ENLIGHTENMENT THINKING

For Dad, drugs weren't about recreation. They were aids in his search for
truth.

It was the by ultimate acid flashback, courtesy of that modern route to the
promised land -- the Internet.

Not long ago, my brother-in-law was showing my mother the power of a Web
search.

He typed in the name of my father, Keith Angier, who has been dead for 23
years.

Much to the family's astonishment, the search turned up a missive that none
of us knew existed but that could now be found online in the Timothy Leary
archives.

My father wrote the letter to Leary in Millbrook, N.Y., in 1963, when I was
5 and we were living in the Bronx.

"Ever since reading an article on the psilocybus mushroom by Gordon Wasson
in a 1957 Life magazine article," he wrote, "I've been interested in this
and other hallucinogens." My father then described his quest for the
"ultimate truth" through the use of both "plain mystical contemplation" and
peyote, which at that point could be ordered through the mail from Native
American religious groups.

He had concluded that "in this era of ubiquitous distractions,"
hallucinogens "may be the only way for most of us."

Unfortunately, it was his experience that "peyote is not only hard to take
and keep down, but contains several useless and baneful alkaloids along
with the couple of good ones." Hence his plea to Leary, whom he and my
mother had seen on "The David Susskind Show" discussing LSD: "I am
interested in your organization because Internal Freedom is the most
important freedom in the world, and your explorations in this area are
among the most valuable today," my father summarized. "Please send
membership information to the address below."

My father was a chronically unhappy and difficult man. He dropped out of
high school but was a voracious autodidact. He did so well on the Army's
I.Q. test that the service wanted to send him to officers' training school
- -- until it found out he had no diploma.

He was discharged honorably with a halfhearted diagnosis of "borderline
schizophrenia." Returning to civilian life, he took the first job he was
offered, as a low-level machinist at Otis Elevator, a post he kept -- and
hated -- until he died at 51.

As he wrote Leary, my father was always in search of "ultimate truth," and
a place where he could rest, and trust, and feel a moment of thoughtful
calm. He couldn't help being spiritual, really; he got it young in such
strong doses.

My grandmother, who reared him and his two sisters alone, was a devout
Christian Science practitioner. As a young man, my father renounced
Christian Science in favor of Communism, but then renounced that when he
grew disgusted with Stalin. He returned to the Christian church, first as
an Episcopalian, then as a Catholic; I still have the wooden crucifix that
he carved in 1957, showing a Jesus so strong in body it is as though he
were holding himself up on the cross.

Finally, he traded Christianity for Buddhism. I grew up knowing Buddha's
eightfold way, and that life is pain, and that this pain is caused by
desire -- including, as I saw, the desire for enlightenment.

With or without the help of Leary's organization, my father obtained LSD,
and my parents and their friends sometimes took it. I knew that too, and I
knew that I wasn't supposed to talk about it with anybody. I knew as well
my father's harsh philosophy regarding drugs.

He disliked drugs that he considered stupefying, among them heroin, speed
and cocaine.

Moreover, he had nothing but scorn for those who took psychedelic drugs
recreationally. As he saw it, casual users were at best wasting their time,
not to mention cheapening the meaning of compounds that have been used
ritualistically by cultures throughout history; at worst, they were risking
their sanity and possibly their lives.

Hallucinogens, he said, should be taken in the presence of an enlightened
guide or priest if possible, with the goal of expanding consciousness and
defying the illusion of self. You want an easy thrill, try a bottle of
muscatel.

It sounds quaint, and self-exculpatory, if not self-deluding: another
dopehead, trying to justify his high. Well, maybe -- or maybe not. We live
in an era of such extreme antidrug propaganda that merely to mention the
possibility that not all drugs are bad all the time risks, I suppose,
attracting the attention of the drug czar Barry McCaffrey's troops.

Hallucinogens didn't make my father happy, of course, any more than did
religion, or leftism, or the intricate ink drawings he drew, or the
interminable Tibetan ritual music he listened to. But they all helped make
him who he was. If drugs didn't expand his consciousness, they certainly
stamped it. I suspect that, by taming the brutality of self, they offered
him fleeting glimpses of freedom.

And my father had the ultimate safeguard against addiction: he was so
easily disappointed.