Chasing Synapses

I got around to watching The Trip earlier this week. It’s a movie about a guy, Paul played by Peter Fonda, who takes LSD and goes trips. Really, it’s one hour of a guy seeing, experiencing, and ultimately causing trouble while being high. Well, naturally after watching this film I got an interest in LSD.

A couple of people at the time, like Timothy Leary, thought that LSD was the “gateway” drug that would help people. Timothy Leary, for example, encouraged the use of LSD for its therapeutic, emotional, and spiritual benefits. Advocates of LSD went as far as creating a book that mimics the Tibetan Book of the Dead. This is what really got my interest.

I followed a trail from William Blake (poet) down the The Doors (rock band) through a common denominator: LSD or drugs, really.

Here’s how it goes:

• From 1790 to 1793 Poet William Blake created The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
• In 1954 Aldous Huxley created The Doors of Perception, a book detailing his experiences with mescaline. He named the book from a line from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.
• In 1962-1964 Timothy Leary, Ralph Metzner, and Richard Alpert created “The Psychedlic Experience: A Manual based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead. This book is dedicated to Aldous Huxley and includes a citation from The Doors of Perception. Part of this text is found in a Beatles track “Tomorrow Never Knows” (but this story is not about the Beatles)
• 1965 Jim Morrison forms The Doors, taking the name from Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception.

This trail is a thesis waiting to happen. Jim Morrison was a poet, Timothy Leary had some crazy poet thoughts, Aldous Huxley was poetically inspired, and William Blake is one of the best poets in history. So after I chased that trail and the hour turned late, I realized something groovy, something totally fantastic and far out that explains my enlightenment this past week: it’s beautiful.

This goes back to the The Trip. In the beginning after Paul, the main character, drives to a dealer for some LSD. He has a two word conversation with Lulu, Katherine Walsh, who is really high (but poetic all the same).

He asks her, “how are you doing?” And she replies, “Beautiful.” Now, I know there’s a lot of terrible things out there in this world. I know there is loneliness, alienation, fear, despair, mockery, condemnation, misunderstanding, guilt, shame, failure, judgment, hate, violence, and so much more out there. I know, I’ve been there. But, when you take out all that you will find: love, life, happiness, and peace. Maybe you’ll find understanding too, if you’re lucky.

It’s just a matter of taking the anti-life equation and rearranging the order of operations to make *your* life beautiful. It really is beautiful. Here’s one more quote from The Trip for you:

I feel like everything is alive! Whole energy levels and fields flowing… That's the sun in my hands, man. It gives off an orange cloud of light... that just flows right out its seams.