENSE

  UP-TO-DATE LIST OF BOO-HOOS

  CATALOGCARTOONS

  Readers of The Neo-Marxian Church Catechism and Handbook will learn that the seal of the church portrays a three-eyed, turned-on toad rampant over the motto “Victory Over Sexuality.”

  Tim Leary: “Lisa, I don’t like your motto. It’s a whiskey trip. It’s not a psychedelic love message. Victory? Over? Sexuality?”

  Lisa: “It’s my trip. Take it or leave it.”

  You ask Lisa Lieberman what her goals are, and she tells you, “Money and power.” To that silly end the last 20 pages of the catechism are designed as a Monkey Ward catalogue of items available from the Neo-Marxian Church, cash in advance, including for $30, a destruct box (“if opened improperly, contents go up in flames”) and, for $100, a certificate stating that “the Chief Boo-Hoo never even heard of you and regards you with indifference.”

  Lisa’s Catechism and Handbook is that rare commodity, an original, personal, unashamed, naked unveiling of a woman’s mind, the Lisa Lieberman head trip. At times padded, at times so involutedly paranoid that you lose the thread, at times sloppily falling down, but always feminine, coarse, shouting, praying, and in touch with Central Broadcasting, the original, 2-billion-year-old Sunday night comedy show.