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  Lisa Lieberman came on the scene before the cool, gentle loveheads. She can’t stand flowers. She hates rock ‘n’ roll. She has absolutely no sense of beauty. She is a clumsy manipulator, a blatant flatterer, a bully to the willingly weak, the world’s most incompetent conman. She is, in short, a sodden disgrace to the movement.

  Oh, pilgrim, if you come to visit the chief boo-hoo, you will see a sign on her door, “Parsonage, Neo-Marxian Church, Lisa Lieberman, Chief Boo-Hoo. Art for Art’s Sake.”

  You ring the bell and await your spiritual teacher. The cover of the book flies open and there, reeking the fumes of a smoky, sweaty twenty-first-century Martian waterfront saloon, is the chief boo-hoo herself: glaring, wrinkled shirt, sloppy pants. Reading this book is a revelatory laugh-cry trip for those who are ready for it.

  Last night Rosemary was lying by the campfire on a bed of pine needles, reading the Catechism. When she finished she looked up, her face beautiful in the red shadows, and said, “Lisa Lieberman is a funny woman.” Rosemary is right. Lisa is a not-wholly holy, funny man.

  SEAL OF THE LEAGUE

  9

  Homage to the Awe-full See-er*

  Reprinted from Psychedelic Review, No. 9, 1966.

  At each beat

  in the earth’s rotating dance

  there is born …“”

  a momentary cluster of molecules

  possessing the transient ability to know-see-experience its own place in the evolutionary spiral.

  Such an organism, such an event,

  senses exactly where he is

  in the billion-year-old ballet.

  He is able to trace back

  the history of the deoxyribonucleic wire

  (of which he is both conductive element and current).

  He can experience the next moment in all its meaning.

  Million to the millionth meaning.

  Exactly that.

  Some divine see-ers are recognized for this unique capacity.

  Those that are recognized

  are called and killed by various names.

  Most of them are not recognized;

  they float through life

  like a snowflake retina

  kissing the earth

  where they land in soft explosion.

  No one ever hears them murmur

  “Ah, there,”

  at the moment of impact.

  These men,

  these “‘s”

  are aware of each other’s existence

  the way each particle in the hurtling nuclear trapeze

  is aware of other particles.

  They move too fast to give names to themselves or each other.

  Such men can be described in no more precise and less foolish terms than the descriptive equations of nuclear physics.

  They have no more or less meaning in the cultural games of life than electrons have in the game of chess.

  They are present but cannot be perceived nor categorized.

  They exist at a level

  beyond that of the black and white squares

  of the game board.

  The “”

  process has no function, but can serve a function in our learning games.

  It can be used to teach.

  Like this.

  Take an apple and slice it down the middle.

  A thin red circle surrounds gleaming white meat

  and there, toward the center, is a dark seed.

  Look at the seed.

  Its function is beyond any of your games, but you can use its properties.

  You can use the seed.

  The seed can teach you.

  If you knew how to listen

  the seed would hum you a seed song.

  The divine incarnates, “,” teach this way.

  They teach like a snowflake caught in the hand teaches.

  Once you speak the message, you have lost it.

  Once you know the message, you no longer know it.

  The seed becomes a dried pit.

  The snowflake a film of water on your hand.

  Wise incarnates are continually exploding in beautiful dance form.

  Like the eye of a speckle fish looks at you unblinking,

  dying in your hand.

  Like cancer virus softly fragmenting

  divine beauty in the grasp of your tissue.

  Now and then “” flower bursts in song,

  in words,

  “xywprhd,”

  “P-8g @ cap,”

  “evol.”

  The message is always the same

  though the noise,

  the scratched rhumba of inkmarks is always different.

  The message is like Einstein’s equation felt as orgasm.

  The serpent unwinds up the spine and mushrooms

  lotus sunflare in the skull.

  If I tell you that the apple seed message hums the drone of a Hindu flute, will I stop the drone?

  The secret of “” is that it must always be secret.

  Divine sage recognize,

  message is lost.

  Snowflake caught, pattern changed.

  The trick of the divine incarnate can now be dimly understood.

  He dances out the pattern without ever being recognized.

  As soon as he is caught in the act, he melts in your hand.

  (The message is then contained in the drop of water,

  but this involves another chase for the infinite.)

  The sign of “” is change and anonymity.

  As soon as you try to glorify,

  sanctify,

  worship,

  admire,

  deify,

  an incarnate,

  you have killed him.

  Thus the Pharisees

  were performing a merry-holy ballet.

  All praise to them!

  It is the Christians who kill Christ.

  As soon as you invent a symbol,

  give “” a name,

  you assassinate the process

  to serve your own ends.

  To speak the name of Buddha,

  Christ,

  Lao-tse,

  (except, maybe as an ejaculation,

  a sudden ecstatic breath like,

  “Ooh!”

  “Wow!”

  “Whew!”

  “Ha, ha, ha”)

  is to speak a dirty word,

  to murder the living God,

  fix him with your preservative,

  razor him into microscope slides,

  Sell him for profit in your biological supply house.

  The incarnate has no function.

  But his effect is to produce the ecstatic gasp.

  Wow!

  Whew!

  God!

  Jesus!

  The uncontrollable visionary laugh.

  Too much!

  So what!

  The stark stare of wonder.

  Awful!

  Awe-full!

  SEAL OF THE LEAGUE

  10

  The Molecular Revolution*

  Transcript of a lecture delivered at an LSD conference sponsored by the University of California, June 1966. Because of hand-wringing on the part of university officials, the conference was moved from the Berkeley campus to an uncomfortable building in San Francisco operated by the University Extension. The small size of the hall limited attendance to 500 persons, about a third of whom were scholars, a third psychedelicists and a third police officers. Allen Ginsberg, who had accepted an invitation to the conference, was unceremoniously disinvited about a week before the opening on the grounds that “poets” have nothing to say about psychedelic drugs! Allen attended the conference, and almost every speaker opened his remarks with a tribute to the disinvited guest.

  Happy Thoughts

  I am happy to be here tonight in what I feel to be a historic meeting of thoughtful and visionary people.

  I am happy tonight because I just got word that my eighteen-year-old daug
hter Susan, who is in Laredo, Texas, today to be sentenced on a marijuana charge, received a suspended sentence and will not have to go to jail for 15 years. [Applause]

  Salute to Allen Ginsberg

  I have more reasons to be a happy man. It is good that Allen Ginsberg is here. Allen Ginsberg joined us at Harvard during the first two or three months of our research back in 1960 and along with Aldous Huxley can be considered as an early guru and architect of our work. He spent many hours sitting with us, telling us about what he had learned in Peru about how Curanderos ran yajé sessions. He told us about the drug scene in New York and in Berkeley and in Morocco. Allen is a walking encyclopedia of psychedelic lore. Above all, Allen taught us courage—taught us not to be afraid in facing those unknown realms of consciousness which are opened up by psychedelic drugs.

  Beloved guru, I salute you. [Applause]

  I am also happy that this conference was moved from the Berkeley campus to University Extension here in San Francisco. This is where it is, and this seems to be where it belongs.

  University Extension and University Contraction

  I would like to make a comment on the move, a piece of wisdom which comes from my cells. My cells tell me that at every level of energy there is a dialogue between structure and process, between free energy and the organization that contracts or controls the free flow of energy. It is necessary with every form of life and every level of energy to have to have this incessant dialogue of the surging outward, the extension, if you will, and the contraction, the control. Apparently this dialogue even exists at the level of the University of California, where we are led to believe that the opposite of University Extension is University Contraction.

  The Department of Internal Chemistry

  However, I respect both sides of this dialogue. Both contraction and expansion, both control and freedom are necessary. Without control we have chaos, void. Without expansion we have robot structure and death. If history teaches us anything, it teaches us that in every generation the surging energy of the new development, the thrust of the young idea, batters against the aging structure and then inevitably, within one or two generations, becomes part of the old static structure. Therefore, I predict that within one generation we will have across the bay in Berkeley a department of psychedelic studies. There will probably be a dean of LSD. When students come home for their vacation, Mother and Father will ask not, “What book are you reading?” but “Which molecules are you using to open up which Library of Congress inside your nervous system?” And the bureaucratic requirements will still be with us. You will have to pass Marijuana IA and IB to qualify for an introduction to LSD 101. Meanwhile, down on Telegraph Avenue, or over on North Beach, there will be the growing black market in RNA, and voices of alarm will be raised at the new chemical instruments for accelerating consciousness, enhancing memory, speeding up learning.

  The same cycles repeat. Structure versus process. Young versus old. We are participating this week in a very ancient ritual.

  The Old Movie—the Same Old Hopes, the Same Old Fears

  For thousands of years, men and women have been meeting to do exactly what we are doing here in this room—to study consciousness. It’s the oldest subject matter of all. How many levels of reality are there? How can we reach them? How can we go beyond symbols? In every tribe in human history there have been men who have specialized in these questions, and the entire tribe awaits their answers. There has always been this tension between the shaman and the war chief. I am sure that secret service agents of the Roman legions sneaked into the catacombs, waiting for the psychedelic services to start. The turn-on instruments, the cross and the chalice, were quite illegal in those days, you know. And later, Turkish Janissaries nervously watched the Sufi dervish dancers working out their elaborate and precise methods for getting high, for whirling beyond the mind through music and dance. And papal commissioners squirmed in Rome while Galileo turned them on in Florence with his telescope. It’s one of the oldest games in history and sometimes I feel as though I am taking part in one of those old, old, late-night rerun movies. The same cast of characters, the same debate, the same fears, the same hopes.

  But here we play out the drama in an awkward stage setting—large hall made of metal. Spotlights and microphones. It would be easier and more orthodox if we were meeting in small groups on a hillside, or in a sacred grove someplace, because of the subject matter. It’s a complicated procedure, this talking about the psychedelic experience to a psychedelic audience. There are many levels of consciousness, and actually, right at this moment, different members of this audience are vibrating at several of these levels.

  Lecturing to a Straight Audience Is Simple

  Now the typical, nonpsychedelic lecturer has to worry about only two levels of consciousness. His job is to hold the attention of the audience to the level of symbolic logic. He spins out one symbol after another. His main task is to stimulate. To keep the audience from falling into the two lowest levels of consciousness—stupor or sleep. The psychedelic lecturer faces a more awesome task. As I look around this lecture hall, I suspect that some of you are mildly stupefied by alcohol. If you have had two or three drinks before dinner, at some moment during my lecture, as I push symbols at you, one after another, your attention may start to waver and your eyelids flicker a little.

  Many of you are stimulated by caffeine and ready to follow the sequence of symbols.

  But I suspect that some of you here tonight are at a more expanded level of consciousness.

  Compared to Lecturing to a Turned-on Audience

  If any of you have smoked marijuana in the last 2 hours, you are listening not just to my symbols. Your sense organs have been intensified and enhanced, and you are also aware of the play of light, the tone of voice. You are aware of many sensory cues beyond the tidy sequence of subjects and predicates which I am laying out in the air. And there may even be some of you in the audience who decided that you’d put over your eyes that more powerful microscope and find out, “Well, where is this fellow at, anyway?” Perhaps you have taken LSD tonight, in which case my task is not to wake you up but rather not to pull you down. I have often had the experience in lecturing to psychedelic audiences of having my eyes wander around the room and suddenly be fixed by two orbs, two deep, dark pools, and realize that I am looking into someone’s genetic code, that I have to make sense not to a symbolic human mind, nor to a complicated series of sense organs, but I have to make sense to many evolutionary forms of life—an amoeba, a madman, a medieval saint.

  Now another problem of communication tonight is that there are many professional and age groups present. We have just had a list of the many disciplines attending this conference, including the young and the nonprofessional. I would like to be able to speak directly and to make contact with every person representing every social and professional group that is here tonight. That is my goal. But the problem is that you speak so many dialects.

  I often feel in this situation like a United Nations interpreter trying to translate at many different levels the message I am trying to get across. You see, if I were to talk just to the young LSD users in the room, almost anything I chanted would probably get the message across. I could read the San Francisco telephone book and be greeted with enthusiastic applause.

  Now, that’s really not such a far-out idea. You see, the white section of the telephone book has a labeling and a space-time location of every ego game in San Francisco, and the yellow section has a listing, from Abbey Rents to Xerox, of every social game in San Francisco, and the turned-on person who listens to a simple recital of that gamut of game labels would get the entire evolutionary message.

  So I’m not worried about the young and the turned-on. I am more concerned about the law-enforcement agents in this room, those whose job it is to turn us off. It is probable that there has never been a scientific, scholarly meeting in the history of our country which has had the benefit of so many law-enforcement officers present. Why are the
re so many secret police agents at these meetings? There is certainly no threat posed to property or person by the gentle people who comprise this audience. What is the threat that attracts the police? Perhaps it is the danger of new ideas. History teaches us that at other times and in other countries, police agents swarmed to meetings where ideas were discussed which challenged the power of the rulers. How does a discussion about the psychedelic experience threaten the power holders of this country? Is it because LSD and marijuana and the other psychedelic drugs may enhance individual freedom? Is our government afraid of internal freedom? I ask the police agents in this hall to listen to these lectures with an open mind. You may be learning about the future. You may even decide to join us.*

  At this point the lecturer waved merrily to two federal agents sitting in the third row, who smiled and waved back. Thus was affectionately celebrated the reunion with the two cops who busted the lecturer, his wife and his two children at Laredo, Texas, less than 30 months before.

  I Want to Talk About Two Things

  First of all, I want to talk about the anatomy and pharmacology of consciousness. There are many levels of consciousness, and if we are going to make any sense of the LSD crisis or the drug controversy which is sweeping America today, we have to understand there are many levels of consciousness, many drugs which trigger off these levels and different social solutions for legalizing and controlling each of these chemicals. Second, I want to talk about the politics of ecstasy and to suggest a course of social action for these controversial times.

  The Eerie Power of the Word “Drug”

  We live, of course, in a drug-happy culture. There are very few Americans over the age of sixteen who don’t use some dope to alter consciousness. Apparently we all agree that chemicals can change consciousness, but each of us tends to have his drug of choice to move to his favorite levels of consciousness. A tremendous breakdown in communication exists as soon as we use this word “drug.” Drug! Drug! Now what is drug? It is a little four-letter phonetic burst—DRUG! Spelled backward, it is “gurd.” It is one of the most powerful syllables in America today. For many people, for most people over the age of forty, the word “drug” means one of two things: doctor-disease. Drug-prescription-doctor-disease-medical control-doctor-disease. Or drug means dope-crime-dope fiend-drug-orgy-drug-crime. These are symbols, but they are powerful symbols, and I don’t know how to change them.