The canard of psychedelic inspiration

[fons_vitae]

I’ll just post this here, since it would connect with many New Age beliefs.

I’m quite irritated with the association some make between the use of psychedelics and creativity. For example: If the Beatles are creative, it’s acid that made them that way. And of course, religious mysticism is often assumed to be the result of drugs, mental illness, or delusion on the part of the mystics.

Is it just me, or does it seem rather absurd on its face that one could isolated and dispense creativity in chemical form? And yet, how could this obvious commoditization of creativity, nay, reality itself not escape the purportedly anti-materialistic hippies? Or maybe they just didn’t care that much…

Even Phillip K. Dick, author of the hallucinatory Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, had this to say in an interview with Vertex:

VERTEX: You are known as one of the first authors to experiment with LSD. What effect has it had on your writing?

DICK: I don’t know of any. It’s always possible that it’s had an effect I don’t know about. Take my novel The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, which deals with a tremendous bad acid trip, so to speak. I wrote that before I had ever seen LSD. I wrote that from just reading a description of the discovery of it and the kind of effect it had. So if that, which is my major novel of a hallucinogenic kind, came without my ever having taken LSD, then I would say even my work following LSD which had hallucinations in it could easily have been written without taking acid.

VERTEX: Isn’t “Faith of Our Father’s,” from Harlan Ellison’s Dangerous Visions, supposed to have been inspired by or written under the influence of acid?

DICK: That really is not true. First of all, you can’t write anything when you’re on acid. I did one page once while on an acid trip, but it was in Latin. Whole damn thing was in Latin and a little tiny bit in Sanskrit, and there’s not much market for that. The page does not fall in with my published work. The other book which suggests it might have been written with acid is Martian Time-slip. That too was written before I had taken any acid.

VERTEX: How much acid did you take anyway?

DICK: Not that much. I wan’t getting up in the morning and dropping acid. I’m amazed when I read the things I used to say about it on the blurbs of my books. I wrote this myself: “He has been experimenting with hallucinogenic drugs to find the unchanging reality beneath our delusions.” And now I say, “Good Christ!” All I ever found out about acid was that I was where I wanted to get out of fast. It didn’t seem more real than anything else; it just seemed more awful.

VERTEX: In the light of your own experiences with acid, how accurate do you think The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch is as far as drugs are concerned?

DICK: You remember what happened when they got on that drug? It was bad, wasn’t it? It was so bad it taxed my ability to imagine bad. And it didn’t do them any good to stop taking the drug because they had flashbacks. And nobody at the time knew LSD was going to produce flashbacks. I had it in mind that the ultimate horror would be to get an addictive, hallucinogenic drug out of your system and you would say, “Well, I’m back in the real world now.” And suddenly a monstrous object from the hallucinogenic world would cross the floor and you would realize that you were not back. And this is what has happened to many people who have dropped acid. It was just an accidental prophecy on my part.

 

[Iprobe]

I did one page once while on an acid trip, but it was in Latin. Whole damn thing was in Latin and a little tiny bit in Sanskrit

So, I’m wondering whether he had studied those prior to that experience?

He who can, does; he who can’t…trips out.

 

[fons_vitae]

So, I’m wondering whether he had studied those prior to that experience?

I would assume he was being facetious.

 

[Usbek_de_Perse]

Where is this psychedelic duck? What does he say? Can we penetrate his wisdom?

 

[fons_vitae]

Where is this psychedelic duck? What does he say? Can we penetrate his wisdom?

I think you mean mescal fowl.

 

[AntiTheist]

I’m quite irritated with the association some make between the use of psychedelics and creativity. For example: If the Beatles are creative, it’s acid that made them that way.

It’s not that drugs make people creative. It’s that drugs release inhibitions that, in some cases, interfere with natural creativity.

So no, merely taking acid won’t give you the musical talent of John Lennon, but if you have some talent, taking drugs might – possibly – give you that push you’ve been needing to “let go” and take the kind of risks in your art that make for great art. They also might possibly do you some harm or might do nothing at all besides give you a really far out trip, man.

And of course, religious mysticism is often assumed to be the result of drugs, mental illness, or delusion on the part of the mystics.

Well, yeah. Anyone who has even a little bit of experience with meditation can tell you that causing trippy experiences is easy and that it can be done with just a little bit of practice, without any chemicals whatsoever.

Various religious devotional practices have similarities to some meditative processes (I’m thinking of mantra yoga, especially), so it’s not terribly surprising that some people have trippy experiences during prayer or whatnot. The trick, of course, is realizing that just because you feel like you’re “one with everything” (or just because you feel like the Saints are appearing to you in your breakfast burrito) doesn’t mean that you are one with everything (or that Saints are appearing to you).

 

[OrdinaryMelkite]

I would assume he was being facetious.

Since we are sort into “New Agey”-type beliefs, I would say he actually “tapped” into the Collective Unconscious, and accessed those languages that way.

Seriously, though----------I agree He probably was being Facetious.

 

[Eric_Hilbert]

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