Too Much to Dream by Peter Bebergal

Author:Peter Bebergal
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781593764685
Publisher: Catapult
Published: 2018-05-16T00:00:00+00:00

A few years later, in a Playboy interview, Leary again stressed context, urging inexperienced LSD adventurers to find a guide.3 He also insisted that those under age twenty-five were the “holiest” generation (at least in 1966), and that a fifteen-year-old was likely to have a much more insightful experience with acid than a fifty-year-old: “Because a fifteen-year-old is going to use a new form of energy to have fun, to intensify sensation, to make love, for curiosity, for personal growth.” The trouble—as many a fifteen-year-old, including me, would experience—was that spiritual LSD guides were hard to come by. Leary and his colleagues, educated, moneyed, and safe in their upstate New York mansions, had the luxury of sitting for an interview with Playboy magazine, talking about set and setting and the future of youth, but the youth were just trying to get by.

While many young people of that generation and the next wanted a religious experience, they were distrustful of religion in any form, even one that looked and smelled and sounded like what they imagined an authentic faith might look like. Leary’s message was one the youth wanted to hear. In all religious traditions, it has been the mystic that has challenged the status quo, that has sought to reveal the hidden and invisible reality that the hierarchical and moral have buried. In many cases, the mystic has been accused of being a heretic. But the mystic is also the prophet, the one who has the direct experience with God and then delivers a radical and often counterauthority message.

As the beatniks handed the torch to the hippies, they passed along a kind of mystical prophecy. It was a message that the religion found in the churches and synagogues was a trap, a trick to keep us from our true destiny, and that the word of God was not at the pulpit, nor was He looking down with a threat of hell in one hand and a promise of heaven in the other. God could be found within, and once He was discovered, liberation from every kind of war, heartache, and injustice could be found.

Leary taught that religion is a matter of experience. Music and drugs, dancing and sex—this is where God is revealed. LSD and psilocybin had become illegal in 1968 and 1970, respectively, and Leary had taken psychedelics out of the purview of science and into the hands of freaks waving flowers and singing “Hare Krishna.”

Timothy Leary would go so far as to say that he was continuing the work of Aleister Crowley and putting into practice the magician’s most quoted maxim, “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.” Most of the baby boomers would find the teachings of Ram Dass less problematic for the suburbs; their children, however, would hear only the echo of Leary, but with neither acid potent enough nor a counterculture cohesive enough to help them do little more than use it as an excuse to get immaculately stoned.

Without guidance, without

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