Page Content (OCR)
Chapter Twelve The older dictators fell because they never could supply their subjects with enough bread, enough circuses, enough miracles and mysteries. Nor did they possess a really effective system of mind-manipulation. Under a scientific dictator, education will really work-with the result that most men and women will grow up to love their servitude and will never dream of revolution. There seems to be no good reason why a thoroughly scientific dictatorship should ever be overthrown. Aldous Huxley also made an early connection between the effects experienced by those partaking of psychedelic drugs and the experiences of Eastern Mysticism and this set the consciousness-raising bomb off with a bang! Along came Timothy Leary, Richard Alpert AKA Baba Ram Dass with their LSD and other modes of mind experienced those drugs and the marvels, leading the parade of those who were “turned on, tuned in”. Abraham Maslow became a father figure to the new “wave” of those desiring to fill the gaping hole of their reality with “peak experiences”. Maslow cited psychedelic drugs as one of the means in which even ordinary people could have a little of what the Eastern Mystics worked many years to develop. Now, it could be had for a weekend seminar at Big Sur, or a study by mail course at only $29.95 per lesson! What a deal! Peak Experiences-experience, experience, and experience-became the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow of the 1960’s. No one needed to live in Existential Despair any longer! Everyone could become a “spiritual voyager” and achieve extended periods in realms of consciousness they had only heard about in veiled, mysterious allusions down through the ages. Encounter groups, radical therapies, old and new combinations of theories and practice came rolling off the conveyor belt of techno-spirituality. The intangibles of spirit had been harnessed! Anyone could evoke some desirable experience by “spiritual achieve in realms of harnessed! Anyone harnessed! Anyone could evoke some desirable experience by manipulating awareness at the basic physical and psychological levels. Never mind that all of this bypassed the vital processes of reason and conscious decision making. By its very nature, the whole techno- spiritual machine operated completely without critical thinking; it tapped the bottomless pit of feeling-emotion-primal being. Never mind that much of this emotion was negative, confusing, anxious and fearful! some In 1931, Aldous Huxley wrote Brave New World in which he stated: Let’s just get it all out here in the open and have a party with it!