The Age of Atheists: How We Have Sought to Live Since the Death of God (54 page)

Encounter groups and “T-groups” were part of life at Esalen, drawing on the work of Carl Rogers (discussed in chapter 19). The aim was ultimate honesty: “Under the Encounter Contract I say how I feel about you. My obligation to be polite, kind or considerate is, for the time being, set aside.” And in another, more startling, innovation people were invited to expose their genitals and discuss the fears and desires aroused by such exposure in a world where those organs were so central. These encounters, obviously enough, could be very intense, creating “transcendent spaces,” new experiences in which people forgot who and where they were, and all feelings of time.
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Arica Awareness Training, Rolfing, Orgone Therapy, full-body contemplative massage, biofeedback, hypnosis, the Spiritual Emergency Network, the Spiritual Tyranny Conference, the Tao of Physics, Sufism, the Spiritual Art and Intuitive Business of Managing Emptiness—all these therapies, experiences and events, and more, have characterized Esalen from the start. Some observers have dismissed it as a “spiritual supermarket.” It still exists, as a non-profit organization providing a “decent but quite humble” livelihood for 150 individuals who between them manage four hundred seminars a year. Their aim is to continue to imagine a new “spiritual”
America, to embrace a “democratic mysticism, a religion of no religion,” a spiritual utopia that still embodies the values and aspirations of the counterculture.

BETTER LIVING THROUGH CHEMISTRY

The second core element of the counterculture was drugs. The fascination with hallucinogenics underlies much of post–Second World War counterculture. For many people through the ages, plants known as “entheogens” (generators of the divine or spirit within) have offered an “alternative spirituality.”
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This aspect of the counterculture has been examined by Martin Torgoff in
Can’t Find My Way Home: America in the Great Stoned Age, 1945–2000
. Stating that roughly one in four Americans has used illegal drugs—so it is hardly a fringe activity—Torgoff made the point that getting high wasn’t just about fun—“it was about rebellion and bohemia and utopia and mysticism . . . [about] refusing to accept or even acknowledge limits of any kind.”
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Dope was a whole way of life: “It was like living in a walled city with your own kind, where you could make up your own language and create your own set of rules, it was a badge which made people different from the rest of the world.” In one sense, jazz was about the profound isolation and pathos of the life around heroin—the cravings, the desolate loneliness of the search, the blissful relief of the shot. In theory, at least, a new kind of existence was available, an un-self-conscious “radiant burning,” living for kicks, tasting the pure ecstasy of life. The fact that it didn’t last didn’t matter: “All the philosophies tell us that nothing does, but while it did last everything was experienced as holy.” It was “the sacralization of the mundane.”
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Many at the time saw parallels in what they were doing and in the ancient Indian shamans’ experience of “peyote vision.” Here, too, drugs brought salvation. In the Native American tradition known as the “vision quest,” people would be required to survive in the wilderness, procuring a guardian spirit, often by means of the New World “narcotic complex” comprising the Americas’ eighty to a hundred mind-altering plants (about
which there is copious documentation), compared with the Old World’s half-dozen. These and other Native American traditions were introduced to mainstream America by Carlos Castaneda, who in 1968 published
The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge
. Originally a university-press book, this purported to be based on Castaneda’s field notes taken during his four years as a participant-observer researching Yaqui beliefs and practices. But his book became a phenomenal best seller and led to six titles in total, with
A Separate Reality
(1971) becoming most well known, the books selling in all some eight million copies. What Americans learned from Castaneda’s books was that Native American culture was intimately bound up with hallucinogenic drugs, used to gain “insight into a world not merely other than our own, but an entirely different order of reality.”
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It was this that interested Timothy Leary, who in 1960 first ingested
Psilocybe mexicana
, the mysterious magical mushroom of Mexico, in a house he had rented in Cuernavaca. Torgoff tells us that “during the experience his mind had completely deliquesced, opening to the most enthralling visions: ‘Nile palaces, Hindu temples, Babylonian boudoirs, Bedouin pleasure tents.’” He slipped farther and farther back in time, “so far back that he became the first living being.” Leary came to the view that mushrooms could “revolutionize” psychology and carried with them the possibility of “instantaneous self-insight.”

Leary felt that psychology had become too involved with the study of behavior and had neglected the phenomenon of consciousness. In the first experiment, to test “the potential of psilocybin for social re-engineering,” it was used in Concord State Prison in New Hampshire, where the changes brought about in the inmates were said to be dramatic: “[F]riction and tension were lowered, and there was talk in the sessions about ‘love’ and ‘God’ and ‘sharing.’” Leary thought he had discovered a method of “imprinting” new behavior patterns on adults: psychedelic imprinting, he claimed, would rank with DNA deciphering as “one of the most significant discoveries of the century.”

Over about four years, Leary and his assistants managed, as they put it, to “arrange transcendental experiences” for more than one thousand persons, including Aldous Huxley, Allen Ginsberg and Alan Watts. Their studies showed that “when the setting was supportive but not explicitly spiritual,
between 40 and 75 percent of their subjects . . . reported life-changing religious experiences. Yet when the set and setting emphasized spiritual themes, up to 90 percent reported having mystical or illuminating experiences.”
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When the news leaked out that scientists at President Kennedy’s alma mater were using mind-altering drugs in a social-engineering project, there was an almighty fuss. But Leary himself was taking more interest in spiritual, religious and mystical matters, as was a Harvard doctoral candidate, Walter Pahnke, who sought to determine empirically whether the so-called transcendental component of psychedelic experience was truly the equal of those reported by saints and mystics. With the support of a university professor he gathered a score of divinity students from a seminary and divided them into two groups. The experiment took place on Good Friday, 1962, after a service in the chapel. Some of the students were given psilocybin, others a placebo of nicotinic acid, which should have produced only hot and cold flushes.

After thirty minutes, “it was very apparent who had taken the psychedelic and who had not. The ten who had ingested the nicotinic acid were sitting there facing the altar; the others were lying on the floors and pews, wandering round in rapt wonderment, murmuring prayers as one of them played ‘weird, exciting, chords’ on the church’s pipe organ. Another . . . clambered across the pews and stood facing the crucifix, transfixed, arms outstretched as if somehow trying to identify physically with Christ and his suffering on the cross.”
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To Leary and his aides, the experiment proved that “spiritual ecstasy, religious revelation, and union with God were now directly accessible.”

When
Time
got hold of the story, however, Harvard Divinity School took a very different view: follow-up studies were canceled, while a medical administrator from the FDA described the psychological benefits of the study as “pure bunk.”

Leary, however, stuck to his guns and began to think of different ways to pursue his interests. Other observers were becoming interested in LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide), which now acquired some revealingly colorful names, such as Pearly Gates and Heavenly Blue. What Leary had in mind was what he called “a new frontier of expanded consciousness,” and in a speech to the Harvard Humanists (a group dedicated to ethical
development based on reason, not religious dogma) he announced the formation of the International Foundation for Internal Freedom (IFIF)—freedom in particular, he said, from “the learned, cultural mind.” He even foresaw an amendment to the U.S. Constitution to guarantee an individual’s right to seek an expanded consciousness. But while he was in Mexico on IFIF business, Harvard officials found that he had given drugs to an undergraduate, and used this as a pretext to get rid of him.

It was not the personal disaster it might have been, had it happened earlier in his career, because he was becoming less and less interested in Harvard. After a period of exile, therefore, he moved to the Hudson Valley and continued what was to become his next project. “Everything we did in the 1960s was designed to fission, to weaken faith and conformity to the 1950s social order. Our precise surgical target was the Judeo-Christian power monolith, which had imposed a guilty, inhibited, grim, anti-body, anti-life repression on Western civilization. Our assignment was to topple this prudish, judgmental civilization.” And, as he famously wrote, “The paradox must be stated as follows: it becomes necessary for us to go out of our minds in order to use our heads. . . . The game is about to change, ladies and gentlemen. . . . Drugs are the religion of the twenty-first century. . . . Turn on. Tune in. Drop out.”

When R. E. Masters and Jean Houston wrote their much-quoted book,
The Varieties of Psychedelic Experience
, they took it for granted that “psychedelic (mind manifesting) drugs afforded the best access yet to the contents and processes of the human mind.” They argued that there are four distinct levels of psychedelic experience, each successively “deeper” than its predecessor. The first level is that of enhanced sensory awareness; the second is reflective-analytic; the third, attained by fewer subjects, they called the symbolic level, at which the subject “experiences primal, universal, and recurring themes of human experience” (in a Jungian archetypal sense); the fourth, and deepest, is the integral level. “The integral level is mystical in nature. It affords individuals a vivid sensation of being ‘one’ with the deeper level of reality.” Only 11 percent of subjects reached this level, but those that did reported a feeling of “oneness with God.” Masters and Houston note, however, that their subjects’ descriptions of God did not match conventional religious language. Rather than describing God
in biblical terms, they said, they used words more reminiscent of Paul Tillich’s definition of God as “the Ground of being” (see above, p. 385).
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For a time, “dropping out” became an act of religious affirmation, Robert Fuller says in his history of drug use in American religious life. Several short-lived churches emerged that used drugs as the focus of their otherwise indeterminate theologies, such as the Shiva Fellowship Church, the Psychedelic Venus Church, the Fellowship of the Clear Light and the American Council of Internal Divinity. One follow-up study found that only about half a dozen of these lasted into the 1990s, with minuscule attendance.

Leary, meanwhile, made a case for not needing to be attached to any kind of formal religion at all. A real religious experience, he maintained, is “the ecstatic, incontrovertibly certain, subjective discovery of answers to four basic spiritual questions: What is the ultimate power of the universe? What is life—why and where did it start? Whence did humans come and where are we going? What am I—what is my place in the grander plan?”

And for a time at least, it appeared that a “fourth great awakening,” as the historian William McLoughlin termed it, had occurred in American religious life. The four major themes of this spiritual reorientation were: (1) a shift from mainline to nonconformist churches; (2) a rediscovery of natural rather than revealed religion; (3) a new appreciation of Eastern religious thought; and (4) a new Romanticism that accords spiritual importance to certain nonrational modes of thought and perception. “In general, this represented a shift from seeking God in the church to seeking God in the depths of nature (including the depths of our own psychological nature). . . . And although this new mode of awareness gave rise to insights that were ineffable upon return to the normal waking state, it nonetheless left the lasting impression that the world is surrounded by a higher order of being.”
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“MUSIC AND DRUGS WORK WONDERS”

Although at times it might have seemed that LSD was the only game in town, that was far from being so. In the mid-sixties, says Torgoff, “there seemed to be more potential pot smokers on American campuses than
ever before. They were easy to identify—rebels, die-hard nonconformists, egghead intellectuals, abstract painters, blue-jeaned folk musicians, jazz disciples, leotarded modern dancers, vegetarians. ‘You wore sandals,’ said one, ‘you went to poetry readings. . . . We got stoned on the peace march. You were
chosen
, man!’”

But the defining moment, the transitional moment in American history, was the emergence of the civil rights movement. “By and large, white people felt completely trumped by black people at the time, who went out and set this incredibly courageous moral example by putting their lives on the line. And I think that those of us who were not actively involved with freedom marches in the South were pressed to come up with an identity and self-image of equal integrity or at the very least didn’t want to participate in a culture which produced that kind of racism. . . . [T]here was this growing desire to create this other realm, imagine yourself into it and act it out—and one of the tools that would soon materialize to prize yourself out of that box was psychedelics.”
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It was about this time that Ken Kesey, author of
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
(in which the patients really do take over the asylum, if only for a day), got together with Hunter S. Thompson and the Hells Angels, “the rottenest motorcycle gang in the history of Christendom,” to conceive the first psychedelic bus; the time when Tom Wolfe wrote his perceptive
Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
(without ever attending a session of acid-taking, or taking it himself), and when Augustus Owsley Stanley III (Owsley to most, Bear to a few) manufactured four kinds of LSD.