Lines of Flight 5
Opening the Psyche
In 60s counterculture, a rejection of standard narrative values went hand-in-hand with a spiritual quest, a life experiment, an exploration of new mind experiences, the discovery of spontaneous creativity, and the search for key points of departure from conformity.
A new sense of freedom was required to venture down the pathless path.
And for those with the courage to find their own way into the forest, not all would be smooth ride.
Timothy Leary
Timothy Leary summed up the conflict, at least at one level, between experimentation with authenticity and resistance by the established order:
Throughout human history, as our species has faced the frightening, terrorizing fact that we do not know who we are, or where we are going in this ocean of chaos, it has been the authorities, the political, the religious, the educational authorities who attempted to comfort us by giving us order, rules, regulations, informing, forming in our minds their view of reality. To think for yourself you must question authority and learn how to put yourself in a state of vulnerable, open-mindedness; chaotic, confused, vulnerability to inform yourself. (Leary, “How to Operate Your Brain”)
Leary asserts the need to de-center the psyche: to open up to experience is the only way to reject authority, as scary as that may be.
Tom Wolfe
Tom Wolfe commemorated the Pranksters travels in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, elaborating on the connection between true creativity and experimentation with the unknown:
Everybody, everybody everywhere, has his own movie going, his own scenario, and everybody is acting his movie out like mad, only most people don’t know that is what they’re trapped by, their little script.
[Aldous Huxley] compared the brain to a ‘reducing valve’. In ordinary perception, the senses send an overwhelming flood of information to the brain, which the brain then filters down to a trickle it can manage for the purpose of survival in a highly competitive world. Man has become so rational, so utilitarian, that the trickle becomes most pale and thin. It is efficient, for mere survival, but it screens out the most wondrous part of man’s potential experience without his even knowing it. We’re shut off from our own world.
… a perception of the cosmic unity of this higher level. And a feeling of timelessness, the feeling that what we know as time is only the result of a naive faith in causality — the notion that A in the past caused B in the present, which will cause C in the future, when actually A, B, and C are all part of a pattern that can be truly understood only by opening the doors of perception and experiencing it… in this moment… this supreme moment… this Kairos.
Wolfe makes it clear that in order to experience the experimental creativity of becoming we must let go of the dogmatic image of thought, our patterns of rational deliberation, and open up to pure difference.
I hope you enjoyed this article. Thanks for reading!
Tomas
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Excerpt from my forthcoming book, Becoming: A Life of Pure Difference (Gilles Deleuze and the Philosophy of the New) Copyright © 2023 by Tomas Byrne. Learn more here.
