Psychedelic Revisionism, as evidenced most recently in the spate of publicity about Michael Pollan’s new book and in interviews with him about it, says that if only Timothy Leary, who was, after all, just “a washed-up psychology professor,” had kept quiet, we would all now be enjoying legal access to psychedelics in controlled studies, wearing eyeshades and headphones, listening to “a very carefully curated playlist” (retch!), having diminished activity in a “very important brain network called the default mode network” because the psychedelic substances “take this network offline,” and then filling out surveys so that scientists can “crunch the data” to find that “a very important personality trait that psychologists call openness” has increased in us— “a very unusual finding.”
Enough with the eyeshades and headphones already! Opening your eyes and looking at the amazing world is not going to turn your trip into an external experience. Choose your own music if you want to listen to music. Don’t spend all your time listening to music anyway, unless you want to.
And enough with the scientistic bs and with seeking respectability in the eyes of people who think everything can and should be kept under control! Psychedelic experience shows that some of the things you care about most—your mortality or immortality, whether or not you love and are loved, your suffering and the suffering of those you love—are not and never will be under your control, and that it is a good and joyful thing that that is the way it is. This is religion, not science. Aldous Huxley got that right in the first place.
To scientists, people are objects to be studied. Psychedelic experience causes some interesting observable effects in those objects, but it is the experience itself, from the point of view of the subject of the experience, that is the realization that everything is fundamentally all right.
It isn’t Timothy Leary’s fault that LSD and other psychedelics are illegal. It’s the fault of those who have the power to make them illegal or to repeal those laws. Since we live in a democracy, that is supposed to be all of us. Timothy Leary expected that when enough people had experienced psychedelics, the very thought of making them illegal would be laughable. His mistake was in believing that that would happen right away. And he wasn’t always scrupulously honest in trying to bring it about. And he was a publicity hog. But he was right about the importance and the value of psychedelic experience. And he was right that it blows the lid off the pretensions of polite society, academia, and institutionalized “science.”
I wish Michael Pollan well. I wish MAPS, the Beckley Foundation, and similar groups well. I think their hearts are sort of in the right place. They just don’t seem very stoned.