Excerpt from:
http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/la-caw-sirens-call4-2010apr04,0,500307.story
By Nick Owchar
April 4, 2010
....
A SURPRISE CONVERSATION: I love it when two books develop an
unexpected relationship. Take Don Lattin's "The Harvard Psychedelic
Club," which has gotten good play not just from us but in other news
outlets as well. It appeals not only because it's an
accessibly-written group bio -- the title echoes Louis Menand's about
an earlier Harvard group -- but also because it looks at how the
lives of Timothy Leary, Richard Alpert, Andrew Weil and Huston Smith
overlapped in the 1960s and fed into the mind-altering, mystical wave
sweeping across America in that era.
Months prior to publication of Lattin's book, however, Huston Smith's
"Tales of Wonder: Adventures Chasing the Divine" (HarperOne: 210 pp.,
$25.99), written with Jeffery Paine, appeared. It covered many of the
same moments described by Lattin. Taken together, Smith's and
Lattin's books form an enlightening complementary relationship.
Take, for instance, what Lattin writes about Smith's participation in
Timothy Leary's drug research:
Huston's trip was awe inspiring, but it was not pleasurable . . .
Leary walked into his living room to check on his subject. He could
tell Huston was not having a good time. He had lain here for hours in
a comatose terror. At one point, he cried out to Leary.
"Tim," Huston yelled. "I hope you know what you are playing around
with because if I mount one step higher the terror is just going to
explode my body and you'll be left with a corpse on your divan."
Leary walked over to the couch to reassure him that everything was OK.
"You'll be fine, Huston," Leary said.
"I know," Smith replied. "I have a family and I do not want to leave
this life at this point. But I know with every conviction that I
could if I wanted and you would have a corpse here on your divan."
Leary, Lattin writes, felt the whole night had been a failure. But
Smith tells us about this episode in his book and that he later
understood what happened to him on that night. It wasn't a bad trip
but one of those terrifying mystical experiences of looking "directly
into the face of God":
"So, the big question: what was January 2 like? Overnight I had
become a visionary, someone who not only believes in a larger world
but has actually visited it. What the mystics had sung were not
poetic metaphors but real experiences, I knew now. The Sufis say
there are three ways to know fire -- by hearing it described, by
seeing it, or by being burned. I was, in that analogy, now burned by
the fire. But one must not be consumed but bring the fire -- or
whatever name we give our experience of ultimate reality -- back
home, to warm our hands and live by."
Doesn't sound like a failure, does it?
.
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
"Sixties-L" group.
To post to this group, send email to [email protected].
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to
[email protected].
For more options, visit this group at
http://groups.google.com/group/sixties-l?hl=en.
