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Ed Prideaux's avatar

Since you mention The Beatles, it's interesting to note what John Lennon reported to Rolling Stone in 1970: "I got the message on acid that I should kill my ego, and I did, y'know. I was nothing, I was shit." It took him years to recover and he seems to have developed symptoms of depersonalisation-derealisation based on descriptions in The Beatles biography by Hunter Davies. Funnily enough, it was a later pair of LSD trips in 1968 that reconvinced him of the reality of the ego.

Someone else worth noting is George Harrison, who was also a heavy LSD user in 1966/7. You can see George's views on the ego in his later song 'I, Me, Mine':

"Having LSD was like someone catapulting me out into space. The LSD experience was the biggest experience that I’d had up until that time… Suddenly I looked around and everything I could see was relative to my ego, like ‘that’s my piece of paper’ and ‘that’s my flannel’ or ‘give it to me’ or ‘I am’. It drove me crackers, I hated everything about my ego, it was a flash of everything false and impermanent, which I disliked"

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David Gosselin's avatar

What’s curious though is that whether a Bach, Kepler, Einstein, Planck, the saints and mystics from Augustine to Rumi, Plato or Confucius, none of them needed psychedelics to transcend and develop a higher self, and yet there seems to be a campaign that ignores that reality and presents a new quick shortcut to transcendence.

It’s all very reminiscent of Huxley final novel, The Island. Have you read it?

I know psychedelics can have benefits, but I really have to wonder when I hear a lot of the modern psychedelic prophets tout the benefits without much reference to the darker historical side of the question, and its implications today.

For instance, how aware are we of the ongoing MK-Ultra programs, the newer ones? The “official story” is that MK-Ultra was shut down and that’s the end of the story. But if we look at many of the discussions around psychedelics and their ability to help repattern the mind, it looks like the MK-Ultra program has simply been mainstreamed. Notably, one of MK-Ultra’s greatest goals was the creation of false memories. These could be used to program assassins or to simply repattern someone’s sense of identity ie to “forget” certain things and “remember others.”

Psychedelics played no small part in this. It’s know that psychedelics allow one to take a distance from their memories and past, and become open to new ways of thinking in a very drastic manner. Naturally, this can be used for good or for bad, much like hypnosis. But if it has such power, is there any doubt the first on the case are the intel agencies themselves?

There is a great book by journalist Tom O’Neil, “Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA and the Secret History of the Sixties.” Among many quotes and new research, he cited pages from journals by clinicians handling “the Family” at the HAFMC.

This quote stands out:

“One of these articles hoped to find out ‘whether a dramatic drug-induced experience’ would have a ‘lasting impact on the individual’s personality.’ Another observed that feelings of ‘frustrated anger’ led people to want to try LSD: ‘The soil from which the ‘flower children’ arise,’ the author wrote, ‘is filled more with anger and aggression, thorns and thistles, rather than passion and petunias.’ Under ‘emotional pressure,’ acid could induce ‘images and sensations of anger or hate magnified into nightmarish proportions.

David Smith had studied these same phenomena, formulating an idea that he called ‘the psychedelic syndrome,’ first articulated in 1967 or early’68.

The gist was that acid, when taken by groups of like-minded people, led to a ‘chronic LSD state’ that reinforced ‘the interpretation of psychedelic reality.’ The more often the same group of “friends” dropped acid, the more they encouraged one another to adopt the worldview they’d discovered together on LSD, thus producing ‘dramatic psychological changes. Usually the psychedelic syndrome was harmless, but regular LSD use could cause ‘the emergence of a dramatic orientation to mysticism.’“

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