These are a few little spin-offs from recent posts... 

Part One: Anyone For Jargon? 

Sex, drugs, and rock 'n roll. Sound familiar? It's a bit of a cliche, isn't it? In fact, pretty banal and grotesque. It bears similarity with another wordbite from the same layer of human history: 'the Swinging Sixties'. Had you asked my father whether his sixties were very swinging, you might have got an interesting answer...

These little catchphrases are the slightly less toxic relatives of expressions used to vilify and demonise. Examples: 'sexist', used to insult anyone who dares suggest that unisex toilets for kids at school might not be such a good idea; 'climate denier', a person who points out that windfarms are inefficient, unreliable, chop up birds and destroy landscapes; 'conspiracy theorist', anybody who puts forward the possibility that what goes on is not necessarily and always what the BBC says; and 'anti-vaxxer', the latest scourge, those misfits who are reluctant to get not-yet-properly-tested new kinds of substance pumped into their bodies at regular intervals.

These -ists and -ers are intended to ridicule, dismiss, and destroy points of view without actually addressing them. It is ad hominem attack. The function of 'sex, drugs.. etc' is more to simplify, to trivialise, to demean. Applying 'sex, drugs, and rock'n roll' to the countercultures of the 1960s and 70s is to reduce them to a simplistic formula, easily comprehended by the general population within the tiny box of their own frame of reference. "Got it. Now, what's for lunch?"  All the while forgetting that those people were stepping out of conventional society with the safety nets and (false) security it provided, risking many things in so doing.

What about sex and drugs and rock and roll in the British counterculture of the '70s anyway? How does it stand up?

Rock music, undoubtedly. There in abundance. Nearly everyone participated to some degree or another. Such music could still claim (just) to represent one part of an alternative way  of living, and it developed in leaps and bounds until 1975/76, when it was miraculously switched off (another story......).

Drugs? Some did, some didn't. Psychedelics were a hallmark, but in truth it was a minority that turned-on big time. There was also a smattering of other more clearly destructive substances around. The majority of folk majored on the old faithfuls of alcohol and marijuana.

And what about sex? Was it all one big, long party, an orgy that the last of the Roman Emperors would have envied? If I consider the period of the 'life story' focus, 1970s, for sure there were more people having more sex with more partners than, say, the 1950s. Mind you, that's not saying a lot.

In my little corner of personal experience, the counterculture of southern England, there remained a considerable protestant/puritan influence on proceedings. Most participants came from such a background, and it showed in a certain sexual reticence; a sense, maybe, that the world of the senses was not very spiritual. On top of that was the overall realisation that the 'free love' ethos of a few years back was not as simple as its proponents had led us to believe. There's no such thing as a free lunch, and jealousy, betrayal, unanticipated love and attachments, were all frequent companions of the life of free love and open relationships.

The only one of my personal friends who at all fitted the bill was Lawrence, from my Black and Decker days. He was a good-looking guy, and easily turned on the charm. For the rest, you'd probably find more sex on the college campus or a week of sun, sex, and booze on the Costa del Sol

There's a story about Timothy Leary. It's 1966; he's left/been thrown out of Harvard, and had washed up in upstate New York, in a large country residence called Millbrook. Along with his fellow psychonauts he ran weekends, courses, and housed a resident community, the sort you might expect.

The authorities were desperate to get Leary. He was leading American youth astray, from the straight and narrow of orthodox unquestioning matrix life. The question was: how?

The psychedelics were bad enough. But, to add real spice to the scandals, word began to go around that the corruption of youth didn't end there. Sex was on the menu at Millbrook as well as the LSD. 'Up at Millbrook, it was rumoured, "The panties are dropping faster than the LSD". Something sure had to be done.

Ex-FBI agent Liddy and a bunch of deputies hid out one evening in the forest, waiting for the lights to go out and to spring a raid. But the lights at Millbrook stayed on. Closer inspection revealed a projector's blue flickering light, and it could only mean one thing: the residents were watching a porn movie and engaging in one of their infamous sex orgies.

One lucky cop was elected to go reconnoitre. He was in for a real naughty feast. He returned in a few minutes with bad news. "It ain't no dirty movie. You'll never guess what them hippies are watching. A waterfall. It goes on and on and nothing ever happens but the water.... I figured there'd be, you know, broads jumping in and out of the water or something."

Sex, drugs, rock'n roll: maybe it's a wish fulfilment fantasy, created by the indignant who just aren't getting enough....

Part Two: Timothy Leary's Acid Trip

He still had a lot going for himself in autumn (fall) of 1961. Timothy Leary of the Harvard Psychological Dept; author of cutting edge books on transactional psychology, charismatic lecturer on consciousness, and in more recent times instigator of the psilocybin project, determining the effects of the psychedelic on the minds and lives of volunteers in carefully-controlled conditions. The project engendered its share of controversy, but the academic future of the goodly prof remained bright. Then Michael Hollingshead came bounding down the stairs with his mayonnaise jar full of sugar paste laced with LSD, and things were never the same again.

It's worth quoting from Tim's 'trip report':

"It took about a half-hour to hit. And it came sudden and irresistible. An endless deep swampy marsh on some other planet teeming and steaming with energy and life..... Tumbling and spinning down the soft fibrous avenues to some central point which was just light.... It was the centre of life. A burning, dazzling, throbbing radiant core, pure pulsing, exulting light. An endless flame that contained everything..... the hard eye of God."

Leary is good at writing about these things. A little later, he decides to check up on his children, who are upstairs. 

"Susan was sitting in bed, the classic thirteen year old... frowning in concentration at the school book in her lap, while rock and roll music blasted through the room.... The puppet doll teenager glanced up. Hi, Dad. She was biting a pencil and looking at the book. I slumped against the wall, looking with amazement at this marionette stranger, from assembly-line America. She glanced up again, quickly. Hi, Dad, what would you like for Christmas?..... In a minute she looked up again. Hi, Dad, I love you..."

Leary continues:

"A shock of terror convulsed me. This was my daughter, and this was the father-daughter game. A shallow, superficial, stereotyped, meaningless exchange of Hi, Dad, Hi Sue... What do you want for Christmas? Have you done your homework? The plastic doll father and the plastic doll daughter.... A complete vulgarization of the real situation - two incredibly complex, trillion-cell clusters, rooted in an eternity of evolution..... offered this rare chance to merge souls and bring out the divinity in the other, but desiccated and deadened into the Hi Dad Hi Susan squeaks."                

For Leary: doubly devastating. His wife committed suicide six years before, and Tim had been the sole guardian of his two kids ever since. Probably not the perfect father, but doing his level best. And now, seeing the terrifying reality. Seeing the father- daughter game - his father-daughter game ; the puppet doll world; expressions of conditioned existence (Buddhism), or the simulation, the matrix. It was shattering.

"My previous sessions with psilocybin had opened me up to the sensory levels of consciousness... But LSD was something different. Michael's heaping spoonful had flipped consciousness out beyond life into the whirling dance of pure energy, where nothing existed except whirring vibrations, and each illusory form was simply a different frequency."

Timothy Leary's life was never the same again. It was, he said, the most shattering experience he had ever had. Once woken to the real nature of matrix existence - the simulation that we take for real - there is no unlearning, there can be no going back. "From the date of this session it was inevitable that we would leave Harvard, that we would leave American society, and that we would spend the rest of our lives as mutants, faithfully following the instructions of our internal blueprints, and tenderly, gently disregarding the parochial social insanities."

And thus 'turn on, tune in, drop out' was born.

Part Three: Being Human  

I'm always going on about this stuff; always using the words. 'Human', 'humans'; human beings, humanity; inhuman. It has also become increasingly common for me to utter things like 'these people are not humans at all', or 'he is no longer human'. A couple of days ago, the question suddenly came to me: 'What the hell are you going on about?'

As a consequence, I wonder whether it might be more helpful to simply jettison the 'human' concept altogether. For now, at least. Since concept is what 'human' is, nothing more.

One of the more out-there statements made on several of the videos on Cosmic Agency is that the human race on planet Earth is not actually homogeneous at all. Instead, it is a conglomerate of visitors from all over the place. All manner of ET races are here, pretending to be 'humans'. They are here for a variety of reasons: benevolent, curious; controlling and destructive, or merely to experience what life is like on a 3D matrix prison planet. Such a variety of energies and intentions goes far in creating the chaotic mess that is 'humanity' these days.

Whether or not we choose to take all this literally, the notion that the human body is simply a 'bio-suit' donned for a variety of purposes would explain an awful lot. 'Humanity' is indeed a mixed bag of the good, the bad, and the ugly. The appearance of 'sameness' is erroneous. 

Following from this is the observation that any idea of 'being human', or 'acting in a human way' beggars many questions. What it means to be human depends entirely upon personal perspective. The phrase 'being human' turns out to be nonsense.

I decided to do away with the notion of humanity. Instead, I would view whatever happens between these upright-standing creatures with two arms and two legs as a matter of frequency, nothing more. A whole pandora's box of different frequency beings have come together; some have very little in common with others, and can truly be considered as different races or species.

It is not primarily a question of species, but, following Timothy Leary: consciousness is a whirling dance of pure energy, where nothing exists except whirring vibrations, and each illusory form is simply a different frequency.

In other words, don't pay too much attention to whether you just so happen to have turned up as a human being or not this time round. The real theatre is life and energy in all its forms. The battle between good and evil, between truth and falsehood, is not merely on the field of human affairs. It encompasses all life, whatever form it should appear in at the moment.

Identifying too seriously with being human is placing a limitation upon oneself that is hardly needed. Seeing all as simply different energy, different frequency, regardless of whether I see it in a human bio-suit or not, has loosened up my view, and removed restrictions that I didn't realise were there. Give it a try; I recommend it.    

References: The story about Millbrook is related in 'Storming Heaven' by Jay Stevens. This is a well-written and, for me, very fascinating book focussed on the USA, outlining psychedelic history. 

Tim Leary's trip is described in greatest detail in his book 'High Priest'. A better general read is Tim's autobiography 'Flashbacks'. This book is highly revealing as to the (more) real Leary, outside the stereotypes and prejudicial views. Along with 'Storming Heaven' it is something of a gem. 

Images: Top: Millbrook Estate

              Centre: Timothy Leary

               Bottom: See? 'Being human' is a nonsense....