Tuesday 8 December 2015

HIPPIE REDUX: #29 Why I'm Glad I'm Over 65!


Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds

Almost all my life I have lived in the modern rational western culture. It's worldview or understanding of reality has conditioned me and continues to impress itself upon me in a thousand subtle ways everyday. But despite our acceptance of it, this consensus reality is only an opinion about the nature of life and I believe rife with distortion and error. If I spent an hour within the body, heart and mind of a Yanomami native in the Brazil jungle, I might be amazed at how his reading of the real is different from mine. If I have had to continually wear blue-coloured glasses all my life, I soon fail to see the blue cast, but get a huge shock when I take them off.
There was a hope in the Sixties that taking LSD would be this shock. A shock to help you see that you are responsible for your own vision of life, rather than having it surreptitiously dictated to you by the dominant paradigm of the established order. Turn on, Tune in, Drop out.
It was suggested that every hippie do at least one LSD trip. I did my trip. It was beautiful, fun, but I can't say it was a game changer. I think it takes more than a few experiences of an alternate reality to develop an independent head. It is ongoing work, however much people like Timothy Leary (pictured) or Ken Kesey might have hoped otherwise. But I think a truth about our situation was emphasized.

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