Hey, Bear (Owsley Stanley), here's one for you. (Psychedelic alert)

Thanks for everything, Bear...



Hey Sonoman,

I guess you read the S F Gate article about Owsley. If not, here's the link:

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/03/14/MND41IAC74.DTL

Here's another interesting riff, titled "Psychedelics and Consciousness" by Jeremy Tarcher on Tim Sculley's Orange Sunshine:

Psychedelics and Consciousness
Jeremy Tarcher

The "one reality/one truth" perspective was totally destroyed for me by my first psychedelic trip. I had the benefit of two experienced guides, and some really good LSD, Tim Scully's "Orange Sunshine."

I took the tabs at 10 in the morning, and by noon my mind had been substantially remade. It is not what happened during the trip (another story altogether) but how I understood it that was so shaking.

From what I gathered, I had been asleep for 47 years believing that the way I saw things was pretty much the way they actually were. People who disagreed with me were either poor observers, or bad at drawing conclusions. How could so many people be mistaken about so many things? I didn't have an answer to that, but I knew that I was pretty much right.

The trip led me to a small understanding of how the mind generates its own reality and how each of those realities was a product of the mind's endless cultural programming.

"DAILY LIFE WAS STILL CHOP WOOD/CARRY WATER, BUT NOW WITH A MORE DISCRIMINATING AX AND A LESS LEAKY BUCKET."
Under this new perspective,I came to understand that everything I saw and didn't see, heard and didn't hear - all of the inputs by which I judged reality - were in fact a product of innumerable filters and screens of whose ability to shape my world I had been almost totally unaware. I was familiar with that idea but had never so forcefully experienced it. These unseen membranes created a particular "Jeremy Tarcher Point of View."

With the experience, everything changed. Everything became more fluid, richer in possibilities, more ambiguous, more paradoxical, more multi-dimensional and more fun. This open framework offered a better way of thinking for me. Daily life was still chop wood/carry water, but now with a more discriminating ax and a less leaky bucket.

As LSD brought about a great cognitive shift for me, so Ecstasy opened my heart in ways that have helped me live in a less dichotomous world, more deeply connected to all beings.

If you're lucky, these openings do not totally contract in the course of everyday life. If you have a pipe, and some smoke-able herbs, you can at least remind yourself of the reality of those deeper places, even when you don't get the full energy of being there.

That, in brief, is my experience, but not one that I would see as being universal. As always, caveat emptor.



This is the author's account, not mine. I did Purple Owsley every day of 1968 and then moved on to more serious shit.
Sonoman

read my reply down-thread

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=103x593286

There was nobody like the Bear.

Sonoman

: (

BUT...

I'm seeing endless previews for this movie called "Limitless"

Take a pill, and you get to use 100% of your brains ability.

That just struck me as "amusing".

We reward ignorance, and punish scholarship.

Bear changed many lives for the better. Maybe more than people realize. I remember the pre-1960s world as extremely uptight.

People joke about the LSD experience, but the laughter was the best part of the trip.
And the "sacred silliness," made it's mark on our American culture.

Without the loosening up of the American consciousness, somebody would have decided to use our Nukes on the USSR.

It sounds crazy now, but this country was wound up-tight as hell.

We are up-tight now, but we are bat-shit crazy up-tight, much more expressive and un-fettered.




(Edited to add a word.)

for Bear, there wouldn't have been a Grateful Dead and if I hadn't become a deadhead, I would not be the person I am.

just add some percussion, mojeoux...

No shit

Sonoman

Married Shari Lewis the ventriloquist-Renaissance woman, founded Esalen, founded Tarcher/Putnam publishing, really interesting guy. He's still around - 79 years old, if it's him.

social reality is a construct. What we can construct, we can deconstruct and reconstruct.

One thing to keep in mind, however, is that the CIA (et al) had LSD a full ten years before the rest of us. Yeah, they really are paranoid control freaks. Who ever controls your perception of reality controls you. Whatever you believe to be true will be the basis for your life decisions, whether it is true or not.

Revelations such as these have been the backdrop for my experience of living for over 40 years.

However if you want to get into "serious shit" you have move beyond questions of "reality" to questions of Being.

I salute you, Mr. Owsley, I for one am glad our paths once crossed.

Besides all he did for consciousness raising, and neing an early patron of the Grateful Dead (THANK YOU!) this man was a genius who revolutionized the sound of live music as we know it. Godspeed Bear!

Well, 1969 must not have been too much of a slouch, either... ;-)

Saw the world spinning round....

I used to pay good money to feel like this.

Now, I cannot make it go away.

Sonoman

more understanding. It also changed my photography. I went from cataloging to interpreting.

With music and other arts I didn't dwell on the technical, embrace the emotional impact. Jazz is not be be studied, it should be felt. That's how you understand jazz. The expansion and contraction of time you hear in jazz has a real physical impact. If it takes a bowl to make that happen for the first time, fine. Once you understand, you don't need the smoke anymore.

Any mind altering substance should only be used to jolt you out of a set definition of reality. It is up to the individual to understand and act on what they experience.