Cultic
Studies Review, Vol. 8, No. 1,
2009, pp. 72-76
Turn Off Your Mind:
The Mystic Sixties and the Dark Side
of the Age of Aquarius
Gary Lachman
The Disinformation Company, Ltd.
(163 3rd Ave, Suite 108, New York,
NY 10003). 2003. ISBN:
0-9713942-3-7; ISBN-13:
978-0971394230 (paperback), $19.95
($13.57, Amazon.com). 430 pages.
“Whenever in
doubt, turn off your mind, relax and
float downstream” are the first
words John Lennon read in 1966 when
he opened The Psychedelic
Experience, a sleek, black
volume by Timothy Leary, Richard
Alpert, and Ralph Metzner (New York:
University Press, 1964). The Beatle
Lennon inserted the concept into his
song “Tomorrow Never Knows” for the
transitional Beatles’ album
Revolver released later that
year. Lennon listened to a recording
of himself reading the Tibetan
Book of the Dead when he wrote
that song while tripping on LSD. The
first lyrics are
Turn off your mind, relax and float
down stream,
It is not dying, it is not dying.
Lay down all thoughts, surrender to
the void,
It is shining, it is shining.
I was eighteen
and a Beatles’ fan when Revolver
appeared. I listened to it and that
song over and over when it came out,
but I had little experience with the
burgeoning occult movement and
mystical drug cultures that inspired
it. I had only a vague idea of what
Lennon was singing about, but I knew
it had something to do with drugs.
My level of experience changed
dramatically in following years. I
began “experimenting” with some
drugs and sought out exotic
spirituality, too. For many of us
coming of age in the sixties, The
Beatles were guideposts. They seemed
to be on the cutting edge of popular
fashion in everything from hairstyle
to spiritual philosophies. In
college I became an art student
among the hippie milieu. We were
reading Hesse, Jung, Camus, McLuhan,
Heinlein, Rimbaud, Tolkien, Marcusse,
Mailer, Yogananda, and Blake. Some
of us went deeper and darker. We
read Blavatsky, Lovecraft, Crowley,
Gurdjieff, Hubbard, and even LaVey.
Despite the
Vietnam War, there was an incredible
romanticism and idealism if not
rebelliousness alive on campuses
across America and Europe, which
culminated in the now infamous
‘summer of love’ in 1967. But the
bright sunshine of Aquarius waned
quickly. Woodstock notwithstanding,
Charles Manson and his drugged-up,
murderous Family cult became the
image of all that was decadent in
hippie culture by 1969. The sixties
were over. However, as Gary Lachman
writes on pages 392-93 of Turn
Off Your Mind,
Manson didn’t ‘kill the sixties’ as
some have suggested. They committed
suicide, ODed [sic] on
excess, high expectations, and a
belief that in getting rid of all
repression—what I’ve called ‘giving
away to strange forces’—some pure,
natural soul would emerge. They were
wrong.
At age 18, Gary
(Valentine) Lachman was a founding
member and songwriter for the
punk-rock group Blondie. He was born
in 1955 in New Jersey. Just out of
high school, he went to New York to
be a poet. Eventually, in 1996, he
moved to London, where he yet
resides. His early contacts with the
music industry during the seventies
placed him in the midst of many
significant persons who were “there”
during the sixties’ ‘revolution.’
After two years with Blondie,
Lachman continued as a musician with
other bands, including Iggy Pop, but
music eventually gave way to his
career as a journalist and writer.
He is a literary critic for many
publications including The
Fortean Times. Lachman is the
latest among astute commentators on
the modern occult revival and New
Age sects in the genre of James Webb
(The Occult Establishment,
The Harmonious Circle), Bruce
Campbell (Ancient Wisdom Revived),
Peter Washington (Madame
Blavatsky’s Baboon) and
especially Colin Wilson (The
Occult). Turn Off Your Mind
is an early work in a series by
Lachman that includes In Search
of P.D. Ouspensky: The Genius in the
Shadow of Gurdjieff (2006) and
Rudolf Steiner (2007), both
of which I recommend.
In this book,
Lachman plunges into his topic with
the story of Charles Manson. He
describes how the hippie “wizard”
was able to maneuver among famous
people and manipulate followers
using ideas he gleaned from
Scientology, The Process Church of
the Final Judgment, and years of
incarceration. From there, we
revisit the Woodstock and Altamont
music festivals that were seminal
events in 1969. Lachman then
discusses the roots of the sixties’
occult revival in 19th
century figures such as Madame
Blavatsky and Eliphas Levi. Lachman
revisits these themes and
personalities throughout the book.
Lachman exposes
occult influences in the lives and
writings of significant sixties’
heroes including Hermann Hesse,
Aldous Huxley, L. Ron Hubbard, and
Aleister Crowley (whose face made it
onto the cover of the Beatle’s
Sergeant Pepper album). He
especially credits The Occult
by Colin Wilson (who wrote the
introduction to Lachman’s 2003
Secret History of Consciousness)
and The Morning of the Magicians
by Bergier and Pauwels as
particularly influential in his
personal grasp of just what was
going on in the mystic sixties. More
characters he covers in depth are H.
P. Lovecraft, Alan Watts and the
Beats, Tim Leary, L. Ron Hubbard,
and Anton LaVey, who founded the
Church of Satan. The book also
offers insight into the mystical
pursuits and substance abuse that
affected the Beatles, Marianne
Faithful, the Rolling Stones, the
Doors, the Beach Boys, and so many
others.
Less-well-known
but influential characters include
the mystical artist and writer Brion
Gysin, whose “cut-up” approach to
writing revived an interest in
Surrealism and influenced Beat
writers such as William Burroughs.
The Beats aimed for “elimination of
the rational ego.” There was Aldous
Huxley’s friend, the “sociopathic
English con man” Michael
Hollingshead, whose “mayonnaise jar
containing water, powdered sugar,
and roughly 5,000 hits of LSD” gave
Timothy Leary, Paul McCartney,
singer-songwriter Donovan, and
countless others their first doses
of acid. When they finally
had enough of the schemer, Leary and
Alpert dismissed Hollingshead from
the Harvard LSD project. In
retaliation, Hollingshead threatened
to reveal Alpert’s homosexuality.
And there was
the Solar Lodge of the OTO (a spin
off of Crowley’s Ordo Templi
Orientalis cult) founded by Jean
Brayton and her husband Richard, a
philosophy professor at the
University of Southern California.
The Braytons “sought absolute
control over their devotees” by what
some writers called “acid fascism.”
The Braytons ran afoul of the law
around the time of the Manson
murders in 1969, when visitors to
their Colorado center found a small
boy chained to the ground in a crate
in 110-degree heat. He had been
there for days. Jean Brayton devised
the punishment because the boy
inadvertently set fire to their
house, thus burning rare Crowley
manuscripts. The Braytons were
thought by the FBI to be connected
to Manson.
I most
appreciated Lachman’s ability in
this book to ferret out the
back-story to many songs,
personalities, and communes that
influenced the mystic sixties. For
example, Leary based his esoteric
community International Federation
of Internal Freedom (IFIF) on Aldous
Huxley’s last novel, Island
(1961), which “depicts a psychedelic
Pacific island paradise threatened
by the incursion of Western
materialism” (p. 177). In the spirit
of Jung’s synchronicity (meaningful
coincidence) that Lachman says
inspired many sixties’ notions of
be here now, I read Island
just before I read Turn Off Your
Mind. The IFIF eventually found
a home in 1962 in Zihuatanejo,
Mexico, where Leary and a company of
several dozen followers experimented
with their LSD-based religion.
Huxley’s Island provided a
blueprint. Residents of Huxley’s
Pala limit mechanization, control
overpopulation by training young
males in yogic retention of semen
during pre-marital sex, and practice
ritual ecstasy with moksha
medicine, based on Huxley’s
personal experience of mescaline.
Taoism, Buddhism, and Hinduism
combine to form the utopian religion
of the Palanese who disdain theistic
faiths, especially Christianity.
Lachman points
out that parrots throughout Pala
randomly shout “attention” to remind
residents to remain in the eternal
present and to continually assess
consciousness. In that spirit, Be
Here Now is the title of Richard
Alpert’s seminal hippie manual that
he wrote as Ram Dass in 1971.
Alpert, Leary’s colleague at Harvard
and co-champion of LSD, synthesized
the LSD experience with ideas that,
with Leary and Metzner at IFIF, he
gleaned from Gurdjieff and Ouspensky.
They added Gurdjieff’s ‘Work’
rituals to IFIF programs. “Gurdjieff
would bellow ‘Stop!’ without
warning” (p. 184) at his Parisian
commune, the Prieuré, where cult
members would have to stop in
whatever position they were and hold
it till let go by Gurdjieff. That
meant while holding a hot cup,
lifting a shovel of dirt, or with
mouth open in the midst of speech.
Leary and company would ring a bell
four times an hour, when all
participants would stop, then
immediately write down their
thoughts and location. Lachman does
not point out that ‘stop everything
now’ at the sound of a bell has also
been one of the exercises during a
thirty-day retreat in the training
of a Catholic Jesuit since the 16th
century. Leary, a sensationally
lapsed Catholic, was ‘trained’ at a
strict Jesuit college.
That is one
general weakness I find in Lachman’s
finely written study: his lack of
attention to thematic Christian
influences on the sixties that I
find were pervasive as a subtext for
the hippie revolution through ‘peace
and love.’ Lachman’s concentration
on the anti-establishment,
reactionary themes of that era might
account for this oversight. Or
perhaps Lachman’s personal
philosophy of consciousness bends
orthodox Christianity to fit a
modernist paradigm. The author
positively entertains the legends
that Jesus traveled and lived in
India and England: “Christ spent
time in India. Those feet … may have
walked in England’s mountain green…”
(p. 80).
If you are
interested in Lachman’s personal
philosophy, read A Secret History
of Consciousness (2003). No
matter what you choose to read by
him, you will be thoroughly
entertained if not enlightened by
this fine writer. I highly (no pun
intended) recommend Turn Off Your
Mind.
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