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Dr. Strange and the Psychedelic Origins of the Future - Part Three
by Vincent Bridges
To the Pranksters it was all a matter of synchronicity. Signs and portents emerged from the great mystic morass of the collective unconscious and took shape as events and metaphors capable of shaping reality. Pay attention, keep the cosmic mind tuned in, be “on the bus” in Prankster terms, and you could actually surf that mother wave of change. The year before, 1964, the Pranksters took their metaphor out for a road trip to the New York World’s Fair in a Day-Glo splashed 1939 International Harvester school bus named Further. Being the Pranksters, they pranked everyone they met along the way and filmed and taped the entire experience, including a visit to Dr Leary’s Millbrook retreat.
While the great west-east LSD summit meeting the Pranksters imagined failed to happen - Dr. Tim was off on a three-day trip and couldn’t be disturbed by a group of west coast costumed crazies - something was gained from the experience. Kesey and the group were off on a different kind of trip, were in fact sailing into the uncharted, dragon-infested waters of the collective unconscious where even the famous LSD gurus feared to go. On the return trip, the Unspoken Thing, the un-reference the Pranksters used for synchronicity, grew deeper and more powerful. By the time the group returned to La Honda in the fall of 1964, something new and truly unique was emerging: the Pranksters were developing a group mind, an egregore to use an archaic term. Now such “group minds” were common in more religious eras, including as recently as the 1930s, when they would typically be expressed as a form of spiritual mania such as faith healing, speaking in tongues and so on, but the Prankster egregore was different. The LSD gnosis at the core of the group experience was essentially transcendental but without any religious, or even recognizably spiritual, overtones. Chemical transcendence made spirituality truly democratic for the first time in human history, and for the first time since the ancient mystery schools, the idea of gnosis had very precise and clinical parameters. Are you experienced? - that is, have you had the experience, the gnosis - took on the very specific meaning of: Have you tried acid? By the end of the 60s, millions will have had the experience, and the very concept of spirituality would never again be the same in the west.
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2005 by AlternativeApproaches.com
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