Leary (1920-1996), of course, was one of the chief icons of the psychedelic 1960s, a man whose advocacy of mind-altering drugs made him, in President Richard Nixon's words, "the most dangerous man in America." He received his Ph.D. in psychology at UC-Berkeley and published distinguished studies in that field before becoming a professor at Harvard University in 1959. There he conducted extensive experiments with test subjects who ingested psilocybin and, later, LSD. Leary believed that hallucinogens were a useful tool for triggering transcendental experiences, heightening intelligence, and treating personality disorder. The controversy surrounding his experiments led Harvard to fire him in 1963 and he spent much of the next twenty years of his life in jails and prisons on various drug-related charges. In the late 80s and early 90s, Leary was an early advocate of the Internet and virtual reality as potential “brain change” tools that could substitute for hallucinogens (which he viewed merely as a means to an end). His death was very public, and an exciting experience for him—he was fascinated with the affect it might have on consciousness in the minute or two after the body died, when the brain was still alive.
William S. Burroughs has referred to Leary as "a true visionary of the potential of the human mind and spirit." Allen Ginsberg proclaimed him "a hero of American consciousness." Tom Robbins says that Leary is "the Galileo of our age." It’s possible that his true legacy will not be known for another quarter century or more.
Beginnings
"Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting."- Plato
Like Leary, Dane did not start off as a visionary from Day One. His lyrics on the first Sanctuary album, Refuge Denied (1987), are mostly fantasy-based, although he does describe a transcendental experience in “Sanctuary” and the band covers Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit,” an anthem of psychedelia. On Into the Mirror Black (1990), the lyrics are more politically-oriented and we encounter the first Dane song based on an experience with LSD, “Long Since Dark” (note the acronym). Here Dane describes a powerful, nocturnal, psychedelic experience: “In the void lies the meaning/Just as the dark sky above had spoke to me/The answer came so clear, then vanished/For a moment I was free/I am free.”
On Nevermore’s self-titled debut, Dane makes an overt tribute with the track “Timothy Leary.” Leary is described reverently as a “wise man…/in search of LSD philosophy/With open heart and open mind/To find the goodness in mankind.” Dane makes reference to Leary and his disciples using Eastern philosophy to help “decode” their chemical-induced visions; a true account, as they did often utilize the I Ching and Tao Te Ching as guides. At the end of the song, Dane again brings up the theme of freedom, saying “all [Leary] was trying to say was that we need to realize our inner harmony, to see things in a different way, to truly be free…” It is also interesting that Dane screams “Timothy Leary is dead” here—Leary did not pass away until May of 1996, a year after Nevermore was released (although he was sick with cancer at the time). Was this a mourning for the passing of the man, or for the departure of his ideas from the popular consciousness?
Breakthrough
"The ecstasy of the spirit is a deep sleep which falls upon it. It becomes ecstatic when it ceases to busy itself with the ideas which impinge upon it, and when it does not exercise activity upon them it slumbers."- Philo of Alexandria
Whatever philosophical dabbling Dane had done prior to 1996, it came full
circle that year on The Politics of Ecstasy album. On this release, there was a striking maturation in both the band’s sound and Dane’s ideas on consciousness. The album’s title, of course, comes from a 1968 book by Leary. “The Seven Tongues of God” is the first chapter in Leary’s book and the first song on Nevermore’s album. Leary defined the Tongues as “the seven levels of energy consciousness, the drugs which induce them and the sciences and religions which study each level” (Leary, The Politics of Ecstasy, p. 50). Dane sings, “to see the light is the purest form of reward.” This is a reference to the “Clear Light of Recognition” that Leary spoke of; when one submits to ego loss and achieves an ecstatic condition. Buddhists call this state of being “dhyana” and the saints and mystics of the West have referred to it as “illumination.” The next song on the album is “This Sacrament.” Leary defined LSD itself as a “sacrament” used to induce an atomic and cellular level of consciousness in the user. Here, Dane describes the liberation of an LSD trip, stating “There’s no constraint when the walls cave in/The neurons turn on/The game begins to fade away.” He refers to several Leary concepts here, including the assessment of modern day life as a “game” we are socially programmed to play without deviation. And he nods, of course, to Leary’s famous mantra of “Turn on, tune in, drop out.” Then there is the Lennon-esque “wink” to Nevermore fans in the line “Lucy in the sky with diamond eyes, long since dark, I wear her disguise of light” should one miss every other clue. What Dane is calling for here is truly radical. “Feel the flow and let all thought fade/We shall be one through this sacrament.” In interviews, Dane (like Leary before him) has been fond of urging others to “make up your own religion because the ones we've got don't work.” The metaphor is quite obvious here, with LSD serving as wafer and wine on the road to spiritual clarity. The title track is a surprisingly angry and bitter attack against corruption, propaganda, militarism, technology, injustice, pollution and all other evils of modern society. This “Politics of Ecstasy” is one that Leary—who was critical, but always good-natured—never could have written, and perhaps that is the point. Dane, of course, penned this song a quarter of a century after the altered consciousness movement had been discredited and its champion thrown in jail. It’s little wonder that he lacks his idol’s optimistic outlook. On “Lost,” Dane begins to question the actual utility of reality, a theme that would be taken to its logical and ultimate conclusion on Enemies of Reality: “Remember in the end/Such a long, strange trip it’s been/So I sing this song for the lost one/Why should I come down?/From here I can see forever.” Dane’s take on China’s Tiananmen Square revolt in “The Tiananmen Man” is fascinating. We all remember the famous photograph of one man standing in front of a row of tanks and blocking their path. Most saw this as a simple, courageous act of political and personal defiance. But Dane viewed it also as a shrewd and inspired attempt to manipulate and control the global media. “His act was a cybernetic gesture…/He knew the world was watching.” Dane sees him as a David against the twin Goliaths of Chinese dictatorship and mass media, and exalts 
him. The song “42147” might refer to the date on which the first article on LSD's mental effects was published by Werner Stoll in the Swiss Archives of Neurology. Sandoz Laboratories, the drug's sole producer, also began marketing LSD in 1947 under the trade name "Delysid." Dane seems to be speaking here from the point of the view of an individual involved in an early LSD experiment.Given how ambitious and radical these lyrics were, it is amazing how little scrutiny Dane’s words received from the metal press and fan-base. It must have been tremendously disappointing to him on some level—particularly as the album’s musical content was praised widely. But Dane’s message was entirely “lost.” Perhaps for this reason, he largely stepped away from these themes on 1999’s Dreaming Neon Black, a concept album that was much more personal in nature (it chronicled disturbing dreams he was having about a former love who had been missing for years after joining a religious cult).
Revisit
"Not in the dim past but continuously by conscious mind is the miracle of creation wrought."- Sir Arthur Eddington
On 2000’s Dead Heart in a Dead World, however, Dane’s focus returned to the political and philosophical. The album begins with "Narcosynthesis” (a psychiatric term used by doctors who treat patients with severe mental disorders with narcotics), where Dane decries self-medication as a means of repressing and denying one’s emotions. This might seem hypocritical, given his advocacy for chemicals that induce spiritual ecstasy, but Leary, too, was critical of casual, unguided drug-use and modern pharmacology in general. Terence McKenna (1946-2000), an author and explorer who studied the ontological foundations of shamanism and the ethno-pharmacology of spiritual transformation, also held this view: “Drugs are about dulling perception, about addiction and about behavioral repetition... What psychedelics are about is pattern-dissolving experiences of an extraordinarily high or different awareness. They are the exact opposite of drugs. They promote questioning, they promote consciousness, they promote value examinations, they promote the reconstruction of behavioral patterns” (McKenna, The Archaic Revival, 1991). The next song, “We Disintegrate,” is a testament to the power of ego loss. The concept of “ego loss” was developed by Leary quite early in his experiments with mind-altering drugs. He described it as follows: “If the participant can see and grasp the idea of the empty mind…he has the power to die consciously—and, at the supreme moment of quitting the ego, can recognize the ecstasy that will dawn upon him and become one with it, then all bonds of illusion are broken asunder immediately. The dreamer is awakened into reality simultaneously with the mighty achievement of recognition” (Leary, Your Brain is God, 1988, p. 65). During the song, Dane asks, “Are we ever free, or slaves to technology?” If the former, then ego loss is the only possible path. On “Inside Four Walls”, Dane correctly points out inequities in America’s justice system that allow minor drug offenders to receive far harsher prison sentences than violent criminals. Referring to an incarcerated friend, he says, “They took away your freedom, but they’ll never take your mind.” This is a precious commodity to Dane; it is almost as if he sees the mind as the last bulwark in society’s relentless attack on independent action and expression. The title of the song “Evolution 169” refers to properties of chaos theory and chaos mathematics, but the lyrics here are likely another LSD-induced allegory. Dane announces “today I killed my ego” and compares humanity-at-large to rats in an experiment who can “touch, but never taste the answers like the way that I want you.” “The River Dragon Has Come” is a cautionary tale about China’s Three-Gorges dam project. Dane warns us again about the perils of modern technology, even citing a Biblical condemnation (“Technology the beast, the Seventh Crown”).Dane did little to advance his theories on spirituality and consciousness on Dead Heart in a Dead World. The album was more of a reaffirmation of ideas he had developed (and taken to more dramatic lengths) on The Politics of Ecstasy. He did, however, explore some interesting political ground. His examination of the criminal justice system’s treatment of drug offenders and technology’s role in regulating and controlling our modern consumerist society trumpet his unswerving belief in personal freedom, the bedrock behind any argument for psychedelic exploration.
Evolution
"Man is made by belief... As he believes, so he is."- Bhagavad Gita
"Everything we experience is hallucination, maya. The reality is a structural-mathematical-logical principle that we don't see. That is, each person creates his own universe out of his own neurological processes. Science is nothing else but the search for the unseen structural integrities that underlie these appearances."- Paul Segall, Ph.D. on a lecture by Timothy Leary
Nevermore’s latest release, Enemies of Reality (2003), represents another stage in the evolution of Dane’s thinking on consciousness and spiritual purpose. On The Politics of Ecstasy he began toying with the notion of “reality” as an outdated and obsolete construct. On Enemies he not only affirms this concept, but seemingly calls for those of like-mind to topple the walls of conventional existence.
On the opening title track, we find a remarkably dark view of modern society. “We are the useless by-products of soulless meat/We are all gone, we all sing the same tragedy,” Dane cries. He is impatient, “waiting to sanitize bastard tongues/To purify the ignorance that hides the sun” (shades of Sanctuary’s “Eden Lies Obscured”). His solution? “Open wide and eat the worms of the enemy/We are the enemies of reality…/Open wide, eat the words, become what you most fear.” What do we most fear? To be sundered from The Game. On “Ambivalent,” he again refers to the “blind and ambiguous…game” that we call life. He feigns ambivalence, but his curse is that he cannot find solace in even the most poignant moments: “The sun in my hand becomes my despair/For I still want the truth.” True enlightenment evades him… “Never Purify” is a scathing attack on the media. Dane’s tone is mocking: “Scrape the pain off of my lips/And watch our lives unwind/When I am in the camera eye/Self immolation can never purify.” He has stated that one of the album’s messages is “kill your television before your television kills you” (Live 4 Metal interview, 6/26/03). “I, Voyager” is the Dane equivalent of Descartes’ Meditations, as he chronicles his travels and observations to this point in his life. “Voyager” was a term used frequently by Leary to describe an individual who uses LSD to imprint the Tibetan-Buddhist experience. Dane tells us, “If you view life as a mission/For truth and purity in vision/You can become as the anointed/And fade away from the disjointed.” There is an odd mix of optimism and pessimism in this song. On one hand, Dane assures us that he is “clear, focused and defined,” inviting us to “take [his] hand and walk in wonder” into spiritual clarity. But there is a great deal of anger here (“In observation I analyze/All the aspects of humanity that I despise”). It is almost as if he is not ready to take the final step and break emotional ties with the world he finds so repugnant. On track number six Dane urges us to “Create the Infinite.” Again, he refers to the “enemies of reality,” telling us they bring “the sickness of cleansing genius.” The idea here is to overthrow contemporary religious and spiritual institutions because the notion of salvation is a farce. Dane mocks Christianity with the comment, “Count to number seven/Your day of rest creates infection, your imperfection,” and then tells us point-blank, “There is no future shock/There is no god/There is no fashionable deliverance.” “Future shock” is a reference to the 1970 book by Alvin Toffler, which somewhat inaccurately predicted that individuals would not be able to cope with the stress induced by the massive technological changes of the late 20th century. Dane feels we have adapted to these changes all too well—but they have only served to dehumanize our society further. “Who Decides” is a commentary on the moral morass our world has become. Dane is the “astronaut” looking down from psychedelically-enhanced heights, unable to tell the difference between the person judged a “hero” by our society and another deemed a “rapist.” To him, morality is merely an artificial game construct used by the fearful to assert their place in a presumed afterlife. The problem? “[You] can’t reach heaven/The truth’s brutal lesson/Forgive yourself, for no one else will die for your crimes.” Lyrically, “Noumenon” is a coda, the place where the album’s themes are reiterated and synthesized. The word itself means “a posited object or event as it appears in itself independent of perception by the senses.” A logical song title, as the central theme of the album is that the perception we consider “reality” is an artificial and distorted construct. Dane chants much of “Noumenon” rather than singing, and his words sound like a carefully crafted set of instructions:
Regret nothing, resistance is remorse
All feeling is now to be without consequence
Truth has become media controlled
Open wide and eat the worms of the enemy
Reality is distortion of perception
We are the enemy
There is no stronger drug than reality
Twist and change, time is nothing, regret everything
Young hearts are pure like violent drops of rain
Until life teaches us to be stoned or ashamed
There is no stronger drug than reality
We are the enemy
On the last song on the album, Dane beckons us to “witness seed awakening.” The great philosophies of the East, of course, view the human body as a sacred temple, a seed center, the shrine of all creation. But to grasp this concept, it is important to understand what Leary viewed as the next step after one experiences LSD-induced spiritual revelations. Leary knew that it was impossible to stay "turned-on" all the time. At some point, one would have to return to what he called the “fake-prop TV studio” of life and initiate small changes which reflect the glory and the meaning of the "turn-on." Changes in the way you dress, the way you decorate your apartment, the way you move and interact with others, for example. “Slowly, gently, you start seed transformations around you,” Leary told us in 1967’s Start Your Own Religion. Dane is obviously urging us to begin this process. He is even optimistic (“in one breath we can still grow”). But what implications it might have for society as a whole (should his vision take hold) he does not say. That is largely uncharted ground, a subject even Leary failed to address in detail.
Awakening?
"I have the utmost respect for the power of psychedelics… My sense…is that people underestimate the depth of change that is required to transform oneself in spiritual life…Yes, awakening comes in a moment, but living it, stabilizing it, can take years and lifetimes."-Jack Kornfield, from the Buddhist magazine Tricycle
“One may understand the cosmos, but never the ego; the self is more distant than any star.”-G.K. Chesterton
There is no doubt that Dane’s thoughts on consciousness have grown more sophisticated with each album Nevermore has released. He is, however, still largely echoing theories and ideas that were introduced years ago by men like Leary, McKenna, and Robert Anton Wilson. From Nevermore to Enemies of Reality he has basically covered the entire range of their thinking—initial revelation to seed transformation. It will be interesting to see where he goes next.
There are, however, some nagging questions to consider…
Why is Dane’s work still marked by so much overt anger when letting go of such emotions is such an integral aspect of spiritual enlightenment? On this topic, Leary himself said, “Emotions are the lowest form of consciousness. Emotional actions are the most contracted, narrowing, dangerous form of behavior … The emotional person is turned off sensually…he has lost all connection with cellular wisdom or atomic revelation … Do not trust anyone who comes on emotional” (The Politics of Ecstasy, pp. 38-39). Dane must be aware of the contradictory nature of his lyrics, his message. On the one hand, he is urging his listeners to open their minds, suppress their egos, and experience dramatic spiritual revelations. On the other, he is making angry, hateful statements about society and Establishment forces, and feeding the type of negative emotions in himself that make such personal revelations impossible. The basic paradox inherent in Nevermore is that if Dane ever truly submitted to his own teachings, the band would cease to exist (at least as we know it today).
And why does Dane continue to deny and/or underplay his true beliefs on consciousness in his dealings with the press? In a June 2003 interview with Live 4 Metal Dane went so far as to say that “enemies of reality” was simply a phrase he plundered from the David Cronenberg film “eXistenZ.” When asked what it meant, he replied, “I don’t know. You’ll have to ask him. I didn’t come up with it,” and laughed. When pressed further, he offered only cursory explanations for the album’s lyrics.
Astonishingly, I could find only one interview where Dane mentioned Timothy Leary. His comments on the man who has had such a huge impact on his thinking were surprisingly flippant: “Timothy Leary—people look at him like he's this huge visionary and revolutionary person, which he really was, but he was crazy obviously” (Invader, The Metal Zine interview, 9/14/00).
Why is Dane so hesitant to share his ideas in public and/or intimate settings? Is he concerned about attracting the attention of government authorities? Is he afraid that if his message becomes known on a wider scale Nevermore will lose a substantial part of its fan-base? And is his reputation for becoming inebriated during live performances somehow related (Leary saw alcohol as a primitive, “anesthetic escape” from fear and ego conflicts)?
Whatever the case, it seems a shame that Dane will not give the public the benefit of the doubt in judging what he has to say. His personal beliefs are obviously the product of a great deal of study and thought, and merit serious consideration from any fair-minded observer. Perhaps he is destined to keep us at arms length—searching for cryptic lyrical clues—until he obtains the broader, more lasting “awakening” that has so tenaciously eluded him.
By: Ladd Everitt
Fonte: http://basementbar.com/
Um dia faço a tradução disso.
