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71 of 87 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
The Empire Strikes Back at the Sixties, March 9, 2004
This review is from: Turn Off Your Mind: The Mystic Sixties and the Dark Side of the Age of Aquarius (Paperback)
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.
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12 of 14 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
This review is from: Turn Off Your Mind: The Mystic Sixties and the Dark Side of the Age of Aquarius (Paperback)
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.
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Does a fine job exploring a forgotten aspect of the 60s, January 5, 2006
This review is from: Turn Off Your Mind: The Mystic Sixties and the Dark Side of the Age of Aquarius (Paperback)
Amid all the other revolutions that happened in the 1960s - sexual, social and political - another revolution took place that has been overlooked by historians. A revival of the occult affected all parts of daily life, from the Beatles' journey into psychedelia to the movie Rosemary's Baby to the novel Steppenwolf. There have always been those interested in the idea of secret knowledge only available to a select few, including ancient civilizations and lost races. Such interests became popular through groups like the Theosophical Society of the 1920s founded by Madame Blavatsky. A later manifestation of this interest in secret things was the near obsession with flying saucers. All the people and movements one would expect to find in such a book are here: Charles Manson, astrology, the Tarot, Jim Morrison, Timothy Leary, yogis, witchcraft, Transcendental Meditation, Brian Wilson, Anton LaVey and Aleister Crowley. Another huge influence on the mystical revolution of the 1960s was the written word. Hermann Hesse was a Nobel laureate whose novels were rediscovered in the 1960s and spread across American college campuses like wildfire. The publication of a fantasy novel by an obscure British author named Tolkien (The Hobbit) by two American publishers at the same time, because of copyright problems, caused another literary firestorm. This helped lead to the rediscovery of 1930s pulp authors like Robert E. Howard and H.P. Lovecraft. Who can forget other literary heavyweights like Jack Kerouac, L. Ron (Scientology) Hubbard, Allan Ginsberg and Aldous Huxley? I very much enjoyed reading this book. It is very well researched, and does a fine job exploring an aspect of "the 60's" that is generally forgotten. This gets two strong thumbs up.
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