Pubdate: Sun, 01 Oct 2000
Source: New York Times (NY)
Copyright: 2000 The New York Times Company
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Author: Natalie Angier

ENLIGHTENMENT THINKING

For Dad, drugs weren't about recreation. They were aids in his search for 
truth.

It was the by ultimate acid flashback, courtesy of that modern route to the 
promised land -- the Internet.

Not long ago, my brother-in-law was showing my mother the power of a Web 
search.

He typed in the name of my father, Keith Angier, who has been dead for 23 
years.

Much to the family's astonishment, the search turned up a missive that none 
of us knew existed but that could now be found online in the Timothy Leary 
archives.

My father wrote the letter to Leary in Millbrook, N.Y., in 1963, when I was 
5 and we were living in the Bronx.

"Ever since reading an article on the psilocybus mushroom by Gordon Wasson 
in a 1957 Life magazine article," he wrote, "I've been interested in this 
and other hallucinogens." My father then described his quest for the 
"ultimate truth" through the use of both "plain mystical contemplation" and 
peyote, which at that point could be ordered through the mail from Native 
American religious groups.

He had concluded that "in this era of ubiquitous distractions," 
hallucinogens "may be the only way for most of us."

Unfortunately, it was his experience that "peyote is not only hard to take 
and keep down, but contains several useless and baneful alkaloids along 
with the couple of good ones." Hence his plea to Leary, whom he and my 
mother had seen on "The David Susskind Show" discussing LSD: "I am 
interested in your organization because Internal Freedom is the most 
important freedom in the world, and your explorations in this area are 
among the most valuable today," my father summarized. "Please send 
membership information to the address below."

My father was a chronically unhappy and difficult man. He dropped out of 
high school but was a voracious autodidact. He did so well on the Army's 
I.Q. test that the service wanted to send him to officers' training school 
- -- until it found out he had no diploma.

He was discharged honorably with a halfhearted diagnosis of "borderline 
schizophrenia." Returning to civilian life, he took the first job he was 
offered, as a low-level machinist at Otis Elevator, a post he kept -- and 
hated -- until he died at 51.

As he wrote Leary, my father was always in search of "ultimate truth," and 
a place where he could rest, and trust, and feel a moment of thoughtful 
calm. He couldn't help being spiritual, really; he got it young in such 
strong doses.

My grandmother, who reared him and his two sisters alone, was a devout 
Christian Science practitioner. As a young man, my father renounced 
Christian Science in favor of Communism, but then renounced that when he 
grew disgusted with Stalin. He returned to the Christian church, first as 
an Episcopalian, then as a Catholic; I still have the wooden crucifix that 
he carved in 1957, showing a Jesus so strong in body it is as though he 
were holding himself up on the cross.

Finally, he traded Christianity for Buddhism. I grew up knowing Buddha's 
eightfold way, and that life is pain, and that this pain is caused by 
desire -- including, as I saw, the desire for enlightenment.

With or without the help of Leary's organization, my father obtained LSD, 
and my parents and their friends sometimes took it. I knew that too, and I 
knew that I wasn't supposed to talk about it with anybody. I knew as well 
my father's harsh philosophy regarding drugs.

He disliked drugs that he considered stupefying, among them heroin, speed 
and cocaine.

Moreover, he had nothing but scorn for those who took psychedelic drugs 
recreationally. As he saw it, casual users were at best wasting their time, 
not to mention cheapening the meaning of compounds that have been used 
ritualistically by cultures throughout history; at worst, they were risking 
their sanity and possibly their lives.

Hallucinogens, he said, should be taken in the presence of an enlightened 
guide or priest if possible, with the goal of expanding consciousness and 
defying the illusion of self. You want an easy thrill, try a bottle of 
muscatel.

It sounds quaint, and self-exculpatory, if not self-deluding: another 
dopehead, trying to justify his high. Well, maybe -- or maybe not. We live 
in an era of such extreme antidrug propaganda that merely to mention the 
possibility that not all drugs are bad all the time risks, I suppose, 
attracting the attention of the drug czar Barry McCaffrey's troops.

Hallucinogens didn't make my father happy, of course, any more than did 
religion, or leftism, or the intricate ink drawings he drew, or the 
interminable Tibetan ritual music he listened to. But they all helped make 
him who he was. If drugs didn't expand his consciousness, they certainly 
stamped it. I suspect that, by taming the brutality of self, they offered 
him fleeting glimpses of freedom.

And my father had the ultimate safeguard against addiction: he was so 
easily disappointed.
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MAP posted-by: Jo-D