The origin of the 60’s: Alan Watts & friends Houseboat Summit

This fascinating recording is of a meeting held in 1967 between Alan Watts, Timothy Leary, Allen Ginsberg and Gary Snyder planning & discussing the future of psychedelic culture. Its offers a very unique & insightful perspective on the creation of would later be known as the “60’s”.

From: The Psychedelic Salon
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PROGRAM NOTES:

"The Houseboat Summit" was held in February 1967, and has been documented in several places on the Web. In addition to the quotes below, which are from this podcast, you can read a more complete transcript of this historic meeting here.

"I think that, thus far, the genius of this kind of underground that we’re talking about is that it has no leadership." -Alan Watts

"What we need to realize is that there can be, shall we say, a movement, a stirring among people, which can be organically designed instead of politically designed." -Alan Watts

"My historical reading of the situation is that these great monolithic empires developed, Rome, Turkey, and so forth, and they always break down when enough people, and it’s always the young, the creative, and minority groups drop out and go back to a tribal form." -Timothy Leary

"Our educational system in its entirety does nothing to give us any kind of material competence. In other words, we don’t learn how to cook, how to make clothes, how to build houses, how to make love, or to do any of the absolutely fundamental things of life." -Alan Watts

"That society is strong and viable which recognizes its own provisionality." -Alan Watts

"And so when the essential idea of love is lost there comes talk of fidelity. Actually, the only possible basis for two beings, male and female, to relate to each other is to grant each other total freedom." -Alan Watts

"Increasingly, we’re developing all kinds of systems for verifying reality by echoing it." -Alan Watts.

"Drop out of the public schools. The public schools cannot be compromised with." -Timothy Leary

"What are we saying when we say now, something is holy? That means you should take a different attitude to what you are doing than if you were, for example, doing it for kicks." -Alan Watts

"Half the things I’ve done are wrong, mistakes [unintelligible]. The moratorium on pot and LSD a year ago is ridiculous. I shouldn’t have done that. I make a blunder at least one out of two times I come to bat." -Timothy Leary

"In other words, when there is a game going on that’s on a collision course, and that this game obviously is going to lead to total destruction, the only way of getting people out of a bad game is to indicate that the game is no longer interesting. See, we’ve left this game and it bores us." -Alan Watts, February 1967

The Psychedelic Salon

Panel discussion: Leary, Ginsberg, Burroughs, Hoffman, Corso, Di Prima + McKenna

From: The Psychedelic Salon

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Guest speakers: Terence McKenna, Timothy Leary, Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, Abbie Hoffman, Gregory Corso, and Diane Di Prima

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PROGRAM NOTES:
"There are no bad drugs. There are simply people who don’t know how to use them. Intelligent people use drugs intelligently, and stupid people are going to abuse drugs the way they abuse everything else. And our function is to raise the level of intelligence. We have to have a program of drug education." –Timothy Leary

"I don’t think there’s any problem with advancing consciousness and becoming more and more aware of the struggle, not with the world, not to convince other people to do anything. The really interesting think is the struggle with the self, and the relation with the self, and there is no end to the improvement that can be done there, the discoveries that can be made." –Allen Ginsberg

[NOTE: The following quotes are all by Terence McKenna.]

"To contact the cosmic giggle, to have the flow of casuistry begin to give off synchronistic ripples, whitecaps in the billows of the coincidental ether, if you will. To achieve that, a precondition is a kind of unconsciousness, a kind of drifting, a certain taking-your-eye-off-the-ball, a certain assumptions that things are simpler than they are, almost always precedes what Mircea Eliade called ‘the rupture of plane’ that indicates that there is an archetypal world, an archetypal power behind profane appearances." –Terence McKenna

"It occurs to me that at any given moment, because of the way the planet is as a thing, some percentage of human beings are asleep, always, and many are awake. And so if the world soul is made of the collective consciousness of human beings, then it is never entirely awake. It is never entirely asleep. It exists in some kind of indeterminate zone."

"Technology, or the historical momentum of things, is creating such a bewildering social milieu that the monkey-mind cannot find a simple story, a simple creation myth, or redemption myth, to lay over the crazy, contradictory patchwork of profane techno-consumerist, post McLuanist, electronic, pre-apocalyptic existence."

"I believe that the truth of the matter is far more terrifying [than conspiracy theories]. The real truth that dare not speak itself is that no one is in control. Absolutely no one!"

"The global destiny of the [human] species is somehow unfolding with the logic of a dream."

"The carrier of the field of the cosmic giggle in most people’s lives is love. Love is some kind of output which messes with the entropic tendency toward probabilistic behavior in Nature."

"The primary contribution of 20th century thinking, if you will, is to have understood, finally, that information is primary. That this world, this cosmos, this universe, this body and soul are all made of information. … The implication for the digerati is that reality can therefore be hacked."

The Psychedelic Salon