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Religion and Psychoactive Sacraments:
An Entheogen Chrestomathy
Thomas B. Roberts, Ph.D. and Paula Jo Hruby, Ed.D.
Author Index | Title Index
Millbrook: The True Story of the Early Years of the Psychedelic Revolution.
Kleps, Art. (1977).
Oakland, CA: Bench Press.
- ISBN: 0-916534-05-7 hardcover
- 0-916534-06-5 paperback
New Edition: Millbrook, A Narrative of the Early Years of American Psychedelianism Recension of 1997 (1997);
(ISBN: 0960038868); Oakland, CA: Bench Press
Description: Hardcover,
x + 355 pages.
Contents: Preface, a
word of explanation, 44 chapters, final P.S. by M. T.
Excerpt(s): Religion
and philosophy are everywhere. Prior to Enlightenment, to take
one example, Kafka seemed very profound to
me, but after Enlightenment he seemed no more profound to me than
the Lone Ranger and his horse Silver. ... Perhaps it will be less
painful, since I can't do a good job anyway, to really hoke this
up and knock out a fast kind of stock market report on how various
names and notions fared after the big crash.
Well, Zen, Yogacara and Madyamaka Buddhist stock
rose sharply while Yoga, Bramanist and Vedantist
issues plummeted on the Hong Kong exchange. In London
Hume
rocketed skyward, Aldous Huxley weakened,
then held, and penny-a-share issues such as Alister Crowley
and Yeats disappeared entirely from view. On
the Scandinavian exchanges, Kierkegaard
trembled, and the Swedenborgian Pig
Iron Works, collapsed overnight. In Paris former glamor
stocks like Camus
began to look a little green around the gills, and, indeed, the
whole tired market became sluggish and depressed.
In New York, as one might expect, a frantic reassessment
took place which drove such superficially disparate stocks as
Nabokov,
Brown to undreamed of levels, while virtually wiping out such
ex-favorites as the hot Norman Mailer and
dropping the old, reliable Mark Twain and Herman
Melville to moderate price levels. The
whole industry of the novel suffered a vast deflation, as the
Ultimate Consumer became more aware of how seriously he had been
swindled in the past by elaborate but shallow metaphors such as
this one.
The disaster in Berlin was a veritable
Gotterdammerung, naturally. Hume's up was Kant's
down-and Schopenhauer's also. Giant
Brains and Ghostly Forms had suddenly gone out of
fashion. Good riddance to bad rubbish! All science-fiction fell,
and then steadied at a cheap price ... as did most popular fiction
of the day, as a matter of fact. Jesus Christ ascended gloriously
on all markets, but Christianity fell. Heraklitus
climbed like a flame. Plotinus
dipped (from a high place). Sufism rose. The S.E.C. sat on the
Pythagorean bucket-shop. Bahai crashed. Science
dipped sharply, and then steadied at a reasonable ratio between
price and earnings. Poetry, in general, and it came as something
of a surprise, did likewise. It cooled off, one might say.
All the Zen masters spiralled into the blue.
Freud and Jung went through wild
gyrations resembling an aerial dogfight, before both sank gradually
to earth. ...
Luther went up a bit, Dante
went down a bit.
The I Ching went through the roof. The Bhagavad-Gita
crashed. The Mulamadhayama-karika of Nagarjuna
became unobtainable at any price.
Shakespeare, unlike almost
every other stock being traded, remained absolutely stable. (pages
56-58)
Compilation copyright © 1995 – 2001 CSP
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