Tag: Esalen

Maximus at the Edge of the Labyrinth

What does it mean that Charles Olson took psilocybin with Leary and Ginsberg — yet never joined the merry caravan of the acid gospel? That his turn toward altered consciousness took the form not of dropout spectacle, but of withdrawal to granite?

Dogtown is not Millbrook. It is not Esalen. It is not Island.

And yet.

In “Maximus, from Dogtown—IV”, Olson walks the stone trails of a post-collapse landscape, beside the ocean, listening for voices in the wind. His poem does not offer transcendence. It grounds. It builds breath into structure. It makes the ruin speak again.

What he found on those walks was not utopia, but continuity — a thread connecting him to the first people of the land, the women who lived alone in Dogtown’s final decades, the dead who still speak in lichen and stone. His poem remembers, not to recover what was lost, but to carry forward the field in which spirit and matter still cohabit.

Like McKenna’s “transcendental object,” Olson’s field is a site of imaginal access. But its mode is not visionary spectacle — it is attunement. A slowing. An entering-into-breath.

In that sense, Olson’s poem is perhaps more kin to Ujjayi than to LSD. Not a peak, but a wave. Not revelation, but reverberation.

To read “Dogtown—IV” in light of the Harvard Psilocybin Project is not to say Olson was “on drugs” when he wrote it. Rather, it is to recognize that he, too, was seeking access. Not through sacrament alone, but through poetics: a method for tracking the world’s subtle frequencies. Breath-based cognition. Projective presence.

His use of the page — spatial, disjunctive, physical — is not an aesthetic choice but a spiritual orientation. It is the line as line of sight. The poem as map of mind in space.

And perhaps, too, as portal.

We often think of psychedelia in terms of color and collapse — visions, melting, revelation. But what if Olson’s Dogtown poems reveal a minor key to the psychedelic tradition — one where the real trip is learning how to stay, how to listen, how to walk the world as though every stone were speaking?

Olson was not a utopian in the manner of Huxley or Leary. But he may have known, better than most, how to breathe a world into being.

The Mushroom People

In the mid-twentieth century, two groups with competing agendas worked to introduce psychedelics into American society: the CIA, with its MK-Ultra program, on the one hand, and countercultural intellectuals, including famous authors like Aldous Huxley, on the other. Among this latter group of “psychedelic utopians,” we can include Huxley’s friend and fellow émigré Gerald Heard, as well as related figures like Timothy Leary, Ken Kesey, and Allen Ginsberg. By now, histories have been written about the efforts of both of these groups; but in accounts of the latter group in particular, what sometimes goes unmentioned or unrecognized was its explicitly utopian intent. After their first encounters with substances like mescaline, psilocybin, and LSD, many of the above-mentioned early users of these drugs felt compelled not just to pen statements of advocacy, as Huxley did in books like The Doors of Perception (1954) and his final novel Island (1962); most of them also rushed to form communes and related kinds of alternative, experimental foundations, schools, organizations, and institutions—among which we can include Esalen Institute, the White Hand Society, the Zihuatanejo Project, Millbrook, the Merry Pranksters, the League for Spiritual Discovery, the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, and others. However, unlike prior utopian projects that emphasized modifications either to property relations or to modes of governance, most of the organizations and communities mentioned above instead prioritized psychosexual deprogramming and the so-called “raising of consciousness” through mass ingestion of psychoactive substances as techniques essential to their goal of changing society for the good.

Although not as active as some of the figures I’ve mentioned above, Black Mountain poet Charles Olson was nevertheless an early, enthusiastic participant in one of these organizations in particular: namely, Leary and Ginsberg’s group, the White Hand Society. Poet Peter Conners tells the story of Leary and Ginsberg’s partnership in his book White Hand Society. The story begins, of all places, at Harvard. Leary and his colleague Richard Alpert (who later took the name “Ram Dass”) launched the series of experiments known as the Harvard Psilocybin Project beginning in 1960. Beat poet Allen Ginsberg was one of the first individuals to participate in this project. British psychiatrist Humphrey Osmond — known both for coining the term “psychedelic” and for administering the famed mescaline trip described by Huxley in The Doors of Perception — placed Ginsberg in contact with Leary after hearing the poet deliver a talk about his experiences with mescaline at a conference hosted by a Boston-based professional organization known as the Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry (Conners 62). After an initial exchange of letters and a visit by Leary to the poet’s East Village apartment in Manhattan, Ginsberg agreed to participate in a psilocybin session hosted at Leary’s home in Boston in November 1960.

Needless to say, Ginsberg reacted positively to the experience. He declared himself “the Messiah…come down to preach love to the world” (as quoted in Conners 84). “We’re going down to the city streets to tell the people about peace and love,” he proclaimed, trying to convince Leary and others to join him. “And then,” he added, “we’ll get lots of great people onto a big telephone network to settle all this warfare bit” (85). We may feel ourselves tempted to laugh at Ginsberg’s pronouncements, jaded as we are by the decades that followed — but these pronouncements were indeed prophetic. Ginsberg’s words made things happen. For telling people about peace and love was exactly what he and Leary went on to do in the years that followed. The two men bonded over the experience, and agreed afterwards to conspire together to turn on other creative types and thus aid in the dissemination of the psychedelic sacrament to others. Poring over the poet’s address book, Leary and Ginsberg chose individuals they thought might be open to participation in future experiments.

Among these contacts was Charles Olson.

Wednesday June 16, 2021

A lifeguard blows her whistle and shouts “Pool break!” Better that than a trumpet. Families return to their seats. Some pack their things and leave for lunch, never to be seen again. A boy-child trails behind one such family mewling a bit, shouting “I want pizza!” Others arrive thereafter and take their place. My dissertation reckoned with these and other visions of the future, from the utopian to the apocalyptic. “How do such visions fare,” asks the one to the other across time, “in light of the consciousness revolution, the Revolution of the Eternal Now? How many or how few present what Esalen psychologist William C. Schutz calls ‘thoughts and methods for attaining more joy’ (Schutz, Joy, p. 10)? Must the Eternal Now be an eternal capitalist present, as per neoliberal ideology — as in books like The End of Ideology and The End of History? Or can we use the present to figure forth the Commune, beloved ones all living together in common, as per the slogan ‘Full Communism Now’?”

Monday September 2, 2019

What happens when, as an experiment, we treat moments of our lives as “encounters”? What were people doing when they joined T-groups, encounter groups, and consciousness-raising groups in the 60s and 70s at places like Esalen? How were these groups organized? Did facilitators exercise claims to authority in these groups? Were they like teachers? Workshop leaders? Pastors? Counselors? Therapists? Gurus? A bit of all of the above, I suppose. Groups fulfill needs of an emotional, psychological, and spiritual sort among people who have come free of traditional affiliations: disaffected subjects seeking re-enchantment, players in search of new games. Such people arrive at these groups and games as they wander markets, festivals, circuits, and arcades. The encounter groups of the 60s and 70s were sites where “role-playing” got its start. Games like Dungeons & Dragons emerged in roughly the same moment and milieu. What’s interesting about encounter groups is that participants trust their feelings to “a bunch of strangers,” rather than to uniformed technocrats, “experts,” priests, and elites. The encounter group is also interesting in that it births group consciousness through use of cybernetic feedback mechanisms. Group members are observed by facilitators. The facilitator reports these observations back to the group. The latter then react to the reports and the cycle begins anew, in much the same way “rounds” occur in D&D. Thomas R. Verney describes two favorite techniques of role-play used by Gestalt therapist Fritz Perls during the latter’s time at Esalen in the 60s and 70s: the “two chair” technique and another called “play the projection.” Could techniques of that sort have a place, I wonder, in one of my courses? Verny’s book Inside Groups: A Practical Guide to Encounter Groups & Group Therapy answers many of my questions. The least authoritarian of the leaders he describes are those he calls “T-group trainers.” The T-group trainer, he writes, “is usually described as a facilitator and a catalyst” (28). Leadership of this sort involves paraphrasing what is said by the group, acting as a mirroring instrument so that members can know themselves and the group can self-actualize. Encounter group leaders are a bit more unpredictable, their methods and techniques less subject to professionalization and external supervision. As for the techniques themselves, Verny writes, these are primarily “verbal and nonverbal confrontation, psychodrama, Gestalt, and sensory awareness,” as well as “fantasy, meditation, and transactional analysis” (34-35).

Tuesday May 22, 2018

The “rise and fall” framework informing Jessica Grogan’s book Encountering America leaves much to be desired, not least because it imposes onto history an imaginary moral economy, one that equates moderation with virtue and radicalism with vice. I found this unexamined framework to be particularly intrusive, for instance, in the chapters of the book dealing with Esalen and LSD. Throughout these chapters, Grogan pins the blame for humanistic psychology’s alleged downfall on what she repeatedly refers to as the chaotic “excesses” of the counterculture — by which she seems to mean some combination of romanticism, hedonism, popular withdrawal of support for institutional authority, and unsupervised experimentation with mind-altering substances. Figures linked with these tendencies include Allen Ginsberg, Aldous Huxley, Timothy Leary, Frederick Perls, and William C. Schutz.

Thursday May 3, 2018

My seeking returns me to the Stanford Research Institute, and to Willis W. Harman in particular. I first heard of Harman about eight years ago, while I was researching writers connected with SRI whose paths intersected with the Whole Earth Catalog and its various 1970s offshoots. Harman, it turns out, was a close associate of CIA operative Al Hubbard. Some have called Hubbard “the Johnny Appleseed of LSD.” Because of his connection to Hubbard, Harman proved instrumental in launching and directing SRI’s “Alternative Futures Project,” the main goal of which was to “turn on” business and thought leaders by introducing them to LSD. Harman also led “The Expanding Vision,” the first seminar at Esalen Institute. Later on, he founded an equally strange, equally “New Age”-oriented organization called the Institute of Noetic Science. Martin A. Lee & Bruce Shlain mention him several times in Acid Dreams, their social history of LSD and the counterculture. For more on figures like Harman and their links to LSD and the Human Potential movement, check out James Dennis LoRusso’s Spirituality, Corporate Culture, and American Business: The Neoliberal Ethic and the Spirit of Global Capital. Take a look as well at Marion Goodman’s book, The American Soul Rush: Esalen and the Rise of Spiritual Privilege.