It was the end of the world as they knew it. It was the Age of Unreason. Works of pop art like the Campbell’s soup can by Andy Warhol, the Impossible Art of Ralph Ortiz killing chickens,and Dennis Oppenheims, “Cyclonic Extensions” virtually rivaling the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel and other classic works. Anti-Art and anti-Reason. The young had always been anarchic and rebellious, the the 1960′s generation, was unique in rejecting not only the official lifestyle of its elders, but rational thought itself. Great Buddha, could they have been right?:
""For most people," Owsley says, "the proper dose is about 150 to 200 micrograms. When you get to 400, you just totally lose it. I don't care who you are. Kesey liked 400. He wanted to lose it." Thanks to Owsley, the Pranksters now had enough LSD on hand to begin throwing parties at which everyone could get a dose. Kesey and the Pranksters called these gatherings the Acid Tests, a series of mind-blowing events at which people tripping on LSD were exposed to flashing strobe lights, tape loops and sometimes — if the band was not too stoned — even a set by the Grateful Dead. On December 11th, 1965, the Dead played at the Muir Beach Acid Test in a lodge by the sea in Marin County. The sound of Jerry Garcia's guitar grabbed hold of Owsley, and he freaked out on acid for the first time. " Read More: http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/news/owsley-stanley-the-king-of-lsd-20110314?page=3 image:http://www.britannica.com/psychedelic/photohtml/opsyroc087p1.html
“Moreover, during the past decade of discord and discontent we have witnessed a movement away from reason and toward mysticism, which appears to be nourished in an ambience of mistrust of authority figures and of the establishment. One is aware of this in attitudes toward government, the law, the church, and education, as well as toward medicine. That the best educated and most sophisticated generation of young Americans in history should be seriously interested in astrology, palmistry, numerology, and even witchcraft is certainly an enigma or major paradox of our time. It is as if George Bernard Shaw’s caution, “Every profession is a conspiracy against society,” had been taken seriously.(John Romano) Read More: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1807408/pdf/bullnyacadmed00145-0031.pdf
Owsley Stanley. 1998: Well, it seems he did, and he kept after me. Each time I’d get a little more explicit, but he just kept coming back. I said, basically, what it boiled down to was that I didn’t think that Tim Leary was a hero. Not a hero to me, anyway. In fact, if I were going to be real precise about what I think, I think Tim Leary was probably the worst thing that ever happened to the psychedelic movement. He made everything difficult for all of us; he wouldn’t listen to any of us who tried to tell him to back off a bit. He was most probably primarily responsible for all the draconian laws we have today on the use of psychedelics and other mind-altering things. I said that as far as I was concerned, I never felt Tim Leary showed me who he was. He seemed to be always playing some role or game or something, or hiding behind some mask, and I just didn’t know who he was. So how can I tell you who he was? He never let me know who he was. Basically, I didn’t want to speak badly to the guy, because I always liked him. I always tried real hard to find some route so that I could actually have a heart-to-heart communication with him. Read More: http://www.bruceeisner.com/writings/2004/08/interview_with__2.html
Oh, and as I watched him on the stage
My hands were clenched in fists of rage
No angel born in hell
Could break that Satan’s spell
And as the flames climbed high into the night
To light the sacrificial rite
I saw Satan laughing with delight
The day the music died ( Don Mclean, American Pie)
“Tune in, turn on and drop out”. Owsley Stanley provided the means to do the turn on part. Stanley, who died at age seventy-six last Sunday, produced millions of doses of LSD which received world wide attention in the 1967 Summer of Love in San Francisco and spread around the world….Paradoxically, the Americans who had chosen illogic as a way of life, used the classic process of reasoning to arrive at a rationale for their unreason. If reason had led men to create nuclear weapons and to fight wars, they had argued that reason itself is suspect, leaving only the alternative of unreason. If Hitler and Stalin were sane, they would prefer not to be. Besides, the reasoning went, if everyone is so close to death, if the bombs are certain to fall eventually, then life itself is purposeless, and what reason is there in reason. And, substituting the plague for the bomb, this is exactly how the sixteenth-century Europeans felt.
“By May 1965, he was back in the Bay Area with 3,600 capsules of extraordinarily pure LSD, dubbed “Owsley” by a pot-dealing folk guitarist friend. “I never set out to ‘turn on the world,’ as has been claimed by many,” Owsley says. “And I certainly never made $1 million from drugs. I just wanted to know the dose and purity of what I took into my own body. Almost before I realized what was happening, the whole affair had gotten completely out of hand. I was riding a magic stallion. A Pegasus. I was not responsible for his wings, but they did carry me to all kinds of places.”…
"The Grateful Dead got their start as the "house band" for the Merry Pranksters' acid tests. "The Merry Pranksters" derived their name from a group of medeival satanists called the Merry pranksters. The motto of the modern-day merry pranksters was "Never trust a Prankster!". The Pranksters membership included LSD kingpin Owsley Stanley, British Intelligence agent and Whole Earth Catalog founder Stewart Brand, child-rapist Allen Ginsburg, and "Mountain Girl" aka Mrs. Jerry Garcia. The Pranksters were also great "friends" with everyone's favorite guys, The Hell's Angels. In other words, the freemason hell's angels were the "security" for the pranksters at their acid tests." Read More: http://www.shroomery.org/forums/showflat.php/Number/1467277
Throughout the summer of 1965, in a big house down in La Honda, about forty miles south of San Francisco, Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters hosted wild parties with guests that included Hunter S. Thompson, Neal Cassady, Allen Ginsberg and various Hell’s Angels. When Owsley showed up one day during the fall, he walked over to Kesey and handed him a couple of hits of acid. Because Kesey had his own source (a Prankster known as “John the Chemist”) and was suspicious of newcomers, he did not seem all that interested in the gift. After sampling it, he changed his mind.” Read More: http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/news/owsley-stanley-the-king-of-lsd-20110314?page=3
In a book published at the end of the 1960′s, Future Shock, Alvin Toffler suggested that those who joined the flight from reason suffered from a previously unknown form of physical and mental illness brought on by rapid incessant rapid change and by the ceadeless bombardment of everyone’s senses with television, radio, newspapers, magazines, books, movies etc.; a never-ending mixed media show in which one is inescapably trapped. There were, said Toffler, a great number of people who could simply not stand up to this pressure. The victim of future shock, he observed, is a person who has broken down under an overload of information like a soldier who has cracked after being under fire too long.
Owsley Stanley:Well, I knew people in the ‘60s that were in the scene I fell into around 1958 or ‘59. I knew people who used pot and peyote, and I just wasn’t interested.
Toffler reasoned, that those under thirty, the first generation to have grown up in Marshall McLuhan’s “electric age” seemed more than any other group to be showing the strain, perhaps they had never known anything in their lives but the relentless pressure of a supertechnological society. If the flight from reason was viewed with alarm from Toffler, the bombardment of the senses has not relented in our present age, with technology being the removed lid on repression and maybe Owsley’s LSD was a repressant and a depressant.
Man, said Konrad Lorenz in his “On Aggression” of 1966, is primarily an irrational creature, violent, hostile and aggressive, and in joining the flight from reason, he was not running away from his essential self but, unhappily, toward it. When we behave irrationally, and violently, Lorenz suggested, it is the fault of the beast within us, in whom, when the pressures are on, instinct rules over reason. And, it seems there is nothing we can do to change these instincts. The conclusion being we must change our environment by changing overpopulation which is a polite way of saying Lorenz was being an apologist for war, murder and madness, absolving man of guilt for aggressive and irrational behavior. The kind of psychological baggage that helped land him a Nobel Prize.
ADDENDUM:
Running out a side door during his freakout, Owsley leaped into his car, gunned the engine and promptly ran into a ditch. When he finally returned to his physical body and found it mostly intact, Owsley was horrified by the way Kesey and the Pranksters were messing with people’s minds. “Kesey was playing with something he did not understand,” Owsley says. “I said to him, ‘You guys are fucking around with something that people have known about forever. It’s sometimes called witchcraft, and it’s extremely dangerous. You’re dealing with part of the unconscious mind that they used to define as angels and devils. You have to be very careful, because there are all these warnings. All the occult literature about ceremonial magic warns about being very careful when you start exploring these areas in the mind.’ And they laughed at me.”…
Three weeks later, on January 8th, 1966, Owsley sashayed into the Fillmore Auditorium in San Francisco for another Acid Test. Barely recognizing him as the freaked-out dude from Muir Beach, Lesh would later write that Owsley looked like "some Robin Hood figure out of swashbuckling antiquity." By then, Lesh, like so many others in the burgeoning Bay Area scene, had been tripping on Owsley's product for more than a year. "So you're Owsley," Lesh said. "I feel as if I've known you through many lifetimes." "You have," Owsley replied, "and you will through many more to come." Read More: http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/news/owsley-stanley-the-king-of-lsd-20110314?page=3 image: http://thewalrusspeaks.blogspot.com/2011/01/grateful-dead-monkey-and-engineer.html
Even as he was freaking out that night, Owsley experienced the single insight that would shape his life for years to come. The Grateful Dead were not just good — they were “magic personified.” Read More: http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/news/owsley-stanley-the-king-of-lsd-20110314?page=3
Read More: http://www.sensesofcinema.com/2004/cteq/grateful_dead/
In 1967, Owsley unleashed on the Haight a particularly nasty hallucinogen known as STP. Developed by the friendly folks at Dow Chemical, STP had been tested extensively at the Edgewood Arsenal as a possible biowarfare agent before being distributed to hippies as a recreational drug. Owsley reportedly obtained the recipe from Alexander Shulgin, a former Harvard man who developed a keen interest in psychopharmacology while serving in the U.S. Navy. Shulgin worked for many years as a senior research chemist at Dow, and later worked very closely with the DEA.Read More: http://battleofearth.wordpress.com/2009/04/26/inside-the-lc-the-strange-but-mostly-true-story-of-laurel-canyon-and-the-birth-of-the-hippie-generation-part-xiv/
ADDENDUM:
Read More: http://www.shroomery.org/forums/showflat.php/Number/1467277 In case it’s not already clear, the Grateful Dead, Owsley Stanley, and the Merry Pranksters were THE most important distributors and promoters of the CIA mind control drug LSD. These people did more than ANYBODY to manufacture, promote and distribute LSD. NO AMOUNT OF MONEY COULD BUY A MORE EFFECTIVE PR JOB for the CIA’s mind control drug LSD. It is not at all unreasonable to assume that the prankster’s and the dead’s promotion of LSD was NOT a spontaneous event that happen after LSD “accidentally” slipped out of the CIA labs at Stanford, as they try to make it out. The dead and their writers always try to make it look like LSD just “accidentally” got out of the army research labs at Stanford. It looks a helluva lot more like it was INTENTIONALLY released by the government masons, using Kesey, the Dead, and Owsley Stanley to hype and distribute this drug. Owsley Stanley was the greatest LSD manufacturer of all time. He is directly responsible for ALL of the LSD used at Kesey’s tests, and for the LSD that was distributed widely. He views LSD as a sacrament. You can read about his ideas on LSD here: thebear.org/essays.html#anchor430693
"Despite being busted numerous times for drugs including cocaine, marijuana, heroin, and HUMONGOUS quantities of LSD, none of the band members ever seems to have done any real jail time. I know of many people with no prior record who were busted with as little as a seed or a joint of marijuana who did jail time. Is the Grateful Dead's "outlaw" persona simply a phony masonic con job? Despite being busted in 1969 with HUMONGOUS quantities of drugs, the Dead not only did NO JAIL TIME WHATSOEVER, but were able to travel freely out of the country for their famous 1972 European tour. 4) The Grateful Dead record covers and art work are LOADED with Freemason symbolism. First of all, the skulls and skeletons which are EVERYWHERE in association with this band. Read More: http://www.shroomery.org/forums/showflat.php/Number/1467277
He is known to promote a book called “The Kybalion”, authored by “Three Initiates”. … If so, then there should be no further doubt that Owsley Stanley, the LSD manufacturing kingpin of the 60′s, was a masonic operative. His family history would certainly suggest a masonic background, as one of his descendants was Augustus Owsley Stanley, a senator from Kentucky. Is it possible to be a Senator from Kentucky without being a mason? Owsley (or “Bear” as he likes to be called) had numerous contacts in government intelligence, such as multimillionaire Billy Hitchcock, and government operative and “Whole Earth Catalog” founder Stewart Brand (also a Merry Prankster). Owsley was supposedly “busted” for LSD in the seventies. How much jail time did he actually end up doing for manufacturing and possessing enough LSD to dose the entire population of the earth a thousand times over? No one really knows. He lives in Australia now.Read More: http://www.shroomery.org/forums/showflat.php/Number/1467277
"No one – not Ken Kesey, not Richard “Babawhateverthefuckhecalledhimself” Alpert, not even Timothy Leary – did more to ‘turn on’ the youth of the 1960s than Owsley. Leary and his cohorts may have captured the national media spotlight and created public awareness, but it was Owsley who flooded the streets of San Francisco and elsewhere with consistently high quality, inexpensive, readily available acid. By most accounts, he was never in it for the money and he routinely gave away more of his product than he sold. What then was his motive? According to Martin Lee and Bruce Shlain, writing in Acid Dreams, “Owsley cultivated an image as a wizard-alchemist whose intentions with LSD were priestly and magical.”---Read More: http://battleofearth.wordpress.com/2009/04/26/inside-the-lc-the-strange-but-mostly-true-story-of-laurel-canyon-and-the-birth-of-the-hippie-generation-part-xiv/
…What role did author Tom Wolfe have in promoting the LSD culture of the Pranksters? His “best-selling” book “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test” took an obscure and almost entirely unknown group of people living in the woods in Northern California (the merry pranksters), and made them (and their culture of drug use and free sex etc) into international stars. Wolfe seems to have a penchant for documenting the exploits of Freemasons. Hence his book “the Right Stuff”, about NASA, which as we all know is controlled by Masons (EVERY single astronaut is a confessed freemason.) Phil Lesh often wears NASA t-shirts at his concerts. … Wolfe is this clown who lives in NYC who goes around in an idiotic white suit and hat. This is his “trademark” or something.Read More:http://www.shroomery.org/forums/showflat.php/Number/1467277 a
Rich Griffin art. "Not long after that, at the tender age of fifteen, Owsley voluntarily committed himself to St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Washington, D.C.. St. Elizabeth’s, it should be noted, had a far more sinister name upon its founding in 1855: the Government Hospital for the Insane. He remained confined there for, uhmm, ‘treatment’ for the next fifteen months. During that time, his mother, in keeping with one of the recurrent themes of this saga, passed away. Owsley apparently resumed his education following his curious confinement, but he had reportedly dropped out of school by the age of eighteen. Nevertheless, he apparently had no trouble at all gaining acceptance to the University of Virginia, which he attended for a time before enlisting in the U.S. Air Force in 1956, at the age of twenty-one. During his military service, Owsley was an electronics specialist, working in radio intelligence and radar." Read More:http://battleofearth.wordpress.com/2009/04/26/inside-the-lc-the-strange-but-mostly-true-story-of-laurel-canyon-and-the-birth-of-the-hippie-generation-part-xiv/ image: http://www.antiquetrader.com/article/hakes_200th_auction_brings_impressive_prices/
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