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From the Archives: Millbrook Wedding

From the Archives: Millbrook Wedding

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Timothy Leary was getting married to a model named Nena Von Schlebrugge up in Millbrook, New York at the Hitchcock house, where Leary had been carrying on his hallucinogenic revelries for the past year or so after leaving Harvard. It was rumored that this was going to be the wedding of the season, the wedding of Mr. And Mrs. Swing as Cab Calloway put it… There were Hitchcocks and friends and relations of Hitchcocks, the Baron and his court, a score of models, and Charles Mingus playing a lonely piano. Even Susan Leary fresh out of jail.  It was indeed an amazing wedding, and for all I know, an amazing marriage, although someone later told me it was over before I’d even finished editing the film.  – D. A. Pennebaker

LSD has a funny way way of creating significance whether we like it or not. A leaf, a lover, or even a stray thought meandering throughout our inner life might well up to become the all and everything, a consuming fire of meaning and revelatory insight. For those of us born on this side of the psychedelic revolution, that startling shock and wonder experienced by our elders when they abruptly smacked their head on Albert Hofmann’s alchemical anvil can hardly be imagined.

We’ve grown up with electronic technologies that store, augment and transmit information at the speed of light (formerly the business of angels), often questioning ecological relationships and organic values, fully aware that we are deeply embedded within complex systems. Video games extend our consciousness into realms that distill animistic concepts; gnomes, fairies, or ogres emerge as a necessary language for operating in these liminal spaces. We can go to Fantasycon or Burning Man and hyperlink our favorite metaphors or experiment with other modes of being. – I have a friend with a 7 month-old baby girl who’s been to three psychedelic music festivals- or 8 if you count the ones she attended in the womb!

But take a minute to step back into the brittle atmosphere of the post-war generation… imagine growing up with an allegiance to stale cultural forms that are all but broken, overstating their presence like the sun before it disappears into the horizon: the Catholic Church before modern psychology, meditation, and yoga; patriotism before Vietnam, music before the Beatles. Imagine that many of the cultural norms you now take for granted are but a potent thought seed pushing outwards and threatening to burst forth like Athena from the head of Zeus in ancient Greek mythology.

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Now imagine that you are a successful Irish professor at the oldest and most prestigious university in America and that your earnest, but controversial work with substances like psilocybin and LSD has gotten yourself, your collaborator and your graduate student in a heap of trouble. This was the scene when Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert were fired from Harvard and took up residence in a cozy mansion at Millbrook in upstate New York- the scene of the Birth of a Psychedelic Culture.

While Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters pioneered and propagated a less clinical, and less intentional adventure quest of communion and psychonautic exploration, Leary, Alpert and Ralph Metzner (a Harvard graduate student at the time and so not technically fireable) contemplated the bardo of eastern philosophies and experimented with set and setting to inaugurate a new era.

Bold and courageous pioneers live the benefit of meaningful events and encounters at every turn. Their firsts are the firsts and their faults become the faults of archetypal patterns that will play out many times along the road ahead by many seekers karmically drawn to resonate and develop emerging forms. So when Dr. Timothy Leary writes, in the fall of 1964, to his friend and colleague Ralph Metzner, who was inspired by Herman Hesse’s writing to travel throughout India, we can only take him at his word:

NEW YORK… Cooper Union… all 1300 seats filled and 300 standing… crowds so receptive it was like whispering things in your lover’s ear… Richard was a smash at U of Minnesota and faculty cocktail party was held etc. The political educational battle over psychedelics has been won and from now it’s just a matter of time… Nena and I have been together almost every minute for the last three weeks and she is an unending series of beauty and wise lessons. We moved directly into the bowling alley which is now the most relaxed, warm, glowing room in the world. We are visiting the Episcopalian minister in town to arrange the most romantic, mythic wedding in history … very soon.

Peggy Hitchcock, the jet-set young lady who hooked up the rebel psychologists with that mysterious Millbrook mansion, describes the bride to be:

Nena was a very young, very beautiful, very successful fashion model. Today we would call her a super model. She was born in Sweden in 1941 and had lived in China with her family as a refugee during World War II, before returning to Europe. Her father, who was a German baron, was much older than her mother had died when she was a child. When I first knew her, she was in her early twenties and had been the sole support for her mother, the baroness, and her younger brother, since she was fifteen. I don’t believe she had much of a happy childhood. I remember feeling protective towards her. As I remember, she and Tim first connected at my brother Billy’s birthday party on her first visit to Millbrook.

Nene had arrived at Millbrook with Van Wolff, as Dr. Ralph Metzner explains:

Van Wolff was a kind of PR-agent-impresario, whose New York apartment was a hub for the glamor set from fashion, photography, film, and the arts. It seemed to be always buzzing with vibrations of seduction, intrigue and gossip. Nena’s picture was on all the New York City buses advertising Winston cigarettes at that time. Tim called her, “A thoughtful and romantic woman, an icon of beauty, surrounded by, instructed by, manipulated by the technicians and producers of the fashion industry.” When they took their first LSD session together, he wrote: “… Nanette allowed her jet-set facade to fall away, just so much childhood scar tissue. From within, emerged an archetypal nobility, the radiant essence of a Valkyrie… I fell under her spell.” (Flashbacks, pp 203-204). She moved into the Big House with Tim and set up a routine of being there and working in New York a few days a week. His relationship with Peggy Hitchcock had for some before evolved into more of a friendship – which continued long afterward. In one of those strange synchronicities, Nena had a close friend, Katy, also a model, who she brought up to Millbrook. She had auburn hair and green eyes, she was gorgeous. I fell under her spell.

leary&alpert pre-wedding

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

As far as the wedding itself, Darlene De Sedle, who was brought up to Millbrook to  make the wedding veil for Nene, explains:

When we arrived at Millbrook, we went to the tennis house where the brides and bridesmaids were getting dressed. The bridesmaids in their spring gowns were scattered here and there around the room like flowers, light blue, yellow, pale pink. I found a comfortable place to sit, shook out the pink and white tulle, and began to sew… (Nena) was glowing blonde and gorgeous, and beautiful light was pouring into the room through the leaded windows. Monty (the hair dresser) handed me a glass of punch spiked with LSD and told me to drink it. It was my first time.

Mingus

And what would a mythic wedding be without the Jazz great Charles Mingus? Fellow psilocybin researcher Rolf Von Eckartsberg describes the potent figure who plays his bass with the force of nature itself :

Mingus is very wise, down to earth and basic, grounded, and we had a most meaningful encounter with him and his art, his bass, his “woman,” whom he asks questions in the solitude and darkness of his attic, to whom he plays and is played and answered. What a sonorous strength it is that emanates from his bow and his strings that set up a column of vibration, rising like a twirling storm, transporting and elevating everything in its path. It penetrates right through the bones and opens the wide luminous landscapes of the internal, this fantastic otherworld of playful color and geometry, radiant energy and ecstatic resonance. Isn’t there some primordial power which sits with love and plays with bow and strings at the flow of life?

And also from Von Eckartsberg, a general depiction of the scene as psychedelic as the substance that Harvard rejected:

The whole house has become a beckoning, enveloping, nurturing tropical ocean of forms, colors and sounds, as millions of fractured, incongruous elements are transformed into beautiful flowers and ornaments of a gigantic organism, radiating joy and peace.

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But as my generation has learned more readily, the metaphysical laws of the ecstatic experience mandate that we endure the downs as well as the ups, and that separation can often follow the realization of the oneness of being. The excitable Leary would have a dynamic career. He would find himself in and out of prison and experiencing life as a cultural icon whose perception would go from hero to scapegoat. Of course, his love-life would be no exception. On p. 223 of “Flashbacks,” Leary describes the end of their “Himalayan Honeymoon:”

So we’re moving on. We had connected as fairy-tale lovers in the enchanted woods of Millbrook, had lived out a season of courtly romance. She had taught me tender lessons of girl-love and female splendor. We had time-traveled through a few mythic incarnations, played out magical dramas in panoramic realms. Now we would have to rise to that most complex human art, gentle separation.

In 1967, Nena went on to marry the Indo-Tibetan Bhuddist scholar and ex-monk, Robert Thurman, with whom she gave birth to the popular actress Uma Thurman.

With the exception of the opening quote from a letter by D.A. Pennebaker, all of the quotes for this piece can be found in “Birth of A Psychedelic Culture,” a book that, like this article, comprises a mosaic of interviews, letters, artifacts and images, depict through concrete anecdotes, the vibrant and mythic scenes of that mysterious episode in psychedelic history.

Technature

Technature

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What is the ‘nature’ of technology?

While some people think that nature and technology are in fundamental opposition, and others rest in the assumption that all that is must be natural simply for having come into being, Synergetic Press author Christian Schwägerl explores the implications of “bioadaptation” as a symbiotic interweaving of technology and biospsheric systems:

Seen from the perspective of a future bio-technosphere, today’s wasteful machines appear to be rudimentary organisms with outdated cycles in urgent need of improvement. Fuel-guzzling Porsches or SUVs, coal-fired power plants and persistent plastic seem to be old-fashioned leftovers from the Holocene, about as impressive as horse carriages and typewriters. Cars of the future would either decompose into material that boosts the environment or give way to other, networked kinds of transport. The guiding principle in this process might be called bioadaptation: using nature as a source to “breed” machines.

In this chapter excerpt from Schwägerl’s “The Anthropocene: The Human Era and How it Shapes Our Planet,” the author takes us on a visionary journey into inspiring and possible future grounded in a real-world dialectical synthesis of technology and nature. Read the Chapter excerpt ‘Technature’ on Realitysandwich.com here.

From the Archive: R. Buckminster Fuller at the 1982 Galactic Conference

From the Archive: R. Buckminster Fuller at the 1982 Galactic Conference

R. Buckminster Fuller

R. Buckminster Fuller

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

On Saturday, September 18th 1982, the renowned inventor and visionary R. Buckminster Fuller presented his talk The Galaxy: A Comprehensive Anticipatory Design Challenge to the Institute of Ecotechnics at their Galactic Conference in Les Marronniers, France.

Sitting to Bucky’s left in the above image (taken during the conference) is John P. Allen, co-founder of Synergetic Press and inventor/visionary behind the massive Biosphere II closed-systems experiment that took place in Oracle, AZ in the early 90’s.

In Allen’s memoir, “Me and the Biospheres,” he writes:

I had first met Bucky Fuller at Harvard, when he spoke before several hundred enthusiastic Harvard and Radcliff men and women. Even with their famous capacity for attention, I wondered how many would make it to the far end of his speech.

Fuller’s being-challenging technique in speechmaking consisted in starting anew on his comprehensive thought at every major talk to see if he would come to the same conclusions and, if not, adopt the new position that had evolved.

… by the end of four hours, the audience had dwindled to a handful. After another thirty minutes, there were only four of us, hungrier for ideas than food. 

‘Now we can get down to something,’ Bucky said with his contagious grin, descending from the platform to stand around the deserted coffee table with us.

Following that initial meeting, Allen, passionately concerned for the future of human culture and the biosphere and inspired by Fuller’s book “Synergetics,” worked to apply synergetic design principles to human enterprise itself.

With fellow synergists, many of whom met in Haight-Ashbury in the late 1960’s, Allen was instrumental in founding Synergia Ranch in Santa Fe (where this press is located) as well as the Institute of Ecotechnics that hosted the 1982 Galactic Conference pictured above.

In a letter to Richard Dawkins, another presenter at the 1982 conference, the zoologist and author of “The Selfish Gene, ” Institute of Ecotechnics chairman Mark Nelson explains the organization:

I.E. was started in 1973 as a private, self-funded research institute to engage in pioneer and demonstration projects around the planet. At present, field projects are underway in India, West Australia, France, Nepal, United Kingdom, U.S.A and the tropic seas, coral reefs and river basins with the Institute’s research ship, the Heraclitus.

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R.V. Heraclitus

 

 

 

 

 

Since 1976 we have hosted annual conferences on ecosystems: deserts, oceans, mountains, jungles, transition zones, the Planet Earth, and last year, the Solar System.

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I.E. 1982 Galactic Conference Roster

 

 

 

 

 

Besides R. Buckminster Fuller, John P. Allen, and Richard Dawkins, other notable attendees of the 1982 Galactic Conference include the microbiologist and Lynn Margulis (author of the theory of symbiogenesis) and the chemist and discoverer of LSD Albert Hofmann.

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Technature

Could ‘Bio-Futurism’ lead to a long & prosperous road ahead?

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A hot topic for layperson and PhD alike, nobody will deny that the term Anthropocene is trending. One the one side, there are those who believe that the idea that humans are in fact the driving force behind a new geological epoch is a benefic and life-affirming path forward; while on the other, those who see only the continuation of a  ‘should be discarded’ notion of anthropocentrism inherited from Christian doctrine (the latter tend see the use of the term ‘anthropocene’ as a clever political/environmental tool at best). Christian Schwägerl- a biologist, correspondent for Der Spiegel, and Synergetic Press author- stands firmly on the pro-anthropocene side of the debate. And in this video, he briefly summarizes the case for adopting the term scientifically as well as embracing a new ‘bio-futurism’ that can embolden a prosperous future.

After explaining how humans have altered 75% of Earth’s land surface, created dead spots in the oceans from the over use of nitrogen fertilizers, warmed the atmosphere through industrial emissions, and now appropriate 90% of mammalian biomass (as opposed to the 1% during the Neolithic revolution), Schwagerl suggests that the long-term thinking that would result from adopting the anthropocene idea as a geological epoch gives us the power to shape our future consciously and for the better. We can never go ‘back to the Holocene,’ a tempting nostalgia prophesied by the European Romantics during the onset of Industrialization, but we can take the reigns by becoming conscious stewards of the biosphere and allowing the anthropocene idea to imbue our everyday decisions with responsibility for our significant ecological role as humans. As Schwägerl explains, “Our lifestyles, our daily consumerism, decisions, what we do or don’t do… shapes the future.”

Schwägerl then explores the notion of ‘bio-futurism,’ a life-affirming way of looking ahead that could allow our civilization to grow with the richness of nature, rather than at its cost. He explains that instead of seeing the activity of cells as being like ‘a factory,’ he suggests that factories and machines are really more like very primitive cells. Once we can grapple with this fundamental paradigm-shift, we can act less like barbarians and more like ‘planetary gardeners’ that prepare a fruitful soil for future open developments.

This is a notion that Schwägerl develops more deeply in Chapter 8 of the Synergetic Press title, “The Anthropocene: The Human Era and How it Shapes Our Planet.” He explains:

“If products were built so that they could be turned back into raw materials for the next generation they would be easier to repair and upgrade than they are today. These products could be made from plant-based materials optimized by biotechnology. Or they could be synthetic and feature organic characteristics created through biomimicry. Innovative recycling plants could be fed with entire scrap heaps from the past to be processed into new raw materials through urban mining. Plastic recycling would become a source of raw material, making it superfluous to drill new oil platforms in the deep sea or in the Arctic. New chemical substances would absorb toxic substances and render them harmless. The bioadaptive imagination of scientists is only just gathering momentum:

  • Compostable cars; synthetic materials that turn into nutrients when they dissolve
  • Machines made of organic material that could easily be recycled
  • Electrodes that work with endogenous substances
  • Colorants following the role model of butterflies
  • Substitute plastic made of insect protein
  • Biodegradable electronics
  • Robots that feed off plastic waste
  • Nanomagnetic designer particles that extract phosphorus and other critically important elements from wastewater
  • Buildings inspired by deep-sea sponges
  • Power plants that imitate photosynthesis
  • Bacteria that produce fuel and construction materials
  • Signal transmission in silk threads

The transformation could go even deeper: genetic algorithms in the future could enable much more complex calculation processes than digital ones; biological nanomaterials could significantly reduce the necessity to use metal and finally, DNA—the very stuff of which life is made—could prove to be superior in information storage, making DNA computers a reality.”

Schwägerl’s inspired vision is only the tip of the iceberg of what’s possible, a persuasive means of getting the reader or listener to see the world differently. For the German biologist, journalist and author, the anthropocene idea is the very spark needed to set off this new wave of bio-futurism and abolish the outmoded notion of humans as ‘invaders’ to nature, thereby returning us to our ecological (from the Greek oikos- meaning ‘house’) place at home on Earth.

Here’s a link to the book.

A Brief History of How We Got Into This Mess

A Brief History of How We Got Into This Mess

wastewater_sketchWhy do we waste so much precious fresh water and so many valuable nutrients by treating sewage through central plants that contaminate larger water supplies? Why is there such a deep cultural taboo on human waste in the west that prevents us from thinking sensibly about what to do with it?

In this excerpt from “The Wastewater Gardener,” Synergetic Press author and former ‘Biospherian’ Mark Nelson, explains how our modern approach to sewage developed into such and irrational mess; a prelude to the rest of his personal and practical tale of developing Wastewater Gardens technologies that have helped communities to live in harmony with their surrounding in many paces around the planet.

Read the full chapter excerpt through our friends at Realitysandwich.comthrough this link: http://bit.ly/17Izof0

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