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"History is hard to know,
because of all the hired bullshit." -- Hunter S. Thompson
["The CIA is not an omniscient, monolithic organization, and
there's no hard evidence that it engineered a great LSD
conspiracy. (As in most conspiracy theories, such a scenario
vastly overestimates the sophistication of the alleged
perpetrator.)"]
***
Burroughs was acutely aware
of the darker side of American politics, and he had some
ominous premonitions about the impending psychedelic
revolution. Despite rampant enthusiasm for hallucinogens
among his peers, he suspected that sinister forces were also
interested in these drugs and that Leary and his sidekicks
might be playing right into their hands. Burroughs feared
that psychedelics could be used to control rather than
liberate the vision-starved masses. He understood that the
seeker of enlightenment was especially vulnerable to
manipulation from without, and he sounded an urgent warning
to this effect in the opening passages of Nova Express,
published in 1964.
At the immediate risk of
finding myself the most unpopular character of all
fiction -- and history is fiction -- I must say this.
Bring together state of
news -- Inquire onward from state to doer -- Who
monopolized Immortality! Who monopolized Cosmic
Consciousness! Who monopolized Love Sex and Dream! Who
monopolized Time Life and Fortune! Who took from you
what is yours! ... Listen: Their Garden of Delights is a
terminal sewer.... Their Immortality Cosmic
Consciousness and Love is second-run grade-B shit....
Stay out of the Garden of Delights.... Throw back their
ersatz Immortality.... Flush their drug kicks down the
drain -- They are poisoning and monopolizing the
hallucinogenic drugs -- learn to make it without any
chemical corn.
***
Despite all the changes they had
undergone, Leary and his associates were still basically
psychologists who felt compelled to figure it all out. But
acid had overturned their dogmas and left them dangling
precariously in an intellectual limbo that was reinforced by
the hermetic environment of the Millbrook estate. As far as
they were concerned, nothing less than the entire history of
human thought had to be reconsidered in light of the
psychedelic experience. Kleps parodied their dilemma in his
chronicle of the Millbrook years, describing the arrival of
LSD as "The Big Crash" in whose wake the intellectual
history of mankind fluctuated madly on the cosmic exchange.
Zen and Buddhist stock rose sharply
while Yoga, Brahmanist and Vedantist issues
plummeted.... In London, Blake enjoyed a mild rise, Hume
skyrocketed, Aldous Huxley weakened, then held, and
penny-a-share issues such as Aleister Crowley and Yeats
disappeared entirely from view ... In Paris, former
glamor stocks like Sartre and Camus began to look a
little green around the gills.... such superficially
disparate stocks as Thoreau, Nabokov, Borges, and Norman
O. Brown were driven to undreamed of levels.... All the
Zen masters spiralled into the blue.... Freud and Jung
went through wild gyrations resembling an aerial
dogfight, before both sank gradually to earth.... the I
Ching went through the roof. The Gita crashed....
Shakespeare, unlike almost every other stock being
traded, remained absolutely stable.
The sense of psychic displacement was felt
most acutely by Timothy Leary. Even though years had passed
since his first acid trip, he could still say, "I have never
recovered from that shattering ontological confrontation. I
have never been able to take myself, my mind, and the social
world around me seriously." Now that he was aware of
"countless realities," routine existence had been revealed
to him as "illusory"; but that did not make it any less
problematic. He confided to Kleps that at times he had the
uncanny sensation that his head was running down his
shoulders, and that he had even considered having himself
committed. Whenever Leary took LSD, he relived a "recurring
science fiction paranoia. Suddenly I am on camera in an
ancient television show.... All
my life routines a pathetic clown act."
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