Counter Culture

A Look at LSD and The Counter Culture Movement
The normal consciousness that we deal with everyday is only one drop in an ocean of intelligence. For thousands of years, man experimented with the fruits of nature with the hope of finding the key to our unconscious. Man revered these fruits as gifts from the Gods that allowed us to find a new spiritual and philosophic connection with God. But in the last 40 years there has been huge opposition to these mind-expanding tools. The once highly regarded gift from God was viewed as a menace that would be the cause of the ending of social conformity in North America during the 1960’s. Honorable judges, parents and fellow competitors made, the individual right of access to his or her own brain, a significant political, economic, and cultural issue in our society. During the 1960’s a man by the name of Timothy Leary would cause a cultural revolution that questioned the perception our society had on hallucinogen drugs. He believed that if people were educated in the use of these drugs that these drugs would be the next step for the evolution of the human mind.
Hallucinogenic drugs like LSD and psilocybin have been embedded in the roots of human evolution. Many of the early Easter

Leary returned back to Harvard and decided to do research on these sacred drugs. He felt that the spiritual experiences that he was given would be able benefit to the dying spiritual ways of America. After successful months with experimenting with LSD and psilocybin therapies, Leary needed to find how this wonder drug would be able to influence people lives for the better. He and his colleagues conducted two main experiments the “prisoners to prophets” and “The Good Friday Experiment.”. The drug was administered several times in series of experiments to see if there were any change in the behaviors of the prisoners. They noticed that the prisoners began to appreciate lives that transcended the damp cold walls of their prison. The experiments didn’t stop with prisoners; Leary began administering the test for what would be called “The Good Friday Experiment” in which 25 religious people were given a mild dose of LSD. The effects were astonishing, many felt during that day the “God was around them.” The administration of this sacred drug in a religious setting to people who were religiously motivated provides a scientific demonstration that spiritual ecstasy, religious revelation, and union with God were now directly accessible. Huge obstacles were to be overcome if these drugs were to be accepted in our society.

That summer Leary and a 5 of his friends (other Harvard Psych professors) decided to go to Mexico for a trip. There they met Gerhart Braun an anthropologist-historian of the University of Mexico. After a dinner and discussion of philosophy, Braun told them that within the hot, tropical jungles of Mexico grows a power hallucinogen known to the Ancient Aztecs as Teonanacatl, or “flesh of the gods.” These magic mushrooms of Mexico had a long history surrounded by religious and ceremonial use. The Catholic Church feared this drug would encourage devilish worship in turn would tarnish the Catholic belief, and banned these “devil” drugs, so effectively that botanists denied of there very existence until they were re-discovered in the 50’s. It turned out that Braun had collected of some these mushrooms earlier that day and offered to try them with the Harvard faculty. So Leary decided to try the so-called hallucinogen. Two out the five abstained and would record the others experience on paper.

In Genesis, “The Lord God planted all sorts of beautiful trees there in the garden, trees producing the choicest of fruit. At the center of the garden he placed the Tree of Life, and the Tree of Knowledge, giving knowledge of both Goo