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COFFEEHOUSE CULTURE -- Issue 2

It is March 1966. And 20 year-old Paul Devereux is about to have a life-changing experience. In the vanguard of the ‘acid generation’, his inspiration had been the writings of the visionary/mystic/intellectual, Aldous Huxley. Extremely intelligent and with a strong spiritual bent, Huxley had offended the establishment when, in 1954, he had published essays describing his mescaline experiences. One of the most powerfully anarchic texts to appear in the latter half of that century, ‘The Doors of Perception’ produced the first crack in the mould which had shaped world consciousness for more than 2000 years. Like many of those who encountered Huxley’s (r)evolutionary opus, Paul Devereux had been inspired and awed by the ecstatic revelations it described.
.....As an art student in London, Devereux was ideally placed to pursue his interest in emulating Huxley. Although ‘Swinging London’ had emerged out of the grey serge 50s, England was still as straight as ever — old men, old minds, old money. But deep within the blossoming Youth Culture (not much culture but nice shiny Lambrettas) there was anarchy afoot. And it was happening in the nation’s art colleges. Ever a hotbed of youthful revolution, for many years the art schools had carried the national mantle for unconventional behaviour. As the sixties headed towards the halfway point, the free-thinking attitudes of art school students started to find expression in the public arena. In popular music, fashion, the media, the graphic arts and wide-ranging social mores, the art school influence became overwhelming.
.....And, at the very heart of art school attitudes and influences, was their preoccupation with drugs.
.....Thus it was that Paul Devereux found himself in possession of two slightly-used looking sugar cubes containing LSD. Dissolving the two cubes in a glass of water, Devereux drank the lot (apart from a teaspoonful taken by one of the friends who would watch over him while he tripped) and waited for the show to begin.
......For an interminable half an hour nothing seemed to be happening. Then, slowly, Devereux began to experience the fluctuations on the fringes of perception and rationalisation that characterise the onset of the hallucinogenic experience. Becoming increasingly aware of the ceiling light hanging above a daffodil in a slim vase, Devereux “realised with some surprise that I could actually feel the heat of the bulb.” Almost imperceptibly he spun in the wider fields of consciousness. Hearing “a pure, ringing tone,” he moved around the room trying to locate the source of the sound while his friends looked on, amused at his behaviour. Finally, in a wave “understanding flooded over me. I was listening to the silence. More precisely, I was tuned into The Silence. All sounds were like bees in amber, they were sealed within this all-pervading no-sound.”
.....With that powerful revelation, the doors swung open. And the revelations came thick and fast. “In a flash I understood the biblical phrase ‘The peace that passeth all understanding.’ At the same time, I noticed that I had arrived at a state of bliss. In fact, it was a holier feeling than that, more a state of grace .... the trains of thought that normally chained me mentally and emotionally had dissolved. I was experiencing the truth of all matter — this is always all that I ever am, just here and now. Everything else is an illusion. What passes for normal rational mentality is the grossest of illusions. I had read these kind of ideas in literature dealing with various forms of mysticism, but I wasn’t intellectualising now. This was simply the direct experience of the fact.”
.....Entering a state where the “grime of time was washed away,” he “saw with astounding clarity that the pristine undersurface of eternity was always there. Time took its course, but, just as sound was encased in silence, time was suspended within the greater medium of eternity. Eternity was not endless time or some future state, eternity was here and now, that was its very nature. Eternity was always present; time was merely a glinting reflection off its surface, like the sparkle of sunlight in the waters of a stream. Truly, as Blake wrote: ‘If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is: infinite.’ The idea that this was ‘poetry’ fell away. I had much the same feeling when someone put Bob Dylan’s ‘Tambourine Man’ on the record player. What had previously seemed to me a string of marvellously poetic images now turned out to be descriptions of the states I was experiencing. The Silence was simply an aspect of eternity that I felt all around me and all through me, and both were, in turn, just other facets of bliss.... Zen writings that had seemed entertainingly half-baked to me suddenly took on deep meaning. ‘A split hair’s difference and heaven and earth are set apart.’ (How very true.) ‘What is gained is no gain, yet there is something truly to be gained in this.’ (Absolutely. I couldn’t have put it better myself.) Far from appearing paradoxical, such sparse, well-honed statements were to be seen as the equivalent of engineering specifications describing the structure of reality.”
.....As his experience reached its peak, Paul Devereux “began to appreciate with some amusement that this profound state of mind .... did not come with mental fireworks,cosmic visions, clouds of angels or hordes of hobgoblins. It was not the result of hallucinatory additions; quite the contrary, the process was one of paring away. The culture I normally inhabited was the hallucination. This was unadulterated primal consciousness, and here there was only here. And now. Here was infinity; now was eternity. This most simple yet vastly complex truth was the joyous, glorious news of liberation. I was thrilled with the exultation of salvation.”
.....As he began the long, slow drift back to normal consciousness, again and again he would be drawn along shamanic paths revealing new truths. Disappearing “down brilliant, swirling tunnels formed from kaleidoscopic colours hurtling along at light speed .... I felt myself going away without myself, as if my mind were draining away. Except that wasn’t possible, because I didn’t have a separate mind anymore.There were no boundaries: the whole cosmos was passing through me and the edges of my personality became invisible, because what was inside me also surrounded me.” In a classic ‘ego-death’ experience, Devereux gave himself up to the Cosmos and slipped out of thinking and into a “place of sanctity, .... ultimate holy of holies.”
......“Several eternities later,” he was back. But still experiencing significant effects from the chemical he had taken. In a series of ‘movie show’ visions he experienced the ability of the mind to mould realities while he dipped his toes in new truths. Taking in many of the archetypal tripping experiences, he started to use the enhanced perceptual abilities that come with hallucinogens. Following a series of visions he realised he could see his friends’ auras.
.....And there was more magic still to come. Some time after watching a daffodil’s petals moving and witnessing the capillary action as it drew water up its stem, he found his “awareness slipping inside that daffodil.” As “an exquisite sensation cascaded through me, I knew that I was experiencing light falling on those petals. It was virtually orgasmic, the .... equivalent of an angelic choir. At every moment I felt, repeatedly, as if I were receiving the first ray of sunshine on the first morning in Eden. The world was unutterably new and innocent.”
.....Although Paul Devereux’s trip was not without its moments of insecurity, paranoia and fear, there can be no doubt from his ecstatic descriptions exactly what he got from it and what conclusions he reached about it. That, within those hours, he was having the fundamental experiences that have always defined man’s relationship with God and the Cosmos, there can be little doubt.
.....What Paul Devereux and so many others have experienced is probably the most important adjunct to successful living that the human race has chosen to ignore. It is an experience that is not only outside of the accepted scientific paradigm but is in deep and fundamental opposition to it. And not only scientific paradigms, for it is also in diametric opposition to accepted and imposed social paradigms.
.....Ladies and gentlemen, what we are saying here is that this is the bridge to freedom. But not all of us know what freedom actually means. Freedom is, fundamentally, a state of mind. Such freedom is, however, not compatible with the social and economic structures that create and dominate our world. If you have ever wondered why those in control seek to limit our experience and proscribe our freedoms, why they continue to subscribe to the scientific paradigm that has become so tired and used, it is because freedom and control (their control) are simply not compatible.