L.S.D.

I haven’t written anything much for a month or so, because I’ve had other fish to fry: like putting a rock and roll band together in a desperate attempt to avoid being forced into some mind-numbing back-breaking job in a munitions factory, or having to “volunteer” for paid drug research programs or whatever else the Tory government that nobody voted for decides that I need to do for the fascist machine to justify my existence to my countrymen, who are brainwashed by their newspapers and years upon years of ignorance. So I thought that this morning, while I have a few minutes, I would put finger to keyboard (so to speak) and write just for the sheer sake of it. And – for no particular reason – I decided that I would write about LSD.

Like Aldous Huxley, Timothy Leary and their contemporaries, Bill W, the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, was a big fan of LSD, and – let’s face it – who can blame him? Bill – like Huxley – considered the psychedelic drug a valid means of enlarging his spiritual life, and he wrote about it excitedly, and at length.

Unfortunately for Bill, he wrote about it on the first thing that came to hand – Alcoholics Anonymous headed paper – and it wasn’t too long before the still adolescent fellowship decided that he had to be stopped.

                “Bill,” I like to imagine they said, “it’s all very well and good for you to be enlarging your spiritual experience through voodoo, Ouija boards, ritual magic and animal sacrifice – we have no opinion on what religious bodies our members identify themselves with – but all this lovey-dovey hippy crap is taking it a step too far. Sort yourself out man, before people start to think you’re some kind of goddam drug-addict.”

As for myself, I took a lot of LSD. A lot. I never saw anything that wasn’t there, I never had a “bad trip” and it did me no harm mentally or physically. What it did do was blow my mind so profoundly that all mental activity was suspended and I experienced life as it is: non-dual, spontaneous, surprising, and happening everywhere, all at the same time. It was the first time in life that I realised – to quote Bill W himself – that “a mighty purpose and rhythm underlay all”.

Job done, you might think. But you’d be wrong. No experience, however profound, lasts. And before too long I was back in my usual dualistic, linear mental groove.

I don’t want to take LSD today, in spite of the fact that I am somewhat of an apologist for it. The fact is that I am also living a twelve step program, and trying to influence my experience through the means of any outside objects (be they drugs, relationships or whatever) is in direct opposition to practicing the very principle that keeps me sober: step 3; reliance upon a higher power, or, if you like, accepting life as it is.

And the fact is, that when I accept life as it is, I begin to be curious; to pay more attention to it: and I notice that hey, it is spontaneous, surprising, and happening everywhere, all at the same time.