Tags / 12 quotes from 2 sources
#counterculture
Beyond Zero and One (Andrew Smart)
No cultural frame for psychedelic experience
cultural references for these experiences, except for the counter-cultural movements of the 1960s, but this cultural framework is limited to our distorted memory and history of that time. All these thoughts were floating around in my head when I looked over at a calendar near…
LSD and the Summer of Love
The decade’s radical movements that were influenced by LSD helped with the expansion of women’s and minority rights, with the most effective anti-war movement in American history, and with new genres of literature and music. The cultural, psychedelic, and geographical locus was…
LSD and rejecting traditional mores
LSD influenced users to embrace the new counter-culture and reject traditional mores, jobs, and relationships.
Leary and the polarization over LSD
The late 1960s made the drug controversial because of the hippie movement and its mass unsupervised drug experimentation. The public controversy, and Leary’s popularity in the media, contributed to a polarized view about the drug. People like Leary, who felt it was his historic…
The Acid Diaries (Christopher Gray)
The best history of the sixties counterculture
While researching this book, I reread Martin Lee and Bruce Shlain’s Acid Dreams: The CIA, LSD and the Sixties Rebellion. Not only is the book the best history of LSD, it’s the best history of ’60s counterculture as a whole: an eyewitness account of just how close the West, in…
Poverty had become psychological
By the middle of the decade so many young people were dropping out that it looked as though “youth” was becoming a social class in its own right, one about to inherit the revolutionary dynamism Marx had ascribed to the industrial proletariat. For between the two world wars…
Feminists dealt capitalism the body blow
Rather than the terrorists, it was the early feminists who dealt capitalism the body blow. Their work offered the first critique of Western society as a whole and provided the first tools with which revolutionaries could begin to revolutionize themselves—to question their very…
Never really trusting LSD
Basically, I never trusted LSD; and despite all the song and dance about psychedelics at the time, I suspect that a large number of my peers didn’t either. Amazing eye-opener LSD might be, but it seemed too volatile, too violent to be workable. Had we known of the research…
The backlash after failed revolts
Perhaps revolts that fail always create this murderous backlash. Ringleaders are either dead or thoroughly discredited; and the rest, however sick at heart, have little option but to try to pick up the pieces and lead some semblance of normal life, to curl up with a lover and a…
Technology should reduce labor
and from what I have glimpsed through them, I would say that Western technology could be pruned back, and pruned back hard. Most of it strikes me as having gone off at a tangent; it’s not even relevant. Personally, I want an apartment and a job like I want a hole in the head…
BPM 4 was Flower Power
Describing BPM 4, the climactic moment of the baby’s delivery, Grof lists some of the salient features of reliving this matrix. [The subject] is struck by visions of blinding white or golden light and has feelings of enormous decompression and expansion of space. . . . The…
Why some trips are good and others bad
Mulling it over afterward, however, I saw that it did allow me to reframe the question of why some people had “good” and others “bad” trips. All along Grof had maintained that the typical order in which the matrices tend to manifest is BPM 2, BPM 3, BPM 4 . . . and only then…