You’ve convinced me you are right with you facts, but I missed the point after reading it twice. Is it that their experiences are too detached from the experiences of the average person as to be promotable and the basis for a movement to “mainstream” the proletariat’s interests and access to psychedelic compounds?
My point is people buy into these beliefs, philosophies, lifestyles, call them what will, because they want a romantic relationship with the idealism and escape from reality they provide. They put people on pedastals because they think it will take them away from something they themselves have in their life right now that they don't want and bring them closer to things they do want. It's a form of escapism essentially and it very rarely works out.
There is a difference between the romance and glitz and glamour and pop culture myth and Hollywood sparkle, and the reality behind the scenes. The former and latter are two very different things. When the red carpet is rolled away, everything is normal but that's when most people don't give a fuck and that's where they are mistaken. For many people they bought into the script without understanding what it implied. It was a break from reality, not an opportunity to transform their own realities beyond the psychedelics themselves.
And from a perspective of privelege, it was the illusion that you could transcend the structure of society and make everybody the same and we could live in an ideal world that broke down all these boundaries. Sounds great on paper but it didn't actually work out. The hidden history of the psychedelic revolution some years after will tell you that. Societal problems still existed, even when they were psychedelic. Still though, that's something a priveleged person will always make the mistake of doing because for the priveleged person they are naturally out of touch with how the rest of the world who are not priveleged function. They profess a way of life that only people among their nuanced demographic may be able to enjoy and afford themselves.
But when you've got people not priveleged following those that are, you also have an equally concerning dynamic where they are wanting for another life that gives them this escape from their current one while offering absolutely no opportunity for that to happen. People are full of all the mantras and positive philosophy and psychology and perhaps even insights, but no actual applicable practical way of applying it to their lives and to others lives as well. They say all the right things but cannot actualize and realize the end goal. And in many ways, it's because it was never meant to happen as they thought it was.
You have the priveleged pretending they don't want to be priveleged anymore while still enjoying their privelege while saying this. And then you have the poorer people trying to be priveleged and trying to resonate with the teachings of the priveleged teachers and finding the idealism and romanticism and dreamy vision of the world doesn't match the reality no matter how hard they try. You have people believing the teachings of these leaders was universal but in reality their teachings were specific to a very inflexible and rigid niche. Their teachings were projections in most cases as opposed to universal truths and where they were universal truths, what use are they in the bigger picture? That isn't to say they aren't or weren't transferrable but it goes without saying much of what was taught was done from a position of already assumed security, wealth, prosperity, social status etc and with the grandiose vision of changing the world. Again, it sounds good on paper. But when you're integrating this into the big wide world, reality soon comes creeping in.
I mean, a lot of the stuff preached during those times was valuable but it's how that value is added to your life, not as a consumer of the culture you're involved in ie the psychedelic culture because then you're immediately a victim just like you were before you decided to escape from one reality to another. When you simply assume there is a new world waiting for you in some mystical, romantic and surreal escape like with the psychedelic sixties you're setting yourself up to lose your footing pretty quickly. And that is what happened, if you ask lots of people who fell for the grand vision yet never fufilled it. Sure it was an adventure but a short lived one. Challenge everything and don't settle for the charm and intellect of those who speak well and know how to string words together. Find a way to integrate it into the world around you and for you to be at that point grounded in who you are, what that means and where you are going. And to understand much of the psychedelic movement was set in a period in time where people really believed they could live in that world forever based on their romantic visions and idealism, detouring away from reality (because they were priveleged enough to do so) and believing the rest of the world could simply follow suit to regardless of all the other inevitable factors involved.
The psychedelic counter culture was a drop in the ocean, not the actual ocean itself. People are often transported under the illusion they are now in another world only to find that their psychedelic trips have to end at one point and all the audiobooks and lectures of Alan Watts won't last forever, all the books on comparative religious studies and philosophy etc can't sustain you forever, the honeymoon period has to end eventually. The drop in the ocean cannot keep them afloat yet they hope for something new to keep them going. Little do they know it was not about the being involved in the movementt but about the underlying awareness they represented. And for many people they were never able to get this message in the first place, let alone get past the first hurdles of understanding what it all means. There is the innate and grandiose flaw in the psychedelic mindset many people seem to have.
It was never intended for all audiences despite the mistaken belief they were.
What was intended for all audiences though was the material gleaned, not the actual superficial relationship to an identity. What bugs me the most are people who grow long hair or have interesting facial hair and wear weird clothes and call themselves hippies or hipsters. They are probably the most corrosive people you can meet. They have absolutely no idea what they represent other than the fact they assume dressing a certain way automatically infers they are a certain type of person. The psychedelic movement and the literature attached is very much like that in lots of ways and it takes quite a lot of restraint, self awareness, congruence and self acceptance not to buy into the superficial stuff. Lots of people acting but very people actually being and becoming. That's another typical middle class dilemma - the belief that you can simply assume a role and it becomes reality, or you can buy into one. That's present in the undertones of what represents the psychedelic movement and it's usually one of narcissism instead of what it should be, which is the opposite.
