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01:03 pm: Bītli par LSD. Part 2
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GEORGE: I can't say how this experience has affected others. We are all individuals, and it's become more apparent to me over the years that while we may all experience a certain thing, we don't actually know if we have experienced it in the same way as each other. I made the mistake of assuming that my experience with LSD would be the same as anybody else's. Prior to that, I'd known that if you all drink whisky, you all get drunk, you all feel dizzy and you all start slipping around. So I presumed, mistakenly, that everybody who took LSD was a most illuminated being. And then I started finding that there were people who were just as stupid as they'd been before, or people who hadn't really got any enlightenment except a lot of colours and lights and an Alice in Wonderland type of experience.

The thing is, after you've had it a couple of times there doesn't seem to be any point to taking it again. Although the tablecloth might keep moving or the chairs get small, the basic thing that I first experienced was the though: "You shouldn't need this, because it's a state of awareness." To change consciousness with a chemical obviously isn't a path to self-realisation. I think in some cases it can have a positive effect, but it is also dangerous. people later didn't have the ability to cope with it - the bogeyman within them would have the "hell", and the "hell" would come out. There were always reports of people jumping under cars and out of buildings. I can understand that, because you do suddenly experience the soul as free and unbound. You can have that feeling, that consciousness of what it must be like to leave your body, like experiencing death - but you have to remember that you're still in your body.

In 1966, I was in India on the day that they all worship Shiva. Amongst the little items being sold in the street I came across a small cactus covered with little hooks, the size of the top of a big poppy. I said to Ravi Shankar, who I was with, "What's that?" and he said, "Shiva would eat that, in mythology." I thought, "Ah, it's mescaline, peyote or something like that," and I said, "I'll try one of them." But Ravi said, "No, no, don't eat it - people who've eaten it have gone mad." Well, that fits the bill for a psychedelic, because the down side of it can be that you go so far out in your mind that you think you've lost your grip and that you're never going to get back to the normal state of consciousness. And, in a way, you don't ever really return to how you were before.

The great thing about it for me was that, whereas with other drugs and alcohol you're under an influence and you feel intoxicated, with psychedelics you don't. It has an effect on you system but you're not feeling intoxicated; you're straight, with a twist - taken out of focus. Suddenly you can see through walls and you can see your body as if it isn't solid. Like when you peel a slice of orange and you take the skin off the slice, you see tiny droplets that all just fit together, but are separate pieces. You can look at your body like that - I can almost see it now, just by recall - and you can see it's all moving; it's all pulsating with energy. It's amazing. Or, you know how it is when you can see a heat haze? It's like that - you can actually see heat. I tried sunbathing on acid once, at the house in LA, and after about ten seconds I could hear my skin frying, a sound like bacon sizzling in a pan. People will say, "Well, he as under the influence of a drug," but I believe it is actually the senses getting heightened to such a degree.

It must be like that for people who have attained a "cosmic consciousness". All the time, they can see through the trees and see the roots of the trees in the ground and see the sap flowing up through the ground and through the tree - as Superman can see through walls. Because the essence and the cause of everything in the physical world is that pure intelligence that is manifested externally as all these different parts. It's the ego identity that fools us into thinking, "I am this body." LSD gave me the experience of: "I am not this body. I am pure energy soaring about everywhere, that happens to be in a body for a temporary period of time."

That was something that I didn't know about back then. I just got born and did what I was doing, and I came along just as The Beatles were coming along and as acid and everything else was coming along; so you could call it karma. And, although it has a down side, I see my acid experience more as a blessing because it save me many years of indifference. It was the awakening and the realisation that the important thing in life is to ask: "Who am I?", "Where am I going?" and "Where have I come from?". All the rest, as John said, "just a little rock 'n' roll band". It wasn't that important. All the other bullshit - that was just bulshit. All the governments and all the people running round the planet doing whatever they're doing - all just a waste of time. They're all chasing their tails in some big illusion. If you can live by an inner rule and become centred on some kind of cosmic law, you don't need governments or policemen or anybody laying down rules. If I had half a chance, I'd put acid in the Government's tea.

RINGO:  I think LSD changes everybody. It certainly makes you look at things differently. It makes you look at yourself and your feelings and emotions. And it brought me closer to nature, in a way - the force of  nature and its beauty. You realise it's not  just a tree; it's a living thing. My outlook certainly changed - and you dress differently, too!

JOHN: I must have had a thousand trips. I just used to eat it all the time. I stopped taking it because of bad trips. I just couldn't stand it. I dropped it for I don't know how long, and I started taking it again just before I met Yoko.

I got a  message on acid that you should destroy your ego, and I did. I was reading that stupid book of Leary's, all that shit. We were going through the whole game that everybody went through, and I destroyed myself. I destroyed my ego and I didn't believe I could do anything, and I let people do and say what they wanted, and I was nothing; I was shit. Then Derek (tipa, viņu bijušais PR džeks Dereks Teilors, kurš vēlāk organizēja Monterejas festu) tripped me out at his house after he got back from LA. He said, "You're all right," and he pointed out songs I had written and said, "You wrote this, and you said this, and you are intelligent; don't be frightened." And then next week I went down with Yoko and we tripped again, and she filled me completely to realise that I was me, and that it was all right. That was it, and I started fighting again and being a loudmouth again, and saying, "Well, I an do this," and, "Fuck you, this is what I want. I want it and don't put me down." [1970]

[I haven't taken LSD] in years. A little mushroom or peyote is not beyond my scope; maybe twice a year or something. But acid is a chemical. People are taking it, though, even though you don't hear about it any more. People are still visiting the cosmos. It's just that nobody talks about it; you get sent to prison.

I've never met anybody who's had a flashback in my life and I took millions of trips in the Sixties, and I've never met anybody who had any problem. I've had bad trips, but I've had bad trips in real life. I've had a bad trip on a joint. I can get paranoid just sitting in a restaurant; I don't have to take anything.

Acid is only real life in CinemaScope. Whatever experience you had is what you would have had anyway. I'm not promoting, all you committees out there, and I don't use it because it's a chemical, but all the garbage about what it did to people is garbage.

GEORGE: I don't think John had a thousand trips; that's a slight exaggeration. but there was a period when we took acid a lot - the year we stopped touring, the year of the Monterey Pop Festival, we stayed home all the time, or went to each others' houses.

In a way, like psychiatry, acid could undo a lot - it was so powerful you could just see. But I think we didn't really realise the extent to which John was screwed up. For instance, you wouldn't think he could get bitter, because he was so friendly and loving; but he could also be really nasty and scathing. As a kid, I didn't think, "Oh well, it's because his dad left home and his mother died," which in reality probably did leave an incredible scar. It wasn't until he made that album about Janov, primal screaming [Plastic Ono Band], that I realised he was even more screwed up that I thought.

After taking acid together, John and I had a very interesting relationship. That I was younger or I was smaller was no longer any kind of embarrassment with John. Paul still says, "I suppose we looked down on George because he was younger." That is an illusion people are under. It's nothing to do with how many years old you are, or how big your body is. It's down to what your greater consciousness is  and if you can live in harmony with what's going on in creation. John and I spent a lot of time together from the on and I felt closer to him than all the others, right through until his death. As Yoko came into the picture, I lost a lot of personal contact with John, but on the odd occasion I did see him, just by the look in his eyes I felt we were connected.


Tags: muz, psy