"Richard Feynman was an extraordinary intellect who revolutionized modern physics. During his astounding career he helped design the atomic bomb, created a Nobel Prize winning theory of quantum electrodynamics, became a skilled safecracker and exposed the flaws which had led to the space shuttle Challenger disaster. His autobiography Surely you're joking, Mr Feynman! is full of anecdotes as to how he used his vast repertoire of arcane mathematical knowledge and plain common sense to outsmart and outwit the scientific, political and military establishments.

Feynman was a brilliant scientist long before he sampled marijuana and LSD while in his mid 50's, but he did claim to have learned from the mind-expanding experiences. Feynman was a friend of John Lilly, a researcher who pioneered the use of the tanks, studied psychedelics and consciousness, and is best known for his work with dolphins. Feynman's use of these illegal substances was mostly in the context of experimenting with his own consciousness while in a sensory deprivation tank.

While experimenting with his mind and memories in Lilly's tanks, Feynman also met Baba Ram Das, formerly Professor Richard Alpert of Harvard, friend of Timothy Leary and author of Be Here Now. Das instructed Feynman in how to achieve out of body experiences, which Feynman accomplished while in the tank.

Feynman found that pot helped him to achieve the hallucinatory state he was seeking. "Ordinarily it would take me about fifteen minutes to get a hallucination going," wrote Feynman, "but on a few occasions, when I smoked some marijuana beforehand, it came very quickly."

Feynman also tried LSD under these circumstances, but in his biography Genius by James Gleick, Feynman is described as being "embarrassed" by his LSD experiences. Feynman also received some criticism from his colleagues for his admission. In an essay called To Smoke Or Not To Smoke, Dr Lester Grinspoon wrote that "Feynman, by courageously acknowledging his ongoing use of marijuana, won the respect and appreciation of many and the enmity of others."

Source: http://www.cannabisculture.com/articles/2783.html

Owsley ‘Bear’ Stanley, pioneering audio engineer for the Grateful Dead has died in a car crash near his home in far north Queensland, Australia.

R.I.P.

Source: http://www.audioprointernational.com/ne ... -1935-2011

"This document is to affirm that I, Phillip Garrido, have clearly demonstrated the ability to control sound with my mind and have developed a device for others to witness this phenomena. By using a sound generator to provide the sound, and a headphone amplification system, (a device to focus your hearing so as to increase the sensitivity of what one is listening to) I have produced a set of voices by effectively controlling the sound to pronounce words through my own mental powers."

Phillip Garrido.

Source: http://voicesrevealed.blogspot.com/2008 ... -2008.html

In The Memory of Owsley "Bear" Stanley.

I would be interested in inteviewing you about your work in the field of recording (Wall of Sound system, live show recording, etc.).

I have already been there, done that... I was never really a recordist, I am just a very (naturally) talented live sound mixer. I have never worked in a studio. I have only done a very non-pa recordings, like Old and In the Way. My main thing was to keep an accurate diary or 'sonic journal' of my PA mixes. I cannot tell you how I mix, nor have I been able to train anyone else to do what I do. It is something special in how I hear sound and music that others do not.

I read your essay about music where you describe your experience in Watts with synesthesia. Had you done any sound mixing before this experience? Or is that what got you started?

Neither.

Do you have any theories of what might have caused you to experience it at that particular moment?

LSD. It was not classic synaesthesia, it was totally unlike any episode described in medicine. I have never had a repeat. I have never heard of anyone else having such an experience.

Why no studio recording? It seems like that would be a natural extension to your PA mixes. I realize that studio recording is very different from live mixing, but it seems like might be some you would have a good ear for...

Studio work is a technique for the preparation of an artificial musical 'art form', which is sterile and bland, not in and of time. It is not 'real' music, which is dynamic and in time and exists only during a live performance. Real music is a transient, ephemeral, aural experience. It exists as a 'pure' art only during the performance- in the present. I am utterly uninterested in the artificiality of the studio.

Owsley Stanley.

Source: http://www.gloriousnoise.com/features/2 ... w.php#more

So you regard consciousness as a continuum then, from rocks to, uh, gods.

Yeah. Which is why I think people are attracted to cystals, because a crystalline substance has a highly ordered electronic behavior, and the behavior of thought and mentation has electronic nature to it. There's a flow of electrons. And in fact one of the very interesting things, as a little aside... we found that some of the psychedelics seemed to affect our ability to interact with inanimate equipment. Specifically, when someone at a show or in a room where someone was playing music was to take some DMT, which is a rather powerful psychedelic, the music would immendiately become louder and more strident. It has a certain tonality to it, a certain quality to it, which is very distinctive.

Generally we'd all do it, right, and we thought, "Oh well, it's just one of those things." But then I got back to that thing that I'd learned from Melissa: Don't assume that this is an illusion caused by the substance. Believe it's real. So I said, "Hey! I believe this is real."

One thing we noticed was that the tubes would get red hot and burn out half the time and it would tear the voice coils out of the speakers. And yet we couldn't make it do that ordinarily. So I actually started making some measurements. We'd measure the amplifier at its maximum output, with a musician doing everything he could to get the max out of it. Then somebody would smoke the DMT - but not everybody, just one person. And we'd measure it. And it would go up six dB.

That's quadruple power, right?

Right. It would go up more than that sometimes. And yet we were absolutely sure we were at the limit. It would be something like 127 max. Somebody would smoke it, it'd go to 132. And it would literally melt the voice coils. Where did the power come from? The tubes couldn't handle it. They would often burn up. They would often get hot, and the internal structures in the tubes would melt. Where'd it come from? What was going on?

I evolved a little theory - I don't know, because obviously this is something that you could do some scientific research on, it would be well worthy of it. The idea being, if there was some type of circuit that was more sensitive to it than others, you could measure different circuit sensitivity. Then you could optimize that, and perhaps you might even be able to develop a circuit that had that property to such an extent that a person could affect it without having to take the psychedelic. And it wouldn't matter what - any interaction of any kind that you could initiate with your mind would enable you to build something that would directly control a machine. Because a computer could interpret anything, once you could get into it that way, you see. Which is what we need - we need a way of controlling machines directly.

It's like an example of many of the opportunities that psychedelics present to man, which are being completely thrown away because of the irrational approach that people are taking to them. This is real. The amplifier changes. The sound changes. The music also changes, so whether that's psychic effect on the amplifier or on the musician, I don't know. But no matter what effect Person A's taking of the psychedelic could have on Person B who's playing the guitar, there's no way that Person B could make that guitar louder by himself. The guitar, everything, got louder, got stronger, became more strident. It changed in quality, but it also became much louder. That came from a direct effect on maybe the electrons flowing in the equipment - which is the thing about the organization of electrons and the similarity, or the very close association, of the quality of consciousness or of thought to electronic motion and matter. Because certainly the most elaborately constrained electron would be the one that's associated with DNA, which is billions of atoms, sometimes, an enormous number of atoms, all of which, arranged in a very precise way, would order the motion of electrons in a very, very precise and specific and special way.

Interview with Owsley Stanley, taken from Conversations with the Dead: the Grateful Dead interview book, by David Gans, p. 303-304.

"In 1968, after I came back with the band, I still had the problem of primitive gear, primitive instruments - in particular the bass. Phil was playing a regular bass. Even though we hot-rodded it, it still seemed as though the technology could be pushed a little further. For a long time it'd be a problem to get... the guitars would be plenty loud, Garcia and Weir would be plenty loud, but you couldn't hear the bass.

Back in the Acid Test days I had discovered this cabinet that stood about three and a half feet tall and was about maybe twenty-four inches square and it had a big eighteen-inch speaker mounted in the bottom, face down. And it had flexible sides that were made out of Styrofoam with a rubberlike plastic around the outside, so when the speaker would move upwards, it would push the sides out; when the speaker would move down, it would bring the sides in. And it was built by a black dude in Berkeley. It was called a Super Bass. And they used an Electro-Voice speaker with two voice coils in it. One voice coil was designed to go to the left channel of your stereo, and the other voice coil to the right channel. It was designed in such a way that it sort of filtered everything out except maybe one frequency, that must have been about sixty or seventy or eighty hertz, or something like that. Well, whatever it was, it was a large complement of an appropriate frequency, or subharmonic, that was in the bass. The result was that when Phil would play, this thing would provide just enough energy at the bottom so that you could feel it in your gut. I don't know that it was musically toneful. It gave him the power of the bass drum. You know how when you're standing right in front of the bass drum and you get that feeling, right? Well, you set this off to the side of the stage and hook it up to the bass with a big power amp on it and it gave that pump just like the bass drum to the bass. Phil loved it! All of us loved it! The dancers loved it! But it was really a pretty shitty piece of gear. But it did work, and I've never seen anything quite like it, before or since. But it was another one of our attemps to bring the bass up so that it could musically stand on its own with the other instruments, because it was always weaker. And so the bass was the focus of attention, right from the Acid Test days. Try to improve the bass, because the bass guitar didn't have the same standing or power, no matter what kind of gear you used, it just didn't have the ability to reach out and grab - it's much harder to get that much power at lower frequencies. The amps aren't as efficient, the speakers aren't as efficient; lot's of problems with that."

Interview with Owsley Stanley, taken from Conversations with the Dead: the Grateful Dead interview book, by David Gans, p. 325.

"Ordinarily we hear just isolated sounds: the rings of a telephone, the sound of somebody's words. But when you turn on with LSD, the organ of Corti in your inner ear becomes a trembling membrane seething with tattoos of sound waves. The vibrations seem to penetrate deep inside you, swell and burst there. You hear one note of a Bach sonata, and it hangs there, glittering, pulsating, for an endless lenght of time, while you slowly orbit around it. Then, hundreds of years later, comes the second note of the sonata, and again, for hundreds of years, you slowly drift around the two notes, observing the harmony and the discords, and reflecting on the history of music. When your nervous system is turned on with LSD, and all the wires are flashing, the senses begin to overlap and merge. You not only hear but see the music emerging from the speaker system, like dancing particles, like squirming curls of toothpaste. You actually see the sound in multicolored patterns while you're hearing it. At the same time, you are the sound, you are the note, you are the string of the violin or the piano. And every one of your organs is pulsating, and having orgasms in rhythm with it."

Timothy Leary, "On Sex, Consciousness and LSD", 1966, taken from The Delicious Grace of Moving One's Hands, p. 10.

"We end up sitting in my car, listening to music for hours, staring at the plants and such around us. They seemed like they kept dying and being reborn to the beat of the music."

Trip report from someone on 2C-E.

Source: http://www.erowid.org/experiences/exp.php?ID=86523

"Now the facts of the matter are that I consider psychedelic drugs plus electric rock and roll to be the most powerful revolutionary agents man has ever known. It's so obvious and so logical and empirically demonstrable. When anyone in any country in the world today - including America, Europe, Western Europe, Eastern Europe, anyone who turns on today is automatically doing something that is illegal. That means that the person who is going to turn on must, in his own mind, and eventually in his own behavior, say to the government in Peking or in Moscow or in Stockholm or in Washington, "I don't believe the governement has the right to control my mind or pass laws against my changing my consciousness." Turning on is a political act. It's the kind of political act that is most characteristic of the new revolution which is the hedonic revolution. The weapons here are not Molotov bombs. The weapons are the radiant eye and the smiling face, the holy orgasm - as a revolutionary weapon it can never be overlooked."

Timothy Leary, "The Berkeley Lecture", 1969, taken from The Delicious Grace of Moving One's Hands, p. 140.

"Another, fourth, and the most important revolutionary aspect of the psychedelic strenght is that it does internally, neurologically, what it is doing outside, symbolically. You see, the symbolic forms or the behavioral forms of revolution are placards and picketing and demonstrations, storming the Bastille, and burning draft cards, and these are important and necessary at a particular moment. But they're short-lived. And they really don't change a lot of minds. They tend to solidify a position: You burn your draft card and it solidifies everyone a little more seriously. These are symbolic acts, but the revolutionary act of taking a psychedelic drug is very important because it anarchizes your nervous system. It does the same thing inside that you want to do outside, that is liberate."

Timothy Leary, "The Berkeley Lecture", 1969, taken from The Delicious Grace of Moving One's Hands, p. 141.

"Now you know you're on the right track in the pursuit of freedom and ecstatic pleasure and God if you're in trouble with the law, and if you're not you have to worry a little bit."

Timothy Leary, "The Berkeley Lecture", 1969, taken from The Delicious Grace of Moving One's Hands, p. 144.

"As soon as I forgot I was on drugs and that was why I didn't understand anything, the plateau struck. It was something I cannot explain. There was a loud, spacey-sounding (like old Starship Troopers FX or something) WOOOOSH in my head. I heard it and I felt it. Instantly I closed my eyes because it startled me."

Trip report from someone on 2C-E.

Source: http://www.erowid.org/experiences/exp.php?ID=86523

"Psychedelic psychology is the study of pleasure. By pleasure I mean the unconditioned state, the state where you're beyond rewards and punishments that are laid on you socially. In other words, psychedelic psychology is how to turn on. It's how to reach the unconditioned state and how to preserve it, and it's about the relationship between the unconditioned and the conditioned state of mind. Turned on, of course, means to turn off your social conditioning reward and punishment, and let the older energies inside your body take over.

Now we deal here, in the hedonic gap, with I think not only the most important but perhaps the only issue. The hedonic gap divides human beings or divides one part of our self from each other. It's the issue. And it can be conflict or it can be harmonious dialogue between that part of us - or those among us - who want to have everything controlled according to the current social ideas of right and wrong, and those who want things to be free and natural.

Technically, this is the social conditioned state versus the unconditioned state. This particular dialogue or conflict or harmonious union is defined in many ways as the responsible versus the creative. It's the uptight versus the turned on, it's the correct versus the free, it's the Christian versus the Non-Christian. This conflict, of course, goes on inside of us as a psychological conflict. One part of us has been socially conditioned to want to do ourselves dirty, no matter how painful it is, and keep everything tight under control. Another part of us knows that we've got two billion years of ticker-tape instructions inside of us, and knows that it's really supposed to happen naturally. That's psychological conflict."

Timothy Leary, "The Berkeley Lecture", 1969, taken from The Delicious Grace of Moving One's Hands, p. 151.

"The most profound moment of the trip came at about 2o'clock. We had stopped talking, both lost in our own fantasies. The atmosphere was so calming, the lava lamp was casting lazy swirling shadows aroud the room and an amazing song, PPK, Resurrection (the full version), was playing on the computer. I was sitting on the sofa, marc was standing by the fireplace, and I can honestly say that for the first time in my life time stood still. The only way I can describe it is that I felt like me and marc were inside a luminous pearl, or a bubble, completely removed from the world in our own little plane of existence. Neither one of us spoke, we just stayed in our positions, perfectly still, and I felt that this was the way it should always be. Each note of the song tugged my heart, transported me into a realm I have never before imagined, just a perfect little bubble of RIGHTNESS, where my surroundings were arranged in the most perfect way they could possibly be. It wasn't euphoria, it wasn't happiness, it was just rightness, which I discovered was the most important thing in life, finding that balance and holding on to it."

Trip report from someone on LSD.

Source: http://www.erowid.org/experiences/exp.php?ID=12607