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drljefe
climber
El Presidio San Augustin del Tucson
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Topic Author's Original Post - Mar 13, 2011 - 04:25pm PT
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He's Gone
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Brandon-
climber
Done With Tobacco
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Mar 13, 2011 - 04:39pm PT
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Fare thee well...
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drljefe
climber
El Presidio San Augustin del Tucson
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Topic Author's Reply - Mar 13, 2011 - 04:43pm PT
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Nice Alembic goB
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Toker Villain
Big Wall climber
Toquerville, Utah
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Mar 13, 2011 - 05:05pm PT
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I'm not surprised he died of a crash, but would have expected a trip-and-fall.
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FRUMY
Trad climber
SHERMAN OAKS,CA
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Mar 13, 2011 - 05:28pm PT
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Purple Owsley, that was amazing stuff.
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drljefe
climber
El Presidio San Augustin del Tucson
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Topic Author's Reply - Mar 13, 2011 - 08:45pm PT
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Alice D Millionaire
White Lightning!
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Skeptimistic
Mountain climber
La Mancha
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Mar 13, 2011 - 08:54pm PT
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Whoa! The Bear's dead?!
I guess I can count myself as one of the lucky ones to have enjoyed the fruits of his labor. Peace.
Story
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cintune
climber
Midvale School for the Gifted
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Mar 13, 2011 - 09:22pm PT
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TYeary
Social climber
State of decay
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Mar 13, 2011 - 11:04pm PT
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No, No, No, he's outside looking in.
TY
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Jaybro
Social climber
Wolf City, Wyoming
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Mar 13, 2011 - 11:26pm PT
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With Leary and Hoffman...
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survival
Big Wall climber
A Token of My Extreme
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Mar 14, 2011 - 12:00am PT
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Bent my ear to hear the tune, and closed my eyes to see.....
R.I.P. man, what a long strange trip it's been indeed.
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Jan
Mountain climber
Okinawa, Japan
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Mar 14, 2011 - 12:37am PT
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I still have friends with Owsley acid in their freezers which they take on special occasions.
RIP.
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Iron Mtn.
Trad climber
Riverside, Ca.
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Mar 14, 2011 - 02:24am PT
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Lest we forget his involvement with Blue Cheer as well....
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Gary
climber
Desolation Basin, Calif.
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Mar 15, 2011 - 01:23am PT
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Tony has it right...outside looking in!
Or is he inside...looking out?
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Doug Robinson
Trad climber
Santa Cruz
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Mar 15, 2011 - 11:04am PT
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Profound impact on my life, and thank you very much Owsley. I haven't been releasing material from the book I'm writing, The Alchemy of Action. But this is a special occasion. So in honor of Owsley, here is a chapter that draws heavily from his work.
Rest in peace brother.
Chapter 9
DOSED
©2011 Doug Robinson
There is a famous story about the guy who was the most flamboyant Acid chemist ever. It was the Sixties, and there was a lot of posturing anyway, though on Haight street people tended to look upon it more as trying on mythical archetypes – medieval prince, saucy belle, cowboy -- as they costumed up and paraded out. Whatever. It’s always been that way; our scene was just a little more mixed-metaphor flamboyant.
Owsley Stanley was a classic tech nerd who built sound systems for the Grateful Dead. They were actually very sophisticated, and over the band’s early years the Dead transformed from awkwardly loud and speedy to a cascading range of hot, and even poignant, tones. Owsley’s successful soundscapes led to an entire lab that built amps and speaker stacks and eventually the stadium-filling, 3-story-high Wall of Sound. Intriguingly, that sound lab got named Alembic Studios, alembic being the old term for the vessel within which an alchemist works his transformations. But Owsley did more than amp the sound. He tuned the audience itself by cranking out reliable LSD in high volume.
Owsley became the alchemist of our generation.
LSD turned out to be the oddly perfect drug for an over-the-top era, quite full of itself and impatient to tear down the walls and erect a cultural revolution completely from scratch. Of course that was naive, almost unbearably so in retrospect, but part of our hippie presumption was understandable in light of LSD’s archetypal turn-on, which just for starters was an order of magnitude stronger than any psychedelic the world had known before. Remarkably, that is still true now that there are many more of them; by the Millenium hundreds of new psychedelics had been cranked out by skilled chemists. Now we appreciate that each of them has a personality. “LSD is known as a ‘pushy’ material,” said Alexander Shulgin, who is certainly the grand old man of psychedelic chemistry. He has personally synthesized, taken and written about over 200 new psychedelics, all with an official DEA permit tacked to the door of his lab, “it tends to take over and push you.”
Back in the Fifties, when Aldous Huxley wrote with such glowing precision about his mescaline experience in The Doors of Perception, there were just a handful of classic psychedelics. Huxley’s trip had sprung from a few hundred milligrams – thousandths of a gram – of mescaline. The doses of Acid, though, on the Mr. Natural blotter paper that circulated as we shuffled into the Fillmore Auditorium to dance to the Dead, were measured out in micrograms – doses almost exactly a tenth of what you’d take of mescaline or psilocybin mushrooms. Acid is so powerful it is still basically an anomaly, somehow profoundly lighting up perceptions at doses that are a pinch of the level of anything else.
Its inventor Albert Hoffman had famously launched the world’s first Acid trip quite by accident. Working in his lab at Sandoz in Switzerland one morning in 1943, he had likely wiped part of a drop off of a flask and then maybe brushed it into the corner of his eye. Soon Albert was overcome by strangeness and then wonder. It quickly became obvious to Hoffman, with the world suddenly coming at him in waves, that he would no longer do chemistry that day. So he got on his bicycle to go home and wobbled through the streets of Basle feeling profoundly altered. A celebration cranked up for the fiftieth anniversary of that event was impishly named Bicycle Day. Put on at UC Santa Cruz, it featured a videotaped message from Hoffman himself, still a picture of vigor well into his nineties.
Anyway, Owsley was his underground heir and good at what he did, and just cocky enough to stride up Haight street practically taking bows as the acknowledged chemist to his generation, the author of a rip-your-mind-open trip that could reach the intensity of a runaway locomotive. Of course his first million hits of acid were made back when the drug was still quite legal. Which was a healthy state of affairs in many ways for so potent a material. Starting with veering away from a natural tendency of the drug to encourage paranoia, which it did a lot more often after the Feds cracked down on it.
Not every strange quality of a drug can be chalked up to paranoia, though. Or even to “positive paranoia,” as Andrew Weil called it -- the tendency to see the universe as benign and supportive and helpful. “A totally pure salt [of LSD], when dry and when shaken in the dark, will emit small flashes of white light.” Hippie myth? Nope, word from the very accurate psychedelic chemist Alexander Shulgin.
Then there was the matter of sussing out its pharmacology, once LSD became the calling card of a generation. We were doing the dose-response studies willy-nilly on the street, which made for some pretty wild rides. Nothing before had been quite so dependent on set and setting, on the state of mind of the person ingesting it, and on his and her surroundings. Shulgin, the wise old master chemist, so street smart he won’t take his new compounds anywhere near the street, says, “The scare stories have been mostly from naïve people who took too high a dose the first time and the rest were cases of people who were fragile emotionally or mentally. If you’re fragile, or ready to tip over, then anything can send you off center; LSD or falling in love or losing someone or having a big fight with your father… In the higher dose ranges, people who aren’t used to it sometimes feel they have less control than they would like. It simply has to be learned, like all psychedelics. Once you’re familiar with the quickness of it and realize you can control it whenever you decide you want to, there’s no reason for anxiety.”
Even Owsley could goof when trying to figure out its dose. He had an experience one day on his own acid out at Muir Beach -- which cuts into the headlands of the Pacific at the wild edge of Marin County -- where he sensed the molecules of his body diffusing, just dispersing themselves away into the universe. He became quite frightened -- panicked even –- and was so relieved, so thankful, when a seeming-eternity later he came down and found himself reassembled.
So ever after that when one of his customers would complain of a similar experience of losing it, of dissolving into the infinite and facing the brutal anxiety that it might be a one-way trip, Owsley would give them his classic line:
“Aw, Dude, you shoulda taken half!”
I have come to think of that as the best advice ever given to a psychedelic voyager. Because I now see our dosing of ourselves – however cheerfully undertaken and raucously ridden out – as a bit of an overdose. Especially when compared to the doses of naturally occurring psychedelics like DMT cooked up in our brains over the fires of challenging experience and leavened with a dash of fear. The very stuff I experienced on the walls of Yosemite during those same years. Those quite organic doses arising from strong experience have the immense advantage, no matter how profoundly they send us into a blissfully altered consciousness, of staying grounded in reality. Which makes the experience more accessible to your evolving life. More useful. More transformative.
Owsley’s line is a kind of benediction for the Sixties. We weren’t just dosed, but overdosed. Or to quote one of The Dead’s lines from those years:
Look out,
Look out!
The candy man.
Up on steep rock, or pounding into the sixth mile on the run, or turning your skis down toward the fall line, we get into more of a threshold dose. More subtle. And we like it that way.
The natural path, the organic high, follows closer to the wisdom of our bodies. If your brain gets you high, if it taps you on the shoulder with freshly-altered perceptions, then take note. You can revel in the perceptions themselves, sure, and even have the course of your life altered by a piercing clarity of thought -- but also notice the circumstances. How did I get here? What happened in my body to change my mind? If I climbed my way into this state of grace, then I like to notice the way that being on a rock wall reminds me to keep gripping tight to the rock. Immediate danger strongly encourages me not to space out but to keep in touch with my surroundings. I can’t stop working the footholds and handholds just because my perceptions get flashy. The circumstances quite literally keep the experience grounded. Which is why I think of climbing as more than a sport. It’s a practice, like meditation. A physical meditation, and with similar results. It admits you to new realms of being, and because you keep one foot in the old realms as you go there, staying connected, it builds you a nice path between your past and your future.
Following the wisdom of our bodies encourages us to pay attention to the measured doses of natural psychedelics that arise in our brains, and to honor the circumstances that encourage them to appear. What could be better than to be awash in the beauty of life, rather than tripping out beyond it?
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Jan
Mountain climber
Okinawa, Japan
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Mar 15, 2011 - 11:17am PT
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That's wonderful Doug!
It seems we reached the same conclusions and escaped the other addictions of our generation.
I was just reading that DMT, which occurs naturally in the human brain, can cause people to demonstrate glossalalia in chemical doses. Obviously charismatics and pentecostals are able to manifest sufficient quantities naturally, to be able to speak in tongues.
I have yet to hear of this happening on a climb however.
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