PSYCHONAUTS
The use of drugs, either pharmaceutical or natural, cannot be accurately determined among Bikers prior to the 1950s. In Victorian times, it can only be presumed that as some poets and artists had submerged themselves in an opiate twilight, there might have been the rare rider who indulged. Altered states beyond alcohol have never swept through the entire biking world; primarily because many riders are satiated by the motorcycling experience. For the majority of Bikers, spirits, beer and tobacco are incidental to their greatest buzz. A post-ride smoke can have the same euphoric winding down as a post-coitus cigarette.
Around the 1920s, alcohol had been an issue (therefore ever more popular) in the US, whereas in the UK, particularly those working in industry had rationalised beer as a thirst-quencher. By the 30s, opiates had become the device of jazz musicians, with other users who might have included Bikers. However, it was in the late 40s/early 50s that alcohol use became particularly notable; among ex-service riders in the US and the UK Teds.
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After the thinkers of the 1920s, the beats, then the Hippies were among the first members of modern civilisation to experiment with hallucinogens other than opium. It was Ken Kesey who had discovered that LSD could be used to explore the mind, and this was recognised incidentally as a pleasurable experience. Despite drugs being regarded as an intellectual Hippy pursuit, the fun element created a further demand for them. The resultant behaviour caused drugs to be prominent in some arguments against youth movements. While the world smoked tobacco, and drank alcohol, tea and coffee, it despised younger people’s indulgences - in what used to be important influences.
Peruvian and American Indians, Celts, and many other early societies used drugs; for divination, in preparation for war, and other contexts of real life. Herbs were used in medicine and cooking, while stimulants like the coca leaf were chewed by South American Indians to sustain physical activity. Without any empirical evidence, their beliefs and practices were ostracised. And illegalised. Some tentative moves towards legalising marijuana are afoot, in the quest to relieve such as arthritis and asthma, but the fact that many people could enjoy themselves in a mental state which scared others witless caused and still causes massive disapproval. This is justified by horror stories, that even the most avid drug user must admit, are often based in truth. Many of us know someone who has departed in spirit if not body. Strange casualties they are, suffering such brutality at the hands of their ethereal lover.
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The new generations that were shaping the identity of Bikerdom included many who would at least have tried marijuana. Stimulants like purple hearts, cocaine, and various forms of speed were enjoyed, as were downers like Mogadon and even heroin. Heroin took its toll among a small minority of Bikers, whose riding became neglected as their lives were slowly wrecked, even stolen. The cocktail of any type of drug and riding was also tried, but seldom brought useful results. The distractions, the tendency to doze, and altered rationality were anathema to biking. Under the influence of marijuana, for example, a top speed of 20 mph was often the result of paranoia. Happily, most attempts to ride under any influence never got under way - just getting a bike started ended in giggling and hilarity. The greatest hindrance to drug use was the tendency for people to combine it with alcohol. This interfered the effects, often in a negative way.
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For those who did use drugs, it wasn’t any kind of: ‘I’ve found God’ experience. If you thought you’d found a deity, you were still relying on someone or something else to sort out your problems. Neither was it a vision of people in white robes in some verdant Elysian field. It is a recognition of how patterns in people’s thinking could be correlated.
The ways of the Mayans and other early civilisations were the aims and objectives of some thinking drug users. Such people commonly believe we have lost touch with something we had in our childhood. We can get close to it under the influence. But because drugs are often hallucinatory, the issues are clouded. Without understanding what’s inside the user’s head, the arguments tend to err on the imagined. However, an ability to ride a trip lead people into extra-logical areas of thought that cannot be governed by science - or psychology, as we know it.
Under the influence of LSD, all conditioning falls away. You are free from all assumptions, all values, floating yet secure in a new knowledge. It is like being able to see into people’s souls, being in love without the sex. The hallucinatory argument seems sustained, particularly as some have seen evil or horror. But to those wrapped up in fear, programming or materialism, those horrors are too real. For those who can let go, it is a rapid and profound experience of purity. If something is niggling you, if you have any mistrust in the company you’re tripping with, even if the environment doesn’t seem right, spectacular imaginings will be interpreted as mishap. The bathroom wall can melt, mirrors can admit you within them, and ants can crawl all over things - only to disappear. Such weird visions inspired a whole art scene, that became part of psychedelic culture.
Under the influence of hallucinogens, the curiosities of nature and subtleties of environment leap out at you. The texture of bricks, people’s skin, and the act of walking and conversation take on new meanings. Staring at a patch of grass, you can see patterns. The arrangements of flower petals become remarkable. These things can be seen by a ‘straight’ mind, because they exist. Like the spirals that exist in all things, from flowers to galaxies. Under the influence, such phenomena are quite profound, if it isn’t the mind that has become over-simplified. Conversation can become silly and giggly. But eventually, you transcend the bull. Any connivance that segregates people is eroded.
The logic of the trip is simplistically infantile, yet superior. Being able to feel that undemanding love you enjoyed before life made its mark on your psyché, whilst at the same time understanding the meaning of the universe, is a powerful experience. It embodies the answer to the question: ‘why’, which has puddled great minds ever since it was posed (and still does, as an altered mind can seldom describe the answer, and a straight mind can never quite recall how it goes...). It is like being able to understand magic. Not hocus-pocus disappearing tricks, but an understanding of natural forces. It brings about a placid state, that resulted in acts of civil disobedience. In the US, some placed flowers down rifle barrels, and the authorities found them a push-over. Even though that act didn’t stop any wars, it was symbolic enough to convince many members of mass-society that ‘the man’ was an outright bastard.
Such arguments like that of Jesus Christ having been murdered for pacifism eroded the inner peace for many. It was a peace for children or religious devotees. The result has been compromise. Realism has replaced idealism. People try to be as much of themselves without impinging on others. But peace and love aren’t abandoned by seemingly cynical older generations. Instead, they come to accept some acquiescence.
If you can’t understand this, you’ve never had experiences comparable with hallucinogens, with or without them. Or, as some might prefer to pretend, they’re beyond you. It is often the way with those who are a little afraid - or just plain skeptical, about journeys into the inner self. Yet anyone can do it. Emotions are not entirely ambiguous to real life. They can help admit you into higher realms of thought. Unless you’re prepared to relinquish control, you’ll remain restrained by your own fear. Not a fear of anything - just an irrational fear.
This may all sound quite passé, but the truth of it is undeniable. We are all shaped by our experiences, good and bad. They can cause us to lie to ourselves, and we might eventually believe those lies. They become part of the conditioning installed by outside influences. We’ve all witnessed how people might speak of others, saying: ‘That’s their true colours showing’. And we’ve witnessed how those persons might say: ‘I don’t know what came over me’. They are moments when we touch our inner selves.
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The more hedonistic drug experiences (especially on marijuana) provide some humour at least. Like when Jamie, a second-hand bike dealer, and a mate called Andy, rode out to Devil’s bridge in the UK’s Lake District. After a walk, they returned to their bikes stoned. They noticed someone coming across the car park, who had ears that extended above his head. They looked at each other, then at him again. It was still happening. But now, he’d been joined by a woman with similar ears - except that one larger one was bent over. Jamie and Andy fumbled with keys and helmets. As they looked up, a young boy had joined the couple. And his ears were enormous too. The two Bikers were undergoing the same exploding hilarity you feel in a library, when someone’s just told you the funniest joke.
A more extraordinary tale was told by a Biker I knew called Snowy. He’d ridden across Australia on a chopper. Whilst far away from civilisation, he’d been riding whilst tripping on LSD. I know I’ve said that biking and altered states don’t mix. But milder doses of certain drugs are not prohibitive - nor even dangerous in a driving context. This is carried by the way he intended to stop, having noticed a strange vibration. Having realised that it was not the LSD that was exaggerating bumps in the road, he presumed something mechanical to be amiss, and was going to pull over and inspect his machine. Before he could come to a standstill, a crack suddenly appeared in the road ahead, and debris began to fall into it. He swerved off the road and performed an emergency stop. Well, there’s not much else you can do, when you’re riding through an earthquake.
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Popular ideals have associated groups like the Beatles with drug experimentation, but to many, their interpretations were sanitised for mass-consumption. Not to take anything away from what the Beatles experienced, they were swayed by arty influences. John Lennon had his Yoko, just as the Velvet Underground had Andy Warhol. Bands that managed to transfer drug ideals through their lyrics without pretension were more relaxed and plausible. The Grateful Dead and Quicksilver Messenger Service for example embodied countrified hip themes. Like the Quicksilver line: Nobody feels like workin’, Panama Red is back in town’. Meanwhile, bands like Tonto’s Expanding Headband and Tangerine Dream explored the more dreamy moods of LSD.
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A steady usage of marijuana flowed down the generations, and by the 1980s, new drugs were being tried by the young. Ecstasy is a notably pure form of trip, but again doesn’t mix with riding. The drug experience is however comparable with the ride. Just as some drug users claimed to have found themselves, many people have found themselves on bikes. It is a similarly profound experience, when you discover a state of being that suits you so well, all you can feel is good in your soul.
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There has recently been an obsession concerned with people finding themselves. To the point where even the earnest soul-searcher has become cynical. Yet even in cynicism, people can still (more often accidentally) discover something that moves the soul. Perhaps still relevant to 21st century thinking, are the ideologies set out in Aldous Huxley’s ‘Doors of Perception’ and ‘Heaven and Hell’. Better to read these than take my word for it, however a working nutshell description might say that those works looked at the ideological practicalities of hallucinogenic drug use.
We have no indigenous mescaline in the UK, however psilocybin abounds in little mushrooms (where land-owners have not responded to a government incentive to eradicate them). Being harmless and enjoyable, and as inspirational as mescaline or LSD, they are yet scary to normal society, which has deemed them illegal. But to get to the point; soulful experiences, be they of a sexual, spiritual, hallucinogenic (what is hallucination?) or even artistic nature, have their purpose and meaning - in rationalising the mundane, as well as vitalising the human state of being. They have a quality, referred to by Huxley, of other-worldliness, putting ourselves into our not-selves...a condition where the humblest of us feel invincible, satiated, even divine.
Transience into this altered state can also be triggered by things and experiences which are significant signals or reminders of other-wordliness. Huxley notes that luminescent colours, shiny objects like jewels or metals have a kinship with out-of-mindness. Fashions and tastes change, and with the motorcycle, there’s been a shift from chrome to carbon fibre. The latter is not so shiny, yet its purpose (of lightness and strength), like shiny metals, in the bike context, is still suggestive of biking nirvana. Whatever quality it is that exhilarates us, when we acquire some new possession, it is this that allows us to stare at it in appreciation. Without even riding a bike, the Biker can be transported into a euphoric state.
The ride itself, as will be described later, is a phantasmagorical experience. Suffice to say, in Huxleyesque language, that for the enthusiast, the motorcycle ride is comparable with how certain Hindu Gods (for example Jollishmatic, the Goddess of miraculous drugs) ride tigers. This is not some dull, mundane crawl, like in how a bus removes its passengers; it has been more appropriately described as the way a breeze carries a perfume. One artist named their image of racer Noriyuki Haga: Divine Wind - which portrays something of the emotion attached to biking, not just the idolisation of Haga-San. Beyond commuting (which can be a joy even to the average commuter, who’s discovered biking delights over their previous drudge), the ride is a ceremony. It is deserving of some pageantry, which will manifest itself in styled bike clothes, and regalia applied to them. These other clothes we wear for riding, and this other world of riding, are an act - nay, a reality, that is more than geographic voyaging. We are transported beyond our every-day selves, just as the inspired writer, artist, or musician (even as the arts are too pretentious) - and transported like the religious zealot or user of hallucinogens (even as religion inspires more cynicism and the drug-evoked search for nirvana is laughably out of fashion); yes we are transported - into a world of child-like, yet sophisticated ecstasy. If biking has not done this for the reader, you’ll have to take my word for it. Mine and the squillions of other riders, past, present, and yet to be. If the reader feels some cynicism towards such apoplectic divination of motorcycling, they have perhaps not seen deeply enough into the preceding chapters of this book, nor deeply enough into Bikers they know or are aware of. That lack, and any misgiving, supercilious or otherwise, should begin to erode now in the minds of even the most cynical misanthrope.
What I’m endeavouring to achieve here, in short, is that it is possible to find an other-self, through the experience of motorcycling. The bike’s appearance and behaviour, our own appearance and subsequent behaviour, combine to become something of a found self. Even in ordinary life, this new self mirrors that other-self we have seen, enjoyed and become, on the other side, or rather at the most sacred depths and heights, of biking. The reason that there are philosophers, and other disciplines concerning the human psyché, is that everyone, from the subsistence farmer to the ruler of many lands, needs a certain something to get by; emotionally and spiritually. As a matter of interest, those who shun this to adhere, for example, to the bleak world of money and more money, are mentally sick, if not emotionally immature or insecure. Though the average human might sense some insecurity and be moved to nullify it, it is through a more noble instinct - if this mess we call humanity has retained such a notion in its loathsome world - to rise unto a state of being that surpasses all the misgivings and qualms of mere existence. We all crave something. Some crave merely to ride motorcycles, but through such a seemingly worldly, if not ordinary act, find so much more - something within ourselves that only surfaces when we extend our existence beyond the confines of the norm; and start living.
Share this divinity with another soul, and you have a bond that is as relaxed and comfortable as a favourite glove, yet as exquisite as a rare jewel; but more importantly, is virtually wordless. No language can communicate such an emotion as the exhilaration of the ride, yet symbolically, the sight of just another person wearing a crash-helmet can invoke a relationship deeper even than some familial ties. Because you’ve both been over that threshold of reality, into the sublime world of balance and motion, scares and thrills...of oneness with a machine. You’ve performed it individually, yet, with a simple nod of recognition, are sharing something only psychics and lovers, or religious devotees might be able to comprehend in one another.
In such company, your other, biking self is mirrored in them. All the restraints of societal values fade, even disappear. When someone can see your soul, when you can see theirs, there is little sense in any pomp or ceremony beyond pure celebration of delight, of innocence, of ecstasy. When such company becomes three or more, albeit convoluted, that essence of spirit is further enhanced. Get a car-park or field, or other venue full of such like-soul-ness (never mind like-mindedness), and you have a recipe for culture, more enduring than any contemporary propensity. The values of biking company are like those of religions of old, who gave up on worldliness to enjoy something that cost nothing and was a greater existence than one of worldliness. Biking per se isn’t for free. But it opens the doors of perception for those, whom Huxley suggests, are ethically prepared for such a notion. The biking lifestyle isn’t a religion, but it comes very close, because of the trust it inspires among individuals. If we take the Lord to be symbolic imagery of a euphoric, complete way to be, then it might be apt to use the lyrics of the band Blind Faith in describing how a Biker feels with themselves, and among other Bikers: I have finally found a way to live, in the presence of the Lord/And I know I don’t have much to give/But soon I’ll open any door/Everybody knows the secret/Everybody knows the score/I have finally found a way to live/In the colour of the Lord.