
How John Perry Barlow gained enlightenment and lost his mind on acid - Alex3917
http://www.synergeticpress.com/JPBForward.pdf
======
rufugee
There's so much more to our world than meets the eye. It's a shame we allow
those in authoritative positions to tell us how we're allowed to live our
lives and how we're allowed to explore the universe, both inner and outer. We
are all born into the world as naive, ignorant and clueless as all those
before us, and NONE of us has the inherent right or wisdom to tell the other
what to do. We should each have real free will...it's unfortunate that no such
thing actually exists.

~~~
hristov
Sorry but you are not exploring anything. You are just experiencing
hallucinations, paranoias and what have you due to the drugs changing the
chemical composition of your brain. That's it, nothing more.

There may be more to the world that meets the eye. You may be right about
that. I personally believe in God, so I do believe there is more to the world
that meets the eye. But the implied message of your post, that we can reach
that world by taking drugs makes nosense. Why would drugs make you capable of
perceiving something that you are unable to perceive otherwise. You still have
the same physical brain and sensing organs. Drugs are just a physical thing
acting chemically on the same physical brain and the same physical eyes and
ears. Why would drugs make your physical eyes and ears perceive the
metaphisical all of sudden? It makes no sense. I mean I would understand if
drugs made your hearing or eyesight better, or if they made you see things in
wavelengths not visible when you are not on drugs. But to make you see
something that cannot be detected on any wavelength even with the best
instruments? Why? It makes no sense.

And if you believe in God, as I do, why in the world would God choose to
reveal himself to only those that take illegal, dangerous and usually
expensive drugs? Does God only like the idle rich? Nope that makes no sense
either.

So, sorry again, but you are living a dangerous fantasy. What you are
exploring with hallucinogens are just hallucinations somehow created in the
pathways of your brain as a result of the chemical disruptions caused by the
drugs. Nothing more. Nothing that actually exists in any way. And as the drugs
damage your brain, your hallucinations will get darker and more paranoid and
if you do not stop you may go mad.

About people telling other people what to do, I do not know about that. If you
see a thousand people lose their minds doing LSD and become sad wrecks that
can barely do anything with their lives between the acid flashbacks, wouldn't
you want to stop number 1001?

~~~
mannicken
Hallucinations here are not "really" hallucinations in a sense you rarely
actually see things that are not there (for that, google deliriants). It's
more like, everyone is acting out a certain role or a set of role in lives,
and have been doing it for so long that they have forgotten they are just
acting.

LSD and such smash the fourth wall of human theater, allowing actors to
realize they are actors. Once they have realized this they have several
options:

1) Continue playing the role they were playing after coming down, if they like
it.

2) Change the role -- hence why a lot of people change their lives after
dropping psychedelics.

3) Leave the play for a while -- this is possibly why some people commit
suicide after psychedelics.

It's like, imagine you're coding.. and you're just so in flow that you forget
you can do anything but code: you don't go to the bathroom, forget about food,
in the zone. Now somebody snaps the chair out of you, and you realize you can
do more things than just code. Now imagine you've been coding for 10-20 years
straight.

Well, acid is like that guy who snaps the chair out of you.

Society considers it dangerous because it has spend so much time making you
exactly what it wants, training you, brainwashing you with random shit that it
doesn't want you to actually gain control of who you want to be.

You wouldn't want a dog you trained for years to bring sticks and shit on the
toilet to realize all of a sudden it doesn't have to follow your commands all
the time.

I suppose, and I just realized this now, that psychedelics are a way of
chemically disabling social conditioning for a while. Perhaps marijuana is
associated with lack of motivation not because it makes you unable to do
things, but because it makes you realize some things are not worth giving a
fuck about.

------
hartror
_One can make a non-ludicrous case that the most important event in the
cultural history of America since the 18’60s was the introduction of L S D.
Before acid hit American culture, even the rebels believed, as Thoreau,
Emerson and Whitman implicitly did, in something like God given authority.
Authority, all agreed, derived from a system wherein God or Dad ( or, more
often, both ) was on top and you were on the bottom._

Does this passage strike anyone else as over stating LSD's impact?

I wasn't there, hell my parents weren't out of their teens in the 60s but from
my perspective it doesn't seem to me like a considerable portion of the
population took LSD. Granted the cultural impact of the drug spread further
than just the people who imbued it but the 60s had so many other factors at
work.

I think the social revolution of the 60s allowed LSD and the culture it
created to flourish and not the other way round as seems to be being argued
here.

~~~
Alex3917
"Does this passage strike anyone else as over stating LSD's impact?"

It's necessarily true, but it's not a stretch either. LSD was arguably the key
driver behind the creation of the Internet, silicon valley, the environmental
movement, the civil rights movement, etc. It was also the reason why
psychiatry adopted the position that mental illnesses were caused by chemical
imbalances in the brain.

"I think the social revolution of the 60s allowed LSD and the culture it
created to flourish and not the other way round as seems to be being argued
here."

So I think the key to understanding the 60s, the hippies, and LSD is the
atomic bomb. Nick Sand and many of the other high level manufacturers and
distributors of LSD were the children of high level figures in the manhattan
project. Nick Sand's dad was one of the key chemists that developed the bomb.
And supposedly the dad of one of the other key acid manufacturers was the co-
pilot of the Enola Gray, one of the planes that dropped the atomic bomb on
Japan.

Most of the energy (and bullshit) behind the counterculture in general was a
reaction against atomic energy and the culture of the 50s. Clearly the angst
would have been there without LSD, but I think that acid became sort of the
banner that everyone rallied behind and that united everyone. This is
especially true since it's such a prosocial drug; one of its main effects is
that it basically makes you care more about other people. (And engage with and
collaborate with them, as the case may be.)

Of course the reason it became such a part of the culture is that it
fundamentally changed a lot of people, especially a lot of people who later
went on to contribute enormous amounts to society, on a deeply personal level.
You can already read a lot about this and you'll be able to read increasingly
more about as that generation gets older and starts retiring and writing
memoirs. In general the ways that any drug impacts culture are really subtle,
but definitely there. IIRC Terence McKenna talks a bunch about it in this
podcast: <http://www.matrixmasters.net/salon/?p=153>

For what it's worth, I also have a collection of a couple dozen or so links to
people talking about psychedelics have changed their lives here:

<http://bit.ly/qkvs3q>

~~~
Confusion
Key word in your story: 'arguably', 'supposedly', 'I think'. You're telling a
story, that may well be completely fictional. Not a shred of evidence for the
key assertions is offered.

I have found this to be typical of stories touting the awesomeness of LSD.
It's inferring causation from the most likely (in the absence of any evidence,
coincidence is most likely) incidental fact that LSD also happened around
then.

~~~
Alex3917
"Key word in your story: 'arguably', 'supposedly', 'I think'. You're telling a
story, that may well be completely fictional. Not a shred of evidence for the
key assertions is offered."

The bit about the atomic bomb actually comes from this about 32 minutes in:
<http://www.matrixmasters.net/salon/?p=75>

My understanding is that the relationship between LSD and the environmental
movement and civil rights movement is discussed in Jay Stevens book Storming
Heaven:

[http://psypressuk.com/2010/06/09/literary-
review-%E2%80%98st...](http://psypressuk.com/2010/06/09/literary-
review-%E2%80%98storming-heaven%E2%80%99-by-jay-stevens/)

And possibly also in the book Acid Dreams. (Haven't read either, so I'm not
sure.)

Anyway the link is obviously somewhat tenuous at this point, though as I said
I do suspect we'll learn more in the future.

------
vibhavs
This is only a 11-page (draft version?) forward to the book titled Birth of a
Psychedelic Culture [1].

1\. [http://www.amazon.com/Birth-Psychedelic-Culture-
Conversation...](http://www.amazon.com/Birth-Psychedelic-Culture-
Conversations-Experiments/dp/0907791387)

------
mistertrotsky
a) I didn't know this guy was both involved with the Dead AND the EFF!
Fascinating.

b) I didn't know that such interesting business happened in Millbrook.
Millbrook! Man that is like twenty minutes away.

~~~
mtoddh
Bruce Sterling's "The Hacker Crackdown" is a really interesting book that goes
into detail about his involvement with the EFF and how it came about in the
first place. It's a great read and available online at
<http://www.mit.edu/hacker/hacker.html>

------
blendergasket
I really feel like programmers could be pushing this individualist
freedom/collective, memetic will forward in such a more interesting way than
is happening now. I feel like we can look at the world, think about how it
could be better, or what kind of system we could use to manifest our
collective will, think about how we could interact in order to bring that
about, and code it. I see way too many groupon clones and not enough
ontological/metaphysical systems/games on the web. Maybe once thre is an
established framework of federated networks that don't create massive cost
when people visit it there will be more fascinating content/systems/structures
on the net.

There is so much possibility for using the net as a way to dissect the
structures we surrender ourselves to live within and then to use their
necessary atoms to create new, more beautiful systems. We just need to get
money out of the equation (I think).

The net is an amazing tool for deconstructing power systems, I would love to
see (and am working towards) a net that creates the systems for building a
new, flexible, federated set of linguistic/metaphysical system, or at least a
marketplace where numerous possible ideas can compete and be spun as memes
into the ideasphere.

------
mynameishere
The comments here are mostly supportive, but did you read as far as where he
admitted to desiring suicide/terrorism and wound up on thorazine? Maybe he was
being figurative, not really sure, but that throws into question any of the
positive effects of such habits. Moreso, it throws into question the self-
analysis required to judge the effects of them. "Yeah, I wanted to kill myself
and others, but it's cool bro."

------
pnathan
Well-written.

I'm not sure if I would like the book, but I know I'd read a book Barlow
wrote. :-)

