** ADVANCE FOR THURSDAY JAN. 12 **FILE**Author Ken Kesey poses in this April 24, 1997 file photo in Springfield, Ore., with his bus “Further,” a descendant of the vehicle that carried him and the Merry Pranksters on the 1964 trip immortalized in the Tom Wolfe book, “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.” Kesey died Nov. 10, 2001 in Eugene, Ore., at age 66, but four years later a Hollywood restaurateur has persuaded the family to resurrect the original bus and restore it as part of psychedelic history. (AP Photo/Jeff Barnard,)
The human mind acts through points of sense contact, and then quite suddenly – it jumps about – between the absurd and the ingenious. Mental formations squash awareness into mental garbage forms. How to break free?
Psychedelic pharmacopeia bridges those two mental states of the absurd and the ingenious. The drugs coalesce to find a most enlightening solution: bizarre mental states unifying the realms of the hilarious, fascinating curiosities mixed with befuddled concentration. Memory, intellect, will, imagination, emotions, feelings, perceptions, mental formations and consciousness layer themselves into a gluttonous Roman salad.
The taker of psychedelics is not a mindful listener, but instead, a voyager that lets some chemicals navigate through his or her mind. Yet the experimenter is still somehow in control. A good tweak of the ambience usually elucidates a type of ‘trip’ where he or she transverses the profound doors of sensory existence, including an intense sixth sense of the mind. The voyager-tripper is both mentally and physically within the art of traveling.
If the tripper is intelligent, he or she will ingest the substance within a controlled, sacred, or creative environment, such as around trusted friends, or during celebratory festivals, the deep forest, a mountain cave, religious rites, intellectual retreats, or performance-artist events.
Ancient nations throughout world history have used psychedelia as doorways into the deeper spiritual realms. Mental transformations increased through the processes of dance, conflict, performance or costume.
A few psychedelic explorers, however, have entered those peculiar worlds through mental sinkholes – never to return. Those few, naive seekers have flown the cocoon of sanity into the fatal embrace of psychedelics; minds drowned into ego-self delusions-monstrosities.
The decade of the 1640s seemed to get only worse. In central Mexico, a strange humidity invaded the wet season landscape, around murky waters of flayed gardens and green snot forest. Only recently, a terrible flood had engulfed the capital, Mexico City, which later overwhelmed and killed thousands of residents. A nasty pestilence was still rife in the water and in the air. Death breathed a thousand vats amongst an imprisoned population of 100,000 plus residents.
Even before the Great Flood of Mexico City of 1629, there was a near riot between two opposing factions of Spanish elites: the Viceroy versus the Archbishop. The King of Spain recalled the viceroy, but he was still concerned about those urban tensions. The king needed a good foreign spy to scope out the political ramparts and intrigues of New Spain-Mexico. King Felipe III of Spain found his man.
He represented an adventurer-Anglo-Irish-ex-soldier-ex-pirate, whatever, to do the job. His name was Guillén de Lampart, or aka, William Lamport.
Due to his Catholicism, he couldn’t stay in Ireland – even with his Anglo-Irish aristo pedigree. He transformed into a long-haired, baroque outlaw, so he attacked English ships as a notorious pirate, and then fought on the Continent in the role of an Irish soldier, one of the famous Wild Geese. He was a true swashbuckler, and an educated one too. By the decade of the 1640s, this French styled fop, Spanish-speaking, Irish aristo-pirate, dolled up in seventeenth-century garb, was on a trans-Atlantic, Spanish man-of-war bound for Mexico.
Stepping into mid-seventeenth-century Mexico City was like entering a contemporary science fiction novel for that frizzy haired, Irish, young pirate-soldier-intellectual. While he was stunned with the wild Spanish baroque church temples, brown and black-skinned people, the ancient Aztec stone ruins, pungent flowers of the sun, and dirty canals like fabled Venice – he was also shocked with the injustice everywhere.
Colonial Mexico City had a new elite class of lazy, Spanish-born, wannabe aristo-parasites, called peninsulares, who lorded it over the rest of the population. These guys did no work, and only collected tributes and taxes from the populace. They used every corrupt scheme under colonialism to grab more bribes.
Those colonial bums especially harassed native communities through forcing them to purchase agricultural junk tools, called repartimiento de mercancias. Another scam was the local Spanish city councils or cabildos forcing native laborers on public work projects that paid slave wages. One of the reasons the colonial parasites wanted so much money was for the purchase of African slaves. Mexico City became one of the premier African slave trading and selling centers in Mesoamerica. Slaving was so rampant that a good part of the urban population was becoming mixed race, Afro-mestizo.
With this new slaving culture, also came the colonial brutality of public whipping, mutilations, torture and even legal murder of African slaves, mostly due to overwork. While the Spanish colonial elites proclaimed a new and wondrous Christian republic of Mexico City, the reality on the street was a completely divergent scenario. William Lamport saw through the crap facade.
William was a still a spy though, and so he took up acquaintances with some local native nobility. One night William took the psychedelic drug of Peyote with one of the native noblemen. Through this trip, William mentally transformed himself – and found a new false identity.
Somehow he had a vision of Fortuna leading him towards a Mexican Revolution, uniting the Natives and Blacks, overthrowing the Spanish colonial parasites – all with the fop-spy man proclaimed as the new King of Mexico!
Most trippers tend to keep the outrageous and comical visions to themselves – and continue with struggling through life. Not William however, he began to talk about his new-found peyote visions. He forgot that there was a very powerful legal tribunal located in Mexico City, the Holy Office of the Inquisition.
The Inquisition had many concerns with the psychedelic use of peyote. They obviously did not like it, but they were also interested in its mental transformations. William happened to tell his peyote experience to a Familar, or a snitch of the Holy Office. The Familiar promptly reported William to the Inquisitors. Within a few days, the Inquisitors had William arrested and placed inside its secret prison.
The Inquisitors were also the protectors of the King of the Spain, and in fact, the head of the Spanish Inquisition was the King of Spain. They wanted to know about this peyote vision for his planned revolt in Mexico City. William refused to tell them the story – and instead, insulted them grievously.
He represented the longest stay of any Inquisition prisoner in colonial Mexican history. While inside, he composed poetry and sonnets, and he even saw the mass imprisonment and public burning of Mexico City’s Portuguese crypto-Jews in 1649.
King Phillip III kept sending letters to the Inquisitors inquiring about his spy’s status. William even became the only prisoner of the Inquisition to actually escape from the secret prison! Within a few days they captured him and then in 1659, in front of hundreds at the Alameda Park in Mexico City, the Mexican Inquisition burned him alive with six other men.
William had survived the persistent English, the unforgiving Atlantic Sea, the cannon, flintlock, musketoon, rapier, cutlass, pike and blunderbuss battlefields of Europe – but he could not escape the Inquisition.
Some historians claim that William was a type of religious-political mystic. He was nothing of the sort. He simply took a mental voyage – and never returned. He didn’t become the Irish King of Mexico – but he did become a celebrated Inquisitorial prisoner – a type of Colonial Spanish Zoro and the subject of some later books. The Peyote trip did work.
Psychoactives or Psychedelics are the drugs of traveling without moving. The mind under the dosage attaches to the sensory orifices and then allays the sensory stimulation into profound mental states. This interior transcendence is the reason why so many artists, seekers, travelers and mystics have experimented with such substances.
The list of intellectuals, artists, scientists and inventors is a long one. For the sake of this essay, I will lightly list some of the more notable ones that transformed their identities from such potent mental drugs.
The most famous ingester from our modern times was the British intellectual and writer, Aldous Huxley. While living in California, and during his first digestion of psychedelics, Mescaline, he composed a book that elaborated on his experiences, The Doors of Perception. One of the artists he influenced was an avid reader and musician, Jim Morrison, who used the name of The Doors, for the future well-known rock band.
Even before Huxley experimented with psychedelics, other nefarious groups were also engaging in ‘psychedelic research.’ In the late 1930s, Albert Hoffman discovered a synthetic hallucinogenic mixture, Lysergic Acid Diethylamide, or LSD, inside of the Sandoz labs in Switzerland. This was the first synthetic potion, since most psychedelics normally transmit through natural plants, roots or fungi mushrooms, such as Peyote (Mexican) Mescaline and San Pedro Huachama (Peruvian) Mescaline. Other native psychedelic plants have included Psilocybin, Ayahuasca and the Iboga root from Africa.
The Psychobabble Quack Cult first tested psychedelics on incorrigible alcoholics, obsessive-compulsive neurotics and even patients that had psychotic episodes. Even the Hollywood actor, Cary Grant, took acid for his anxiety. Following the psycho-quacks nefarious footsteps, the US Military and the CIA, through their MKULTRA program, tested the drug on enlisted soldiers, convicts and other ‘unknown groups,’ to see if LSD could function as a truth serum under interrogation-torture techniques.
Professors and scientists at universities, such as the University of California Berkeley, experimented with LSD to discover its effects on creativity and genius. One such Harvard professor-scientist had lauded the effects of LSD, and soon became its greatest intellectual promoter – Dr. Timothy Leary. Meanwhile, diverse musicians and artists, such as the painter, Jackson Pollock and the Beat traveler-writers, Ken Kesey and Allen Ginsberg, took psychedelics for further intellectual-artistic growth.
By the 1960s, the massive Kool Aid Acid Tests, or the Pacific Beach-performative parties, had already taken place along the Northern California and Oregon coasts. The favorite rock band for those spontaneous performance art-festivals, was the traveling Grateful Dead. Other rock and free jazz musicians also ventured into psychedelic territories, such as The Beatles, Jimi Hendrix and Jefferson Airplane.
The Comic artist Robert Crumb used LSD-Acid as a window to elaborate his comics creations. Artist communes, such as the Drop City Collective in Colorado, also experimented with acid explorations. LSD had moved from the intellectual and spy fringes to the music-artist-hippie-counterculture. The powerless hippie buffoons hitched to the Trip.
The Amerikan Empire of Sociopaths also saw the change – and so like the Spanish Inquisition before it, banned LSD in 1966. Since then, the Empire has persecuted and imprisoned unfortunate LSD sellers within its megalith of gulags. During the late 80s and early 90s, the DEA, the Drug Enforcement Administration, (US), used rasta-haired, undercover narc agents to snatch up young men into the greatest prison hell hole of world history – just for a few tabs of paper acid.
Another previous psychiatric drug use, synthetic MDMA, or Ecstasy, has also entered the prison of controlled psychoactive substances – and the illegal black market. Due to its recent illegality, Ecstasy, or Molly, is now often cut with unwholesome substances, such as Heroin, increasing the risk of injury or death for casual users at raves and festivals.
Even with all the recent US Government persecution against psychedelics, the exception being the Native American Church’s legal use of Mescaline, they proliferate everywhere. Both Acid and Ecstasy are especially common at raves, dance clubs and at artistic-cultural festivals, such as Burning Man and The Rainbow Gathering.
Why do religious fanatics and state sociopaths hate psychedelics so much? The answer refers to the history of its use. Since the earliest civilizations emerged in Celtic Europe, Mesoamerica, the Andean mountains, and the forests of the Congo, humans have wanted to explore the connections between their minds and the supposedly invisible worlds around them.
Psychedelics release the sense-consciousness ducts, which allow the concealed universe to access the scattered mind. They transform mental objects into the funny and truthful. At least the human mind accepts this as so.
This freedom to explore other realms, without applying for a state passport, represents a mortal danger to those serious ones who want to maintain control over the minds of the less powerful.
Any human, regardless of intellectual training, can transpose their mental drug experiences into an understanding of the absurd and ironic – found everywhere, within all existence, and inside ourselves.
Humans can laugh at the total absurdity of their own created identity egos, sacred religious-ideological doctrines, costumed hierarchies, degenerate political structures and pathetic economic systems.
The drape has been cast away and the Wizard of Emptiness reveals itself. The true god-hero of the psychoactive drug experience transforms into the scrawny kid emperor running around with no clothes on his body.
Guns and Anarchy 