Flashback Downloads: Haight-Ashbury, 1966

posted on evolver.net by Vintage Tripper, Sylvia Anderson | November 12, 2010


If we had to live in a city again, I wanted a big apartment, close to a park. I found one through a rental agency. It was a five-room flat on the corner of Shrader and Waller streets, a block from Golden Gate Park and within my budget. Great! The fact that it was also a block from Haight Street didn’t mean a thing to me. I was still in my New-Yorker head of thinking that nothing really important could be happening anywhere west of the Hudson, and I had never even heard of Haight-Ashbury. It was Fall, 1966, Little did I know that all Heaven was about to break loose in our new neighborhood, in our apartment, and in my own consciousness.

So Todd, Yogi and I moved into our new digs in the Haight. The apartment was one flight up, over a tool rental store. I actually felt somewhat relieved living in a city again. At least I could walk to the laundromat and grocery store if the van wasn’t running. And living just a block from Golden Gate Park was wonderful. It was a huge park, extending ten miles west to the ocean, with many meadows, forested areas, museums, and a great playground for kids of all ages. Todd especially enjoyed the spiral slide, the petting zoo, and the merry-go-round.

Hoffman's Potion

This documentary offers a compassionate, open-minded look at LSD and how it fits into our world. Long before Timothy Leary urged a generation to "tune in, turn on and drop out," the drug was hailed as a way to treat forms of addiction and mental illness. At the same time, it was being touted as a powerful tool for mental exploration and self-understanding. Featuring interviews with LSD pioneers, beautiful music and stunning cinematography, this is much more than a simple chronicle of LSD's early days. It's an alternative way of looking at the drug... and our world.

Psychonauts Generation 1 1932-1965

 Where an individual stands on the issue of access topsychoactive plants will determine, more than anyother issue, how that individual engages in the coming planetary shift.

psychonaut: somone who navigates the psyche by the aid of psychoactive plants given by nature, or synthetic compounds produced in the laboratory. Term proposed by Ernst Junger. Wikipedia:

EXCERPTS FROM:

Three Generations of Psychonauts: G1

metahistory.org (read full article)

A psychonaut (from the Greek ψυχονα?της, meaning literally a sailor of the mind/soul) is a person who uses altered states of consciousness, intentionally induced, to investigate his or her mind, and possibly address spiritual questions, through direct experience. Psychonauts tend to be pluralistic, willing to explore mystical traditions from established world religions, meditation, lucid dreaming, technologies such as brainwave entrainment and sensory deprivation, and often psychedelic drugs (entheogens). Because techniques that alter consciousness can be dangerous, and can induce a state of extreme susceptibility, psychonauts generally prefer to undertake these explorations either alone, or in the company of people they trust. Therefore, they are averse to using altered consciousness in a social or "party" context. Psychonauts generally regard the latter sort of use as irresponsible and dangerous.

psychonautics: the practice and technique of exploring altered states of consciousness; a mode of cultural-cognitive expression, comparable to physics, esthetics, ethics, etc.

January 13, 1941 Wilhelm Reich meets Albert Einstein in Princeton and the two men talk for five yours, mainly about Reich's theory of cosmic orgone. At that moment when ethnobotanists such as Shultes were on the track of shamanic practices that would reintroduce animism into the modern world, Reich was explaining to the world's best known scientist that the entire universe is animated by an erotically charged vital force called orgone.

April 1943 Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann, who was to become a close colleague of Schultes, accidently absorbed LSD-25 on his fingertips—a chance event which, to some minds, changed the course of human evolution.