"Ralph? The time has come, to go out of your mind. Are you ready, Ralph? Are you ready to die and be reborn? First you must be in a state of grace. First, you must examine yourself in this mirror of confession. What do you see there? Your personality: all your goals, and your fears, your little ambitions... the chess game of your life. You have to check that Ralph, you can't take that on the trip with you. And then that other side of you Ralph, that dark unconscious, all those animal impulses which you hide and keep down below. All this baggage too must be checked. You can't take that on the billion year voyage to God." - Timothy Leary, from the album: "Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out"
Timothy Leary can be so, so silly sometimes. Suffice it to say that I have sat in the dark with friends and attempted to listen to his recordings, his guided meditations, only to find myself incredibly distracted by the silliness and flat out corniness of the whole spectacle.
While listening to the naive, starry-eyed banter of America's acid guru, it seems hard to believe that President Nixon once declared him to be the most dangerous man in America.
My generation has a much different idea of what dangerous is; one needs only to dial into the current mass pop cultural zeitgeist to have an idea of how much things have changed since the sixties. The drugs no longer even claim to be about enlightenment, and the flowers have all been traded in for guns.
Something else has been traded in too.
In general, when comparing the children of the sixties with the children of today, there is a cynicism where there once was wonder. Even the artistic and musical subcultures of today that revolve around ingesting psychedelics have a certain air of self awareness that those of the sixties did not possess.
In the modern psychedelic art and music scenes, there is a pervading tendency or trend that involves making fun of psychedelia in a psychedelic way. Where a genuine sixties hippie might speak rapturously about the cosmos and timelessness, the children of those hippies are more apt to say, "Hey, look at me doing the hippie thing: talking all rapturously about the cosmos and timelessness. Aren't I just so clever/funny?"
Whatever the case may be, whether you are donning the psychedelic robes of the sixties to make an ironic artistic statement about psychedelic culture or whether you are actually a disciple of Leary himself embarking on a billion year voyage to God, there is a certain type of reflection going on in both cases that I believe is an integral part of the psychedelic experience.
This reflection, in short, involves looking at your own beliefs, the way you dress, the way you think, and all the ideas that you have about God, country and the Universe, as being separate from who you are.
These are habits that you have formed and hold onto in your attempt to construct and maintain an idea of yourself. But then, one might ask, if I am not my ideas about everything, then what am I?
And this, many hippies, artists and even Buddhists would agree, is a great place to start. What am I?