Outline for the Coming Chemical Society, Or Dexedrine vs the Old Academic Process

I WISH people were willing to admit how much they are a chemical machine. I think it is confusing to set off all that comes as pills and capsules and call those things "drugs." By "drugs" we usually mean a chemical influence that changes the way we feel and hence how we think, too.

But everything that we experience in this blessed world contributes to the way we feel. For example, when I write, I turn out the most stuff when I'm on dexedrine (a legally purchaseable drug with prescription) or amphetamine-derivative drugs. But I also write more stuff more easily during the late afternoon following a good night's sleep, a shower, and a meager meal than I do at other times. Sometimes I can do some pretty good stuff after a couple of beers from the icebox. But never after any hard liquor; the only think I like then is sex or unconsciousness. It is easier to write while the Pentangle's record is playing than during anything by the Beatles (they're too distracting).

The concept of being "distracting" is interesting. It implies that we experience things distinctly from each other. This isn't the case at all. The experiencing of a certain time in your existence is not an additive construction piling together your imagined chemical sector, your sense perception sector, and your intellectual understanding sector. Isolating, for example, your sense perceptions as an independent phenomenon was something we did only to make out study of them easier. They are part of the whole thing that is you. And they only mean anything when it is seen how they fit in with the whole that is you in your given moment of being.

So there are no different kinds of experience. There is only human experience. Calling what we do "drugs" is merely an attempt to categorize experience. Experience is a great rainbow of variation -- a multi-colored spectrum of things that can make us feel different ways. "Drugs" are like the red of the rainbow. The things that we include in the sector of drugs blend in from the sector of food and out into the sector of climate. Just like the rainbow, it's hard to tell where one ends and the other begins. The outstanding characteristic of 'drugs' is that they are small.

Now, people have a phobia about taking drugs because they think drugs will alter their natural condition and carry them into the unnatural sphere. But there is no condition for human beings which could be identified as the natural one. If you happen to drink a lot of coffee and eat bagels all the time, your natural condition will be tremendously different from what the man who eats beef and drinks wine feels like.

All ways of experiencing the world are probably equally valid.

It is true that taking a "drug" usually locks you into experiencing you actions through a given fixed perspective for as long as you are under the drug's influence. If, for example, you take LSD, you've got to be ready for clear light, revelation, and ego transcendence for the next eight hours or more. (A lot of people don't think they are ready for this. And since there is no real condition of being ready for an experience or not being ready, what they think they are capable of is all that matters. Too bad.)

But how is the influence of the drug different from surrendering yourself to the food you eat and the barrage of sensations you life puts you through every day? Perceiving the world through a marijuana haze does not change what there is to experience. It only changes how you experience the same old existence that always exists. It changes your values and your desires.

The mind-altering drugs change what you want to do. On this end of things their impact is probably for greater than other stimuli. But it is still only an extrapolation of the kinds of effects you get from food, light, and heat.

Also it seems that the philosophy behind most of the other stimuli we consciously subject ourselves to is to put us into neutral--to free us from stimulation. We eat food to free us from hunger and to save our bodies from weakness and deficiencies. We adjust the thermostat in our rooms so that we will have to feel neither cold, nor heat. We want to hang in the middle, to reach a stasis in how we feel. This is what we think of as our "natural" condition. From here, we presumably, we can experience anything that might happen.

Before I dared to take NoDoz for the first time, I thought it would turn me into a zombie, a being so dehumanized that he wouldn't feel the natural coming on of sleep. After a while I came to realize that the chemicals in my body that combined to produce the effect of sleepiness were merely being altered by others of their kind -- friendly, similarly structured chemicals. In other words, that sleepiness wasn't something spiritual that had been violated by chemistry.

It is time for man to realize that he is a chemical being. (The time has come now because things are getting out of man's conscious control--or rather, too much under his unknowing and accidental control. Automobile exhaust, Nytol, and the sheer noise of the subways are making man into what he feels like without his realizing it.)

Most of our complex emotions can be traced to the gurgling of enzymes. Even happiness. There is a pill of synthetic mescaline available in some corners of the underground, which, during its first four hours, gives you a gush of pure, unexplained happiness. And the same goes for tense, moral anguish. Perfectly above-ground psychiatrists have been giving their uncomfortably anxious patients a drug called librium (itself one of the atomic elements) to space them out a little more.

Think of all the ways you feel. Up. Down. Eager. Relieved. Curious. Hungry. Tired. Think of sexual ecstasy. Here we have the most intense human emotion we can feel. And it doesn't bother us to know that it's made up of the mustering of chemical stimuli, the organizing of the flow of desires.

And man needn't worry that a realization of himself as a chemical being defeats his ideas about spirituality. All true religions ultimately relate to concepts of higher human consciousness. That is, ideas of an awareness that transcends human bodies. These ideas don't have to be imagined as fabrications of cerebral chemicals. This higher concsiousness can be explained metaphysically as being a form of pure energy that pervades the universe and makes up the protons and electrons themselves. Indeed, astronomers have found that space has a constant temperature of 3° Kelvin held by the uniform spread of radiation from the original "Big Bang" which created the universe.

So spirituality remains quite alive; but on the bodily level we can see that drug-induced variations are just as "natural" as feelings otherwise chemically produced.

* * * * *

Now watch and see what would happen if people started altering their awareness frequently and willfully with drugs. Let us look at dexedrine and the academic process.

Dexedrine is a form of that big category of things known as "speed," and is part of an even greater gathering of "ups." However, the term "speed" is usually applied to those very large does of amphetamines that hippies and other tramps take for kicks. Taking drugs for kicks is the kind of sensory self-indulgence that we of the protestant ethic scorn. These self same people who become "speed freaks" also take LSD, not for the clear light and revelation, but for the voltage that burns out their synapses. These people are not to be worried about, though, because most of them die.

People who take things to excess is something we see all around us, and something that we, in most cases, have accepted. Just because most of our population is obese because they are helplessly self-indulgent when given easy access to mashed potatoes, this doesn't mean mashed potatoes should be made illegal. And any heart specialist knows obesity kills.

Dexedrine can be gotten with a rescription from your neighborhood drug (sic) store. It is prescribed for people who are hopelessly lethargic. To people who don't have the will to carry their weight around the house. Also to people who have to keep awake in spite of ther tiredness. like the GI's fighting in the night trenches of South Vietnam.

The drug is largely wasted on these people. There is no activity more ap- pealing to someone who has taken dexedrine than the reading of a book. The total fibre of the dexedrine-doped person's being is riveted to the ideas flowing to him out of the book. Not to the action of looking at the printed words, but to the act of understanding the expression of the author's mind.

Because this comprehension is so deep and so undistracted, the person can read books terribly fast. He can acquire all sorts of knowledge terribly fast. In fact, as he sits at this desk surrounded by open books, notes, papers and lists, he feels the urge to bring all his understanding together into one singular comprehension of how it all works. To do this, he constantly tries to work more rapidly.

There are many aspects of this peculiar chemistry which I think are like things we've seen before. For example, every university's faculty (and ours is no exception) has its meditative old scholars who are known to sit quietly reading through even hellishly noisy events going on around them. They are probably achieving a total communication with the author. But the chemistry which got them to this state comes from their entirely book-oriented life style. Dexedrine can drop a student into a book no matter what kind of rock 'n'roll life he leads. (Remember, there is a lot that can be said for rock'n'roll, too.)

In short, the capacity for learning under dexedrine is absolutely astounding. Given the way most Hum and Soc Sci courses are set up now, the average dexedrined student should be assured of at least a B if he started from scratch the day before the test. In most of the courses that the masses take at this university, he could understand and organize in his mind the entire content of study. It's all a matter of maximizing your efforts.

And the whole experience is tremendously euphoric the entire time.

And there are all sorts of really fabuous and not so really fabulous side effects you notice while you're on this tireless study sprint. First off, you become an incredible anal compulsive. If you ever wondered what this is like, you can find out. There's nothing particularly "bad" or annoying about being an anal compulsive; you, as one, just demand tidiness. You can be typing in your room and suddenly become aware that you are tremendously irritated by something about the room. You're ill-at-ease until you spot the bedspread. After you make the bed and smooth it flat, writing is much more relaxed. You also, it seems, really like to excrete in both the two natural human ways; this, I think, is the origin of the term.

You also tend to dissociate yourself from that which isn't neat and ordered (because your mind is so incredibly ordered). If you have been chewing the top of a Bic pen in your zeal, you would probably leave it behind somewhere, not remembering you need it to cover the pen's point, because you wouldn't believe that such a crumpled thing could belong to the set of objects that had to do with you.

Another thing is that you are generally unable to feel emotion. You can't love anyone or want anything; you can only order its existence. You can't care about anything in a way that you feel; you can only be interested in it in an intellectual way. This absence of emotion can be frightening, but only so if you believe yourself to be on a a "trip." You are equally incapable of emotion while playing tennis or doing anyone of a great set of totally occupying things. Do you ever stop playing tennis for fear of departing from the "natural" human condition?

For some reason, dexedrine doesn't seem to do much good in the study of science and mathematics. It has something to do with pacing. That kind of thinking, I guess, has to trickle in at a slower speed.

But for the vast body of study here at his university, dexedrine is not only adequate, it's glorious. One imagines that he had turned on the tap and knowledge is filling up his head like a swimming pool. And, indeed, it is.

I can only take a flyer at what would happen if dexedrine ever came into much wider use than it already is now here. (For one thing there would be more illness because using it a couple of times in a row really wrecks you for days.) But there would probably be a good deal more frittering away of time. Students wouldn't "sweat" their work as they piled up real-life smelling, touching experiences in their new free time.

I'm not really sure how the professors would react to all this. Maybe they would decide there is something wrong with the content of their courses--too much learning what other people's ideas were and not enough making the students capable of dealing with the same kind of thinking these men did. But I honestly can't say that I am sure that's what the lectures should be doing.

Imagine what happens when the year comes down to one day's work for each hour test, paper, and exam. That's all that you have to do