Newsgroups: alt.drugs

To: anon@anon.penet.fi

L.S.D. Best book..The Only Book.

My psychedaelic experience began in September 1970. My companion and
guide helpfully set me up with an LSD starter-kit of Frank Zappa's 'Hot Rats'
and Dr. John's 'Night Tripper'. The quite astonishing psychedaelic architecture
of Frank Zappa's music was my first synesthetic experience. Dr. John left you
quietly muttering incantations and wondering where you'd learned them and
what they meant. His music was sublime and subliminal. To read, I was given
Chairman Mao's 'Where do correct ideas come from' (which I now realize
was purely for show) and Timothy Leary's 'Politics of Ecstasy'.

I haven't read the book for nearly twenty five years. But I count myself as
lucky to have had that book to read right at the beginning. I didn't like
Leary's
style. But his overly rich,  sub-McCluhanite flashiness and his funny views on
religion didn't matter. Tim had the answers. Alright, you could tell from
his style, he was a bit of boaster. But Tim was the only one who new
where to go. Tim was the only one who told you the protocols. When you
looked at your hand and suddenly you were able to identify every last
pulsing capillary, fixed in utter astonishment, just this side of shock,
Tim said that what was happening to you was clearly a kind of
 awareness that, if pursued, would propel you from the normal confines of
your body, to a level where you were conscious of the molecular and
sub-molecular
basis of all things. There was an exciting comic book quality about Tim's
adventures.
Tim regressed regularly. Back to the womb and beyond...back and back. Tim
remembered when we were frogs, back even further, when we were amoeba.

Tim's adventures were both red-blooded and cerebral at the same time. As
an exercise in prose, Tim's book will seem horribly dated. It didn't
read too well at the time. But as a 'try-this and see' manual it was an
*essential* guide for so many of us. By the time that Tim wrote the Politics
of Ecstasy, he had long since made his mind up that psychedelics belong to
humanity and that narrowly scientific accounts were only part
of the picture. Much of what Tim said might have been bollocks. But Tim
took a giant step.

The Politics of Ecstasy: the best book, the only book.