The man who turned on the world

by Michael Hollingshead

No Synopsis Available.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0856340154
• ISBN13: 9780856340154
• Release Date: January 1973
• Publisher: Blond and Briggs
• Length: 255 Pages
• Weight: 0.35 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Best Internal & External Bio of the Psychedelic Experience

A must read for the history of modern America psychedelics!! Great autobiography and history of the psychedelic movement! The perfect book to read after Timothy Leary's High Priest, which is where I'm coming from. And you can get a HTML copy of this on acidmagic.com. I printed 213 pages. This book is for anyone interested in Mysticism and internal spiritual seeking and the meanings within psychedelics. I'm saddened that this book is out of print and unavailable for a decent price. Where Leary leaves off, Hollingshead picks up and goes further down the historical road of psychedelics and its progenitors, describing the psychedelic renaissance from the Leary-Albert streams into that of a whole movement, first of Harvard 1960-61, then of the International Federation for Internal Freedom in the 1963-64, the Agora Scientific Trust, Inc in Manhattan 1963 and Castalia Foundation (named after Herman Hesse's book) of 1964-67 and the League for Spiritual Discovery of 1966-68, etc., etc., expression of the metaphysical reality and the beauty of the flower of the spirit, the Age of the Flower Children born out of the individual experience of transcendence as in an earlier age, the Vedic Soma that brought the light of consciousness into the world. Hollingshead has been there, said that, done that and has done a hell of lot more than most people I've had contact with. He's the man with the famous Maionaise Jar with 5,000 hits of pure Ergot acid, the man who first turned on Timothy Leary and Richard Albert (Ram Dass), Maynard and Flo Ferguson and many, many others. Hollingshead knowledge of the external movement and influence of psychedelics is both impressive and of great interest, things you find out that you never knew but wish you had. But ultimately, it's his understanding and depth of the internal Buddhistic, ego-crushing descriptions, his Eastern and Western comparisons, that have me loving this book as a real treasure. At the end of the book Hollingdale writes: Our mind craves dreams, those magical realms, for ever present between somewhere and nowhere, which beguile us with a thraldom all their own and help keep our sense of wonder alive. And if the new 'matter-of-factness' encroaches on our brain to no other end than to make of our life a thing and not, as it longs to be, an instrument of self-transcendence, we feel distressed by our inability to dream as once we did; and all delight is gone, our life somehow diminished, which is the cause of most of the angst in the self-the knowledge that what is most human in our life is being determined not by our 'true' needs, which are divined from the centre of our being, opening like the petals of the lotus and are beyond thought, beyond intellect, 'beyond striving', but are on the contrary, determined entirely by external forces, through no choice of ours. We are at once the victims and the beneficiaries of modern technological advances. Reality is now the new myth-making substance. We are ma

Entheogens: Professional Listing

"The Man Who Turned On the World" has been selected for listing in "Religion and Psychoactive Sacraments: An Entheogen Chrestomathy" http://www.csp.org/chrestomathy