Read Online Season of the Witch : How the Occult Saved Rock and Roll (9780698143722) by Peter Bebergal - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Peter Bebergal
Ads: Link
âChapter 24,â taken almost word for word from the popular
I Ching
translation by Richard Wilhelm and Cary F. Baynes, first published in 1950. The twenty-fourth hexagram,
fu
, is eerily prescient as it âcounsels turning away from the confusion of external things, turning back to oneâs inner light. There, in the depths of the soul, one sees the Divine, the One.â Whether it was intentional or not, in âChapter 24â Barrett expressed not only his own spiritual desires, but the yearningof an entire generation that was coming of age listening to Pink Floyd.
The Piper at the Gates of Dawn
is filled with its own internal spiritual anxiety, mixing pagan folk images with Eastern mysticism. This would characterize much of the 1960sâ otherworldly desire, which borrowed from everything that was even vaguely non-Christian and out of tune with mainstream religious mores. Nevertheless, there is a single spark in both pagan magic and Eastern theology with which the counterculture could build a fire that would burn for generations and would feed the New Age movement and almost every subsequent contemporary alternative religious community. Barrettâs writing of âChapter 24â was even more prophetic than he could have imagined. The twenty-fourth hexagram of the
I Ching
,
fu
, which inspired his song, is the hexagram of self-knowledge and individuality, of not giving in to the temptation of the crowd, but recognizing the unity of all things: âTo know this One means to know oneself in relation to the cosmic forces.â
The
Piper at the Gates of Dawn
is the dream of one man, made audible through a group consciousness. And for much of the counterculture that identified with this dream, LSD was the method to attain it.
Barrettâs own intense turn toward LSD as a path was congruent with the times. The table had been set for a mystical communion to be given on the tongue as a hit of acid. By 1967, mystical consciousness and psychedelic drugs had become synonymous. LSD and other hallucinogenic drug experiences seamlessly aligned with occult and Eastern religious imagery and ideas. The feeling of ego dissolution, for example, corresponds nicely to the Buddhist notion of ego transcendence. A sense ofunity or âbecoming one with the universeââa common phenomenon for those who have had a psychedelic experienceâis akin to pantheism, where God is believed to be in all things, and all things are in God. None of this is to suggest that the LSD trip somehow communicates special spiritual knowledge. But the acid experience can be overwhelming, and Eastern mysticism and occultism are well suited to make sense of an otherwise inexplicable occurrence.
This sacred marriage between LSD and the East was beautifully, if not artificially, realized in the 1966 book andâas perfectly suited to the timeâcompanion record,
The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead
, by Timothy Leary, Ralph Metzner, and Richard Alpert (later known as Ram Dass). The authors had their work cut out for them. They had to make two simultaneous, possibly opposing, claims: first that the psychedelic experience is remarkably similar to the classical mystical experience as described by Eastern traditions, and second that LSD can take the place of rigorous religious discipline to achieve the mystical state of consciousness. This idea was first elevated to the popular consciousness by Aldous Huxley in his 1954 book,
The Doors of Perception
, a canonical text during the 1960s. Huxley, who had once been a devotee of the Hindu philosophical system known as Vedanta and wrote forcefully against attempts to circumvent rigorous spiritual discipline to attain a union with the divine, took a little less than half a gram of mescalineâthe psychoactive substance found in the peyote cactusâand had a change of heart. Huxley came to believe psychedelic drugs could bypass the need for
I Ching
translation by Richard Wilhelm and Cary F. Baynes, first published in 1950. The twenty-fourth hexagram,
fu
, is eerily prescient as it âcounsels turning away from the confusion of external things, turning back to oneâs inner light. There, in the depths of the soul, one sees the Divine, the One.â Whether it was intentional or not, in âChapter 24â Barrett expressed not only his own spiritual desires, but the yearningof an entire generation that was coming of age listening to Pink Floyd.
The Piper at the Gates of Dawn
is filled with its own internal spiritual anxiety, mixing pagan folk images with Eastern mysticism. This would characterize much of the 1960sâ otherworldly desire, which borrowed from everything that was even vaguely non-Christian and out of tune with mainstream religious mores. Nevertheless, there is a single spark in both pagan magic and Eastern theology with which the counterculture could build a fire that would burn for generations and would feed the New Age movement and almost every subsequent contemporary alternative religious community. Barrettâs writing of âChapter 24â was even more prophetic than he could have imagined. The twenty-fourth hexagram of the
I Ching
,
fu
, which inspired his song, is the hexagram of self-knowledge and individuality, of not giving in to the temptation of the crowd, but recognizing the unity of all things: âTo know this One means to know oneself in relation to the cosmic forces.â
The
Piper at the Gates of Dawn
is the dream of one man, made audible through a group consciousness. And for much of the counterculture that identified with this dream, LSD was the method to attain it.
Barrettâs own intense turn toward LSD as a path was congruent with the times. The table had been set for a mystical communion to be given on the tongue as a hit of acid. By 1967, mystical consciousness and psychedelic drugs had become synonymous. LSD and other hallucinogenic drug experiences seamlessly aligned with occult and Eastern religious imagery and ideas. The feeling of ego dissolution, for example, corresponds nicely to the Buddhist notion of ego transcendence. A sense ofunity or âbecoming one with the universeââa common phenomenon for those who have had a psychedelic experienceâis akin to pantheism, where God is believed to be in all things, and all things are in God. None of this is to suggest that the LSD trip somehow communicates special spiritual knowledge. But the acid experience can be overwhelming, and Eastern mysticism and occultism are well suited to make sense of an otherwise inexplicable occurrence.
This sacred marriage between LSD and the East was beautifully, if not artificially, realized in the 1966 book andâas perfectly suited to the timeâcompanion record,
The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead
, by Timothy Leary, Ralph Metzner, and Richard Alpert (later known as Ram Dass). The authors had their work cut out for them. They had to make two simultaneous, possibly opposing, claims: first that the psychedelic experience is remarkably similar to the classical mystical experience as described by Eastern traditions, and second that LSD can take the place of rigorous religious discipline to achieve the mystical state of consciousness. This idea was first elevated to the popular consciousness by Aldous Huxley in his 1954 book,
The Doors of Perception
, a canonical text during the 1960s. Huxley, who had once been a devotee of the Hindu philosophical system known as Vedanta and wrote forcefully against attempts to circumvent rigorous spiritual discipline to attain a union with the divine, took a little less than half a gram of mescalineâthe psychoactive substance found in the peyote cactusâand had a change of heart. Huxley came to believe psychedelic drugs could bypass the need for
Similar Books
