The term “psychedelia” means to make clear one’s mind and makes no reference at all to drug use, although during the 60’s drug experimentation was popular and hallucinogenic drugs such as LSD were taken to reach heightened states of perception and to recreate the experience of clearing the mind from the clutter of daily life through meditation.
Psychedelia and Artistic Creativity
Psychedelia is to free your senses in any way that opens your eyes and allows you to see the world in a different light. As Blake wrote, “If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is: Infinite”. By doing this man can see the sacredness and beauty of the natural world.
Not everyone can train their minds to block out everything else and without teaching or training a simpler alternative was to experiment with drugs. In Psychedelic Distortion and the Meanings of the 1960s, Jonathan Harris writes that this drug use was used “as a means to inspire artistic creativity”.
Similarly, Glenn O’Brien explains in his essay Psychedelia and Its Legacies that “to take psychedelics was to lift the veil on a kind of consciousness that was not ordinarily accessible”.
A Child's View
Jon Murden writes in his Psychedelic Liverpool? that the true meaning behind English psychedelia is “nostalgia for the innocent view of the child”. Society’s restrictions mean that as we grow older our minds are clouded and we cannot see the sacred in nature. Aldous Huxley writes in The Doors of Perception that under the influence of mescaline, “visual impressions are greatly intensified and the eye recovers some of the perceptual innocence of childhood”.
This idea of cleansing our perceptions is similar to the idea of the “beatific vision”, a change in consciousness connecting spirituality with nature. Huxley writes that “Ideally, everyone should be able to find self-transcendence in some form of pure or applied religion”, which was the aim of those trying to learn new knowledge about themselves and the changing world around them.
True Visionaries
He goes on to state that through drug use everybody can see visions, but it is the true visionary that can go on to express “in literary or plastic symbols, what he has seen”. Psychedelic musicians, for example, were some of those who could put in words and in song the visions that they had of the world around them, whether through hallucinogenics or just an ability to reach heightened states of mind through religion or meditation
In The Doors of Perception he describes taking mescaline to try and step into the world that is only inhabited by such giants as Blake, believing that great minds see the world differently to ordinary people and that taking drugs was a way to enter that world, if only for a short time.
Huxley writes that he does not believe that the influence of drugs can create a realisation of ultimate enlightenment and the beatific vision, but that “to be shown for a few timeless hours the outer and the inner world...as they are apprehended, directly and unconditionally, by Mind at Large – this is an experience of inestimable value to everyone and especially to the intellectual”.
