Acid Ex Machina: Reflections on the Psychedelic 60s

1. Symbiotic Psychosis

“The brighter the light, the darker the shadow.” - C.G. Jung

The stereotype one has of the 1960’s counterculture, like everything else in America, tends to fall on a simple partisan binary. For the nostalgic liberal, the era represents a triumphant struggle between young wildeyed free-loving peacenik hippie psychonauts vs. old, oppressive, sterile, warmongering, money-grubbing squares. For the embittered conservative, the decade represents a cultural defeat at the hands of spoiled, cowardly (if not traitorous), drug addled, over-sexed degenerate freaks vs. the free-world loving champions of patriotic middle class prosperity, in all their star-spangled trappings.

Wonder Years, indeed.

Such stereotypes may be useful when attempting to understand America’s polarized political discourse, but they fall short of revealing the dark libidinal (dare I say spiritual) fear that I think is at the heart of the American psyche.

It must be underlined that the 1960’s was an unprecedented time of economic growth and technological advancement for most Americans, and that it is precisely from such abundance that progressive discontent could grow and cement itself in popular culture via new and readily available mediums (Television, like LSD is a drug whose influence cannot be underestimated). Unlike their “Greatest Generation” parents, who were content to be free from economic depression, the Boomers had grown up well-fed enough not to think twice about hungering for more.

On the margins of this cultural binary, we can see the Freudian life and death drives at work. For the dominant culture, a certain insecurity and paranoia formed from having it too good and the new suburban middle class could find a certain solace via a perpetual war for civilization against Communism, most notably in Vietnam. Similarly, fears of nuclear annihilation by intercontinental rockets could be alleviated through a “peaceful” space race that would allow us to use our collected technological powers to transcend our vulgar earthly conflicts (one that would find its apotheosis in Kubrick’s Space Odyssey).

Marshall McLuhan once commented that the style of the ‘hippie’ was something like a jester, a clown, mocking social norms of the time. I think that is true, but I also think there was something deeper going on.

The more eccentric revolutionary antics and aesthetics of 60’s counter culture should be seen as the internalized image of the dominant culture’s own displaced violence and loss of identity. In contrast to the shiny middleclass culture that had emerged at the end of World War II, the counterculture seemed to harken back to the American Transcendentalism of the 19th century, whether it knew it or not, and the pastoral frontiers of America’s earlier, “wilder” days. The “hippie” is both pseudo-Cowboy and pseudo-Indian simultaneously and in this folksy figure we see a Freudian return of the repressed, the ghosts of the conquered and colonized coming back to haunt the newly domesticated mega-middleclass.

In Jungian terms, the counterculture was America’s shadow, the repressed and forgotten elements of our culture, bubbling up and reasserting itself against an over-rationalized, disenchanted world of the immediate postwar era. The ‘California Dreaming’ and the westward pull of many artists and young people to the Golden State was perhaps an echo, a benevolent reenactment, of Manifest Destiny.

It is in this context, however, that we must view the era’s psychedelic experience — not as simply a counter movement to the dominant values but a kaleidoscopic reflection and reorganization of them; a synthesis of competing and contradictory urges emerging from the various machines (both real and imagined) of culture like a psychosomatic napalm inferno. In a word, it is useful to regard the ascendant “drug culture” of the 1960s as indicative of a deeper psychological dialectic, even a symbiosis of sorts, between “dominant” and “counter” culture(s).

This piece will explore a number of examples of the influence of this tension within and without the emerging psychedelic culture, focusing particularly on the influence of LSD, in 1960s music, literature, film, politics and religion in order to better illustrate the overall psychedelic gestalt (wholeness) of the generation’s consciousness, as well as its continued relevance.

2. A Genealogy of Acid

“It’s very, very dangerous to lose contact with living nature…”

- Albert Hoffman

Just how influential were mind altering substances on the emergence of the counterculture? According to scholar Nora Smith, “most of the aspects of the counterculture were based around the idea of taking drugs and the effects of drugs on the body, so without the emergence of a drug culture, the counterculture would have never occurred.” Even more provocatively, Authors Martin A. Lee and Bruce Shlain assert in their book Acid Dreams that electric rock music was itself psychedelic and that Bob Dylan’s transition from classic folk to “electric-that is to say, psychedelic-folk” was inspired due to his “mystic” drug experiences quoting one spectator who said of Dylan, “He was LSD on stage.”

If we are to trace the chemical genealogy of the 60s counterculture, however, we have to begin with the origins of Lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD aka Acid) itself as well its early high cultural enthusiasts are a far cry from the rainbow-clad populism it would go on to attain. LSD was famously (or perhaps infamously) discovered by a young Swiss chemist named Albert Hoffman by accident on November 16, 1938, after accidentally ingesting some of the substance known as “LSD-25” while working for a pharmaceutical-chemical company.

Hofmann began to recognize his altered state while riding home on a bike with a colleague when he recognized that he had “difficulty speaking” and upon arriving home began to fear that he was “losing his mind” in an experience of “coming up” that would later be popularly known as a bad trip.

However, as the night wore on, Hoffman recounts that the world’s first acid freakout became a pleasant, and decidedly spiritual, experience as he recounted that between a hallucinogenic stream of colorful and shape-shifting infinitudes he stated that: “..occasionally I felt as if I were out of my body. I thought I had died. My ‘ego’ was suspended somewhere in space and I saw my body lying dead on the sofa.” After finding himself alive and in perfect health the next morning, Hofmann decided that he had discovered something that he believed was life changing and ultimately benevolent. These events would fondly be remembered by psychedelic enthusiasts as “Bicycle Day.”

Hofmann recounts in his book LSD: My Problem Child, his 1961 meeting with Aldous Huxley, the famous British author of the Dystopian Brave New World and The Doors of Perception, a series of essays about religious experience via psychedelics (a study inspired by some of Huxley’s personal experimentation) in which Huxley had “redefined taking mescaline and LSD as a mystical religious experience.”

Huxley recounted to Hofmann some of his own experiments with LSD and other mind altering substances (which he refused to ever refer to as the pejorative “drugs”). The following year, released The Island, a utopian novel in which society used visionary drugs to achieve enlightenment rather than the oppressive “Soma” of Brave New World. It is more than likely that LSD was no small inspiration for the utopian psychedelics of Huxley’s fictional island society.

Shortly before Huxley died he wrote in a letter to Hofmann that “what must be developed — the art of giving out in love and intelligence what is taken in from vision and the experience of self-transcendence and solidarity with the Universe….” Hofmann certainly shared the utopian view of socially responsible use of psychedelics that Huxley held, and was ultimately disappointed with how his “problem” child would be used by the wider society. It is interesting, however, that the uses of LSD in its earlier conceptions had something of a techno-futurist, even elitist, air to them. LSD was seen as more of a sacrament for the wise, not a new product for the masses.

Unsurprisingly, LSD would come to the interest of certain governmental agencies, namely the C.I.A, for its potential value in espionage. Early experiments with LSD by the U.S and U.K governments “viewed LSD as a drug that emulated mental illness, producing hallucinations and anxiety.” The C.I.A’s notorious MKULTRA mind control experiments included dosing unsuspecting individuals with LSD. In one experiment conducted by British intelligence, 44 Royal Marines were given doses of LSD and asked to perform a simple set of tasks under the command of an uninhibited Commanding Officer. Unsurprisingly, the Officer is forced to give up the experiment entirely when marines descend into fits of laughter and tree-climbing. Similar experiments were conducted by the U.S with identical results.

In 1957, a former Marine and Police Officer named Wayne Ritche would be arrested after “losing his mind” and attempting to rob a San Francisco bar at gunpoint. As it would be revealed later, the CIA had “at least three safe houses in the Bay Area where experiments went on…” IE experiments that involved giving LSD to unsuspecting citizens.

The official reason for these experiments were because the government feared that “communist regimes, were using hallucinogens to induce confessions from prisoners of war held in Korea.” And LSD was just one of the CIA’s many attempts at creating a “truth serum.”

Ironically, in the next decade, San Francisco would become the center of more consensual psychedelic experiments. The psychologist Timothy Leary, like Hofmann and Huxley, regarded his own psychedelic experiences as something deeply spiritual, however, Leary would be much more of a proselytizer (though a questionable one) for the psychedelic experience. Leary and his associate Richard Alpert, under Aldous Huxley, led a series of experiments at Harvard University with psilocybin.

They even “hosted well-known figures including Allen Ginsberg, who participated in the tests.” Leary would be fired by Harvard for vague reasons (though more than likely due to their open advocacy for psychedelics). Following this, Leary took a more guerilla approach to his psychedelic experiments. He began producing LSD independently (the legality of which was still grey) and even claimed that he helped distribute over a million doses “released” in Haight-Ashbury, San Francisco. This would be the perfect location for starry eyed fans of psychedelically prone rock bands such as the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane.

Author Ken Kesey and his band “Merry Pranksters” also played a role in the spread of psychedelic culture. Kesey had first tried LSD in the “Menlo Park Experiments” in 1959. Unsurprisingly, the experiments at Menlo Park had been sponsored by the C.I.A. The acid fueled bus tours of Kesey and his Pranksters did attracted a lot of media attention, who portrayed the Pranksters and their drugs as dangerous. Of course, the “negative” attention only served to attract the young and rebellious even more.

Timothy Leary himself once said that “The LSD movement was started by the CIA.” There is a special irony in the role of paranoia in the spread of LSD. The C.I.A experimented with it for fear of it being used by Communists. The media then sensationalized fear of LSD which only attracted countercultural youth to use and abuse it who, in a sense, were also searching for a “truth serum,” And we can assume that those who did were likely only more suspicious of the government after doing so.

The relevant pattern in this genealogy is meant to show the trickle down (to borrow the dubious economic term) aspect of LSD’s history; from an startling accident to a movement and from a tool of inspiration (or control) of different elites to a utopian “liberator” of the youthful masses. The new perspectives that this unlikely mingling of dominant and counterculture would produce would rapidly find its way into new cultural aesthetics.

3. The Mind Altering Politics of Television

“Breakfast where the news is read

Television children fed

Unborn living, living, dead

Bullet strikes the helmet’s head”

-“Unknown Soldier” The Doors

It might seem peculiar at first to include television as being part of the psychedelic experience. In a number of ways, however, television is an experience that is not unlike how an LSD is commonly described. Television is a rapid succession of colors, shapes, images, feelings, and experiences that can either be euphoric or menacing. In the same way that Lee and Shlain noted the relationship between electric and psychedelic music, we can see a relationship between electric images and an LSD trip. Even Leary’s maxim: “Tune in. Turn on. Drop out.” has, at the very least, a cybernetic quality to it , and is a very telling analogy.

Further, there is an ironic aspect to television in the 1960s. On one hand, television is a great promoter of the atomic family, commercial advertisements, and the American way. However, Vietnam would prove to be the first “televised war” (Boomers were the first true T.V generation) and the very machine that could reliably promote conformist thinking began to inadvertently undermine it (at least for millions of young people) as the lines between an artificial positive reality were blurred in juxtaposition with the dark reality of war.

During World War II, depictions of dead American soldiers were strictly prohibited. It wasn’t until the last days of the war with Japan, when Roosevelt believed that American’s were celebrating too early, that footage of dead and wounded GIs was shown to the public. TV changed all of that. The was in Vietnam and its daily horrors were broadcast directly and daily into the homes of American citizens.

At the same time, scholar Elizabeth J. Burnette points out that coverage of Vietnam was an early example of the erosion of the line between fact and entertainment based News “creating the admixture ‘infotainment’’’ She further notes that because of the symbolic nature of television, the American military were often depicted to “represent the American soldier in the style of the western hero.”

We will return to this point later.

The relationship between psychedelia and television may continue to seem tenuous, until we consider that both the psychedelic culture and aspects of T.V culture in the mid-20th century had a peculiar but potentially informative precursor: The Influencing Machine. Victor Tausk, an early student of Freud, had studied a paranoid phenomena in many schizophrenic patients throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries who reported that were being “persecuted by ‘machines of a mystical nature,’ which supposedly work by means of radio waves, telepathy, x-rays, invisible wires, or other mysterious forces.” These machines and their workings could never be fully explained.

But they were said to project flat images into the the surroundings of their victims.The very term Influencing Machine could be a perfect synonym for T.V, and the transmorphic, almost demonesque, nature of its evil influences could directly be for someone having a bad trip at Woodstock. What is so remarkable about these phantom machines is that they seem to anticipate what would become normal routine for most people in the developed world in the 20th century.

In any case, while this view of T.V is speculative at best, it may prove useful in understanding some of the psychedelic cinema and literature of the era.

4. El Topo & 2001: A Space Odyssey as Psychedelic Americana

“If you are great, El Topo is a great picture. If you are limited, El Topo is limited.” - Alejandro Jodorowsky

Chilean born filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky’s 1970 film El Topo is a surrealist re-imagining of many of the Western film genre tropes. To give a basic summary, the film tells the story of a black-clad gunslinging cowboy (played by none other than Jodorowsky himself) who abandons his son early in the film to wander the desert in search of other mythical gunslingers for him to duel.

Through a series of ultra-violent blood soaked, bizarre, and often sexual, encounters, the cowboy defeats all four of the great master before he is “crucified” with bullets by his female companions. He is then taken by an “outcast” woman who brings him into a subterranean monastery populated by “outcasts”, where his hair turns white and he renounces his violent past and becomes a monk of sorts. Finally, his hair is shaved and he returns to the world, only to see a violent group of “cultists” that enjoy torturing and enslaving people for entertainment, attack the “outcasts”. After killing the mob in another bloody shootout, the reformed gunslinger commits suicide via self immolation.

According to scholar Adam Breckenridge “Jodorowsky is also working to undermine the ideology of countercultural convictions as thoroughly as they worked to undermine the convictions of mainstream culture.” Breckenridge feels that El Topo is an intention mashup of conflicting cultural images (cowboy & monk, for example) without “committing” to any one theme because “Jodorowsky wants to force us to confront the difficulty and even outright futility of achieving spiritual fulfillment in our lives.”

However, it should be noted that El Topo could be seen as a very clear metaphor re-birth through violence, or at least its internalization. The black clad gunfighter of the film could be seen as having all the qualities of a American violence, particularly in Vietnam. When this violence inevitably fails to bring glory or enlightenment, the gunslinger burrows into the earth like a mole.

Upon emerging, he is forced to pay a final karmic debt by watching and avenging the slaughter of the innocents by evil cultists (whose decadence and cruelty could easily represent Americans or westerners), before taking the violence upon himself via immolation (or the “light”*)- a clear homage to similar acts of protest in response to war. In other words, the “chaos” of El Topo is because the film turns the “admixture” of the violence of Vietnam and the spiritual longings of the counterculture into a mythical archetypal film.

In many ways, Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey shares some interesting similarities. Both films depict a spiritual quest of sorts that turns violent. Both films include a psychedelic “rebirth” of sorts at the end of said journey. Both films place pop-cultural American archetypes within a mystical/psychedelic framework. The cowboy and the astronaut, one from the American past and one from the American present-future. One is absorbed into the subterranean monastery to reemerge and transcend via fiery suicide and one is absorbed into a transcendent “gate” of flashing lights and colors to be cosmically reborn via a transdimensional mansion, respectively .

Perhaps most interestingly though, the rogue computer HAL and its conflict with the central protagonist Dave corresponds neatly to the concept of the nefarious Influencing Machine mentioned earlier and one could see the imposing black obelisks in the film as metaphors for the empty or black screen of a television or movie theater screen.

El Topo means “The Mole” in English and the opening of the film titles reminds us that the mole “always digs towards the light.”

5. Synthesis, Semi-Actualized Realities, & Afterthoughts

“If I knew what a hallucination was I would know what reality was.”

- Philip K. Dick

In 1977, the popular science fiction author Philip K. Dick called a press conference to announce a “discovery.” Throughout the 50’s and 60’s Philip K. Dick had written novels that dealt with the transient and often illusory nature of reality. His Hugo-Award-Winning Man In The High Castle, which depicted an alternate 1960s America in which the Axis Powers had won World War 2, dealt heavily with such subjects. His Novel Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said told the story of a dystopian U.S in which the forces of counter cultural and dominant culture had fought a civil war of sorts, leading to a hyper-oppressive state in which people sought to escape reality via psychedelic drugs and television-like computer simulations. That latter was a novel whose “reality” was not too far from the one Dick and his generation actually lived.

In the press conference, Dick asserts that his obsession and “preoccupation with pluriform pseudo-worlds,” was no mere artistic license or creative speculation on his part but in fact, stemmed from a “manifold of partially actualized realities.” Dick goes on to describe that while he was under the influence of sodium pentothal after a dental appointment, he was struck with a “pink light” of pure information in which he experienced “recovered memories” of his time as a persecuted Christian ancient Rome, during the early days of the Church. Dick would eventually fictionalize these “autobiographical” events in his novel VALIS.

According to Dick, VALIS (Vast Active Living Intelligence System) was a system that transmitted spiritual knowledge or the pure “logos” directly into his mind. Again, we see the psychedelic rebirth of the 19th century “Influencing Machine.” Philip K Dick would die of a heart attack in 1980 shortly after completing the third book in his VALIS trilogy. Dick, like Kerouac, had been an avid user of Benzos and other stimulants, as well as a heavy user of many mind-altering substances including LSD.

In many ways, Dick represented both the highest and most creative artists of his generation’s psychedelic bend as well as many of its darker and more tragic elements. Dick’s experimentation with various substances in order to create some of the most lauded science fiction novels of the 20th century was very much in keeping with the high-minded ideals of Hofmann and Huxley. However, his descent into madness, paranoia, and ultimately death is also indicative of what cost those Icarian heights could force psychonauts like himself to pay.

In a similar vein, John Brunner’s futuristic novel Stand On Zanzibar, written in 1968, depicted a future world in which psychedelic drugs such as “Skull-Bustium” are legal and sold over-the-counter, a perpetual war in the “Pacific Conflict Zone” constantly loomed over the heads of young men who feared the draft, and a computer entertainment communication device called “Scanalyzer” was all the object of consumerist desires.

One could say that Brunner merely projected the social tensions and trends of his time into the future, but can we really say he was wrong?

Indeed, it is hard not to imagine that both Dick and Brunner were in-tune with the semi-actualized realities of the present. The modern world is yielding its own Millennial Gestalt. Young Libertarians of the 60’s would have been avid supporters of Barry Goldwater, now they fight to legalize Marijuana, and all its increasingly creative and potent offshoots, in States across America. Young people today are absorbed by their respective “Scanalyzers” from which they watch various “conflict zones” from around the world.

It is for these reasons that retracing the difficult fractal paths of past generations’ experiences with such potent substances and powerful imagery is now more important than ever. The great specter of “semi-actualized realities” that lurk somewhere between our subconscious imaginations and historical destinations, as good or bad “trips”, will be fully actualized by our choices alone.

Sources Cited

1. Smith, Nora. “LSD and the American Counterculture .” The Chico Historian 26 (2016): n. pag. Web.

2. Acid dreams: the complete social history of LSD, the CIA, the sixties and beyond Martin A.Lee — Bruce Shlain — Pan — 2001

3. Hooper, Troy. “Operation Midnight Climax: How the CIA Dosed S.F. Citizens with LSD.” SF Weekly. SF Weekly, 23 Mar. 2017. Web. 24 Mar. 2017.

4. Burnette, Elizabeth J. “Vietnam.” Vietnam. N.p., n.d. Web. 24 Mar. 2017.

5. Turner, Christopher. “The Influencing Machine.” Cabinet Summer 2004: n. pag. Print.

6. Hofmann, Albert, and Albert Hofmann. LSD, my problem child ; and, Insights/outlooks. Oxford: Beckley Foundation Press, 2013. Print. Chapter 8. Meeting with Aldous Huxley

7. Breckenridge, Adam. “A Path Less Traveled: Rethinking 8.Spirituality in the Films of Alejandro Jodorowsky.” Journal of Religion & Film (2015): n. pag. Web.

9. Theduderinok2. “Did Philip K. Dick disclose the real Matrix in 1977?” YouTube. YouTube, 26 June 2010. Web. 24 Mar. 2017.

10. Brunner, John. Stand on Zanzibar. London: Gollancz, 2014. Print.

Originally published at https://www.schizotopia.net on June 16, 2020.