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ALLEN GINSBERG
acid. I think his reason for putting down acid, he said - actually
I talked about that before - that you were left vulnerable or left
anyone in his situation - with the Pentagon with the map room
making Eldridge Cleaver dolls and sticking pins through, figuring on
sending out agents to assassinate him (which I'm sure is true) -left
him more vulnerable, because acid does make you vulnerable psychi–
cally to any influence and also leaves you without defenses which is
its advantage and disadvantage. I had thought the Revolutionary
Convention in Philadelphia formally accepted acid and grass as instru–
ments of revolution. I think that at this stage they did, that they
had done this several months ago. I wonder if that was like a group
decision or whether that was Cleaver's reaction to Leary ... there.
That's one question I had. Is this a group community decision–
Cleaver's sudden edict....
ANDERSON: Cleaver seems to be in his own head in Algiers.
GINSBERG: That's just one question we might think about. The other
is, if it's true that acid or psychedelics make it difficult to have
twenty-four hour alertness under extreme murderous stress conditions,
then I wonder if the prescription for an hour a day quite safe legal
meditation would be found useful for revolutionaries. But the point
is: is Cleaver reacting negatively to the type of consciousness that acid
catalyzes, in other words, is he reacting negatively to a kind of bum
anxiety trip, or is he reacting to a practical poEtical situation–
because I think his characterization of it, is that you lie on the grass
with your beloved and stick the grass in a book except they don't let
you because they come and arrest you for the grass, but he's putting
it, both the acid and the grass, in terms of a pleasure kick, rather
than a yoga trip or an enlargement of psycho-political consciousness.
Whereas I had always thought of acid and the psychedelics as being
a variant of yoga and exploration of consciousness, or a medicine, as
with the American Indians or the Chama Indians in South America
that I spent time with. I think that that mode of psychedelic conscious–
ness is very useful politically and humanly to experience - how–
ever you get it, whether you get it through drugs or whether you get
it through meditation or whether you get it through universal cosmic
accident or whether you get it through death-bed vision or whether
you get it through sexual union or whether you get it through revol–
utionary breakthrough - but it's necessary that everybody have con–
tact with their ultimate nature and with an enlarged consciousness so
that they can formulate a legitimate planetary humanly large revolu–
tion. So the question is: is that mode of consciousness being rejected,
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