A Call for a Sanctuary Based on Aldous Huxley's Island
I wrote "A Call for a Psychedelic Sanctuary" three years ago for Island Views Newsletter. After I published it, if discovered that a non-edited version was printed.
So I have finally gotten it together a clean version of the essay. I put it on my blog Bruce Eisner's Writings and you can read it here.
Here is a few excerpts from the essay.
"Wooden ships on the water, very free and easy, Easy, you know the way it's supposed to be, Silver people on the shoreline, let us be, Talkin' 'bout very free and easy. ... Horror grips us as we watch you die, all we can do is echo your anguished cries, Stare as all human feelings die, we are leaving - you don't need us. Go; take your sister then, by the hand, lead her away from this foreign land, Far away, where we might laugh again, we are leaving -you don't need us'. David Crosby, Crosby, Stills and Nash
Four decades have passed since fresh winds of change blew our nation and around the world. In Wooden Ships, Paul Kantner wanted to catch some of the wind those changes to "keep the party going" as the end of the magic millennium drew to a close. The winds blew icy cold as the decade ended.
The 1960s were an extraordinary period - a time in which millions of people acted as if they had swallowed some kind of pill which made them different - and of course they had. The cultural icon of the man in the thin gray flannel suit with a drink in his hand gave way to the image of a different kind of cocktail party - the kind they had on the popular TV show "Laugh In." They were having drinks with a different kind of rum. It wasn't the rum that young John Kennedy's elders had run in from Cuba in the thirties in martinis that made sixties parties swing. Old Ike's stolid attitudes had given way to a new vision of the Western world, as articulated by Kennedy, who was both a symbol of the strong stirrings of change as well as a martyr to the kind of reaction that it would bring forth.
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Along with the strong bonds of group identity that the psychedelic community felt in the sixties, there was a strain of thought that perhaps the only way to live the way we want was to go somewhere else. In the sixties, Crosby Stills, and Nash made famous the song "Wooden Ships" which suggests we set sail and find a "distant" land. "We are leaving; you don't need us" was their refrain. Indeed, we still aren't wanted and that distant land still beckons. The mutant genes that carried our forefathers from England need new soil.
We who were the youth generation that comprised the Psychedelic Movement are now middle-aged. We are an important segment of the huge Baby Boom generation- the population explosion that followed World War II. We went to Woodstock, we dropped in and had careers, and many raised families. Many have not forgotten their idealistic past, and our income supports many projects which we all hope in some way may improve our current situation.
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We are now at the beginning of the twenty-first century. In four decades, some two generations have been born and grown up since the days of hula-hoops, John F. Kennedy, screaming teens outside of Beatles concerts, and young Professor Leary at Harvard. Certainly the sixties had its phony parts, and its excesses are part of what destroyed its momentum.
But those of us who grew up back then and have been involved in the Psychedelic Movement know that underneath all of that "fluff" is a set of important truths, ethics, and principles. As the world's population soars from the three billion people who inhabited the earth when I was born to the over six billion alive now to the projected twelve billion which will be here by 2040 according to the current predictions, it is possible that we may see civilization as we know it fade. It is possible that with so many people, technology will not be able to keep up with our overall growth and we may experience a new Dark Ages.
Large numbers of people will be subjected to more control and regimentation with the goal of making them better consumers rather than more enlightened people.
This essay and Island Foundation, like the novel Island it got its name from, are not just about taking psychedelics. Psychedelics happen to be a powerful tool which opens people up to new ideas and ancient wisdom. Island Foundation's goal, like Huxley's in writing Island, is to synthesize these ideas and form something new and better.
We must take steps now to keep our torch burning in the potential darkness and to re-ignite the spirit that brought so many changes four decades ago. So in this manifesto, I call on the members of Island Foundation, the psychedelic/entheogen community, and all of those of you who find some sense in these words to get involved in our Psychedelic Sanctuary Project. Please-write, call, email, and let us know your level of interest and tell us how you can contribute to this flagship Island Project.
"A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands there, it looks out, and seeing a better country, sets sail. Progress is the realization of Utopias."
--Oscar Wilde
