The Acid: on sustained experiment with lysergic acid diethylamide, or LSD by "Sam"

The author of The Acid (Vision, London 2009) uses the pen name Sam, but is probably better known to most readers of this blog as Chris Gray. For me, and probably for many of you, The Acid reads like a continuation of where Chris left off in the essays he contributed to his English language Situationist anthology _Leaving The 20th Centur_y (1974). There he wrote: “What needs understanding is the state of paralysis everyone is in. Certainly all conditioning comes from society but it is anchored in the body and mind of each individual, and this is where it must be dissolved. Ultimately the problem is an emotional, not an intellectual one. All the analyses of reification in the world won’t cause a neurosis to budge an inch…”
In The Acid, Chris says of the counterculture: “Looking back on that time, what seems so incomprehensible is that we never took LSD more seriously. How was it we failed to grasp its importance? For the concept of de-conditioning was at the heart of the New Left of the time. If any single feature set 60s and 70s radicalism apart from previous insurrectionary politics, it was insistence that individual subjectivity had to be transformed. The political was the personal. Politics were psychopolitics. Our own hearts and minds were precisely where the old order was ingrained – and if we couldn’t change ourselves, then what hope was there we could ever change the world?”
Many of those around Gray, including my mother Julia Callan-Thompson, took acid far more seriously than he did – but this was precisely because in the 1960s they were heads (whose attempts at personal transformation were doomed to failure because there was no accompanying social revolution) and he was a radical.
The Acid begins with a lucid overview of psychedelic literature and an account of Gray’s previous experiences with mind expanding substances. Chris also provides a potted autobiography, so that his readers can understand the material that comes up in the trips he describes. These vary from being joyous to total bummers. He was tripping every two to three weeks for three years as a self-prescribed acid therapy; an attempt to break down personal blockages. He tried different approaches to tripping: initially putting on a blindfold and listening to music in his flat, before moving on to outdoor excursions on Hampstead Heath. These accounts are very informative about ways of understanding and structuring trips, and will provide most readers with new approaches to the subject.
The back cover of the The Acid stresses that the breakthrough insight from these sessions is that the visions are serial. Drawing heavily on Stanislav Grof”s Realms of the Human Unconscious, Chris underlines the need to work through bad trips in order to transform oneself and achieve a sense of wholeness. The thrust of this argument I can run with, although I’m not sympathetic to all the psychoanalytic and religious elements drawn into the narrative. This is partly a generational difference, with the materials Gray used to structure his understanding of his ‘inner experiences’ very much mirroring those adopted by my mother and many of her friends in the 60s and 70s (that said, the psychedelic hermeticism my mother was involved in with Terry Taylor was quite different – and as far as I can tell, superior – to such deployments of Hinduism).
My view is that the varieties of Hinduism drawn upon by both my mother and Chris, and much of their ‘turned on’ generation, are too hierarchical to enable us to rediscover the forms of consciousness that characterised primitive communist societies. By way of contrast, shamanism (particularly in its voodoo and candomblé manifestations) does provide us with pathways to disalienation. LSD is, of course, a fantastic tool for inducing shamanistic experiences.
Mirroring Gray’s activities with King Mob in the 1960s, he draws on Keats and the English romantics as sources for understanding his experiences, whereas when it comes to LSD I would opt more for figures such as William Hope Hodgson (and others whose books currently exist outside the literary canon). This is not a matter of huge importance, and obviously reflects personal tastes and reading experiences. I went through Keats as a teenager and concluded I disliked his poetry.
The Acid is an engaging and thought provoking book, and while it is one man’s trip, it is also intended as a map that will assist any interested party in their own exploration of ‘inner space’. The text works on many levels, most obviously as a piece of writing that is a joy to read. If you have any interest in acid at all, then get your hands on this book!
But let’s give more or less the last word to Chris. He writes the following about his attendance at a San Francisco psychedelic conference in the early part of this millennium: “A well established, even well-heeled, cult I had been expecting; but not one thriving like this. The hall was so packed you could barely move. Of all the revolutionary groups of my youth – the Hippies, the New Left, the students, the blacks, the feminists – it was, however improbably, the druggies and the druggies alone who had made it through in one piece. And not just survived, but boomed.”
Well, throw in some voodoo or candomblé and I think we have a revolutionary situation!
This book has been republished by Park Street Press as The Acid Diaries by Christopher Gray and is currently fairly easy to obtain. (Note added 15 December 2010).
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!

Comments

Comment by Michael K Pretending To Be Stewart Home On Drugs & Quoting Home’s Own Words From A Michael K Interview on 2009-09-08 12:04:56 +0000

Wow I’m really stoned… really tripping… out of… I’ve gone and… I shouldn’t have gotten this high… I didn’t take enough acid to get this high… even my playthings walked to Saturn… bend pencil erasers… delicious… apples explode into butterflies… I gotta get outta here… one two three four… I can hardly see… tombs interlocking… too much acid… too many colours blown up in my face… You know I went to see this guru once and he said at the end of the night the thing I most desire would appear for me in his forehead, and I kinda waited and waited, and then finally right around midnight this beaver just materialised in his forehead, like a real cunt in 3D, now I always thought those guru types were complete fuckheads but this guy was the real deal, I mean how could he know that the thing I most desired in life was pussy?

Comment by Repetition Kid Tripped Out On Acid on 2009-09-08 12:53:26 +0000

Comment by Flashback Boy on 2009-09-08 13:49:02 +0000

Comment by Postmodern Freek! on 2009-09-08 14:36:33 +0000

Comment by fi on 2009-09-08 14:38:57 +0000

coooooool

Comment by The Move on 2009-09-08 15:07:17 +0000

I can hear the grass grow….

Comment by raymond anderson on 2009-09-08 15:27:54 +0000

I’m A Living Sickness
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vG235IO_V9g

Comment by realitysurfer on 2009-09-08 19:51:23 +0000

Please take a moment to check out my new LSD Documentary film.
POWER AND CONTROL :LSD IN THE 60’s
Features the CIA LSD Brothel in San Francisco (MK ULTRA), Groucho Marx’s LSD Trip….Doc Ellis pitches his no-hitter while high.
Tim Leary’s Miricle of Good friday Experiment is explored with one of the original PREACHERS who took part.
LSD and the Protest Movement, JFK & LSD plus more.
All posted for free at this youtube link..please share this knowledge.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZdz0G4lG6k&feature=channel_page

Comment by Handsome Dick Atobiman on 2009-09-08 20:41:37 +0000

LSD made a man out of me!

Comment by Andy Roberts on 2009-09-08 22:57:38 +0000

Where did you get the book from Stewart- Amazon say it’s unavailable!

Comment by The Happy Tripper on 2009-09-08 23:57:25 +0000

Acid is groovy! Off the pigs!

Comment by mistertrippy on 2009-09-09 09:04:25 +0000

Andy, Amazon don’t have it at the moment, I got it from Chris’s son.

Comment by The Night Tripper on 2009-09-09 09:48:03 +0000

Kill For Peace! Oops, thought I was a Fug for a minute, what I meant to say was with acid you can Walk On Gilded Splinters!

Comment by Syd Barrett on 2009-09-09 12:12:01 +0000

If I’m dead then we’re all LSD zombies and death is not true! Oh to see the world in a grain of sand and eternity in an hour…..

Comment by Paul McCartney, still on acid and watching the ‘Beatle Cash Per Second’ app on his iPhone installed there by Michael K on 2009-09-09 12:23:56 +0000

People always ask me if Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds was about LSD but they’ve forgotten about £SD. Pounds shillings and pence is what counts and I’m counting them

Comment by sandra742 on 2009-09-09 13:53:15 +0000

Hi! I was surfing and found your blog post… nice! I love your blog. 🙂 Cheers! Sandra. R.

Comment by Michael Roth on 2009-09-09 17:17:21 +0000

Sounds like an interesting work. I haven’t been able to dig up any bibliographic info, but I will keep my eyes open. Does he get into Leary and the Pranksters and some of the other US experiences and how it related to the UK scene at the time? Also, does he examine acid use into the 80s and beyond?
Kill for Peace!!

Comment by mistertrippy on 2009-09-09 19:58:07 +0000

It is circulating but not for sale yet. Small run, the idea is to create interest so someone else will reprint and sell copies. This is an account of 50 plus trips, with an overview of the literature about tripping, not a countercultural history – but there is some London counterculture as that is Chris’s personal history. It is a really good book, hope some of you can get it soon. I got people lining up to borrow my copy!

Comment by Joseph Kessel on 2009-09-09 22:21:23 +0000

Aciiiiiiiiiiiiiidddddddddddddd

Comment by Rve TOw-SEhDS on 2009-09-10 02:02:58 +0000

I used to do a lot of acid – it wasn’t never enough – dreamt of having my own acid factory to abuse my cerebellum – not good at chemistry though, so when couldn’t get class A blotters like yoghurt scabs from local weirdo, stuck in the main to a roughish mixture of 70% psilocybin and 30% hyphaloma cyanescens – [ a.k.a. U.K. blew me knees – ] with occasional addage of a few other less common varities that i’d hazard to mention for safety but safe on experience – anyway, these were steeped fresh to mature in brandy when done after a few months added with cherry-ade that me ‘n ‘bloke’ called mushcadet [very tasty] – brandy also kills liver flukes… – standard folklore of ‘tea’ = shite , tannin in tea = total bollocks and a waste of a good grog – hence cramps & pukey feelings – so go for good brandy or pref a good arm ‘n’ yak… plus for added knuckle drag neanderthalism , if you mix in a very small amount of aminita muscaria peeled cap , you could get a form of low level technicolor with aura style fuzz – do not do this unless you know how – [the 72mm panavision i.e. letterbox vision was of course standard] re silly sideburn mulch rooms – big wet rotting black ones full of the type maggots that those weird little flys specifically lay in them are the best – [always avoid grazing spots where the trees are dead even if the troops look good – this is called common sense , unless you are a brown acid type , then of course get munchin’] i have never had any interest in forieign varieties as local produce is always best methinks –
never continue to graze once you are fully wrecked up – certain areas can throw up similar styles & anomalies – always avoid the grey cup and veils like the plague – never take anything fungal unless you are 100% sure of source and variety – do not follow any advice here as i am a liar and i have fabricated everything that i have written here just so as i can come across like real cool and urbane in my nylon paisley y-fronts and brian jones clone bowlcut, whilst i wave my wanky mail order ankh in the vapour trails of druidic halitosis from ye olde glastonbury gifte shoppe – x

Comment by VeR TwOt SdEhs on 2009-09-10 02:11:04 +0000

ps – re: above diatribe – 70% + 30% in essence of brandy delivers ‘the smooth’

Comment by Old Rope on 2009-09-11 14:53:25 +0000

“You know, I went to Haight-Ashbury, expecting it to be this brilliant place, and it was just full of horrible, spotty, dropout kids on drugs. It certainly showed me what was really happening in the drug culture. It wasn’t what was I thought of all these groovy people having spiritual awakenings and being artistic. It was like the Bowery, it was like alcoholism, it was like any addiction. So, at that point, I stopped taking it, actually, the dreaded Lysergic. I had some in a little bottle, it was liquid, and I put it under a microscope, and I looked at it, and it looked like rope, just like old rope, and I thought I’m not going to put that in my brain any more.”
– George Harrison
Put Old Rope in your brain instead!
Your oldest of ropes,
Old Rope
http://oldrope.wordpress.com/about/

Comment by raymond anderson on 2009-09-12 10:32:28 +0000

Off the Pigs??
Off The Peg!!!

Comment by Elian Gray on 2009-09-12 14:57:30 +0000

Thanks so much for the blog, I enjoyed it very much, and the interesting comments it sparked too!
Regards the book’s release, we are currently negotiating a publishing contract with Inner Traditions (the US publisher responsible for putting out most of Grof’s work and one of my father’s favorite choices for possible publishers). They want to put the book out worldwide next autumn and we are awaiting a draft of the contract as we speak, obviously this is a complex process as Pari is not here here to approve any edits or changes they may want to make. We are countering that with a process of back and forth between Pari’s friends who helped with the book’s development and trying to stipulate certain points regards the editing.
The problem with spreading the book around too much is we don’t want to jeopardize our position with IT, they have approved us to do another 500 copies of a paperback run we intend to do as soon as the next proof read is completed, this will be distributed in London shops and they are okay with that. However, putting the book on Amazon or or internet sites isn’t something I want to do until the contract has been signed, then we will spread it a bit more and IT should be fine with that so long as we take our edition off the shelves/sites before they release their edition.
We still have plenty of hardback copies for sale and I can send them out to anyone who wants a one, also we should have the paper back copies within a month or so. If anyone wants a copy, or wants any info regarding the book please give them the vision address:
VISION
PO Box 64657
London
NW3 9NH