Hi MOQers: I recently found some interesting stuff on Gerald Heard, who I mistakenly mentioned as Beard in yesterday's post. The "b" key is right next to the "h" key, ooops! Anyway Heard was a pioneer in the mystical use of LSD and was a friend of Huxley's. The two of them, as well as Alan Watts, were all Brittish. And their pioneering work actually occcured in the 50's. I mention this to point out that the ritual use of hallucinogens isn't really an invention of America's hippies in 60's, as many people assume. Heard was wrote thirty-something books of science, history, religion, philsophy and even fiction. He was a BBC science journalist, wrote novels and was a mystic. He saw the new physics, Gestalt psychology, semantics, the socialogy of knowledge, holistic theorys and the use of hallucinogens as part of a larger cultural shift and a profound epistemological revolution. He was especially interested in exploring "nonconsensus reality" and the ways in which our consciousness creates "reality maps". Gerald Heard was not much like our friend Chaz. Huxley first ate mescaline at home, under the supervison of a psychiatrist, in the spring of 1953. Heard ate his first dose soon thereafter and pretty soon a lot of people getting in on it, Cary Grant, James Colburn and Jack Nicholson were among the "artists" to take LSD. Heard caught the interest of a Los Angels based psychiatrist named Oscar Janiger who then founded the Albert Hoffman foundation to conduct research on the drug. I think Hoffman, the inventor, was also a Brit. All of this was before Tim Leary and the 60's counterculture made LSD so infamous. In fact Heard stoppped experimenting with it in 1966. In order to explore the religious and psychological potential of LSD, Heard traced the use of various visionary drugs "in rites of religion, in social procedures, in drama and in oracle systems". He saw the task of religion as one of "rebinding" the soul to integral consciousness, or to overcome the psychic fragmentation that results from the mind/body split. Heard said that LSD is "a perfect psycho-physical aid to sustain the mind at its utmost reach, and as an aid to that total unwavering attention which permits the emergence of the highest quality of comprehensive consciousness". I blush at the word "perfect", but otherwise I think it expresses the idea behind LSD's purpose. In a letter to a partner and friend, written in '66, he concludes that the LSD experience is "only the first hint of the oncoming Psychological Revolution, the Copernican Revolution of the Mind". Heard writes, "The third act is due. And the writer today mst face it...Beyond tragedy lies meta-comedy. The central figure of that play is known in Asiatic drama, the very word play they call Lila, the weaving dance that displays and resumes the universe." How Pirsigian is that!? DMB MOQ Online Homepage - http://www.moq.org Mail Archive - http://alt.venus.co.uk/hypermail/moq_discuss/ Unsubscribe - http://www.moq.org/md/index.html MD Queries - [EMAIL PROTECTED]
