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Turn Off Your Mind : The Mystic Sixties and the Dark Side of the Age of Aquarius

Turn Off Your Mind : The Mystic Sixties and the Dark Side of the Age of Aquarius

List Price: $17.95
Your Price: $12.21
Product Info Reviews

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Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Turn Off is a Turn on.
Review: *** I guess there will be spoilers***

This book is wierd. My girlfriend bought it before it was advertised on disinfo and on other web site. She found it by mistake (withou really looking for it), bought it and it turned out to be a really good book. She read it and got me real interested in it when she told me about anecdotes on Anton Lavey, that Process church, the Manson family.

Tunr off your mind is filled with so much information for somebody who is not an expert but is really interested in the fields of music, litterature, and wierdness. The good thing about this book (and I guess its like that for alot of other books) is that it makes you want to go get information on other things like the movies, the music and the litterature it talks about. It really opens some kind of door to other things.

My only little criticism would be some small incoherence or small contradiction. **Spoilers** Like sometimes the author refers to books as "usaly found in any Hippes bookshelves" and later on stating that the hippies did not read a lot. Also ive found the ending to be a little dissapoinment. I wont go into any details but it makes you question the purpose of the book. Maybe I just got offended when it spoke badly about Morning of the magicians and it tuned me off really a little.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Magical Misery Tour
Review: Anyone touting the Sixties as a great era needs to read this book. You will find here an essay on the shadow side of the various counter cultural icons who made up the times. There's a "false" romanticism that seems to find a way to rationalize pathology. Solutions to the problem of pain and suffering require more effort than the facile slogans and quasi-philosophical notions of the era can admit. Those cognitively loose set of assumptions, I have noticed in myself and others, seem to have an inflated way of passing for deep, abiding truth. The book challenged and brought those ideas to task for their net effect. It took me on a retrospective trip down memory lane, into the atmosphere of my earliest intellectual pondering. As I read I began to recall my growing awareness, during late childhood and adolescence, that I was living in a sick and dangerous world. My protest and rebellion, at that time, took a number of common and predictable forms. This all failed to calm the fear, anxiety, depression that haunted my awareness. There were mitigating circumstances, such as the music. I also encountered the Lotus Sutra Tradition of Buddhism. Now, at the start of the New Millennium, I see the same, if not similar, forces of misery at work. I still believe it is possible to bring about constructive change. One suggestion that comes to mind, after reviewing the panoply of largely popular writers and personalities described in "Turn off Your Mind," is to detach from any kind of sentimentality about the "Mystic Sixties:" that will only lead to what I referred to above as "false" romanticism. True romanticism is far more balanced in nature than the words themselves are able to convey. However, take what I say with a grain of salt, read the book for yourself.





Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Intriguing Sourcebook -- Author Keeps Mum About Himself
Review: for persons who, like me were too young to participate in the Sixties.

I did not know just how heavily the Sixties were influenced by ideas taken from writers of fantasy, science fiction, and occult literature. Imagine designing a commune based on novels written by persons who had never lived in communes themselves, who had no practical experience of them. Small wonder so many communes ran into trouble!

Shortly after reading the chapter on Carlos Castaneda ('The Teachings of Don Carlos') Amy Wallace published her memoir, 'Sorcerer's Apprentice: My Life With Carlos Castaneda.'

Reading that book in conjunction with Lachman's book will be fascinating.

One large demerit I would assign to this book is that Mr. Lachman does not disclose what his own philosophical position is, which means the reader cannot take Mr. Lachman's biases into account.

My take is that Gary Lachman appears to be deeply sympathetic to Gurdjieff/Fourth Way work. There is nothing at all the matter with this, but if you're a practitioner of 'the Work', this will affect your perspective on spiritual and occult/magickal practice. If this is where an author is coming from, his or her readers deserve to know.

At the same time Lachman gave some very misleading information about Zen Buddhism, classifying it as an occult discipline, which in fact Zen is not. The radical thing about Zen is that it rejects all attempts to pursue or cultivate special powers or special states of mind, and considers these distractions that keep the ego busy spinning webs of illusion

In the academic world, it is standard practice for authors to tell the reader what their own stance is, so the reader can take author biases into account when reading their material. I wish Gary Lachman had been up front about his belief system. I had a nagging impression that Lachman was deeply loyal to a belief system, that this was affecting his use of information in 'Turn Off Your Mind' and he was not telling readers where he was coming from.

Having to engage in this kind of guesswork while reading Lachman's otherwise fascinating book was irritating, and I did not feel I could trust that he could be evenhanded. Lachman also seems rather amused by the people and events he describes.

The sad thing is that many people suffered during the Sixties, had their trust betrayed in terrible ways by opportunists and hustlers who ruthlessly exploited them. Many were broken in body and spirit during the 1960s and did not survive. No one knew the dangers of drugs, out-of-control social groups or counterfeit gurus, and all of these burst upon the scene during the Sixties.

Pioneers pay a price by falling into traps and pitfalls. They suffer and bleed so that so that latecomers like Lachman can spot those same traps at a safe distance and avoid them.

Still I did appreciate 'Turn Off Your Mind' because it gave so much information about how many odd groups (such as Scientology) got started--many of which are still with us.

For a very compassionate and unsparing personal memoir by someone who participated in the 1960s and lived to tell the tale, I highly recommend

'Sleeping Where I Fall' by Peter Coyote.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: The Stink Of The Occult
Review: I've always had a very secretive interest in mysticism and visionary states of consciousness. I've also been a big fan of Blondie. So when I discovered that a former member of Blondie has written books on mysticism and altered states of consciousness I almost freaked. Unfortunately, I was very disappointed by this book. Gary Lachman does not appear to really know anything about mysticism. This entire book is written from the perspective of a serious occultist. Everything he writes about is related back to either G.I. Gurdjieff or Aleister Crowley or Charles Manson. It is a sustained misinterpretation of the spiritual reality, a sort of spiritual psychosis, completely lacking in real insight.

It is ironic that the author is familiar with the Theosophical Society but focuses on Helena Blavatsky instead of George Russell (aka A.E.) whose book "The Candle Of Vision: Inner Worlds Of The Imagination" shows an extraordinary understanding of miraculous states of consciousness which can make real magic happen in the subjective realm of the mind.

On the other hand, this book is a great reference tool for researching all the mystic and psychedelic influences of the sixties which probably have had a greater influence on you than you might care to acknowledge. It should also be noted that a mystical experience is always interpreted through the religious framework of the mystic's culture. Therefore Gary Lachman's perception of a mystical experience could be due to a bad 60's vibe!

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: The Empire Strikes Back at the Sixties
Review: The subject is fascinating and needs more attention, but Lachman has an ax to grind. Is he disgruntled or just out for a buck? His criticism of the book "The Morning of the Magicians" in reality applies to THIS book. It is "badly researched, poorly documented and full of inaccuracies". Lachman's book is written in a superficial tabloid conspiracy buff style. You may recognize a phrase here, a phrase there, lifted from others.
Lachman makes the most tenuous connections to build his argument. For example, Bobby Beausoleil wore a top hat (not unusual at the time). So did Mick Jagger on a concert tour. Therefore the Rolling Stones are connected with the Manson family. One use of the word "magic" is enough for him to label a writer as magical. He labels the Marxist philosopher Marcuse a Gnostic, who wanted to bring magic to politics. Lachman follows the common newspaper editorials of the day in equating student activism with Nazism. He also argues that occultism=Nazism and environmentalism=Nazism! He finds Anton LaVey's philosophy "revolting" although I doubt he knows anything about it. He supplies untruths, such as that LaVey had a "dope-smoking lion" and "often appeared in the buff" in girlie magazines.
The book has a British slant, although he is unaware the Picts were not fictional. Some terms will be unfamiliar to Americans. He is unaware California has a long history of religious cults, and never mentions Ravi Shankar in a discussion of the sitar. The first 200 pages are hard to get though, as it is a historical survey through books - who wrote what, and who turned who on. Writing about Jack Parsons, he uses the term "South Orange Grove Avenue" for his house at least 8 times in 10 pages, and "spit and image" for "spitting image", showing the need for an editor.
A final example - he feels the movie "The Matrix" continues the sixties tradition, and the characters wear black clothes, which Lachman terms a "Gestapo-like dress code". He's not simply being descriptive here, but equating the two. This type of guilt by remote association is the main current of the book.

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: Interesting but Tendentious
Review: Turn Off Your Mind

Book Review By

Jaye Beldo

Gary Lachman, author of Turn Off Your Mind: The Mystic Sixties and the Dark Side of the Age of Aquarius has done an impressive bit of psychedelic spadework. Digging deep into the putrid soil of the peace, love and understanding era, he offers us a chance to peer into a malign, subterranean panorama where 'the sinister dalliance of rock's high rollers' such as John Lennon, Mick Jagger and Jim Morrison once took place. Regarding the 1969 Manson murders as a kind of morbid albeit culminating apostrophe of the times, the author deftly proceeds to describe, in illuminating detail, the forces at work that not only consolidated the Hippy mythos into a market place of quasi-utopian idealism but also mutated it into the hallucinogenic commercialism we are currently subjected to. Covering trends such as the Lord of the Rings/Tolkien craze, Carlos Castaneda, Transcendental Meditation, Herman Hesse, I-Ching, The Process Church and Scientology, Lachman gives us an impressive (if not depressing) overview of the suave and evil forces which took over the Flower Power movement and drove it back into the ground it desperately tried to grow out of.

Attempting to bolster his argument that the principal cause of the era's demise stemmed from prominent gurus, musicians, magicians and authors giving in not only to their egos but to 'unseen forces' of a satanic variety, Lachman overlooks some of the more positive and redeeming things born of the times. Most obvious is his treatment of Timothy Leary whose 'acid messianism' the author takes pains to point out in great detail. He chooses to ignore the profound and influential neurocircuit model of consciousness Leary devised during his LSD trips (see Robert Anton Wilson's Prometheus Rising for one of the best descriptions of neurocircuits currently available). Gary also tends to gloss over H.P. Lovecraft as well, painting the popular 'horror' writer as a kind of 'anorakish' pulp hack unable to come to terms with his own macabre visions no matter how bizarre and compelling they seemed to be. (Please check out Polaria: Gift of the White Stone by W.H. Müller for an astonishing description of the esoteric/spiritual dimensions of Lovecraft's work-H.P. was an Initiate indeed and has much recondite knowledge encoded in his text which escapes the vast majority of his readers). Lachman's focus on the personal lives of 60's luminaries gone awry causes him, at times, to undervalue the real puppeteers at hand, i.e the forces above and beyond (and behind the scenes as well). There were grey eminencies hiding within the tie dye patterns and macramé who made sure that the sixties generation would burn out according to plan. Those involved in the CIA's MK-ULTRA program (both handlers and handled), the FBI's COINTELPRO operation and, of course, the Tavistock Institute for Human Relations, where the Founding Fathers of mind control reside, are curiously neglected in Lachman's otherwise excellent book. (Interesting that the psychiatrist R.D. Laing, also mentioned in Turn Off Your Mind, was a product of Tavistock-he was highly popular in the 60's and 70's with books like The Politics of Experience and Knots. I suggest augmenting your reading by checking out Uri Dowbenko's interview with John Coleman in Popular Paranoia edited by Kenn Thomas for more info. on the Tavistockians and what they have done in terms of manipulating mass consciousness.) Lachman also disregards Charley Manson's CIA connections, connections brought to light in Adam Gorightly's chilling exposé, The Shadow Over Santa Susana. Manson, according to sources cited in that book, was a product of MK-ULTRA, along with Anton LaVey and many influential others.

However, in spite of Lachman's tendentiousness, he has done quite an exceptional job of exposing the paisley patterned and black lighted underbelly of the 60's in a way I've not seen done before. The author is obviously very well read (immediately check out the bibliography when you buy your copy and see for yourself) and has an ability to conjoin rare information in a convincing, inspiring and sophisticated way. He certainly commanded my interest considering that I read my 430 page review copy in about a day and a half, unable to put the damn thing down. Turn Off Your Mind has profoundly broadened my perspective of who/what subverted the 60's. More importantly, we can use the kind of awareness the author successfully fosters to prevent those creepy Fabian Luddites, whether human or not, from ever wrecking the revolution machinery again. Considering that the Age of Aquarius has yet to begin (another two to three hundred years according to some astrologers) we have ample time to fortify and prepare ourselves for a redux of satanic hucksters, cosmic charlatans and other con(sciousness) artists waiting for the kill in the wings of our third eyes. I recommend perusing Turn Off Your Mind in order to prepare yourselves for the inevitable onslaught. (...)

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: An Edge-of-the-Seat Trip through the Occult 60s
Review: Turn on your mind, and read Turn Off Your Mind! At last someone has done for the Sixties counterculture what Colin Wilson did for earlier times; namely, to present a dizzyingly thorough sweep through the spiritual stirrings of a period in the life of the West, and to do it in so engaging a style that it keeps the reader up at night like a masterly detective yarn. Lachman's research is marvelously vast; not only do all the expected figures - Leary, the Beatles, et al. - make an appearance, but also a host of easily overlooked influences on Sixties spirituality, such as H.P. Lovecraft and Aleister Crowley. What especially sets this book apart is the emphasis, as the subtitle suggests, on the darker side of the counterculture's mystical aspirations; a side which includes both the frankly Luciferian forms of occultism, and also the fraud, silliness, dead ends, corruption, and dashed hopes of some ostensibly benign spiritualities. No one who wants to understand the Sixties, or who wants insight into the background of the religious life of our own time can afford to miss this fascinating chronicle


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