On most weekends during my third year of college, I would take some of the underground LSD with a group of friends and have intense experiences and unexpected adventures.
We were strongly influenced by the media The first time I asked for a book about LSD at a small bookstore in the San Fernando Valley where I grew up, the man at the counter recommended reading the Tibetan Book of the Dead, Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse and This Is It by Alan Watts.
The popular music so strongly influenced by the Beatles and amplified by the local California psychedelic rock scene had a strong message mystical message.
So my friends and I would have what called powerful mystical experiences. It was common to find people involved in the psychedelic journey to feel like that had learned the secrets of the universe and now knew everything. Some of them would become to various degrees messianic in their belief in their experiences.
I had experiences which I interpreted as mystical experiences but looking back on them from the vantage point of have lived a life, I my own and others experiences not understanding everything but as understanding how little I know and how much we humans know as a species.
Many people had what we called psychedelic experience and so they opened their minds to many ideas and things otherwise may have considered.
To me this was the most valuable lesson I learned from these adventures.
Many of those who read this are too young to remember these days and know of them mostly through school and urban legends.
The psychedelic experience not only opened people up to new ideas but also new ways of behaving and living together. They became a small tribe called the hippies living in the middle of a much larger majority of people who either curious about them or hostile to what their ways of living.
I do not advocate the use of LSD. It is my personal belief that most people should not take LSD. Not only because for many, their personality and life experiences might lead to temporary but bad experiences and in rare cases longer term problems. But also f you also because the LSD commonly available on the streets is not pure and therefore even more unreliable that the real stuff
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