Mavericks of the Mind: Conversations with Terence McKenna, Allen Ginsberg, Timothy Leary, John Lilly, Carolyn Mary Kleefeld, Laura Huxley, Robert Anton Wilson, and others…

by Brown, David Jay

  JOHN: From Orthonoia to Metanoia through Paranoia. Orthonoia is the way most people think; they're creating simulations that everyone accepts. Metanoia is where you leave all that and you're experiencing higher intelligence. But the first time you do this, you're scared shitless.

  On my first acid trip in the tank, I panicked. Suddenly I saw the memorandum from the National Institute of Mental Health: "Never Take Acid Alone." One investigator who tried to take acid alone got eaten up by his tape recorder. That's all I could think of. Luckily I was scared shitless, had no idea what was going to happen and boy, that was rocket fuel if ever there was one! I went further out into the universe than I've ever been since. So the paranoia is rocket fuel to get you into Metanoia.

  Before I did the tank I was frightened by water. I sailed a lot in the ocean and feared sharks. I had a continuous phobia about this. Finally I got in the tank and went through that horrible experience, being frightened to death, you know. And after that I was never afraid of water.

  DJB: Do you see a similarity between lucid dreaming and ketamine experiences?

  JOHN: No. Lucid dreaming is never as powerful as ketamine.

  DJB: Well, one nice thing about ketamine is that you can maintain the high for as long as you want.

  JOHN: When people start talking about "higher" states of consciousness I say, "In outer space there's no up or down."

  DJB: It all becomes relative.

  JOHN: No, it isn't even relative.

  DJB: It isn't even relative?

  JOHN: It isn't anything you can describe.

  DJB: Now I'm thoroughly confused.

  JOHN: If you stay around me long enough you're going to get a whole new language. Some people stay around me for a while and run away. I can't keep a woman here. They all get frightened sooner or later. I'm crazier than hell.

  DJB: So are you writing these days? What are you doing?

  JOHN: I never say what I'm doing. My analyst said it very well. I came in one day and flopped down on the couch and said, "I just had a new idea this morning, but I'm not going to talk about it." And he said, "Oh, then you understand that a new idea is like an embryo. A needle will kill an embryo, but if it's a fetus or a baby then it's just a needle-prick." So you have to allow a certain amount of growth before you talk.

  RMN: What do you think is the best therapy for people?

  JOHN: The best therapy for people is to hit them over the head with a hammer.

  DJB: Maybe we could start running workshops at Esalen.

  JOHN: I've been hit over the head several times. We had a big hot tub out here. I stood up too fast and the circulation left my brain and I fell face down. Three days before, Toni had read how to do mouth-to-mouth resuscitation in The National Enquirer, and she did it. So many people have saved my life, it's incredible. I finally figured out that ECCO doesn't want me to go yet. I asked them to let me go at times. They keep saying, "You've got to teach, you've got to learn what it is to be a human." So, I'm spending all my time now trying to learn this. You know, it just gets to be fun. I realized that certain humans have a lot of fun. On some day I said, "What is it to be human?" And they said, "To laugh more."

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  Stepping into the Future

  with Nina Graboi

  Nina Graboi has had a remarkable life which covers over seven decades of some of the most transformative years in human history. Born in Vienna, Austria in 1918, she fled the Nazi takeover of her country and spent three months in a detention camp in North Africa. Through a mixture of ingenuity and good fortune she managed to escape and came to America with her husband in 1941.

  Arriving as a penniless refugee, she went on to become a society hostess in an exclusive Long Island community. At the age of 36 she was living what most people considered the epitome of the American Dream, yet Nina felt a great void in her life. In search of this missing link, she plunged into the study of esoteric subjects and became an avid practitioner of meditation. When she was 47 she left her husband and became deeply involved in the counter-culture of the sixties.

  Nina had her first psychedelic experience in the company of Alan Watts and she frequently spent time at the famed Millbrook estate where a group had gathered around Timothy Leary to study the mind-expanding effects of LSD. She was the Director of the New York Center of the League for Spiritual Discovery , a nonprofit organization which operated to help and educate people engaged in exploring the potential of psychedelic consciousness.

  In 1969 she opened a boutique in Woodstock and lived there for the next ten years. Her recently published autobiography, One Foot in the Future, chronicles her remarkable spiritual journey and has been described by Terence McKenna as "an extraordinary tale of humor and hope. " Today, Nina lives in Santa Cruz and gives talks on the relationship between the psychedelic experience and the spiritual quest. She is a frequent radio talk-show guest and is the subject of a television documentary entitled, Voices of Vision.

  We interviewed Nina on January 12, 1992, on a rainy day at Two Bat Ranch, in Malibu. Her face dramatically contradicts her 72 years and she presents the demeanor ofa woman who is in the spiritual prime of her life. Nina talked with a gracious calm in the warming glow of a log fire, about the politics of sexuality, the use of psychedelics and the future of the human race.

  RMM

  RMN: Nina, in the fifties, when you were living in Long Island, you had what most people would consider the pillars of success--wealth, social status, a loving family--and yet you gave it all up. Why?

  NINA: When I was the woman who had everything, I realized that everything is nothing. I had been busily pursuing the American Dream, and when I had it, it tasted like ashes. I was raised in an atmosphere where success was the goal and only superstitious peasants believed in anything beyond the physical. But unless I could discover that there is more to it than being born, getting married, having children and scrambling up the ladder of success, life lost all meaning for me at that time. I felt a yearning for more so profound that I was ready to die if I could not find it. That was in 1956. There were others who searched as I did, but I did not know them. I was very alone. Books were my only source of information, and for the next twelve years I read my way through psychology, psychic research, philosophy and comparative religions. This brought me to Buddhism and Hinduism, and I felt I'd come home.

  RMN: You were divorced at a time when far fewer couples than today split up. Didn't that take a lot of courage?

  NINA: It wasn't a sudden decision, you know. My children were both in college, and I had planned for a long time to end my marriage once the kids were on their own. But yes, it took a lot of courage to end a marriage of twenty-seven years in those days. Aside from the emotional toll, I had no legal rights because I was the party who wanted the divorce. Feminism was still a long way off, and the fact that I'd helped build the business, raised the children, and taken care of the home, counted for nothing. As I had no marketable skills, my financial future could not have been more bleak. It took courage, but it was the only thing I could do if I wanted to continue to grow.

  DJB: What kind of life did you move into?

  NINA: I moved from a fourteen-room house to a one-room studio in Manhattan. I was heading The N.Y. Center for The League of Spiritual Discovery at the time --a labor of love that paid nothing, but was as rewarding as it was instructive. In 1969, a few months before the Festival, I moved to Woodstock and opened a small boutique stocked mostly with craft items that I made. Later, I ran The Woodstock Transformation Center where many of the now-familiar New Age skills like meditation, Yoga, T'ai Chi, herbal lore, nutrition, Astrology, Tarot and related subjects were taught. Like the LSD Center, it was financially unrewarding, and when my money ran out, I learned to live on whatever I could find to support myself, including house cleaning, altering clothes, organizing craft shows, and so on. I led the lifestyle of the hippies, though I was not a h
ippie myself--more like a den mother. I saw them as my children, my friends, my teachers. They were so wise, these young ones--they had it all in their heads and hearts, but they had not yet learned how to live it.

  RMN: Did you ever miss your former lifestyle?

  NINA: Never. Not once. The lavish parties were behind me. I closed the door of that home with the lovely garden and swimming pool and never looked back. Looking back isn't my style anyway. I'm generally not very interested in what happened in the past--too busy with what's going on now!

  DJB: So much has been written about the sixties, it is possibly the most overanalyzed decade of this century, and yet many people, even those who were a part of it, often find it hard to express what was going on. What do you think the sixties were about?

  NINA: The main characteristic of the sixties was idealism. America's youth in the Eisenhower years was dull and apathetic; all they wanted was to prepare for a safe, secure job. And then suddenly, only a decade later, youngsters who had lived in middle and upper middle-class homes were seeing that their parents in split-level homes with two-car garages were not very happy, so they said, "Screw it, I don't want to live like that!" And they burst out of their suburban homes and landed in crashpads and huts and tents. The materialistic lifestyle of their parents made no sense to them. It was the same thing that had happened to me a decade earlier. As I see it, the sixties were the beginning of a quantum leap forward in human consciousness. Customs and beliefs that had long been taken for granted were challenged by a generation that did not blindly obey authority. And simultaneously, the heavens opened and showered down all the spiritual goodies that had for so long been the secret knowledge of the few. What followed was so threatening to the existing order that a backlash had to come. Nixon, Reagan, Bush, the greedy eighties. The forces of inertia do not willingly make room for the new.

  RMN: How do you think your perspective was influenced by the fact that you were older than most of the people who were experimenting with consciousness change at that time?

  NINA: I was 47 when I left my former lifestyle. Unlike the hippies, I'd had plenty of experience; my feet were firmly planted on the ground. I was enamored of the hippies, though it wasn't easy to adjust to the irresponsibility that often went along with the idealism. Still, I felt more at home with them than I had ever felt before, and my years of esoteric studies helped me to help them see the spiritual path a little more clearly.

  DJB: What did you think about the sexual revolution?

  NINA: I deplored it. It was another male chauvinist ploy, though that term was still unknown at that time. It was a perfect example of male domination. Most of the young women I knew did not want to sleep with everybody who came their way. In the sixties, it was considered ill-mannered to refuse to get in the sack with anybody who asked. "We're all one," they said. The boys loved it, but few of the girls did. Besides, I don't believe that freedom means license. Everybody was so interchangeable-bodies, bodies, playing musical chairs.

  RMN: Tell us a little about your time at Millbrook, the psychedelic research center where you often stayed with Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert (now Ram Dass).

  NINA: Well, I didn't exactly stay with them, but I saw a good deal of them on my visits to the Millbrook mansion in upstate New York. As a setting for the exploration of the psychedelic consciousness, the vast estate could not have been more perfect. The sixty-four-room mansion and other outbuildings on the estate were in sufficient disrepair to lend a note of funky eeriness to the scene. Inside, the bizarre mingled with the sublime. It was a combination of research center, monastery, country club, mental hospital and testing ground for all the New Age methods of spiritual growth and physical healing. Add Indian music, jazz, incense, beautiful people clad in loose, lovely robes--that was Millbrook. The people who lived there took LSD together in the spacious living room. They lay on mats listening to music. You know, when people think of what went on in those group sessions, they think of orgies, wild, Dionysian revelries. I'm sure that these went on in many places, but in my experience, group sessions at Millbrook appeared quite sedate. I remember a video crew from a major TV station filming a small group on acid, and all they saw were some people sitting cross-legged on the floor chanting “Om, Om, Om.”

  RMN: In the sixties, many individuals experimented with mind-altering substances like LSD and marijuana, and yet, as you mention in your book, you observed very few negative effects. Why do you think that was?

  NINA: There were some negative effects, but the great majority of experimenters before psychedelics were made illegal had predominantly positive experiences. Some of the negative effects can be traced to the disinformation put out by the government and the sensation-hungry media, but in most cases, those who were pushed over the edge had been close to it before. It is unfortunate that there is no way to screen out people who are at risk, as there would be if these substances were legally controlled instead of criminalized.

  RMN: Could you tell us about the dangers involved in taking psychedelics and can you specify who should and who shouldn't use them?

  NINA: I don't believe psychedelics are for everybody. People who are already pretty spaced out need first to get grounded. Others with rigid belief systems may find themselves shaken to the core by the collapse of their valued beliefs. Then there are those with weak egos. I define the body as a spacesuit and the ego as the survival kit that contains the instructions that ensure survival on this planet. The weak ego has not developed its survival skills. It can also get inflated and believe that it needs lots of money and power and possessions to survive. Before we approach psychedelics we should understand that we are not what we think we are ···e are more! We are more than our bodies. Out-of-body experiences may occur in a psychedelic session, and the unprepared person can have a profound panic reaction. Psychedelics can be used as a therapeutic tool, to go deeper into oneself; this may best be done in the presence of a therapist. They can also be used as an aid to creativity and to problem solving. But their noblest and most ancient use is as a bridge to the ineffable--the Higher Self. The most dangerous and wasteful use is to take them simply for kicks.

  DJB: How have your experiences with psychedelics affected your perspective of yourself and the life process?

  NINA: One of my first discoveries when I entered the psychedelic consciousness was, "It's all upside down!" The absurdity of the things on which the world places the greatest value came home to me in Day Glo colors. I had seen it before, when I lived among the wealthy suburbanites, but now the willingness with which people enslaved themselves to a life of producing unnecessary services and consumer goods so they could buy more unnecessary services and consumer goods struck me with great force. In one of my LSD sessions, the words real estate came into my mind, and I laughed hysterically for half an hour. The idea of owning a piece of the planet! Do you see how ludicrous it is? On LSD, I had flashes of the cosmic consciousness of which the saints and yogis speak. I had had brief hints of it in my solitary meditations, but they didn't come close to the actual mystical experience. To know, not just to believe, that we are part of the stream of being and that we exist, even apart from our bodies--inevitably, this must affect every aspect of our lives. Like thousands of others, I "dropped out" of a lifestyle that seemed meaningless to live with the hippies who shared my quest and my ideas.

  RMN: Of all the major religions you relate to Hinduism the most. What is it about this religious philosophy that attracts you?

  NINA: What I find particularly attractive is the lack of dogmatism in eastern philosophy. It is very broad in its acceptance of all forms of worship and all kinds of manifestations of God. Most people need to relate to a personal divinity before they can see that all is God. Hinduism has a variety of divinities and spiritual disciplines to choose from--a brilliant approach to psychology that has no equal in the West. And then there is the impressive fact that only Buddhism, of all the world religions, has never been responsible for a Holy War. There is also their
approach to desire; they say that it is caused by ignorance--the ignorance of our own true nature which is no other than the Atman or Buddha nature --the in-dwelling God. In my pre-psychedelic meditations, I was shocked to discover that my mind is a chattering monkey, as the Hindus and Buddhists say. To still it even for a minute is no easy task. Today, millions know the benefits of meditation, but before the sixties, yoga was widely assumed to be no more than a set of physical exercises.

  DJB: What do you think happens to human consciousness after death?