Allen Ginsberg, 1995, at Georgian Court Q & A continues: – see here
AG: What’s up next? How much time do we have left ? (checks watch)
Eric Wurmser [teacher]: Do you want to take a … look there’s a question there.
Student (6): … I was wondering if you could describe further the experiences in The Yage Letters, with you and Burroughs
AG: [corrects pronunciation] – Ya-hey
G:. Yage (“Ya-hey”) ,sorry
AG: Well, everybody who dropped acid felt the same psychedelic. Psychedelic is psychedelic. The thing there is, though, you might call it an extension of diet rather than taking drugs. You might think of peyote, or mushrooms, as an extension of diet. That’s macrobiotics. I eat a macrobiotic diet and it gives you a different morale and then some. You eat meat then you carry that meat in your soul. You eat macrobiotic, you carry it kind of (with a) strong pure sense of.. your morale changes and your perception changes. The yage and peyote cactus were used as purgatives, (you know, make you throw-up, throw-up is important). The initial effect is nausea. You know, once you vomited out the poison, and (then) you perhaps see some panoramic sense of the cosmos or alternative mind. But I don’t think you need to do it more than a few times. I remember once I spoke to Dr. Albert Hofmann who invented LSD. He said he had only taken it six or seven times. I asked him, “how come not more?” – “Well once you get the glimpse, how often do you have to.. open the window? Once you have the experience, how many times are you going to (need to) keep opening..”
I remember the great French poet, Henri Michaux, who experimented a lot with mescaline saying that he wasn’t so much interested in what kind of vision people had on mescaline, he was more interested in what they did with it the next day. What they were able to build on, a more permanent perception that they got if they could do so. Day-to-day violence, that would be unfortunate. Whereas one problem of the American psychedelic would be… getting clean would be a bit more important than provocation, whatever insight you got. So, the spiritual materialism of counting your visions as if they were gold or something. I had six visions, I took acid 200 times before it. But you know, finally nothing comes from it – art or marriage, or armies or whatever. So, it’s a question of what grounding to hear the visionary mind that’s a statement embroidered in Zen. There’s the notion of satori, a big mind, that satori is something that comes and goes, you don’t cultivate satori, it’s a place of how you ground it, how you work for it, how you apply it, rather than how you get a gold star for having it.
Can everybody hear? Okay, so in this case, panoramic awareness. Awareness of the space of this room, so that you’re addressing the person furthest away from you, so that they can hear.
to be continued