 Life lived in the absence of the psychedelic experience that primordial shamanism is based on is a life trivialized Denied and enslaved to the ego The 60s you know today when we often look back at this time and think yeah, man It was groovy We had the Beatles Hendrix and Woodstock right on bro But the reality of the day was that it was mostly a whole lot of Vietnam War civil rights protests MLK and JFK Assassinations and that time we almost descended into nuclear war with the missile crisis down in Cuba Someone should have just yelled jam on G and got it over with real fast But hey Eisenhower probably would have lied about that too But yet in the darkest depths of those years something was waiting for us at the bottom ready to guide us back and set us free We're of course talking about the psychedelic renaissance spearheaded by Albert Hoffman's synthetic hallucinogen LSD whether you partook in an LSD trip or not at the time if you were even alive There's no denying that the 60s and its counterculture of consciousness exploration was forged on its anvil LSD's aura if not its substance was a huge component of the air that you breathe and the fabric of the streets that you walked This hallucinogen infused the exhalations of musicians philosophers advertisers and activists and gave birth to one of the most beautiful experiences humanity has ever known and Turned the youth of the nations against their oppressors So in the words of the infamous Neuronaut Timothy Leary Turn on tune in and drop out as we explore just how much LSD and psychedelics shaped the 60s And if you're super into this stuff the spirit medicine walkers course is now once again available This is over 30 hours of outstanding psychedelic information Everything from what is plant medicine to how it works and how to use it properly to get the most benefits from your experience We've had so many requests to bring this course back that it couldn't stay closed for long Use the link in the description to get access right now and please enjoy the video Whenever you ask anyone about the 60s You'll probably get a list that involves hippies mini vans bell-bottom jeans and people dropping buckets of acid Or if you're a bit more widely read you might group those things into part of the counterculture But before we can talk about LSD We need to look at just why the idea of a counterculture came up at all and why exploring consciousness became so popular in the first place The short answer is much like today that many young people started to think the government and established systems of authority Relying to them and didn't have their best interests at heart. So they began exploring their hearts themselves Funny how history repeats itself The previous decade was pretty much defined by the Cold War between the capitalist states of the u.s And the communist ones of the soviet union but no one really fought that honorably and the whole thing kind of boiled down to Well, my nukes are bigger than yours. Oh, yeah prove it. No you and there was a lot of spying and espionage Involved but sometimes didn't work out very nicely for some of the poor countries Which all the people who happened to be coming of age around that time saw and began to question If the government was spying and interfering so much who or what else could they be spying on the infamous port here on Student statement encapsulated the vibe of late teenage angst saying we are people of this generation Bread in at least modest comfort housed now in universities looking uncomfortably to the world we inherit Kicking off the decade with a bang President Eisenhower was caught out over the u2 incident where the u.s Claimed they simply sent a weather plane to Russia when it was actually a spy plane and the Russians played a reverse Uno card by showing everyone pictures of it which resulted of the u.s Government being caught in a blatant lie at the highest level then three years later JFK was assassinated which led to a bunch of conspiracy theories that the CIA was pulling strings and planning things behind the scenes And if you want to dive down that rabbit hole of stuff like MK Ultra check out our conspiracy theory of everything movie before it's Banned again, but in the words of avatar ang when we hit our lowest point. We are open to the greatest change While all of this was going on at the top level of society other elements Especially the students at universities were starting to wake up to the importance of civil rights and treating people fairly You could even say that the next generation were going through a consciousness shift of their own People began to think more about funding anti poverty programs to look after the most vulnerable and with the work of people like Rachel Carson the growing threat of industrialization and pollution on the planet Especially with pesticides in the food market started to weed its way into popular consciousness Despite resistance from the establishment on another level around the 60s birth control started to get more easily available Which coupled with the rise of neo-tantra meant young people were having way more sex just for the sake of it rather than for Reproduction because there wasn't as much threat of unwanted pregnancy Which meant both women and men had more freedom to choose sexual partners outside of the traditional marriage that defined their parents era It was in this environment that LSD burst into the scene There was nothing counter about the 60s counterculture believe me It was weaved into every level of society and was on almost every street. You know how if you go to Amsterdam today There's almost as many cannabis shops as there are Starbucks Yeah, imagine that going on while acid rock and the Beatles were blaring in every dark corner and Psychedelic album covers like cream wheels of fire were being posted on every wall. It was groovy, man It wasn't just the visuals and feelings of LSD that captured the hearts of people though The drug acquired a status of almost divine power that could initiate you into the inner mysteries of the universe If you don't know about the story about how Albert Hoffman created LSD in the first place I encourage you to check out Netflix's the mind-explained episode on psychedelics But needless to say when he accidentally ingested too much on his second attempt and had the world's first bad Acetrip one that involved a bike ride from hell and him drinking basically a cow's worth of milk Don't ask he came out of it saying it felt like a demon had invaded me taken possession of my body mind and soul But yet the next day everything glistened in a fresh light. The world was as if newly created The heads of the counterculture referenced this idea and saw the potential for enlightenment and liberation Something that was already being dramatically pushed in every level of society There's a long tradition of ancient heroes from mythology descending into the underworld to acquire new knowledge both Odysseus and Aeneas Did it in their epic poems the Odyssey and the Ayned but to the young people of 60s America LSD offered a chance to travel to their own underworld and emerge with a new sense of being that echoed their newly emerging world In other words the essence of the counterculture became to send into madness and emerge Enlightened seeing the world anew as the heroes of old once did this mythic attribution of LSD was echoed in the works of Timothy Leary Ralph Metzner and Richard Alpert when they intricately weave together their book the psychedelic experience that sought to be a kind of Acetrip guide that was based off the Tibetan book of the dead The idea was to read it to a person tripping to deepen their experience and allow them to find new landscapes of reality It's opening lines even begin oh Voyager the time has come for you to seek new levels of reality Your ego and the name game are about to cease you are about to be set face-to-face with the clear light all Sounds very biblical That's because it was as far as they were concerned LSD was the bridge to God giving you the ability to return ready to change the world with your new knowledge It's important to remember though this fascination with LSD had been building since its discovery and the mainstream view wasn't always negative as Dr. Hoffman pointed out in his memoir Sando's laboratories seeing no obvious medical purposes for the drug initially Provided it completely free to researchers leading to nearly a hundred scientific papers appearing annually that were mostly pretty positive But in 1965 when patents had expired and accounts of bad trips and widespread use had made LSD a serious threat to the public health The company announced it was stopping production to its creator LSD's overuse and abuse in recreational environments Was what led to its illegality Mainstream governments began to see it as a drug that was destroying their old and dying world Upsetting the traditional values of the Western middle class which resulted in quick action to restrict the availability By making any use of it illegal But this action almost single-handedly created one of the biggest spiritual screw used by the universe ever Everything changed in 1967 when the Fire Nation Sorry wrong episode When the infamous human being festival Exploded like a tidal wave of pure spiritual force in San Francisco to protest the bill that made LSD illegal Organized by artist Michael Bowen it called together tons of famous philosophers and speakers like Timothy Leary Rom Dass Alan Watts and poets like Alan Ginsburg who chanted mantras and gave talks on the drug to explain How it could work to create change peace and love in the world Coupled with live music from people like Jefferson Airplane and Grateful Dead the whole festival centered around personal empowerment cultural and political decentralization communal living ecological awareness and Exploring higher consciousness Culminating in the very thing that later defined the 60s altogether This was the movement that gave birth to hippies and told the mainstream media that the culture of expanding consciousness was here to stay Following the festival boom the spiritual energy showed no sign of slowing down And within the same year a few months later the summer of love kicked off in full force drawing nearly a hundred thousand people together in the Neighborhood of Hyatt Ashbury which became psychedelic cultures ground zero helped in part by the famous psych rock artists like Jimi Hendrix Pink Floyd and the birds who got the media even more interested when people finally came down from their highs and came home from the Summer of Love they were never again the same their minds had been opened by LSD and they had seen the new age That was emerging some hippies even began to form communes to live as far outside of the established system as possible to try and reject active political engagement with the mainstream and Following learies to turn on tune in and drop out hoped to change society by dropping out of it altogether But how did eastern mysticism 20th century psychiatry research new age politics and 19th century? Romanticism become so intertwined The answer lies in the famous shaman professors who guided their students to experiment in the first place when Aldous Huxley wrote about his experience with mescaline and peyote in the doors of perception His title was taken straight from the 19th century romantic poet William Blake when he said if the doors of perception were cleansed Everything would appear to man as it is infinite See the romantics in the 19th century were pushing for an alternate culture that might displace the encroaching industrial age way before it was cool To them polled reason would be tempered by visionary warmth Objective science by internal experience Hoffman even sounded like a romantic poem himself a few times saying that he believed LSD could reveal the miraculous powerful Unfathomable reality that was hidden from everyday sight To the counter culturalists there was a crisis in society Not one that could be solved by increased taxes or a better property market because it was a spiritual crisis The old world was dying and the coming new age required a shift away from the material and back to nature to reconnect with ourselves In that way LSD became a political tool as much as a spiritual one It offered a physical means of descent with the mainstream and the promise of a reformation as a tool of awakening But as awesome as this sounded it didn't quite go to plan if you look around the world today It still hasn't as the hippie movement grew older and the people who practiced it mellowed out as they aged The counterculture was largely absorbed by the mainstream, but not before leaving a lasting impact on philosophy and society as a whole It's kind of funny Even though the LSD culture of the 60s stressed a return to nature away from technology and objective science It's only through science that LSD's prophetic visions have really become realized before founding Apple Steve Jobs ranked his LSD experience as one of the most important times in his life and While Jeff Bezos has never publicly acknowledged taking psychedelics DMT or other potent entheogens that come from plants and animals Often found from the literal Amazon Then you have his Amazon the everything store that supports massive amounts of human experience and knowledge on its cloud servers That are now starting to listen and see everything too So maybe someone did tune in and drop out Nevertheless, it's safe to say that LSD whether it's seen in society or hidden in the undercurrent Outside of the public mainstream view There's no question that it's played its role in shaping our society in a very powerful way And maybe it will again one day soon and may we all flow together into the new age toodles