Dr. Strange and the Psychedelic Origins of the Future

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Forty years ago, back in 1965, America was a nation in the clutches of radical social and cultural evolution. A President had been assassinated; the Civil Rights Movement reached toward its crescendo and the country was caught in an escalating pattern of undeclared war in South-East Asia as the Cold War threatened to become hot once again. The twenty years of technological change since the end of the World War produced other, even more profound signs of radical evolution. And so, even though The Cold War, the ideological “culture war” left over from the disastrous wars of the first half of the 20th century, would officially continue for another quarter century, the seeds of change that would blossom into the brave new world in which we now dwell were planted back in the summer and fall of 1965.

I was thirteen that summer, and among the many things that caught my newly teenaged awareness – the Beatles, modern poetry, Civil Rights, girls – was a new comic book character named Doctor Strange. He appeared every month in the back of a badly printed wood-pulp rag called Strange Tales, which I remembered, from what I thought of then as my childhood, as being full of funky monsters and tentacled aliens. It was then, I discovered, the home of the Human Torch and, at least in the last eight pages, Dr. Strange.

A brilliant but heartless neurosurgeon, Dr. Stephen Strange lost his abilities in an accident. Driven to recover his skills, he traveled to Tibet where he encountered The Ancient One, who, after testing him, taught him the “mystic arts.” Returning to the west, Dr. Strange settled into a spooky old house in Greenwich Village and took up his role as protector of mankind from various supernatural threats as “the master of the mystic arts.” By the fall of 1965, and Strange Tales #137 and #138, Dr. Strange had taken his mythos and gone where only a few people had ever gone before – into the heart of Eternity…

Out in California, down the peninsula from San Francisco in Santa Clara County, some folks were also taking trips into Eternity and creating new mythologies out of their chemical Gnosticism. The super heroes of Marvel Comics, particularly Dr. Strange, would play a pivotal role in the formation of that mythological futurism. To anyone reading Strange Tales #138 that late summer of 1965, the splash pages showing Dr. Strange voyaging in a truly surreal universe in search of Eternity represented a new and novel view of transcendence. And it was exactly that quality of transcendence that made Dr. Strange a hero to the local psychedelic underground; they knew what it was like to open the doorways of perception and step through into a wholly new world.

Up in the Santa Clara hills at La Honda, Ken Kesey and his fellow travelers The Merry Pranksters were experimenting with a new type of drug, LSD or “acid” in Prankster parlance, which mimicked, on many levels, the multi-layered experience of reality granted with transcendence or psychosis. Kesey, famous for his late Beat era novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, was turned on to the wonders of LSD by CIA funded psychiatric testing at Stanford Medical Center down in Palo Alto. By that summer, 1965, the very idea of chemical transcendence, first floated by Harvard psychiatrist Timothy Leary three years before, seemed poised to enter the mainstream.

LSD had been accidentally discovered during the war by Albert Hoffman of Sandoz labs in Switzerland while researching blood-clotting agents. Dr. Paul Linebarger’s landmark work Psychological Warfare, 1948, introduced the then radical idea that certain drugs might be useful in reconstructing the perceived reality of a subject under interrogation. “Brainwashing” it would come to be called by the mid 1950s, when a flood of research money allowed institutions, such Stanford Medical at Palo Alto and the Mental Research Institute at Stanford, Connecticut, to experiment with the new mind-altering drugs. Out of these experiments came not only Timothy Leary, but also Allen Ginsburg and Ken Kesey.

The CIA discovered that LSD was not a good brainwashing drug, although Charles Manson would soon show them how it could be done, but the genie, in the form of the expanded perceptions of their experimental subjects, was permanently out of the bottle. By early 1965, there were several leakage points. On the east coast of the US, in New York, Boston, etc. and its British spin-off, the leak centered around Dr. Leary, first at Harvard and then at Millbrook in upstate New York, and his compatriot Michael Hollingshead in London. These guys were into peace and love and eastern mysticism for the most part, and they didn’t read Marvel Comics, even though there might be said to be several points of comparison between Dr. Strange and Dr. Leary, both famous physicians who give up everything to pursue mystic realities, even down to the Tibetan connection.

The other major leakage point was in Santa Clara County, mainly Palo Alto and Stanford University. Kesey had been dosed there in 1959, and when the genie escaped from this leak, it spread from Big Sur to Malibu in what seemed like no time at all. LSD was easy to synthesize from lysergic acid monohydrate and, unlike amphetamines, was completely legal in 1965. The east coast crowd used their PhDs to order directly from Sandoz, but out in the wild west of California, the oddball science geeks started making their own.

The epitome, indeed the icon, of this new LSD alchemist was Augustus Owsley Stanley III, who, after having dropped out of several prestigious colleges, started the world’s first mass market transcendence lab in Berkeley California in 1964. Owsley would meet Kesey in the fall of 1965, just as Dr. Strange stepped through his portal into Eternity, and the convergence of synchronicities growing from their encounter would create the first nodal point on the Curve’s upward path toward the Singularity of mass extinction or enlightenment.

©2005 by Vincent Bridges - All Rights Reserved

©Copyright 2005 by AlternativeApproaches.com

In the early 1960s, before heading up into the mountains to La Honda, Ken Kesey lived near a quiet valley south of Stanford University. Back then it was known for its fruit orchards and was called the Valley of Heart’s Delight. It wouldn’t become Silicon Valley until 1971, and by then the radical evolution of the future was under way. But it all started, the future was truly groked and teased into manifestation, right there, amid the peaches and the apricots of Heart’s Delight. That somehow is comforting to contemplate…

Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard were depression era graduates of Stanford University when they pooled their resources in 1938 to build audio oscillators out of their garage in the valley. Their first customer was Walt Disney, who bought eight oscillators for his new movie Fantasia. Twenty years later, the area was full of new tech companies. In 1959, just as Kesey was discovering LSD up at Stanford, Robert Noyce, one of the founders of Fairchild Semiconductors, discovered a way to mass produce thousands of transistors on a single piece of silicon, inventing, along with Jack Kilby, the computer chip as we know it.

Six years later, Noyce’s boss, director of Fairchild’s Research and Development Laboratories Gordon E. Moore, made an even more fascinating discovery. Since the first prototype microchip, complexity, the amount of transistor power on a single slice of quartz, had been doubling roughly every year. And, Moore predicted in the April 1965 35th anniversary edition of Electronics magazine, this doubling would continue at the same rate for at least the next ten years.

At the end of that decade, Moore revised his prediction to a doubling every two years. Even this however was conservative. Moore’s prediction, and by 1975 it was “Moore’s Law,” became the core faith of the entire global computer industry and the complexity doubling had settled at around 18 months. This growth curve has continued right to the present day, 2005, with the 28th doubling, an increase of over 1,000 billion times the processing power of that prototype chip in just 45 years.

Such radical change is unprecedented in human history. Exponential change, the series of doublings, creates a curve that quite quickly goes straight up. The industrial revolution of the 19th century presented a few examples of such exponential growth; the railroads between 1830 and 1840 doubled their track mileage at almost the same rate as the microchip. This curve drove the radical changes of the 1880s in America, when a farm boy from Ohio, such as Gordon Moore’s grandfather, could catch a train to a new life out in the vastness of the west. Millions rode this wave of technology and America was transformed as record numbers of immigrants signed on to settle the frontier. The trip to California went from four months, on the fastest Clipper ship, to six days and San Francisco went from a gold rush boomtown to a sophisticated city with pretensions of culture.

It was the greatest such Curve in human history to that point, but it leveled out after roughly 14 doublings in 85 years. That curve was limited by material constraints, land, steel, coal and so on, but the electronic curve of Moore’s Law doesn’t recognize such constraints. Basically, the only limits are imagination and quantum mechanics. This lack of material limits means that the cost of this technological miracle shrinks as well. The cost of shipping a ton of wheat on the transcontinental railroad was halved at most three times during the era of the railroads’ greatest expansion. By contrast, the price of computing power, transistors on a chip, has halved 30 times. I just bought a memory chip for my PSP that has eight times the computing power of NASA’s Apollo program for under a hundred dollars, and for $5 wholesale you can buy a “smart card” that has the computing power of a 386 PC, circa 1990. Soon, very soon, computers will be so common, and cost so little, that microchips with power that seemed miraculous in 1965 will in fact be as disposable as pocket lint.

Everyone older than 45 or so has lived through the entire shockwave of the curve. Unlike our parents and grandparents, who had as much as a generation to absorb the shock of the 19th and early 20th century’s technological curves, this microchip driven curve shows no sign of slowing down long enough to allow anyone to adjust and become comfortable. Fortunately, the early incremental changes were small enough at each jump that only recently have the shockwaves been sharp enough to shake the nature of our culture, and perhaps very soon, to shape the nature of what it means to be human.

As with the changes, which were global in scale, produced by the rapid technological growth stimulated by the railroads, the exponential and unstopping curve of information technology is also driving changes in everything from biology to robotics to human interactions. And these curves of accelerating change are now proliferating exponentially. Innovation is happening so fast, literally, that people are incapable of defining what they are inventing. All of these curves are now a wave, and they add up to a world that is profoundly different from the past, even the recent past.

With each doubling of Moore’s Law, every 18 months or so, we are coming closer to a shock wave event horizon where, perhaps very suddenly, our everyday reality stops making sense. The idea that the exponential growth of the curve would result in huge and unpredictable social changes was first floated in 1993 at a NASA colloquium by science fiction author Vernor Vinge. He borrowed from astrophysics the idea of a singularity to describe the event and in many ways it is a very apt description. Vinge argued “…that we are on the edge of change comparable to the rise of human life on Earth.” Meaning of course the possibility of greater-than-human intelligence, a Dr. Strange level transcendence event.

According to Vinge it could happen on several levels at once. The Curve could create a supercomputer, intentionally or not, that has super-human intelligence. Or the Internet could interconnect so thoroughly as to wake up as a kind of global brain. Or, cyborg technology could wire a human into these expanding cyber-awarenesses and thereby create the greater-than-human consciousness. Or, perhaps, genetic research will produce humans with truly enhanced intelligence and abilities. Any of these are not only possible but also likely in the next few decades. Vinge believes that if the singularity is possible, and everything suggests it is, then its advent is truly unstoppable.

At the present, all serious discussions on the impact of the curve start with Vinge’s ideas on the singularity. The major point of discussion has become what affect the critical uncertainties - such as: Is the curve smooth; is it driven by natural or mathematical forces; will software keep up with hardware; if the curve is predetermined will it result in infinite change? – will have on the immediate future. The game now is looking for “early warning” signs of the approaching cultural singularity.

Because, if the singularity can happen, it will happen, then early nodal points of human electronic interaction and expanded awareness demonstrate that it is happening. These are points where the future seems to be bootstrapping itself. Joel Garreau, in his book Radical Evolution, points to the 2003 Shadow Bowl operation by a group of geeks from San Diego State as a sign post. The group, called The River, wired the entire Super Bowl for human cognition. This is indeed a marker, an early warning sign that, at least on a technological level, the singularity is rapidly approaching.

However, the first such nodal point of the curve’s singularity occurred just a few months after the first appearance of Moore’s Law, back in 1965. And it happened at the crucial intersection of LSD, electronics, music, and the mass consciousness of transcendence symbolized by Dr. Strange’s voyage in search of Eternity. Once that first node happened, the arrival of the singularity, the concrescence of the wave, was just a matter of time.

©2005 by Vincent Bridges - All Rights Reserved

©Copyright 2005 by AlternativeApproaches.com

To the Pranksters it was all a matter of synchronicity. Signs and portents emerged from the great mystic morass of the collective unconscious and took shape as events and metaphors capable of shaping reality. Pay attention, keep the cosmic mind tuned in, be “on the bus” in Prankster terms, and you could actually surf that mother wave of change. The year before, 1964, the Pranksters took their metaphor out for a road trip to the New York World’s Fair in a Day-Glo splashed 1939 International Harvester school bus named Further. Being the Pranksters, they pranked everyone they met along the way and filmed and taped the entire experience, including a visit to Dr Leary’s Millbrook retreat.

While the great west-east LSD summit meeting the Pranksters imagined failed to happen - Dr. Tim was off on a three-day trip and couldn’t be disturbed by a group of west coast costumed crazies - something was gained from the experience. Kesey and the group were off on a different kind of trip, were in fact sailing into the uncharted, dragon-infested waters of the collective unconscious where even the famous LSD gurus feared to go. On the return trip, the Unspoken Thing, the un-reference the Pranksters used for synchronicity, grew deeper and more powerful. By the time the group returned to La Honda in the fall of 1964, something new and truly unique was emerging: the Pranksters were developing a group mind, an egregore to use an archaic term.

Now such “group minds” were common in more religious eras, including as recently as the 1930s, when they would typically be expressed as a form of spiritual mania such as faith healing, speaking in tongues and so on, but the Prankster egregore was different. The LSD gnosis at the core of the group experience was essentially transcendental but without any religious, or even recognizably spiritual, overtones. Chemical transcendence made spirituality truly democratic for the first time in human history, and for the first time since the ancient mystery schools, the idea of gnosis had very precise and clinical parameters. Are you experienced? - that is, have you had the experience, the gnosis - took on the very specific meaning of: Have you tried acid? By the end of the 60s, millions will have had the experience, and the very concept of spirituality would never again be the same in the west.

The Pranksters intuited it all, groked it at a level that only science fiction could follow. One of their favorites happened to be Ted Sturgeon’s classic tale More Than Human, where a group of mutants collectively form a super-human intelligence. The process was called bleshing, a combination of blending and meshing, and this description of group consciousness matched the Pranksters’ experiences perfectly. Groking was another science fiction concept, meaning to understand in the fullness of time, lifted from Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land. And, very much in the way of the Unspoken Thing, Dr. Strange, with his blend of western science and ancient mysticism, was the very model of the modern psychedelic adventurer.

As the Prankster egregore emerged and defined itself in the spring and summer of 1965, many different synchronistic threads were moving in the same direction. LSD was spreading rapidly through the “Beautiful People” underground nationwide and in San Francisco, the city of Saint Francis by the bay, a community of sorts was beginning to take shape. This community, of artists, actors and musicians, was alerted to the goings on at La Honda by the April bust – Kesey was caught supposedly flushing half a kilo of pot down a collage-covered toilet – and its subsequent publicity. More and more attuned individuals began to show up at Kesey’s and the egregore began to expand along with them.

And then the Hell’s Angels arrived, and the group mind expanded in unexpected directions, and a key point of the Prankster ethos, fearlessness, was put to the test. Curiously enough, it turned out to be a marvelous, if somewhat unholy, alliance. The Unspoken Thing was working, and the Pranksters’ reputation grew accordingly. Following hard on the extended Angels party, Kesey and the core group went off for a week to speak at the California Unitarian Conference down at Monterey. Here, the Prankster mythos brushed against the religious metaphor, and the sense, among the group mind, grew sharper that something… big… was about to happen.

All that was needed was a chain of synchronicity, that old acausal convergence of coincidental events, and a critical mass, of some kind, would be achieved. No one imagined, however, that it would start with a trip to see the Beatles in concert…

The Beatles that summer were close to the pinnacle of their popularity. Their movie, the spy-spoof Help!, was in theaters and doing well, and the single of the title song was riding the top of the US pop charts. They were also on an American tour, working on songs for a new album, due out near Christmas, Rubber Soul, and they had been experimenting with LSD. Just a week before the Cow Palace show in San Francisco, the Beatles had been tripping with Hollywood hippies The Byrds and Peter Fonda. It seemed natural, even inevitable, that after the Hell’s Angels and the Unitarians, the Pranksters would absorb the greatest force in pop culture into their “movie.”

Maybe it started with issue #130 of Strange Tales, where Dr. Strange began his epic encounter that led him to Eternity and the Human Torch and the Thing try to meet the Beatles, or maybe it surfaced from a chance comment made by a Unitarian teeny-bopper during the Monterey conference, or maybe it was just the omni-presence of the vibe as all the San Francisco radio stations went into Beatle-mania mode weeks before the event. However it happened, just as the Beatles were hooking down a dose of LSD in Benedict Canyon with the Hollywood hippies, the big sign on the gate out on Rte 84 was changed, from “The Merry Prankster Welcome the Hell’s Angels,” to “The Merry Pranksters Welcome the Beatles.”

They put up the sign, and things began to move. A Palo Alto connection found the Pranksters thirty tickets, a supposed impossibility in and of itself, and by September 2nd, the whole group was back on the bus, super-rigged with sound equipment and crowded with super-hero crazies in capes and face paint, a yahooing carnival going up over the ridge past Skylonda and Cahill ridge, then down through Palo Alto and out onto the Harbor Freeway, in motion, in synch and so high that it seemed like the whole universe could be drawn into the movie… the Unspoken Thing…

And then they arrived at the Cow Palace, an old arena designed for stock auctions and rodeos set in the midst of what looked to be miles of barbed wire stockyards and slaughter pens. Streaming through this desolate and concentration camp-like environment are tens of thousands of kids focused on the Beatles with true religious intensity. The Pranksters, swept up in the mob, eventually arrive at their seats, high up in the rafters, perched tilted down at the stage and looking out over a writhing sea of screaming teeny freaks, thousands of pubescent girls in the throes of something truly out of control. And just when it couldn’t get any louder or more frantic, the Beatles, tiny dolls to the Pranksters in the rafter seats, appeared on stage and the sea of churning hormone craziness erupted into… what?

It dawns on Kesey in a flash. The churning mass of teen angst has become one being, one vast mind focused on the tiny dolls on stage who have urged them on to this point of ecstatic omni-being, and who don’t have a clue what to do with the formless intensity directed at them. The crowd ripples as they move, and then, suddenly, it snaps and the vast churning multi-armed thing lurches forward, fighting its way toward the stage, debris and bodies streaming out over the heads of even more screaming teeny freaks.

The Pranksters feel it at once, and begin to head for the bus. By the time they have all escaped the concrete warrens of the Cow Palace, the teeny freaks are streaming out, still wired out of their minds and with no place to direct the energy. They start piling around the bus, pelting it with left over jellybeans that didn’t get thrown at the Beatles, and slowly, the bus begins to move out through the crowd.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, three or four hundred people are hanging around waiting for Kesey to arrive back with the Beatles for a real Prankster throw down. Needless to say, the crowd was royally pranked when Kesey and crew returned without them. However, among the multitude that night was Owsley.

At this point, Owsley, as Bear Research Group, was the world’s largest manufacturer of LSD, including Sandoz. Over the next month or so, Owsley and the Pranksters would come to share a common vision, that of turning on the world. As for the Beatles, well, they continued to experiment with LSD, quit touring all together, and in 1967 had the delightful idea of taking an old school bus on a Magical Mystery Tour and making a movie of the experience… the Unspoken Thing at work…

©2005 by Vincent Bridges - All Rights Reserved

©Copyright 2005 by AlternativeApproaches.com

Time magazine’s cover story that week was “The Turning Point in Vietnam,” by which the establishment press meant winning the war, not increasing the level of protest. Out in Berkeley, across the bay from San Francisco, a proposal from the local chapter of the Vietnam Day Committee had grown into a worldwide event, the first large-scale antiwar protest of a new era. Somehow, someone from the Committee asked Kesey to speak in a prime time slot, just before the protest march into Oakland. This turned out to be a disastrous choice, as Kesey had his own opinions about the protest movement.

The Pranksters arrived in full gear, the bus painted blood red and covered with every nationalist icon imaginable. Kesey took the stage in Day-Glo flack jacket and a WWI vintage helmet, also glowing faintly orange in the gathering darkness. The Pranksters, costumed for the occasion and playing their oddball atonal Chinese jazz behind Kesey’s folksy harmonica rendition of “Home on the Range” set the tone. Kesey launched into a long thoughtful meditation on how much the protest movement resembled the military, ending with the advice to just say f*#k it to the whole thing. The march rapidly lost steam after that, and turned back from Oakland at the first sign of trouble.

That night, over in San Francisco, something strange was happening. All that summer, bands of oddly dressed young people floated back and forth between Virginia City – Yep, Virginia City with its images of Bonanza and the wild, wild west – and the old Victorian neighborhood of Haight-Ashbury, and they were high, as much of the time as possible, on Owsley’s latest acid. People flowed into the scene from the theater and the artistic community and strange little cafes opened, the Blue Unicorn, Mother’s and the Matrix. The faithful were gathering, waiting for their own spark of transcendence.

In September, a group of folks who had been part of the Red Dog summer in Virginia City, and who lived on Pine Street in the Haight, formed a collective, The Family Dog, to put on dance events every week. Not rock ’n’ roll shows, not sock-hops, but something closer to musical happenings. They rented the Longshoreman’s Hall down on Fisherman’s Wharf, lined up the Charlatans, the Red Dog Saloon’s house band, with the Jefferson Airplane, The Marbles and the Great Society as back-up acts, with Russ the Moose, the potheads and hipsters favorite DJ, as MC. Ralph Gleason of the Chronicle mentioned it in his column, and the radio station gave it airplay. Alton Kelly, soon to be famous for his “psychedelic” style, did the fliers. They called the event “A Tribute to Dr. Strange.”

For a thousand or so people, it was something they had been waiting for without realizing it. They showed up as if it might never happen again, dancing and tripping openly. Even Allen Ginsburg was impressed. Jazz critic Gleason tried to describe it in his column the following Monday: “The bar did no business and the Coke machine ran out. That’s where it was at. Long lines of dancers snaked through the crowd for hours, holding hands. Free-form improvisation (“self-expression”) was everywhere. The clothes were a blast. Like a giant costume party.”

John Cipollina, one of the founders of Quicksilver Messenger Service, was there that night. “I don’t think any of us were ready for that many people,” he commented later. “Wow, I didn’t know there were that many people doing what we were doing. We all thought we were originals.” And almost all of those originals were there that night. Chet Helms, later manager of Big Brother and the Holding Company and one of the founders of the Family Dog, described it this way: “There was a sense of sanctuary. They couldn’t bust us all.”

Why Dr. Strange? No one at the time seems to have bothered to explain it. But there was something right about it. Alton Kelley was a fan of Dr. Strange artist Steve Ditko’s work, and beyond that was the larger metaphor. Dr. Strange, as “master of the mystic arts,” stood for the whole Unspoken Thing. Holding a tribute to this icon ensured that everyone on the “vibe” understood. At a basic and visceral level, Dr. Strange was the metaphor that allowed those thousand originals, Dr. Stranges every one of them, to coalesce into a community.

The movement was on, the San Francisco scene was born, and it felt so good that the Family Dog did it again the next weekend. This time it was “A Tribute to Sparkle Plenty,” and more people showed up. It was the happening thing, but it somehow lacked something… The excitement of the Dr. Strange event was down a bit. Late in the evening, a tall guy with longish blond hair and yellow granny glasses came up to Family Dog founder Ellen Harmon. With fiendish intensity, the hipster informed her: “Lady what this little séance needs is us.”

He was Dead right, but it would take a couple of months for the scene to merge into the nodal point madness of the Trips Festival. By then, the fiendish blond Warlock would be a leading figure in Owsley’s new project, the house band for Kesey’s latest inspiration, the Acid Test. In December, at the height of the synchronicity, guitarist Jerry Garcia plucked the name Grateful Dead out of the aethyrs, and a very long and truly strange trip began. The fusion point, the critical mass of transcendental consciousness, music and community was fast approaching, and once again, it would be the Pranksters who supplied the critical element.

More to come...

©2005 by Vincent Bridges - All Rights Reserved

©Copyright 2005 by AlternativeApproaches.com