by Erik Davis
Gurus and demagogues waited in the wings, of course, as demonstrated by the later explosion of authoritarian fringe religions like the Hare Krishnas, the Unification Church, and the Children of God. But at its most self-aware, the counterculture gave birth to a new kind of pilgrim, a postmodern seeker who embodied a radically democratic and experimental relationship to the myriad domains of the human spirit. At their best, these spiritual tinkerers were (and are) dynamic and pragmatic, open to the protean possibilities of creative magic and deeply suspicious of the “one size fits all” approach of more traditional and absolutist religions. Though running the risk of aimless dabbling, the eclecticism of what would come to be called “New Age” was also a prescient religious response to a shrinking globe. Recalling the metaphysical melting pot of ancient Alexandria, it seems that polyglot times demand that religion be not just rekindled, but reinvented.
And as any hacker will tell you, invention proceeds by bricolage, the creative and experimental assemblage of ad hoc techniques. For all its purple haze, freak spirituality implied a curiously empirical interpretation of Homo religiosus. Visionary and sacred experiences were facts of human existence, but they were also products of human endeavor, and could be catalyzed and tweaked through a wide variety of psychophysiological means. For meditators, mystics, and Caucasian shamans, the only legitimate course into the blazing dawn of enlightenment was to cobble together experimental protocols from a wide range of traditions. As the “Cookbook for a Sacred Life” that closes Ram Dass’s freak classic Be Here Now explains, “This manual contains a wide variety of techniques. Everyone’s needs are different and everyone is at a different stage along the path. But, as with any recipe book, you choose what suits you.”11
As the glossy mail-order catalogs of the New Age would later demonstrate, the sacred cookbook is only one step away from the spiritual supermarket, where Zen clocks, Navajo dream pillows, and plastic rune stones repackage the same old magic of the commodity. But the counterculture’s fetish for “consciousness tools” cannot be written off simply as esoteric consumerism. After all, the baby boomers were the lab rats of the information age, the first human beings weaned on television, transistor radios, and the other consumer technologies that flooded American society following World War II. Even when they turned their backs on the mechanistic West, they could hardly shake their birthright as children of technique. So while freak seekers may have been naive in believing that tantric sex, mescaline trips, or yoga asanas would patch their souls straight into the cosmic motherboard, they were perfectly reasonable in recognizing that such “technologies of transformation” catalyze powerful and potentially meaningful psychospiritual experiences.
Some sacred technologies even offered information, which is why Tarot cards and astrological manuals rocketed to the top of the occult charts. Perhaps the most sublime of these oracular media was the I Ching, the ancient Chinese Classic of Changes whose English translations were first embraced by Jungians and beatnik poets in the 1950s. The text itself is a profound but often puzzling brew of shamanic Taoism, nature symbolism, and Confucian legalese. The roots of the system are the polar forces of yin and yang, the creative and the receptive, whose statistical permutations are organized into sixty-four hexagrams—a binary system impressive enough to have fascinated Gottfried Leibniz, the seventeenth-century Rationalist metaphysician whose innovations in logic helped lay the foundations of computer science. By tossing coins or dividing piles of yarrow sticks, the user derives the hexagrams appropriate to his or her situation. The I Ching thus functioned as a kind of personal countercomputer: a binary book of organic symbols that could challenge a System raging against the Tao. But even as it tapped into the analog patterns of the soul, the I Ching was at root a digital system, its underlying numerical patterns familiar to any computer programmer.
But of all the consciousness tools embraced by hippies, the most potent was certainly LSD, a gnostic molecule first synthesized and ingested in 1943 at the Sandoz chemical labs in Switzerland. An artificial product of laboratory technique, LSD is a synthetic molecular apparatus that catalyzes its mysterium tremendum with mechanistic predictability. At the same time, LSD catapults the user into a world whose workings utterly defy the causal logic of modern science. As Terence McKenna writes, psychedelics open up
an invisible realm in which the causality of the ordinary world is replaced with the rationale of natural magic. In this realm, language, ideas, and meaning have greater power than cause and effect. Sympathies, resonances, intentions, and personal will are linguistically magnified through poetic rhetoric. The imagination is evoked and sometimes its forms are beheld visibly.12
By delivering such fantastic and occult perceptions in a cluster of synthetic chemicals, LSD subliminally and paradoxically expressed the cultural logic of the information age, in which technique invades and rewires not just the mind but the imagination. In this sense, psychedelics are perhaps best seen as media, apparatuses of communication that channel “information” into the mind while shaping that information into dreamtime. In his vastly influential 1954 book The Doors of Perception (whose title was snatched from William Blake’s visionary snippet: “If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything will appear to man as it is—infinite”), Aldous Huxley argued that in its ordinary state the mind acts as a “reducing valve,” filtering out the chaos of sensations and subconscious processes. Hallucinogens blow open the valve, letting the “Mind at Large” gush in with visions, insights, and swelling emotions. Though many people interpret this gnostic rush mystically, it also sounds a lot like information overload. The profound connections and giggling synchronicities that visit the psychedelic traveler may signify nothing more than the mind’s exuberantly creative but ultimately doomed attempt to organize a multidimensional spew of incoming data.
Thinking along similar lines, Marshall McLuhan described psychedelics as “chemical simulations of our electric environment”; as such, they allowed users to “achieve empathy” with the archaic echo chamber of the electronic media.13 More soberly, the Zen writer Alan Watts pointed out that “psychedelic drugs are simply instruments, like microscopes, telescopes, and telephones.”14 Or televisions, one might add, noting that the image of the boob tube sneaks into The Psychedelic Experience, a self-consciously spiritual trip guide written by Timothy Leary, Ralph Metzner, and Richard Alpert before they dropped out of the straight world of Harvard. Mapping the LSD trip onto the afterlife dramas described in the Bardo Thödol, the so-called Tibetan Book of the Dead, the authors describe a stage where the tripper realizes that all sensation and perception are based on wave vibrations, and that “he is involved in a cosmic television show which has no more substantiality than the images on his TV picture tube.”15 Nearly everyone took it for granted that, if tuned in to the proper set and setting, the psychedelic voyager would transcend the world of information and taste states of unitive consciousness similar to those glimpsed by the yogis and alchemists. But not everyone agreed about the ultimate value of such pinhole visions, especially given their ultimately technological basis. Watts coolly concluded that “When you get the message, hang up the phone.”
Ken Kesey didn’t want to hang up the phone—he wanted a party line. In the early 1960s, Kesey and his Merry Pranksters began throwing experimental fetes that were destined to bring the acid gospel to the masses. During these electric Kool-Aid acid tests, LSD was only one component of a storm of media frenzy that did not so much cleanse the doors of perception as coat them with experimental movies, Day-Glo glyphs, and dripping light projections. The house band was the Warlocks, later to transmogrify into the Grateful Dead. For Jerry Garcia, Kesey’s acid tests conjured up nothing less than electromagnetic magic:
They had film and endless kinds of weird tape recorder hookups and mystery speaker trips.… It always seemed as though the equipment was able to respond in its own way. I mean … there were always magical things happening. Voices coming out of things that weren’t plugged in …�
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From most accounts, the acid tests certainly got their mojo working. But unlike the serious psychological therapists who preceded them, the Pranksters and many of the freaks that followed generally failed to construct anything like the contexts of meaning that traditional shamanic or religious cultures have always used to integrate cognitive ecstasy (and its metaphysical morning-afters) into ordinary life. Once you hopped on the magic bus, all road maps became suspect; all you had were the knobs and dials.
That’s why Uncle Tim’s famous sound bite calls to “tune in” and “turn on” were metaphors of media, not of message. Trust in the psychedelic apparatus, the televised pied piper said with a grin, because with it in hand you can “storm the gates of heaven.” For all its creative magic, this quintessential Promethean dream also reflected the instrumental hubris that already inflamed postwar society. In many ways, freak spirituality simply reproduced industrial society’s belief in quick-fix technological solutions. As Dery writes in Escape Velocity:
The inhabitants of the sixties counterculture exemplified by Kesey and his Pranksters may have dreamed of enlightenment, but theirs was the “plug-and-play” nirvana of the “gadget-happy American”—cosmic consciousness on demand, attained not through long years of Siddhartha-like questing but instantaneously, by chemical means, amidst the sensory assault of a high-tech happening.17
Dery suggests that when the acidheads tweaked a DuPont Corporation slogan into the rallying cry of “Better Living through Chemistry,” they were being less ironic than they supposed.
On the other hand, by poaching drugs and technologies from the military-industrial-media complex, the sixties consciousness brigade can also be seen as imaginative pragmatists, reenchanting the world by any means necessary. Humans have gobbled visionary drugs throughout history, and the fact that the most influential psychedelic of the twentieth century came in a twentieth-century package says nothing about its power to, at the very least, simulate the exalted states that bug-eyed visionaries and shape-shifting shamans have reported throughout the ages. Once through the neon paisley gates, many a freak grew weary of acid’s metaphysical shell game, hung up the phone, and hit the meditation mat. Many logged “long years” tracking Siddhartha’s faded footsteps, recognizing a glimmer of themselves in the Buddha’s relentless empirical self-exploration.
Others fled to the Esalen Institute, perched on the edge of California’s arcadian Big Sur coast, dangling on the literal edge of the West. There they found psychotherapeutic frameworks for their explorations and, occasionally, a more systematic philosophy to boot. Founded by Michael Murphy and Richard Price, two intellectuals committed to radical psychological development, Esalen helped spawn and nurture what came to be called the human potential movement, an eclectic blend of spiritual practices and psychological therapies that heavily influenced the dawning New Age scene. Just as the sixties’ occult revival reintroduced magical practices and archetypal imagery into popular culture, so did the human potential movement pry open the iron gates of Western psychology to make way for states of consciousness previously ignored or written off as gibberish or madness. Meditators, psychedelic visionaries, yoga freaks, group gropers, Gestalt therapists—all had a place at Esalen. Inspired by Abraham Maslow’s emphasis on “peak experiences,” those flashes of godlike or transpersonal capacities far above the muddy ruts of the mundane mind, the intellectuals and therapists behind Esalen pushed the envelope of consciousness without entirely abandoning the empiricist sensibilities of their university peers.
As any of Esalen’s original “psychonauts” could tell you, the center’s commitment to the exploration of transpersonal states of consciousness often paled beside its celebration of the liberated flesh. For Harold Bloom, Esalen hosted the rebirth of gnostic Orphism, with its doctrine that the redeemed self lives in perpetual intoxication. But amidst all the body oil, drug trips, and nude hot tub comminglings, the headier characters at Esalen also helped refashion the paradigm of cybernetics and information theory into a pragmatic, hands-on, and dispassionate approach to the new mutations of the bodymind that characterized the Esalen experience. While criticizing the modern cult of instrumental reason, they yanked the old alchemical quest into the information age.
One key figure in this reconstruction was Gregory Bateson. An anthropologist by training, Bateson had participated in the pivotal Macy Conferences of the 1950s, gatherings that hammered down the social and scientific implication of cybernetics. But for all his links to the technocratic and scientific elite, Bateson later bloomed into the quintessential California philosopher, a resident of Esalen and patron saint of the Whole Earth Catalog. Calling cybernetics “the biggest bite out of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge that mankind has taken in the last two thousand years,”18 Bateson argued that the science provided nothing less than a philosophical paradigm shift, one that would enable us to understand nature, social behavior, communication, and consciousness as holistic elements interacting within an even broader living system that folded together mind and matter. Suitably popified, Bateson’s antireductionist, deeply ecological take on cybernetics would eventually trickle down through the popular counterculture as holistic thought.
Studying everything from Balinese art to schizophrenia to the dolphin researches of John Lilly, Bateson helped give birth to a cybernetic model of the self. For Bateson, the self is an information-processing pattern inextricably linked through feedback loops to the body and the environment. Mind is not a transcendent blip of Cartesian awareness, but an immanent pattern that links the knower with the known in a larger “ecology of mind.” For Bateson, the gnostic escape hatch is inconceivable, because there is no separate soul or self that can escape this larger ecology. In his article “The Cybernetics of ‘Self,’ ” Bateson clarified his notions using the example of a man chopping down a tree. The process of constantly adjusting the swing of the ax to the shape of the cut face—an action that Bateson identified as a “mental” process—is not something just whirring around inside the man’s skull. Instead, it is brought about by the whole system of “tree-eyes-brain-muscles-ax-stroke-tree.” Information, which Bateson memorably defined as “a difference that makes a difference,” flows through the total system, and this larger pattern of information has the “characteristics of immanent mind.”19 This immanent mind is an ecology of information that permeates the material world, an intelligence much greater than the trivial thoughts zipping about the lumberjack’s brain. Presumably, if our sweaty gentleman could cut out his internal chatter, he might be blessed with a visceral, intuitive perception of this larger networked intelligence.
If all this strikes you rather like cybernetic Zen, you have definitely been keeping your eye on the ball. Taoism and Zen, at least as the counterculture perceived them, offered a worldview based on natural flux, nondual awareness, and the spontaneous and transpersonal creativity that arises when the ordinary ego gets out of the way. Bateson himself gestured toward tenets of Eastern philosophy, as did the systems theory buff Fritjof Capra in his 1975 freak best-seller The Tao of Physics. Though Capra was criticized for his metaphysical leaps, the connection between systems theory and Eastern thought is no joke. As the scholar and ecological activist Joanna Macy later argued in her book Mutual Causality in Buddhism and General Systems Theory, both cybernetics and early Buddhist philosophy can be said to characterize the world as a nonlinear dance of mutually adjusting feedback loops. Macy points out that early Buddhists described the self as a product of twelve constantly interacting subcomponents, including sensation, desire, physical contact, and mental grasping. As in a cybernetic circuit, there is no single control center or stable point of agency; instead, the self emerges from a dynamic and interdependent ecology of mind and being.
Though the school of “humanist psychology” that Esalen helped bring to life rejected the grim determinism of behaviorism, it did not entirely abandon the model of the human-machine that still dominated more conventional psychological discourses. Instead, th
e Esalen crew attempted to cultivate the human-machine’s cybernetic intelligence, amplifying its embodied awareness and psychological potential, and helping it get a handle on the various “programs” the self habitually and instinctively cycles through. The most hardwired manifestation of this dynamic cybernetic alchemy was biofeedback, first pioneered and popularized by Elmer Green. A relatively simple technological process, biofeedback allows human subjects to directly monitor their own brain waves (or other “invisible” physiological functions) in real time. With practice, one can extend one’s volition and begin to consciously modulate and regulate these previously unconscious somatic functions. In essence, one learns to cyborg the self, managing stress levels or any number of physiological functions.
Of course, yogis had been regulating their heart rates and internal sphincters for thousands of years; in this sense, Hinduism’s more physiological techniques of ecstasy formed a kind of old-school cybernetics. Inevitably, Green and others came to suspect that biofeedback might serve as a handy pogo stick to help people reach the transpersonal states of consciousness that yogis and Zen monks took decades to cultivate—states that various EEG studies showed were tied to distinct patterns of brain wave activity. Green started hooking electrodes up to yogis, while the behaviorist Joe Kamiya proved that one could train oneself to alter brain-wave states through biofeedback. As Green explained, “the average person, without having to subscribe to a religion, or to a dogma, or to a meditation system, could learn to move into the state of consciousness in which the seemingly infallible Source of Creativity could be invoked for the solution of problems.”20 Though the correlation of brain waves to specific states of consciousness was hardly an exact science, then or now, seekers inevitably started clamoring about “instant Zen.”