How many of you saw the article on the study done in Germany with LSD and its effects on language? (Here’s a link). As I read the little synopses about it, I found myself laughing. None of this is new information to those of us who grew up in the sixties and seventies. However, if they can uncover new ways to treat depression and mental illness, rock on.
Another use for LSD is currently under scientific debate. An author of the study says that “Inducing a hyper-associative state may have implications for the enhancement of creativity.”
I really had to sit back and just say “duh” to that one. Again. Were you just not around in the 60s or 70s? What in the world do you think was happening with all of those musicians and the incredible artists? Did you just completely miss Timothy O’Leary’s existence?
There was an interesting magazine called “Mondo 2000” that circulated in the 1980s / 1990s. It’s editor was R. U. Sirius and then Queen Mu. It was a cyberculture mag that absolutely fascinated this young white girl who had grown up in the purity of Iowa farmland. In one of R.U. Sirius’s long, rambling articles, he told of his experience with acid and subsequent meeting with aliens. They lived among us. He was absolutely certain that if he hadn’t been tripping, he would never have been able to cross over into the dimension where they could be encountered. I couldn’t believe what I was reading. It. Was. Awesome. Here were people exploring things that I would never have the courage to attempt and they were happy to tell me about it.
Now the only problem with that culture was that they couldn’t accomplish much since they spent so much time being high. The magazines weren’t published on a regular basis, no matter how many promises were made. There was never enough money because they simply couldn’t stay focused on the task at hand. You should know, though, that many of the folks from Mondo 2000 transitioned to work at “Wired” magazine and for BoingBoing. This was the beginning of the cyberpunk subculture.
But the failure of that magazine tells me that if you’re going to use LSD to create, you really need someone straight around you to make sure that the rest of the work gets completed.
Now why am I telling you all about this?
Well, I read about this German study on LSD and had to chuckle at its obvious conclusions. Then it took me down a long path of memories to times when the outliers in our culture were more willing to publicly experiment with things and not worry about who was going to storm their houses based on an errant tweet or personal FB photo.
And hey … I would have been willing to be a participant in the study. Just for a short time. Under controlled circumstances. My cells have never seen anything like that before and they’d be prime fodder for entertainment. Just be sure to let me have a laptop so that I can write things down as I’m going. It would have to make for an entertaining read. I mean, what if there were aliens all around us … just on a different dimensional plane. I’d like to have a conversation with them. As long as they have a universal communicator. Wait. Maybe the LSD would open my synapses enough so that I could actually understand their language too.
Yeah. I probably need to get back to writing about Bellingwood. It’s a lot closer to sanity than this little rabbit hole.
