Indigenous ways of knowing; Black Radical thought; Surrealism; Afrofuturism; Zen Buddhism. All have been guides: blueprints for counter-education for those who wish to be healed of imperial imposition. All provide maps of states other than the dominant capitalist-realist one. Hermann Hesse describes one such line of flight in his short novel The Journey to the East, a book first published in German in 1932, unavailable in English until 1956. Timothy Leary’s League for Spiritual Discovery takes after the League in Hesse’s novel. It, too, is but a part of a “procession of believers and disciples” moving “always and incessantly…towards the East, towards the Home of Light” (Hesse 12-13). Two of Leary’s psychedelic utopias, in other words, take their names from books by Hesse: both the League for Spiritual Discovery and its immediate precursor, the Castalia Foundation.
Tag: League for Spiritual Discovery
Thursday June 17, 2021
My readings lead as all roads lead: to Castalia, the “elite institution devoted wholly to the mind and the imagination.” Castalia, Castalia, where “scholar-players” play the Glass Bead Game. Castalia, Castalia, the invention at the heart of Hermann Hesse’s final novel Magister Ludi. Hesse published the book in German under the title Das Glasperlenspiel. It appeared in Switzerland in 1943. The aim of the Glass Bead Game, as Hesse imagines it, is “the unio mystica of all separate members of the Universitas Litterarum.” Castalia, Castalia, Parnassian spring sacred to the Muses. Castalia, Castalia, remade as foundation by Leary and Alpert prior to their renaming it the League for Spiritual Discovery in 1966. Before Castalia they called themselves the International Federation for Internal Freedom. Castalia was the name they adopted in 1963 as they arrived to the Hitchcock Estate in Millbrook, NY. Some group of tricksters relaunched the Foundation in 2020 with repulsive rightwing content antithetical to the earlier foundation’s spirit and intent.
Friday September 25, 2020
Students in my classes produced presentations on Beats, Hippies, and Millbrook. The third class was more comprehensive in its coverage — though none of the groups mentioned the new religions and religious organizations formed at Millbrook: the Neo-American Church, for instance, and the League for Spiritual Discovery. Practitioners of religion were targeted by government. These were utopian communities of love and peace: open, welcoming communities founded not through settlement but through sacramental use of psychoactive substances. They modeled for the civilization the Alternative, the solution to the economic and environmental crises. They also modeled, however imperfectly, an attempt at alliance with anti-racist, anti-colonial groups like the Black Panther Party and the American Indian Movement — a point neglected in the histories presented by my students. Is there more I could say to help them vote? Or is the action we must take vaster than that? Let us trust that the texts will lead the way, permitting us to say what needs saying.
Friday November 9, 2018
How did Ken Kesey and his psychedelic community the Merry Pranksters re-imagine reality through their use of the phrase “the current fantasy”? How does one determine one’s fantasy? Surely it’s by performing these fantasies collectively — in groups, with others. In today’s performance, let us imagine ourselves as psychedelic detectives, researching Michael Bowen and Gary Goldhill, figures Tom Wolfe references as members of the League for Spiritual Discovery in his book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Goldhill was an English head who worked for the BBC, Wolfe says, until he took some magic mushrooms in San Miguel de Allende, and in so doing discovered “the Management and gave up all, all the TV BBC game and dedicated himself to The Life” (Wolfe 361). Time to dive back into this thing, no? Symbols trigger recollection of forgotten knowledge. They cure us of our amnesia. We realize reality is a hologram — Philip K. Dick’s “Black Iron Prison.” A military coup d’état occurred on 11/22/63. Our duty now is to unravel belief in the frame.
Trance-Scripts 