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  The Man Who Turned on the World

    Michael Hollingshead

        5.   The Millbrook Happenings

1964

    In the Fall of 1964 I arrived at Millbrook. Leary and Alpert, who had proclaimed themselves the International Foundation for Internal Freedom (IFIF), had had to leave Zihuatanejo, Mexico, where they had set up a training centre for people using LSD. They got back to New York and started looking for an alternative base somewhere in the States. The solution to their problem came in the form of a sixty-four-room mansion on a 2000-acre walled estate within two hours motoring distance of the city. They had rented the estate from the young millionaire Billy Hitchcock, at a nominal rent more or less—$500 a month.
    The mansion was empty when they and their tiny followship arrived, but it was the ideal place for them to be; it was secluded and spacious and not entirely lacking in antiquated charm. It had been built in the 1890s to the rather bizarre architectural specifications of the German-born gas-lamp magnate, Charles F. Dieterich, who christened his country seat 'Daheim'.
    The spires and turrets pointing above the trees into a clear open sky, 'Daheim' looked, at first glance, like the creation of some neo-baroque American King Ludwig. In addition to the main building, there was an out-building that consisted of a downstairs bowling alley and a large fireplace room upstairs. It was built in the style of a Bavarian chalet and had a little verandah from which access to the roof was easy. There was also a lodge house at the entrance to the estate, in which Maynard Fergusson and his beautiful wife Flo lived with their children.
    Millbrook was the headquarters of the Castalia Foundation, so named after the intellectuals' colony in Hermann Hesse's book Das Glasperlenspiel (The Glass Bead Game), the last and finest novel by Hermann Hesse, the story of which is set in the Alpine province of Kastalien around the year 2400. In this emotionally chill utopian future, isolated from the mass of population, the elite monastic Castalian Order displays its intellectual mastery through the ritualised game of glass beads, a game encompassing all human knowledge.

'The pattern sings like crystal constellations,
And when we tell our beads, we serve the whole,
And cannot be dislodged or misdirected,
Held in the orbit of the Cosmic Soul.'

'These rules, the sign language and grammar of the Game, constitute a kind of highly developed secret language drawing upon several sciences and arts, but especially mathematics and music.... The Glass Bead Game is thus a mode of playing with the total contents and values of our culture.... All the insights, noble thoughts, and works of art that the human race has produced in its creative eras, all that subsequent periods of scholarly study have reduced to concepts and converted into intellectual property—on all this immense body of intellectual values the Glass Bead Game player plays like the organist on an organ… (the Game represents) an elite, symbolic form of seeking for perfection, a sublime alchemy, an approach to that Mind which beyond all images and multiplicities is one within itself in other words, to God.' [Hermann Hesse, The Glass Bead Game, tr. by Richard and Clara Winston, Jonathan Cape, 1970, p. 14ff.]

'Groups which attempt to apply psychedelic experiences to social living will find in the story of Castalia all the features and problems which such attempts inevitably encounter: the need for a new language or set of symbols to do justice to the incredible complexity and power of the human cerebral machinery; the central importance of maintaining direct contact with the regenerative forces of the life-process through meditation or other methods of altering consciousness; the crucial and essentially insoluble problem of the relation of the mystic community to the world at large. Can the order remain an educative, spiritual force in the society, or must it degenerate through isolation and inattention to a detached, alienated group of idealists ?' [Timothy Leary and Ralph Metzner, The Psychedelic Renew, Cambridge, Mass., Vol. 1, No. 2, Fall 1963, p. 179.]

'The sole purpose of creation is that the soul should be able to enjoy the Infinite state of the Over-soul (Paramatman) consciously. Although the soul eternally exists in and with the Oversoul in an inviolable unity, it cannot be conscious of this unity independently of the creation which is within the limitations of time. It must, therefore, evolve consciousness before it can realise its true status and nature as being identical with the Infinite Over-soul, which is One without a second.' [Meher Baba, 'The Divine Theme for Meditation', cited in C. B. Purdom, The Perfect Master, Williams and Norgate, London, 1937, p. 309.]

'So far you have been searching for your past personality.
Unable to find it, you may begin to feel that you will never be the same again,
That you will come back a changed person.
Saddened by this you will feel self-pity,
You will attempt to find your ego, to regain control.
So thinking you will wander here and there,
Ceaselessly and distractedly.'
            (The Tibetan Book of the Dead)

    We also played behavioural games with each other, accumulating evidence to test various hypotheses. As an example, in June 1965 we had all been studying Gurdjieff's Meetings With Remarkable Men, Ouspensky's The Fourth Way, and Orage's Psychological Exercises. Gurdjieff maintained that most people sleepwalk their waking hours away, and saw his own role as that of an alarm clock to wake people from this diurnal somnambulism. To test this we planned a Self-Remembering game. It started at 9.00 a.m. and, in an arbitrary sequence, a bell would ring four times an hour throughout the day. The bell was the signal for us to stop and record what we were doing at the time. Under the heading EXTERNAL we answered the questions Where are you? and What game are you playing? Under the heading CONSCIOUSNESS we answered the questions When? (i.e. Past, Present, Future), Where? and What game? As the house was full of behaviourists this seemed a normal thing to do.

    Tim's wedding to 'the beautiful blonde Swedish model' Nena Von Schlebrugge took place six weeks after I had moved into my upstairs room at Millbrook. It was a radiant morning and we were up early to welcome the guests, most of whom drove up from New York. The marriage service was held in the Episcopal church in the village of Millbrook in the early afternoon and afterwards we returned to the estate where we had arranged a Swedish-style buffet in all the downstairs rooms of Castalia, so guests could wander around the house eating delicacies. I had met most of the guests individually, or in small groups, but this was the first really big gathering of assorted heads. There were some 150 of us, all high on LSD, or pot, or both. It was a brilliant festive occasion with everyone dressed up so brightly that it was like watching an idyllic pageant from Elizabethan England. Most of the girls had dazzling ornaments over Indian saris. They held flowers and seemed to glitter in an extraordinary delicacy. The men wore robes and brightly coloured costumes—harlequin pants, richly textured jackets, sumptuous shirts. To view them on the lawn from the roof of the bowling alley was to peep into a kaleidoscopic garden party of glorious humanity. Castalia had been transformed into a palace and it embraced this ceremony.
    It was one of those days when everyone was happy and joyous and loving. Felicities filled the air. Charlie Mingus played his bass, Maynard Fergusson cogitated on his trumpet, and other musicians joined in to produce an elegant weaving series of improvisations. Don Snyder took a wonderfully sympathetic series of photographs.
    Before Tim and Nena left for New York to catch the plane to New Delhi for their first visit to India there was a receiving line and we all filed past with our presents. Psychedelic presents of course. Some gave hashish, some gave bags of excellent grass. Some gave mushrooms. A snuff box of cocaine. A quantity of LSD. The entire range of mind-expanding substances were proffered to the newly-weds, and all the while people were turning on. When Tim and Nena left we carried on with the celebrations into the dawn, and watched the sun edging over the horizon as the earth heaved over and took us into another day.
    Tim was away for more than a month, during which time we sent him messages about what we were doing. Tapes would arrive at New Delhi via American Express and would be taken up to Tim and Nena, about a mile away in Almora.

'Dear Tim and Nina. We're missing you very much. We've been studying the works of Meher Baba, particularly his book God Speaks and we find this fundamental to our journey. We've also been reading Rene Daumal's Mount Analogue and our souls are climbing the mountain. Our bodies too: we've built our own mountain from chicken wire and plaster of paris, and we've painted routes and markings on this mountain, a metaphoric statement of where we're at, all climbing the mountain together. We ran seven sessions last week. Some wonderful. Jacky and Susan are very well. Jack is doing well at school, making new friends who he brings round to watch the deer in the park. Susan has been learning to bake. On Tuesday some of us went to Salvador Dali's birthday party at the St. Regis hotel. We were all dressed up, wearing ski masks, each with a different musical instrument. They were about to throw us out when they discovered we were Dali's guests. Gabi gave Dali his pet iguana for a present. Later, when Dali took us to the Stork Club for a meal, he paid and left the iguana on the table as a tip. We are sending you some LSD by next mail, to c/o American Express, New Delhi. Enough for forty trips. Love from Millbrook.'

'Our purpose in being here is to expand our awareness. To assimilate and to see aspects of the psychedelic consciousness. To observe the phenomena of inner space. This is the Magic Theatre. By magic we mean the phenomena of everyday life through which we pass most of our time asleep. Tonight we shall be mixing auditory and visual phenomena. The brain is capable of processing all this data. It will see different images moving in a random/planned fashion. Sound tracks, some of which have been cut up, will be heard. Films and light will perform. All you have to do is focus on one point. And then you will see the rest. Diversity will be unity. But do not try to understand. The brain will do all that later. Here you will have 10,000 visions. So sit back and relax. Extend yourself to an aesthetic distance. You may have the opportunity of leaving your body. Leaving your mind. You are going on a voyage. The price of admission is your mind. For if you attempt to analyse and conceptualise you will cheat yourself of the opportunity to see things in a fresh manner.'

Is it a dream ?
    Shadowy
    Elusive
    Invisible
All things
All images
Move slowly
Within
Shimmering nets

Here
Essence endures
From here
All forms emerge
All forms
Emerge
From this second
Back to the ancient beginning
            (Tao Sutra 21)

'Tamara, her blonde hair falling to her baggy white pyjamas, was passing out Tibetan incense.
    ' "That's because it's delightful," she explained.
    'The patrons who jammed the 123-seat basement jazz club accepted the offerings with an equally earnest mysticism, for they had come to experience the debut of the Psychedelic Theatre—a simulated "session" with the consciousness expanding drug Lysergic Acid Diethylamide, or LSD.
    'It was "speakout" night at the Village Vanguard… last week an LSD symposium transcended the merely verbal because, as a grave young man backed by a throbbing bass declaimed, "Our limited lexicography, with its procrustean subject-object limitations cannot communicate this experience."
    'Darkness. Up tempo bass. Lights flash through the audience; slides flash on a sheet: Mount Rushmore, biological specimen, Buddha sliding in and out of focus. Drums and a clarinet pick up the rhythm. Tamara, accompanied by Tasha, a thin, haunted-looking young man also in baggy whites; they dance, not quite to a twist, with Siamese arm motions. Later, more dancing, to the Beatles, while a flickering blue light seems to stop the motion into jerks.... A noise like three monotone bears trapped in a sewer, transforming itself into an oriental fluting, bonging and chanting. A movie of a frog embryo in a glass bowl, evolving rotating and flipping to a cool jazz score, while a voice quietly intones universal truths and insights: "… muddy water cannot be fathomed."
    'A hundred would-be experiencers were turned away, business at the bar was slow, and the audience was rapt and curiously split. "There's an awful lot of uptowners here," muttered a hostile hipster, glowering at a section of Wednesday matinee women.
    'There was a scattering of ageing beards, but the other face was that of youth, sure of its terminology—"Cosmic consciousness", "re-entry", and "set".
    'Some matched the religious fervour of the performers, residents of a Millbrook, N.Y. "utopian colony" who soberly passed out jelly beans and balloons during intermission.'

    So involved had we been in the Psychedelic Theatre and so closely had we communicated with Tim in India that it seemed like days not months had passed when he eventually returned with Nena. After the preliminary salutations of welcome, Tim made it very clear that he had mainly learned from India that all fire and metals should be kept underground. 'The great work of the future,' he said, 'will be to return fire and metal back to earth. This will be a work of joy. All works of destruction involve fire and metal. We must overcome them. In future we will separate our garbage into metallic and non-metallic substances. All the metal must be buried.'
    I took it upon myself to bury all the empty tin cans by sticking them upside-down into the footpath through the garden. So we would walk on the metal and it would eventually subside into the earth.
    Tim began to take up his psychological work with some intensity and announced one morning that three senior Yale psychologists were coming to see around Millbrook that afternoon. Tim wanted this to be a serious exchange of ideas so he asked Arnie Hendin—who wore funny hats, trousers made out of multicoloured curtain-material, and bells—if he would mind discarding his technicolour clothes for the duration of the psychologists' visit.
    'Uhuh,' nodded Arnie.
    And, true to his word, he went to borrow a lounge suit and a tie and a white shirt and shoes.
    The psychologists arrived for lunch and sat, rather stuffily, listening to an affable Tim making jokes and lighthearted conversation. Most of the members of the household present for lunch were stoned, but, in deference to Tim's wishes, we maintained an external propriety. In the middle of lunch Arnie walked in sporting his splendidly conventional outfit and carrying a copy of the New York Times under one arm. He nodded and sat down opposite the three psychologists who seemed suitably impressed by his impeccable attire. Arnie opened the Times and began to read it. Then he smiled and, as he did so, a trickle of green liquid started spilling from the corners of his mouth, and slowly ran down to his little beard. Next Arnie opened his mouth a little and the green liquid spurted over his chin and on to his white shirt. By now everyone was staring at Arnie, so he opened his mouth in a yawn and the green gushed from his mouth over his newspaper and his shirt, all the while reading the news as if nothing was happening. Arnie had filled his mouth with green vegetable dye and it produced the first one-man happening I had ever seen. The psychologists observed this event fastidiously and seemed, from frowns and raised eyebrows and movements of the mouth, to have agreed that this irreproachably dressed young man was inoffensive—merely afflicted by a slight idiosyncrasy. Tim said nothing at all about it. Neither did we. It seemed the wisest course to smother the scene in silence.
    After lunch, Arnie having excused himself with a nod, we suggested to the psychologists that we show them around the house. Indulging the frivolity of a moment, one of the psychologists asked if we had any animals in addition to the four dogs that wandered about the front porch. Tim pointed to the line of Tibetan monastery flags strung along the turrets on the roof of the house and jocularly linked that with the presence of our Tibetan monkey upstairs. Often the monkey roamed about the house, but at meal times it had to be kept in its huge cage because it would perch high up on shelves and throw eggs at people. Obviously that couldn't happen to a distinguished group of Yale psychologists. Tim said he would remember to show them the monkey. We got to the room, entered, and there, sitting in the cage with a banana in one hand and engrossed in the New York Times, was Arnie. Tim let the psychologists draw their own conclusions.
    Arnie was not only magical and mischievous, though; he could be practical. Once Dick Alpert got a severe cold, dosed himself with aspirins and sleeping pills and retired to the bowling alley where he curled up in a sleeping bag before the big log fire. Arnie asked me about Dick and I confirmed that Dick was miserable and had just gone off to try to sweat out the cold in front of the fire in the bowling alley.
    'He doesn't need to do that,' said Arnie.
    'Oh ? Why not ?'
    'I know of a way to cure colds.'
    I had considerable faith in Arnie's powers and agreed to accompany him at midnight to see Dick. When we got into the bowling alley Dick was sleeping like a twisted log in front of the burning fire. Arnie started to prepare the room. He arranged coloured pieces of glass on the floor and built a shrine with a statue of the Buddha quite near to Dick and his sleeping bag. Then Arnie lit about twenty candles. I was watching him, at a loss to see what he was doing other than to create a setting that would normally appeal to Dick. Arnie rushed out again and came back with a primus stove and a huge metal crucible in which he melted lead.
    'This,' smiled Arnie, 'is an old recipe for curing colds.'
    I nodded.
    Every now and then Arnie would throw an apple or a banana into the molten lead and they rapidly disintegrated into sparks which filled the room with a pungent smell. Arnie felt he should now wake Dick but it proved impossible. So Arnie filled a hypodermic with DMT (N,N-dimethyltryptamine—a very fast-acting but temporary psychedelic drug which throws the subject into fantastic realms and renders him incapable of physical action) and injected Dick in the buttocks. Just as he was pulling the needle out, Dick sat bolt upright and we watched him maintain this position rigidly for half an hour while he swirled through neurological space. When he came round, Arnie fed him 800 gamma of LSD from a spoon. After about fifteen minutes Dick turned round and saw the flowing colours of the glass, the Buddha, and the crucible. He looked at Arnie, who was wearing a hat with a tassel of bells, like a troll from Ibsen's Peer Gynt, and who still periodically threw fruit into the molten lead. As a final measure Arnie put on three separate record-players simultaneously—a Beethoven symphony, a Coltrane record, and a Stockhausen record, all at full volume. Dick seemed to swim in this incredible sonic tidal wave for an hour. Arnie asked Dick if his cold was any better.
    Dick smiled: 'It's gone completely.'
    The wonder was that he was still there after such drastic treatment, but in fact the cold never returned. We might, therefore, claim that Arnie had found a cure for the common cold, but somehow I cannot see his methods being universally adopted by the medical profession.

    Millbrook was not confined to the activities of the permanent household. As its name spread we received many people we admired. As I had been the first person to turn Tim on to LSD, with what he felt were satisfactory results, I was usually called upon to act as guide for the special guests. Several of these had memorable trips. Feliks Topolski got in touch with me, saying he had heard about me from Alex Trocchi in London. Feliks had come to New York to do murals in the St. Regis Hotel and when he arrived at Millbrook we agreed to do a Cook's Tour of the mind. We went to the upstairs room of the bowling alley and I decided to concentrate the visual input on colour, using the projectors to suggest amorphous masses of undifferentiated tonality. I blended images and sounds and let Feliks think on them.

'Remember:
The hallucinations which you may now experience,
The visions and insights,
Will teach you much about yourself and the world.
The veil of routine perception will be torn from your eyes.
Remember the unity of all living things.
Remember the bliss of the Clear Light.'
                (The Tibetan Book of the Dead)

'The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil… '
            (Gerard Manley Hopkins, 'God's Grandeur')

'My LSD experience began with a solid hour of what my "guide" described as cosmic laughter. The more I laughed, the more I tried to think of depressing things—specifically, the atrocities being committed in Vietnam—and the more wild my laughter became . . . I laughed so much I threw up.    
The nearest "outlet" ws a windoe. My hands seemed absolutely unable to open it. My guide opened the window with ease, and I stuck my head out. Was this a guillotine ? Was he to be my executioner ? Such fantasy occurred to me, but I trusted him and concentrated instead on the beautiful colours of my vomit.
    'On the phonograph, the Beatles were singing stuff from A Hard Day's Night… I started crying… for false joy, it turned out.
    'I had seen the film with my wife—we are separated—and there was, under LSD, an internal hallucination that she had not only helped plan for this record to be placed, but, moreover, in doing so, she had collaborated with someone she considered a schmuck in order to please me.... Filled with gratitude, I decided to call her up (the power of positive paranoia), but I also decided that she had planned for me to call her up against my will.... Then I called—collect, since I was in another city.
    'The operator asked my name.
    'I suddenly answered: "Ringo Starr !"
    ' "Do you really want me to say that ?"
    'I was amazed at my calm, logical response: "Of course, operator. It's a private joke between us, and it's the only way she'll accept a collect call."
    'The operator told my wife Ringo Starr was calling collect, and naturally she accepted the call. When I explained why I was calling, she told me I was thanking her for something she didn't even do. I had been so sure I'd communed with her.... '

'Valley of life
Gate of the Soft Mystery
Beginnings in the lowest place
Gate of the Soft Mystery
Gate of the Dark Woman
Gate of the Soft Mystery
Seed of all living
Gate of the Soft Mystery
Constantly enduring
Gate of the Soft Mystery
Use her gently and
Without the touch of pain.'
            (Tao Sutra 6)

    'his doublet all unbrac'd;
No hat upon his head; his stockings foul'd
Ungarter'd and down-gyved to his ankles;
Pale as his shirt; his knees knocking each other;
And with a look so piteous in purport
As if he had been loosed out of hell
To speak of horrors.'
                (Shakespeare, Hamlet)

'The first thing I saw was this young chick coming in. She was beautiful with long dark hair. She had a glass in her hand and asked me if I would like some grapejuice. I said yes. She put a glass on the floor and proceeded to fill it with grapejuice until it overflowed and then a red trickle of grapejuice moved across the floor, up the side of the opposite wall, along the ceiling, down the wall near me, on to the floor again, and towards the couch. I had to get up as it threatened to pass over me. I managed to avoid it and it got back into the glass. It was utterly real.'

'In New York we set up a centre in a large townhouse with a full working theatre in the basement, bought a roomful of divers musical instruments and opened another chapter in the history of psychedelia. In reaction to the programmed existence at Millbrook, a constant party developed which continued nonstop for months. Many of the Millbrook tribe would visit with us on their days off to play and learn. After a while we got restless. There were too many people around and it got repetitious and dull. We decided to take a trip. It was very cold in New York. I was shooting a lot of DMT… at that time a smoking form had not been discovered. Arnie, Cathy, Simba the Siamese cat and me, plus guitar, soprano sax, pocket coronet, phono, records, psychedelic magic kit and a suitcase of drugs piled in the white Alfa and headed for warmer territory. The I Ching might have suggested it, I think.
    'The total picture we gave freaked out every cop south of the Mason-Dixon line and we were busted every time Arnie drove. (From the driving seat that is… we all drove at once which can be very tricky sometimes but taking a trip while tripping is another trip—if you know what I mean.) Arnie and I were in costume, he looking like Jesus, but in baseball pants, high sneakers, beads, etc., which is quite the mode now… in '64 it was extraordinary and worth a hundred gamma just to look at it. When he would add extra touches to his gear like those kid space-helmets we wouldn't get half a mile before a cop would see us go by and flip. No harm . . . we were always released very quickly. Arnie, in his best prophet manner, would promise interrogating police chiefs fire and flood unless we were released at once. It always worked.... He's a fine magician. Our clothing was a time trip and it caused short circuits in robot people. Although we ate in all types of restaurants we were never asked to wear ties or jackets. Mainly, I think, because it never occurred to them. It would have been like asking an Eskimo to wear a tie. After a few days' travelling we had it worked out pretty well. Anything we needed from the establishment would be gotten by Cathy as she had a fairly straight appearance.
    'We had gotten into warm weather and we travelled and explored all over the countryside on and off the roads… cutting across fields and meadows and treating the Alfa as if it were a Land Rover; stopping at our slightest whim. Antique stores, underground caverns… far-out little towns with one gas pump the man cranked, little stores that sold penny candy in glass jars and had spittoons that were used. Rural America almost unchanged in fifty years.
    'In Charleston we checked into the bridal suite of the Holiday Inn, had supper in our room (preferable to going out) and after bathing proceeded to set up shop. Out came the incense, candles, bottles, India prints, mirrors, toys, comics, phonograph, musical instruments, movie camera, fireworks (we had bought $100 worth a few hours before), magic kit and the drugs. We had everything but grass… the brown rice of drugs. Arnie tried to score some from our coloured bellhop but his mind had been whitewashed. He brought us a bottle of vodka which we duly set in place unopened. We had about thirty-five caps of beige acid which we hadn't tried yet. We each took a cap. As it came on we saw it was good and took a few more. We were feeling great and proceeded to get married. We had bought funny fake marriage licences which we signed with our other names; Vazy McKoops, Ring, Hank and the Cat Paw Print. We kissed, danced, lit roman candles off the balcony and sparklers inside, which Arnie photographed in the candlelight. We danced and drew arabesques with them, and I drew a showering sparkler out of the bell of the golden soprano. We were flying !
    'I took some more caps. Arnie followed. We were travelling very fast now. The speed of sound (all motion is relative) at least. Again we took some more caps and now really started to move. We were at a rate that was so glorious that we decided to add a little JB840 to it.
    'I went out into the hall and got some Coke. Then instead of putting a normal dose in a glass, overcome, we poured three-quarters of a bottle of JB118 into the glass and drank. Suddenly, violently, and with a sickening lurch we were moving faster than light. I fell back on the bed and had a vision of a Roman or Etruscan warrior holding a sword to my stomach. It was no vision. I knew it was real. We had poisoned ourselves. Death was here. Real Death. I remembered and gave in surrendering to it. A pain lanced through my right side and my convulsive gasps stopped. BLACKNESS. And then pinpoints of light in the stygian dark. I realised the lights were stars and we were moving through the very edge of our solar system at some unknown speed, but without the feeling of movement. Then to the front of my mind, I sensed an alien intelligence.
    'Curious, I probed further, trying to contact it, when it started a mind-probe in an area it thought empty of life it tripped every alarm in my nervous system and body. I could feel my body on earth panicking, ready to explode with terror. I had to withdraw the mind-probe and take care of my terror-struck earth body. My mind came and, carefully, slowly, I began to turn off the alarms and unlock the muscles, sinews and nerves, calm and soothe the glands and get my body back to normal.
    'As I was working I realised through visions in another part of my mind, that all of us on earth are remnants of other races and civilisations from various solar systems seeded into earth bodies for a reason not yet revealed. I had been from this solar system originally and had been a galactic ambassador, quite used to dealing with other cultures. Arnie was not of this universe originally, and I vaguely saw his shape as it had been; huge, swift and somehow, feline… fifteen feet tall, five tons and covered with golden fur.
    'I opened my eyes, candlelight flickered, and the Holiday Inn took shape. Then a silent screaming came into my mind. It was on the edge of sanity driven there by fear. It was Arnie, Arnie the Great, The Prophet, Magician, Seer, Artist, Arnie was flipping out. I tried to lock my mind on to his, but he was so frightened, his mind was like greasy Jello. I couldn't hold on, so I followed, and when it would stop for an instant, I would hover and try to coax him back. It would have been all right, but Cathy didn't understand. She was trying to help vocally, and every sonic vibration only drove him further out. It was horrible! Arnie was moaning and flickering in and out of reality, sanity pain and dimension. I finally took Cathy to the next room and made her promise to remain silent, but she has a very strong mind and, when she began thinking of medical help, I couldn't block her thoughts completely. Soon Arnie began to think for help.
    'After a time I gave up and called the desk for a doctor. Less than three hours had passed when we started and we were still very high to say the least… plus slightly in shock. The doctor after a game attempt to get Arnie hospitalised, reluctantly gave him a mild sedative. After several stern reminders from me that he was a doctor, not a judge, he finally left, radiating disapproval.
    'After a few more eons—earth time, about an hour—Arnie fell asleep. By then it was dawn. We were asked to leave soon after. When Arnie awoke, we moved to the nearest motel (a block away I think) and ate in bed rather quietly and slept till the next day. When we awoke we ate some more, discussed the dumb doctor, and the strange intelligence we had encountered, took stock of our drugs (we had thrown out all of the JB), and packed, giving all the fireworks to a bellhop as Arnie was afraid he would set them off mentally. We were quite down from the experience so we each took two capsules (Cathy wasn't having any), and I drove us out of Charleston through spiral type buildings, heading south, the top down. By the time we were out of the DMT-coloured city-limits and on the open road, we were feeling normally glorious. The car purred, the cat slept, and overhead the most tremendous, white thunderhead in a purple-rose sky formed a glorious paean to earth and the future and we sped into the technicolour southern dusk.'

'The first step is the realisation that there is more: that man's brain, his thirteen-billion-celled computer, is capable of limitless new dimensions of awareness and knowledge. In short that man does not use his head.
    'The second step is the realisation that you have to go out of your mind to use your head; that you have to pass beyond everything you have learned in order to become acquainted with the new areas of consciousness. Ignorance of this fact is the veil which shuts man within the narrow confines of his acquired, artifactual concepts of "reality", and prevents him from coming to know his own true nature.
    'The third step (once the first two realisations have taken place) is the practical theoretical. How can consciousness be expanded? What is the range of possibilities outside of our current verbal-cognitive models of experience? What light do the new insights perhaps most important, how can the new levels of awareness be maintained ?'

'On alternative weekends they are joined by ten to fifteen paying guests recruited by direct mail and word of mouth. Most are middle-class professionals—teachers, doctors, psychologists, students. The fee of $75 a person or $125 a couple includes plain home-cooking and a mattress on the floor.... There is no happy hour of cocktail chatter. Instead, each guest is escorted silently to a box-like room in the old servant's wing and left there for an hour to meditate.
    'The rooms are decorated with madras hangings, wall-sized paintings of Buddha, a collage of words and images collected from a psychedelic fantasy, or religious posters from India. The only furniture besides the mattress may be a lamp, a bookcase or a writing table.'

'Silence has greatness simply because it is…
It is and that is its greatness, its pure existence…
There is no beginning to silence and no end…
Man does not put silence to the test, silence puts man to the test…
Silence contains everything within itself; it is not waiting for
anything, it is always wholly present in itself and completely
fills out the space in which it appears…
Silence is original and self-evident, like the other basic phenomena, like love and liberty and death and life itself…
And there is more silence than speech in them, more of the invisible than the visible…
There is also more silence in one person than can be used in a single human life… '

What Do We Mean by Game?
    A game is a temporary social arrangement with the following characteristics:
    goals, roles, rules, strategies, space and time limits, values, rituals.
    All of these characteristics of any game are subject to revision. Ecstatogenic games are voluntary and the contract explicit.
    You have been invited to participate in the "Experiential Workshop Game" during your stay at Millbrook. This means you are a three-day member of a social system which in some ways may be novel to you. This contract is designed to lessen your "culture shock" and aims to set up a memorable weekend.

Goals
    1. To communicate and exchange ideas about consciousness
    and its expansion and control. Relevant theories about consciousness-expansion will be discussed—neurological, philosophic, religious, psychological, oriental. A wide variety of methods will also be reviewed.
    2. To employ several of these methods during the weekend, to expand the consciousness of participants and to maintain as high a level of ecstasy as possible.

Roles
    While there are many roles involved in running such an enterprise, in this contract we are solely concerned with the roles involved in the visitor game.
    The roles which have been most comfortable to you and of which are of most use to you in your regular life will be of lessened utility here and, indeed, may handicap you. The aim of the workshop is to get out beyond your routine robot consciousness. Thus there is little interest in who you are (were) and much more concern with where and how far you can go. What you can obtain during the weekend depends in part on how much of your routine ego you can leave in your room.
    . . . Why don't you check it in your suitcase ?
    Staff roles. Around ten people will be present during the weekend whose job is to facilitate the goals of the seminar. Their functions are assigned and scheduled. Visitor roles. In general, the actions of visitors are addressed towards the two goals of the seminar: i.e. to learn as much as possible about the theories and methods of consciousness-expansion and to put this knowledge into practice. It is assumed that each visitor is here because of his past experiences and his current interest in consciousness-expansion. It is hoped that you can contribute any special knowledge you have when it seems relevant.
    The Seeking Help Role. This is not a psychotherapeutic situation and the doctor-patient game is not played. Personal problems cannot, therefore, become the focus of discussion.

Rules
    1. Be aware of and try to minimise the attempt of your robot to capture audiences for its personal dramas.
    2. Please obey the laws of the land. In particular do not bring marijuana or any other illegal chemical to the weekend workshop.
    3. Visitors are asked to maintain their own room during their stay.

Strategies
    The ecstatic-psychedelic experience can be reached by several means:
    intellectual
    emotional
    bodily movement
    sexual
    somatic-sensory
    One of the aims of the workshop is to encourage expansion of consciousness in all five of these functions in some sort of balanced harmony. (Consciousness-expansion in the sexual will be limited to indirect methods.) Since the average person quickly falls into habitual and stereotyped modes of awareness—mental, emotional, physical, sexual, and instinctive—the weekends are designed to produce novel experiences which deliberately "break through" these stereotypes. If you feel yourself reacting with shock or outrage at the challenge to your favourite habits, please remember that this sort of friction probably points to an under-development of some function and is a challenge for growth. For the same reason, do not concentrate only on one of these methods of consciousness-expansion. Take advantage of this opportunity to expand consciousness at all levels.

Space Factors
    After a while one of the staff will show you around the house and grounds. During your leisure time you are free to use any areas except for the third floor (which is residential) and the kitchen, except during breakfast period.

Time Factors
    The schedule of programmes will be announced. Consult a staff member about additions and revisions to the schedule and about leisure play.

Values
    According to the "game model", values are specific to the particular game and hold only for the defined spacetime limits of the game. In the ecstatic game, the "goodness" or greatness of your robot performance is of lessened importance. Each person starts each second with a fresh neurological slate. "Good" is what raises the ecstasy count of all persons present and "bad" is what lowers the ecstasy count.

Mythic Context
    While any human behaviour sequence can be seen as unique and original, another illuminating perspective can be obtained by recognising that certain classic human games are continually being re-enacted and that any social situation you find yourself in is a current version of an ancient drama. The question is not How does it turn out? (that is probably pre-ordained by the script and the role) but rather, How well do you play your part ? and, How conscious are you of your role at each moment ? and, How can you change your my/this game?
    The Millbrook Workshops are clearly a re-enactment of one of the oldest and most ambitious games—the transcendental game, expansion of consciousness, internal exploration, ecstatic discovery. Our endeavours here are descended from and indebted to those groups of explorers in India, Persia, China, Greece and to their current western counterparts.

Rituals
    The creation of consciousness-expansion experiences usually involves rituals—some of which are directly practical, others of which are designed to evoke mood or readiness to change. The use of certain rituals (candles, mandalas, pictures, incense, etc.) is strictly experimental and does not involve any commitment to sectarian systems on the part of staff members or visitors.'

    Finally MESSAGE FOUR reiterated the five most important areas of consciousness accessible to the average person—intellectual, emotional, body movement, somatic-sensory, sexual—and requested the visitor to spend the next ten minutes reviewing his stereotyped methods of awareness in each of these five areas.
    Naturally many of the visitors were overwhelmed by reading MESSAGE THREE in solitude, and there was always one guest each weekend who would decide—in silence—that the experience was going to be too much. 'They think they have fallen into the hands of a mad scientist,' Tim used to say, 'and that's when we hear them creeping down the back stairs and screeching out of the driveway.'
    Those who stayed on would be divided into groups of five and taken by their appointed guide for a walk in the woods by candlelight. We walked silently in Indian file, then returned to the oak-panelled library for a lecture by Tim or Dick or Ralph or myself. We outlined and discussed our philosophic and methodological ideas and hoped that the guests would sleep on them. For some sleep was rather difficult as they tried to anticipate what was to come.
    Saturday morning breakfast was a food game. Everyone had to be up at 7:30 for Ralph Metzner's yoga session, including instructions on sitting in the full lotus and half-lotus positions, standing on the head, and eliminating the doubting fly of the mind. After this Ralph took them to the kitchen for breakfast (where a cupboard door bore the legend 'Take LSD and See') and let them look at it for a while. He had reversed the visual connotations of all the food. The scrambled eggs were green, the porridge was purple or bright orange, the milk was black. As the guests sat down to eat Ralph would say:

'Our ideas dictate to us what we imagine reality to be. And we are very much affected by the imprints we have, particularly those of colour associations. When someone says sky, we think of blue, when someone says meadow we think of green, when someone says scrambled eggs we think of yellow. But this is a mental hangup. It doesn't really make any difference whether scrambled eggs are green as they are today, or whether they are yellow. Why is this ? All of these colour changes were achieved by a non-toxic, odourless, tasteless vegetable dye and as you are eating your green scrambled eggs and drinking your glass of black milk try to reconcile in your mind the different subjective responses that you have, and notice how your brain deals with this input.'

    'Observe your body
    Mandala of the universe
    Observe your body
    Of ancient design
    Holy temple of consciousness
    Central stage of the oldest drama

Observe its structured wonders
        skin
        hair
        tissues
        blood
        bone
        vein
        muscle
        net of nerve

    Observe its message.'
                    (Tao Sutra 24)

    hand-woven cloth
    uncarved wood
    flowers—growing things
    ancient music
    burning fire
    a touch of earth
    a splash of water
    fruit, good bread, cheese
    fermenting wine
    candlelight
    temple incense
    a warm hand
    fish swimming
    anything which is over
            five hundred years old
Of course it is always best to be secluded with nature.'
                    (Tao Sutra 19)

    'That which is called ego-death is coming to you
    Remember:
    This is now the hour of death and rebirth;
    Take advantage of this temporary death to obtain the perfect
    State—
    Enlightenment.
    Concentrate on the unity of all living beings.
    Hold on to the Clear Light.
    Use it to attain understanding and love.'
                    (The Tibetan Book of the Dead)

'Can you lie quietly
    engulfed
    in the fierce slippery union
    of male and female ?
    Warm wet dance of engeration ?
    Endless ecstasies of couples ?…
Can you feel the coiled serpent writhing
    While birds sing ?
Become two cells merging
Slide together in molecule embrace
Can you, murmuring
Lose
All fusing.'

    'As you return
    Remember to choose consciously
    Power is the heavy stone wrenched
        from your garden of tenderness
    Virtue is the heavy stone crushing your innocence

    What can be learned
    From nature is
    Harmony
    Therefore—
        Shun the social
        Cuddle the elemental
        Avoid angles, lie with the round
    Shun plastic, conspire with seed
    Do no good
    But
    For God's sake
    Feel good
    And
    Nature's order will prevail'
                    (Tao Sutra 3)

'A quick belt of whisky from the suitcase improves things considerably. OM.
    ' "I am Michael Hollingshead," says the man in the doorway, half an hour later. He is tall, thirty-ish, baldish, with cold, cruel grey eyes. "I am your guide for the weekend. Will you follow me?" He has an English accent and a soft voice of sinister authority.
    'Down the hall (OM OM OM) down the stairs. Outside four people gather silently in the back of a battered Land Rover: two women and two men, one of them an egg-bald bespectacled young man from Ottawa.
    "'Right now we're in the period of silence," says Hollingshead. "First we'll go for a little drive, then a little walk, then dinner." He drives along a track through dusk-hushed woods, then out into a field and stops at a pond… Hollingshead produces a bottle of cocktail sherry and paper cups. Dusk deepens. The pond is covered with a film of green growth, which creeps.
    ' "Is the period of silence over ?" asks the poison ivy woman, emboldened by sherry.
    ' "Not for you," says Hollingshead with a little smile.
    'The drive continues through the woods and fields, then back to the house… Timothy Leary enters and sits. He is tall, forty-five, handsome, barefoot, a dentist's son, the father of three: a boy, a girl, and the psychedelic movement… Leary talks… The reason psychedelic experiences are important and valuable is that people live their lives by their own "chess-boards", playing the lawyer-game, the merchant-game, or some rule-ridden ego-game, rarely if ever expanding their consciousness to the point of true awareness and understanding of man and nature, including themselves.
    'He demonstrates: Susan Leary and Hollingshead enact a short skit, she as a wife asking her overworked husband to take a holiday, he as a school principal firing a teacher. Their chessboards do not match; they do not understand each other…
    'The appearance of things around Castalia's baroque bastion indicates a certain abandonment of modern survival values… No particular concern is shown for the house… Castalians are above the landed-gentry game. Furniture is not important to them…
    'The woodwork and windows need washing, the old parquet floors need polish… the dogs… anoint the porch at will…
    'An air of sad decline pervades the house, like a Rolls-Royce being used as a dump truck.'

    'But, as for thee, I think and deem it well
    Thou take me for thy guide, and pass with me
    Through an eternal place… '
                    (Inferno, Canto 1, tr. Dorothy Sayers)

'The role of the psychedelic guide is new in our society, but the newness of the role should not blind us to the antiquity of its precedents. Priest and shaman, after all, were the first purveyors of its technique. Seer and sibyl mapped the cosmography of its domain. Perhaps the finest of its precedents is to be found in the figure of Virgil in Dante's Divine Comedy.... It should be one of the chief tasks of the guide to assume the role of Virgil in this chemically-induced Divine Comedy and to help the subject select out of the wealth of phenomena among which he finds himself some of the more promising opportunities for heightened insight, awareness and integral understanding that the guide knows to be available in the psychedelic experience. [R. E L. Masters and Jean Houston, op. cit., p. 130f.]

'HOLLINGSHEAD EXPEDITION TO LONDON 1965-66

Purpose: SPIRITUAL AND EMOTIONAL DEVELOPMENT

To introduce to London the interpretation and applications and methods developed by and learned by Michael Hollingshead.

A YOGA-OF-EXPRESSION BY MH.
Plan
    No specific programme of expression can be specified in advance. The Yoga may include
    1. Tranart* gallery-bookstore.
    2. Weekly psychedelic reviews—lectures—questions and answers—Tranart demonstrations.
    3. Radio—TV—newspaper—magazine educational programme.
    4. Centre for running LSD session.'

Chapter 6