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

~ (Author) "In 1960 a book appeared in France with the unusual and striking title Le Matin des Magiciens, The Morning of the Magicians..." (more)
Key Phrases: Don Juan, New York, San Francisco (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description

How did a decade of love and peace end in Altamont and the Manson Family bloodbath? Gary Lachman explores the sinister dalliance of rock’s high rollers and a new wave of occultists, tying together John Lennon, Timothy Leary, Mick Jagger, Brian Wilson, Charles Manson, Anton LaVey, Jim Morrison, L. Ron Hubbard and many more American cultural icons.

We will use advance copies to solicit reviews in national newspapers and magazines, as well as embarking on a radio interview campaign. The author is a well-known journalist and literary critic and interviews extremely well.

Gary Lachman was a founder member of Blondie and wrote the group’s early hits. Born in New Jersey and a long-time resident of both New York and Los Angeles, he now lives in London.

From the Publisher

The Sixties were a time of revolution—political, social, psychedelic, sexual. But there was another revolution that many historians forget: the rise of a powerful current that permeated pop culture and has been a central influence on it ever since—the revival of the occult. Beliefs that were previously ridiculed took center stage—in the music of The Beatles and the Rolling Stones, in films like “Rosemary’s Baby,” and on the bookshelves, with Lord of the Rings, The Tarot, and the Tibetan Book of the Dead becoming best–sellers. Astrology, kabala, hippies, yogis, witchcraft, Satanism, drugs, UFOs—they all became the common currency they are today. But when Sixties liberationism met the occult—as it did with the Manson murders—it was often with sordid consequences. In Turn Off Your Mind, Gary Lachman delves deep into the dark heart of the mystical Sixties. The author, as Gary Valentine, was a founding member of the hit music group Blondie. He’s now a writer and literary critic for publications that include MOJO, THE TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT and THE LITERARY REVIEW. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 430 pages
• Publisher: The Disinformation Company (June 1, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0971394237
• ISBN-13: 978-0971394230
• Product Dimensions: 7.6 x 5.1 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (19 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #436,894 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

52 of 64 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars The Empire Strikes Back at the Sixties, March 9, 2004

By	Riley Gordinier (Richmond, CA USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Intriguing Sourcebook -- Author Keeps Mum About Himself, June 28, 2004

By A Customer

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.

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An Intriguing Look at Some of the Forces Behind the Mystic 60s, September 24, 2006

By	Dr. Richard G. Petty (Atlanta) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

I rarely review more than one book by a single author, but in Gary Lachman's case it is really justified. He is the former bass player and songwriter with the band Blondie, and so he came in on the tail end of some of the extraordinary goings-on that permeated part of the art and music culture of the late 1960s.

Gary has done an extraordinary amount of research and digs deeply into the dark side of the 1960s. He turns up some fascinating material about the people who provide the soundtrack for many of us as we were growing up. There is a wealth of anecdotes about the Mick Jagger, Marianne Faithfull, the Rolling Stones and a host of other celebrities who soaked themselves in New Age spirituality, and in some cases the dark side of the occult, producing songs like Sympathy for the Devil and eventually spawning bands like Black Sabbath.

The book is populated by some extraordinary individuals including Kenneth Anger, Anton LaVey and, of course, the Maharishi, who all hoped to extend their reach by appealing to the rich and famous in the music and the arts. The motives of some of the people whom we meet were clearly of the highest order, while others, including Charles Manson had their own agendas.

Gary's book is quite well researched, opinionated and extremely readable. Though I would be willing to bet that most readers will also find a few things that he says to be infuriating. I thought that I knew a lot about those days, but it turned out that there was much that I had not known before: The book is a revelation about people, beliefs and practices that are still affecting us today.

If you have any interest in the New Age, mysticism and in the explosions in music and personal freedom that happened at the end of the 1960s, I cannot think of a better book that ties them all together.